In 2008, Whitney Stump got fed up with watching drivers run the stop sign in front of his house in Muncie, Indiana. Stump, a twenty-seven-year-old father and graduate student, reached out to city officials and requested a crosswalk. But Muncie City Hall refused his request, saying that a crosswalk was not needed because the intersection—the corner of Dicks and North Streets—was not by a school.
So Stump took matters into his own hands. He went out to the quiet residential corner and carefully painted a crosswalk himself.
To Stump’s credit, the paint job looked professional. Local police and city hall were not pleased, however. His act of resistance made the national news after he was arrested not once but twice; the second time, police caught him touching up his work. Stump eventually served ten hours in jail on charges of criminal mischief but was unapologetic to the end. “If they’re not going to provide a safe environment for me and my community, then I believe I have a moral obligation,” he told a local news station.1
This character—the crosswalk vigilante—pops up in the news every so often. In 2013, Anthony Cardenas of Vallejo, California, “got tired of seeing people get run over here all the time” and painted a crosswalk on a four-lane street near his home. He was arrested but “received a hero’s welcome” in his neighborhood upon posting bail, CBS Sacramento reported.2
More recently, in 2019, two local men painted a crosswalk on 16th Street Southeast in Washington, DC, following the death of a thirty-one-year-old pedestrian. The District Department of Transportation said that it had planned to install a crosswalk at the location, where it had been requested more than 250 days prior to the death of Abdul Seck, but city officials told radio station WTOP that they were waiting for the right weather.3
These kinds of stories—local man with a paint can versus traffic safety authorities—can be a little amusing. But they are symptomatic of the real sense of anger people feel when being refused a basic, low-cost safety amenity like a crosswalk.
These stories also raise a good question: Who dictates where and when crosswalks are needed? In the traffic engineering profession, that responsibility belongs not to nearby residents, elected officials, or even the engineering staff in the town, but to an obscure technical book called the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.
The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is one of the key federal guidebooks for US road design, mandating the rules for signals and signs that run through every city and hamlet in the United States. The purpose of this eight-hundred-page document is to provide uniformity in the look of highways across the nation, from the northern territories of Alaska to the tropics of Key West.
The MUTCD not only tells engineers where and when to install crosswalks, it also tells them how they should look, which road signs are allowable and what they should say, what color they should be, and what font they should use. And the MUTCD—quite clearly—discourages traffic engineers from installing crosswalks. To understand why, a little background on the ideology in the transportation engineering profession is needed.
“When considering how to make an intersection safe, engineers begin with a bias toward flow,” wrote Dan Albert in Are We There Yet, a history of the American automobile. “The technocratic language of highway and traffic engineering obscures an ideology. Traffic engineering trades safety for mobility.”4
This same kind of ideology—rules that privilege the speed of cars and trucks over the safety of pedestrians—is seen throughout the MUTCD. One of the most striking examples of this “bias toward flow” is the manual’s instruction about where and when to add a marked crosswalk with a traffic signal.
The MUTCD instructs engineers that a crosswalk with a traffic signal is only “warranted” if ninety-three pedestrians per hour are crossing at the location in question. Failing that, the MUTCD states that a crosswalk with a traffic signal can be warranted if five pedestrians are struck by cars at the location in a single year. In other words, five people have to be maimed or killed in a single year at a single location for it to warrant delaying drivers with a traffic light.
The reason is that traffic engineers do not want to inconvenience drivers. The rule, said Christopher Monsere, professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering at Portland State University, is “purely delay based. We know from the research that giving vehicles a red signal is the best way to get pedestrians across,” Monsere said. “The warrant to get that . . . is very high.”5
In recent years, more progressive engineers have begun speaking out about the bias toward flow. One of them is Peter Furth, a professor of civil engineering at Northeastern University. In 2016, Furth testified to the Boston City Council that standard engineering practices were putting pedestrians in the city at risk.
For example, the Landmark Interchange by Fenway Park in Boston required pedestrians to wait almost two minutes to cross the street. The signals, Furth testified, were programmed by a standard engineering program called Synchro, which “is based on minimizing auto delay, and it doesn’t even calculate pedestrian delay.” But two minutes is just too long to ask pedestrians to wait for a walk signal. Faced with that long of a wait, many will jaywalk, and some may get hit and killed, Furth testified.6
Throughout the MUTCD, pedestrians’ safety is traded for time savings for drivers. Furth pointed out, for example, that to reduce vehicle delay, the MUTCD allows engineers to program traffic lights so that pedestrians have just enough time to get to the median, in the center of the street. Then they must wait—with traffic whizzing by—for a second walk signal to complete the crossing.
Defenders of the MUTCD will point out that engineers are allowed to use their so-called engineering judgment about many of these rules. In other words, there is a certain degree of flexibility to make decisions that deviate from the MUTCD’s guidelines, if local circumstances call for it.
Engineers nevertheless feel a lot of pressure to abide by MUTCD guidance. There is a common perception that engineers who abide by the manual’s standards—and the municipalities and states they represent—are mostly shielded from liability, but that is not strictly correct; engineers simply have to document their engineering judgment if they deviate from the rules. The guidelines in this book are still powerful motivators, however, and the MUTCD carries with it the force of law.
The people who have the power to make changes to the MUTCD call themselves the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (NCUTCD). They meet biannually in places like Columbus, Ohio, and Virginia Beach.
This group of men—the group is overwhelmingly male—are, generally speaking, from the old school of traffic engineering. Many received their training during the Eisenhower era, when completing the Interstate Highway System was the industry’s primary focus.
Today, a new school of thought is threatening to disrupt the status quo at the NCUTCD, as seen by the culture clash flare-up at the committee’s January 2019 meeting. That day, a progressive younger professional engineer named Bill Schultheiss proposed a change that would have advanced pedestrian safety across the United States. He proposed that every traffic signal in the country be required to have a pedestrian signal head that displays “Walk,” “Don’t Walk,” and a countdown timer. Currently, there is wide variation. As the NCUTCD wrote in its minutes,
Some States install pedestrian signals at nearly every traffic signal where other States have far fewer installations. There are many signalized intersections across the Country where there is regular pedestrian activity without any provision of pedestrian signal heads.7
Schultheiss—a twenty-year industry veteran who works for the Washington, DC–based Toole Design Group—proposed making these signals mandatory at every traffic signal. The change was especially critical, he argued, given the dramatic increase in pedestrian deaths currently under way.
The NCUTCD brought the mandatory pedestrian signal heads up for a vote. The change was supported by more than half the members, but it failed to get the supermajority two-thirds needed for passage because a minority of voting engineers chose to prioritize cost savings over pedestrian safety. The proposed change was shelved.
Signal heads only cost about $5,000 each—a rounding error compared to the cost of road projects—but some engineers were apparently concerned it would require additional investment, such as utility work or the construction of crosswalks. Those investments could theoretically cost as much as $50,000, some opponents reasoned.8
Schultheiss wrote on Twitter that the decision was a moral failure. “When we discuss [the] cost of infrastructure we are making policy decisions and value judgments regarding who is important and whose life has value,” he said.9
In many ways, though, the NCUTCD was working as it was designed. Its bylaws—requiring a two-thirds majority vote for changes—are designed to be conservative and to make change difficult. Those rules are necessary, backers will say, to ensure that changes are not approved without sufficient data to support them. But it also means that the engineering profession is, by design, slow to respond to new problems—like a decade-long escalation in pedestrian deaths.
The NCUTCD is a publicly sponsored organization, with voting members appointed by some of the most important traffic engineering institutions in the United States. But in some ways it is an insular group. The committee does no real public outreach. It does not seek input from experts in adjacent fields—like public health and urban planning. The culture of the committee itself is part of the problem, Schultheiss said. “These committees can . . . like any committee, be influenced by the bias of the people on it,” he said.10
Civil engineers as a group are not representative of the populations who suffer the most from poor walking conditions. Traffic engineers are by definition professionals who can afford cars and thus at a minimum may lack direct experience with waiting for buses along suburban arterial roads marked for speeds of 45 miles per hour. They are also unrepresentative in other ways. According to census data compiled by the government transparency group Data USA, 85 percent of civil engineers are male, and 80 percent are white.11
The industry has not been willing to confront these kinds of biases in a direct way, said Schultheiss. “There’s no recognition of the history of discrimination and institutional racism within our system,” he said. “We don’t talk about it. We’re afraid to talk about ethics, equity, and we hide behind these formulas. I think that’s where our business has failed.”12
Part of the problem, said Veronica Davis, a black civil engineer and principal at the Washington, DC–based planning firm Nspiregreen, is lack of representation in the industry. Davis said that she was one of just seven women in her class of one hundred civil engineers at University of Maryland. Maybe five total were people of color, she said.13
Today, traffic engineering’s biases might be more subtle than previously, but in the past, many US infrastructure policies were explicitly racist. For example, in the 1960s, Davis’s grandparents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were displaced when their whole neighborhood was leveled for the construction of Interstate 10. During that era, nearly one million people14—mostly low-income people or people of color—were displaced by highway projects. Neighborhoods of color were specifically targeted in a campaign of so-called slum clearance. “It was racism,” Davis said, that made her grandparent’s home a target, “because they weren’t poor. They had master’s degrees.”15
Davis said that engineers have not been trained to think about the wider social consequences of their work. “Engineers aren’t taught about public involvement,” she said. “They’re taught where the road needs to go. They’re not taught about the people part.”16
In a 2018 article in PE Magazine, an industry publication for traffic engineers, Schultheiss questioned whether the profession was living up to its code of ethics, which requires engineers to “hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.” In practice, he wrote, many dangerous designs that would predictably produce deaths have become part of the “standard practice” in the field because they help promote speed for drivers.
“Is it ethical to seal engineering drawings for a project with deficiencies we know will likely result in people getting injured or killed because this was standard past practice?” he wrote. “When I discuss this question within my profession, it creates significant discomfort because nobody wants to feel complicit in the deaths of thousands of people every year and the related degradation of air quality and the environment. However, I and others believe we are undeniably complicit and ethically bound to change the system.”17
These more progressive ideas have yet to be codified in some of the most important manuals, but that too is changing. In response in part to the slow evolution of guides like the MUTCD, more progressive engineering associations are increasingly releasing their own street design guides.
Perhaps the most notable are those issued by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), an industry group representing transportation officials in twenty-five major US cities.18 In 2011, NACTO released its bicycle design guide, which instructed engineers in how to create substantive, safe, and protected infrastructure for urban bicyclists. And in 2017, it followed up with a guide to designing public transit–oriented streets.
These guidebooks still do not have the clout of the MUTCD, yet they have been important in providing additional tools for engineers focused on more vulnerable road users. In 2014, the Federal Highway Administration gave its unqualified support to NACTO’s Urban Street Design Guide, instructing engineers to use it “in conjunction with” other guidebooks like the MUTCD.19
Instead of waiting for permission, some engineers and some cities are forging ahead to make safer conditions for pedestrians. Seattle, for example, is not waiting for the arbitrary ninety-three pedestrians per hour minimum to add a crosswalk. The city is piloting a program in which crosswalks are first installed and then pedestrians are counted afterward to see if they meet the ninety-three-per-hour threshold mandated by the MUTCD.20 In the city’s first experiment with this approach, on a six-lane arterial (15th Avenue NW at NW 53rd Street) in the Ballard neighborhood, early observations were that no pedestrians were crossing at the location.
A funny thing happened after the city provided a safe crossing, however: people started using it. After the crosswalk’s installation, Seattle again measured the number of pedestrians crossing at the location, and it met the ninety-three per hour threshold.
Portland, Oregon, is also using a policy for installing crosswalks that does not conform to the conventional engineering wisdom. There, city rules call for a crosswalk at any place where twenty pedestrians are crossing per hour. In addition, Portland city guidelines call for a controlled crosswalk—with a traffic signal—every 530 feet within zones of the city that are considered “pedestrian districts.” Outside of those areas, the standard is 800 feet. Portland’s “spacing guidelines for marked pedestrian crossings” call for a crossing at every bus stop as well.21
Another leader is Montreal. In late 2019, Montreal mayor Valérie Plante proposed a “paradigm change” in the city’s policy toward pedestrians. She announced that all twenty-three hundred traffic lights in the city would be updated with walk signals and countdown timers. In addition, the city planned to add four to six seconds of crossing time to every one to accommodate “the most vulnerable road users,” such as older people and children.
Plante articulated the counterargument to the “ideology of flow” used in the MUTCD perfectly. “What is more important: the lives of people or [for traffic] to be more fluid, in a way that it goes faster?” Plante was quoted as saying. “For me, as mayor, the choice is obvious. It will always be security.”22
Against the ideology of flow has risen a countermovement with the radical premise that no amount of traffic deaths should be considered acceptable. The concept—known internationally now as Vision Zero—originated in 1995 in Stockholm. There, newly appointed Swedish road administration director Claes Tingvall had become fixated on a crash that had killed five young people. Their car had hydroplaned and struck a concrete lamppost. When Tingvall inquired about removing the post, he was told that doing so would be an admission of guilt on the part of the agency. “I was shocked over the mentality that prevailed,” he told the engineering firm AF Consult in 2017. “That crashes were subject to moralization and the cause was always sought in the actions of the victims.”23
At the time, Swedish transport policies called for balancing safety concerns with other priorities like cost savings and “accessibility.” In other words, the government was willing to accept some number of deaths so as to facilitate fast travel—in a very similar way to how traffic safety is currently thought of in the United States.
Tingvall proposed a radical new way of approaching the issue. He argued that safety, not speed, should be the clear, countervailing priority. He called it an “ethical mandate”24 and sought to design the nation’s roadways to make the inevitable human mistakes less deadly.
Today, Sweden’s traffic death rate is about one-third that of the United States’ on a per capita basis. In Sweden in 2017, there were 254 traffic deaths, about half the number from 1997.25 Between 2000 and 2017, traffic safety on a per capita basis improved almost four times faster in Sweden than in the United States26 and Sweden has all but eliminated child traffic deaths. In 2012, for example, just one child under age seven was killed in a car crash in that country of ten million.27 If the United States could match Sweden’s per capita traffic safety record, nearly thirty thousand lives would be saved in the United States annually.
In the United States, people blame road users—pedestrians, drivers—when someone is killed. The National Highway Traffic Safety Association, for example, states that “94 percent of accidents are caused by human error.”28
But as Tingvall noted, that is not the way it works in other fields, such as nuclear power or aviation. “In every situation a person might fail,” Tingvall said. “The road system should not.”29
He put forth a different conception of traffic risk. System designers—like traffic engineers—Vision Zero posits, share responsibility with road users for deaths or serious injuries that occur within the system. The Swedish policy is not to rely on education and trying to control the way pedestrians behave, and it does not do much enforcement. In rural areas, cameras are used, but not much in cities.
“There’s not a lot of evidence that finger wagging about certain behavior produces differences in how people are behaving,” explained Daniel Firth, who was Stockholm’s chief strategy officer for transportation until 2017. There is a huge, overarching effort in Sweden to control drivers’ speed, however. That is primarily achieved by engineering—by redesigning roads. “It should be really clear as a road user what the appropriate speed is, and in a lot of places, it should be almost impossible to go over it,” said Firth.30
In Sweden, an approach called the “right speed in the city” method is used. Each street in Sweden is categorized based on uses and characteristics. It is a major arterial? It is an important busway? Is it a shopping area, with lots of foot traffic? Is it a street used by emergency services? Does it serve an industrial area?
“Based on these dimensions you put in this Excel file . . . it spits out the appropriate speed,” said Firth.31
Then the street is redesigned to “self enforce.” Speed bumps and speed tables—raised crosswalks—are used to slow down drivers in areas where pedestrians are present. In some places, streets may actually be physically narrowed with “bump outs” at intersections that shorten the crossing distance for pedestrians and force drivers to turn more slowly.
In addition, Swedish transport planners might plant trees near a road to narrow the road’s look and feel. Visual cues can be used to tell drivers to slow down. If money is tight, paint can be used to visually narrow the roadway. Concrete bollards might also be placed in the middle of a street to force drivers to take tight, controlled left turns or give pedestrians a midblock refuge while walking to complete a crossing.
The guiding principle in Swedish traffic safety is to ensure that the human body is not exposed to impacts that will cause death and serious injury. So in areas where pedestrians are present—residential areas or shopping districts, for example—the speed limit is mostly limited to 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.5 miles per hour). At that speed, even when a pedestrian is struck by a car, the odds of survival are very high: only about 6 percent of pedestrians struck at that speed die.32 On highways, Sweden uses barriers to prevent head-on collisions. In higher-speed areas where two cars might collide but pedestrians are not present, the country imposes speed limits of 50 kilometers per hour (about 31 miles per hour)—approximately the speed at which a right-angle T-bone-style crash will be survivable for drivers or passengers.33
Sweden’s transport safety policy has been praised by international experts and has been exported all over the world, including to the United States. More than forty US cities—including New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, San Antonio, Fort Lauderdale, and Macon, Georgia—have adopted Vision Zero policies aimed at entirely ending traffic deaths over time,34 and many have had Vision Zero programs since the early 2010s. Perhaps the most substantive effort has been from New York.
In 2018, five years after New York City committed to Vision Zero, its traffic deaths fell to a record low of two hundred.35 That was down almost a third from 2013 and the lowest number since 1910.
“Vision Zero efforts started in 2014, and we saw annual declines yearly through 2018,” said Marco Conner, co–deputy director of New York City’s nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, which advocates for better conditions for local transit riders, cyclists, and pedestrians. “I think that has been remarkable in the face of rising traffic fatalities nationwide during that period.”36
Like in Sweden, street redesigns have been a core part of New York City’s Vision Zero efforts. The city reports that it conducted hundreds of street safety interventions between 2013 and 2018, including adding bike lanes at a rate of about fifty miles per year. There are now more than 1,200 miles of bike lanes in the city—a 30 percent increase since the start of Vision Zero.
Protected bike lanes with some kind of physical delineation from traffic, like bollards or curbs, have been shown in particular to reduce collisions—not just for cyclists, but for motorists and pedestrians as well. A 2014 New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) report found that on six Manhattan corridors that have added protected bike lanes—on streets like Broadway, Columbus Avenue, and 8th Avenue—overall crashes were reduced 17 percent, and pedestrian injuries fell by 22 percent. Meanwhile, the bike lanes in general did not have any negative effect on vehicle traffic; the department reported that travel times on those streets stayed the same or in some cases even improved as much as 35 percent.37
New York City also made other efforts to slow speed, following Sweden’s model. For example, NYCDOT added 363 speed humps in 2018.38
In pursuit of Vision Zero, NYCDOT has also given special attention to its intersections. One of the city’s most effective measures was simply giving pedestrians a bit of a head start at traffic lights. Since 2013, the city has retimed almost four thousand traffic signals to add “leading pedestrian intervals,” which give pedestrians a five- to seven-second head start crossing the street before vehicles get a green light. That few extra seconds is important because it gives pedestrians a chance to get into the center of the intersection—where they will be visible—before cars start making left turns. Left turns are very dangerous for pedestrians and difficult for drivers in part because a car’s side pillar between the windshield and door obscures a driver’s view.
Leading pedestrian intervals are inexpensive, costing around $1,200 each to install, but studies have shown that they can make a big difference. In 2016, NYCDOT found that fatalities and serious injuries declined 40 percent at the intersections where these timing devices were installed.39
The city has used other low-cost intersection treatments to ensure that drivers go slower when making left turns. It has also “hardened” more than two hundred intersections by installing bollards between the yellow lines at the center of an intersection.40 The treatment is designed to force drivers making left turns to slow down and make the turn at a sharper angle.
Conner said that those two treatments—the introduction of leading pedestrian intervals and intersection hardening—seem to have had an enormous effect on pedestrian safety in particular. “From 2016 to ’17, we saw the biggest drop in pedestrian fatalities that I’ve ever seen,” Conner said. “It was a 38 percent reduction.”41
New York City residents had called for the city to add leading pedestrian intervals as early as the 1990s. In 2007, Transportation Alternatives pressed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office to add the treatments. “We know that failure to yield is the second-leading cause of fatalities in the city,” said Conner. “The fact that it took almost twenty years since as far as we know they were first called upon to do it by advocates . . . It’s mind-blowing to think of the lives that could have been saved if they would have done this earlier.”42
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio deserves credit for what he has accomplished, said Conner, but in some ways, the effort has still been too limited. “He hasn’t fully recognized the crisis, and that is a crisis we can actually do something about,” he said. “I think we’ve kind of reached the limit of what can be done without a willingness to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘We in the city are not going to prioritize the speedy movement or cars of the storage of cars over safety.’ . . . People have gotten used to free parking and wide roads as a right. It’s going to take political courage and a commitment to prioritizing life over the convenience of a few car owners.”43
Looking at US Vision Zero cities more broadly, the results are difficult to judge at this point. Through 2018, only New York City and, perhaps, San Francisco showed any clear, sustained decline in traffic deaths. San Francisco’s death rate also dropped to a one-hundred-year low in 2017, but in 2019, it had surpassed that number—twenty-three—by August.44 Even in New York, 2019 was a bad year, with fatalities jumping 9 percent to 218 deaths.45
Portland, Oregon, is another city that has made a notable effort. After agreeing to Vision Zero in 2016, Portland lowered default speed limits in residential areas to 20 miles per hour.46 More than $100 million has been spent on crosswalks as well as speed cameras and beacons that warn drivers that a pedestrian is crossing.47 But in 2019, Portland was bracing to have its second bloodiest year since 2008.
Under fire in the local alternative weekly newspaper, Willamette Week, city commissioner Chloe Eudaly said, “It’s deeply troubling. I’ve been asking myself, ‘What are we doing wrong, and what can we do faster?’”48
Grassroots advocates say that there is simply a lack of political will for change. “The way that they’re operating, in the same manner that they’ve been operating, they’re going to get the same results,” neighborhood activist Anjeanette Brown told the paper.49
Jonathan Maus, editor of the Portland-based transportation news site Bike Portland, said that city leaders still have not really broken the habit of prioritizing drivers’ speed and convenience over safety. “For the first time in decades our city transportation department has lots of revenue and they’re doing so many projects it’s hard to keep track—but they still aren’t taking the bull by the horns,” he said.50
Even in Sweden, progress on Vision Zero has not been “linear,” as New York City transportation officials would say. In 2018, traffic deaths in Sweden increased 28 percent over the previous year,51 and Norway has recently surpassed Sweden as the world leader on traffic safety.52
“There’s definitely a recognition in Sweden that it has . . . I wouldn’t say stalled, but the early successes are going to be hard to replicate,” said Firth. “There’s a reason it’s called Vision Zero and not plan zero, because we know this is going to be really, really hard.”53
In some cities, Vision Zero efforts have also faced a painful backlash. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti introduced a Vision Zero plan in 2017. As part of the effort, the city conducted “road diets” on nine miles of roads on the west side of Los Angeles in 2017. In response, outraged neighborhood residents attempted to recall their city council representative, Mike Bonin, who was a supporter of Vision Zero.54 And commuters who used local roads to avoid congested highways began fundraising for a lawsuit to overturn the city’s decision. Eventually, the city capitulated and reversed a number of the projects.
Some experts say that it is simply too early to say whether Vision Zero is working in the United States. Most US cities are small enough that there is a fair amount of statistical noise in the data, especially when it comes to fatalities. “This will take time and leadership and the political courage to do what works,” Vision Zero network director Leah Shahum said.55
Some international cities have made bigger commitments than any US city. London’s mayor Sadiq Khan is having the front end of city buses redesigned and speed-limiting technology installed in his quest to reduce deaths and serious injuries by 50 percent by 2030 and eliminate them entirely by 2041.56 Large portions of the city have speed zones dedicated as 20 miles per hour. City of London Police have an entire crash investigations unit that seeks to get to the bottom of every fatality and serious injury and make recommendations for systemic improvements that could help avoid the next one. London’s traffic fatality rate is about half that of New York City’s on a per capita basis.
But London also struggled with Vision Zero initially, said Firth. One of the city’s first major moves was to paint bike lanes on the streets—“Cycle Superhighways,” they were called. But many of them were low quality and put cyclists in a dangerous position.
“You almost have to kind of make a bunch of mistakes at the beginning before you get it right,” said Firth. “That’s what Vision Zero does. It puts this blow torch on you to do the right thing.”57