Ever wonder what would happen if the police stopped enforcing traffic laws? New Jersey State Police conducted an experiment along these lines starting in the summer of 2023, about a week after the release of a report documenting racial disparities in traffic enforcement. From July of that year to March 2024, the number of tickets issued by police for speeding, drunk driving and other serious violations fell by 61%. decline, new york times It "coincided with an almost immediate increase in crashes on the state's two major highways," reported last month. New Jersey's road fatalities jumped 14% for all of 2024, although road fatalities nationwide were slightly lower. decline. The conclusion is obvious: The rollback of enforcement in the Garden State is causing some motorists to drive more recklessly. For better or worse, enforcement is necessary for traffic safety.
Over the past decade, however, one ideological faction within the road safety movement has downplayed the role of law enforcement in preventing vehicle crashes. The coalition of urban experts, transportation planners, academics and nonprofit activists instead focused on reactive measures to make drivers more alert and responsible: narrowing lanes to encourage drivers to slow down and curbing efforts to widen sidewalks and shorten crosswalks. bumps,” and other physical changes designed to stabilize vehicular traffic.
For good reason, progressives are alarmed by racial disparities in law enforcement, and New Jersey's experience goes some way to confirming those concerns: Police have eased up on issuing tickets because they apparently felt uncomfortable with outside scrutiny of discriminatory practices. dissatisfied. But the incident is also a powerful testament to the value of law enforcement as a public service. If you don't take enforcement action, you must agree to share the road with someone who is driving drunk or driving at double the speed limit.
In many communities, efforts to redesign streets to promote safe driving are taking place under the banner of Vision Zero, a movement that aims to eliminate all traffic fatalities. But a design-first approach has become a substitute for, rather than a complement to, personal responsibility.
Historically, design was only one element of Vision Zero. In practice today it is almost the only one. Even mainstream organizations explicitly denigrate law enforcement. In 2022, when the nonprofit Livable Streets Alliance launched an initiative called “Abolition of Law Enforcement’s Role in Traffic Safety: A Roadmap for Massachusetts,” it claimed that “traffic congestion is not effective in reducing serious and fatal traffic crashes. (Some grieving families in New Jersey might disagree.) Another nonprofit, the Vision Zero Network, claimed in November that “despite some achievements” in law enforcement, “there is ample history. and current evidence of harm and inequality for some people”. Types of enforcement, specifically traffic stops. ” (The point is clear, but also troubling; the question is what conclusion to draw.) Some activists have even criticized automated speed cameras—which do not require the intervention of potentially biased police officers—for placing the burden on low-income drivers financial burden.
Dismissing driver misconduct is the wrong prescription for addressing racial and economic inequality. People in disinvested communities disproportionately fall victim to reckless driving. The fatality rate for black pedestrians is more than twice that of white pedestrians. Vulnerable groups, more than anyone, need strong protection from the law, not the abandonment of this vital public service.
The United States has the deadliest roads among wealthy nations. About 40,000 Americans now die in traffic accidents each year, and an increasing number of them are pedestrians and cyclists who don't even benefit from our car-first model. I understand why safety advocates favor solutions other than tickets. As I said before, in most parts of the country, driving is both cheap and a prerequisite for daily life. Vehicles are large, heavy and poorly regulated; laws to prevent abuse are inadequate; roads are wide, conducive to speeding and unsafe to cross on foot. Transportation planners and legislators have gone too far in reshaping our landscape and laws to accommodate cars, with devastating consequences for racial equity and other priorities.
However, the increase in vehicle fatalities is difficult to explain simply in structural terms. For beginners, almost all Since 2010, the leading cause of a surge in pedestrian deaths in the United States has been nighttime crashes. Changes in street design simply do nothing to address the leading causes of car crash deaths: failure to wear seat belts, drunk driving and speeding.
Today’s Vision Zero contains some useful insights into the power of design to influence behavior. The goal of reconfiguring streets is to "nudge" people to drive better, just as calorie counts on menus are supposed to promote healthier eating. These ideas seemed to be everywhere in the early 2000s, drawing on popular versions of Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economics research. With more evidence, we now know that their effectiveness is more easily demonstrated in TED talks than in real life.
When it comes to traffic safety, an overemphasis on nudges has distorted our thinking. For example, street design essentialism assumes that the most dangerous driving behaviors are unconscious, whereas we know that many drivers actively choose to be reckless. No country with an improved safety record (including Sweden, the birthplace of Vision Zero in the 1990s) has made dangerous driving impossible. What are our peer countries? have What is being done is to combine targeted design improvements with targeted and even intensified enforcement activities.
U.S. street safety activists have often called for greater enforcement. Now, instead of focusing on curbing the dangerous behavior of individuals, many of them are looking for bigger villains, blaming high road fatalities on apathetic state highway departments and greedy automakers who profit from oversized SUVs . In this view, individuals are merely passive users of transportation systems, subject to invisible forces. Coupled with activists' obsession with street design, this approach often results in a strange form of 21st-century progressive patronage: commissioning voluminous reports and unrealistic renderings from like-minded nonprofits and consulting firms; stagnant, undemocratic listening sessions; and creating a white elephant project that cannot be imitated.
Street redesign has its own pitfalls. For starters, planning is much easier than executing. Changes to the build environment must run a NIMBY attack twice: once to build, and then a second time to withstand the post-installation backlash. All this became clear in the 2010s, when conditions were particularly favorable for infrastructure development. Today, borrowing costs are several times higher and the construction industry’s labor gap is about a third of what it was before the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, raw material prices skyrocketed. In some cases, this combination has doubled the cost of road construction. New tariffs, if implemented, will exacerbate these problems.
Beyond street design, what else should communities focus on to improve safety? Half of the car occupants who died in car crashes were not wearing seat belts. Drunk driving is a factor in nearly one-third of car crash deaths. The same goes for speeding. However, not all speeding is the same. Driving 55 miles per hour in a 50 zone is usually not a problem. Super speeders (e.g., motorists who exceed the speed limit) may be overrepresented in traffic fatalities. Streets are designed to make ordinary drivers more conscientious, but without anti-social behavior directed at deviants.
Rather than justifying permissive attitudes toward reckless driving, social justice requires a more targeted campaign. Who exactly is being helped by having reckless drivers, many of whom are affluent suburbanites, speeding through working-class neighborhoods? Speed cameras don't solve everything - they may not stop speeding drivers, for example, and they're useless against stolen cars and fake license plates - but to the extent they're effective, they can eliminate bias in law enforcement. It is not a contradiction that private dangerous driving and abuse of police powers will not be tolerated. Road safety campaigners should redirect some of their efforts away from promoting the design-industrial complex and towards targeting the most deadly behaviours.
Design is just a tool. Just as beautiful office decorations cannot boost the morale of a dying company, many serious traffic safety problems cannot be solved by design. Let’s start a new era of safety by ticketing motorists for not wearing seat belts, talking more about speeders (and impounding their cars and licenses), and renewing decades of efforts against drunk driving. America's huge traffic fatality rate is a complex problem. As New Jersey recently reminded us, law enforcement must be part of the solution.