Traffic deaths rise in U.S. cities despite billions spent to make streets safer
Two years after her 5-year-old daughter Allie was killed by a driver who ran a stop sign, Jessica Hart wants to know why little has changed. Despite repeated promises from local and federal transportation officials to slow down traffic and make streets safer in her community and around the country, the grieving Washington, D.C., mother said she hears a lot of talk, but little action.
"It felt like after Allie was killed, I couldn't not do something," said Hart, who now advocates on behalf of Families for Safe Streets, a non-profit that works to end traffic violence. "If we're just expanding highways so that people can go faster, then what's that going to get us? It's not going to get us lives saved. So, it's a big societal change, really, that I think we need."
The U.S. Department of Transportation spent a total of $2.4 billion on programs aimed at reducing traffic fatalities in 2022 and 2023. Still, according to federal data CBS News analyzed, traffic deaths have been rising in most major American cities.
The money falls under U.S. DOT's Safe Streets 4 All, or SS4A, program. It includes funding for a program called Vision Zero, which was first introduced in Europe decades ago.
The goal of Vision Zero is to reduce fatalities to zero by designing roads and altering driver behavior to slow traffic speeds and limit conflicts between cars and pedestrians. The program was first introduced in Sweden in 1997, where it led to a 67% drop in traffic-related deaths, according to research conducted at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. After Spain adopted Vision Zero, the traffic fatality rate in that country dropped by 80%.
A CBS News analysis suggests Vision Zero policies have been less successful in the U.S.
CBS News analyzed data on every U.S. traffic-related death from 2016 to 2021 and found little to no difference in the number of deaths in most cities that adopted Vision Zero. In a few cities, including Durham, N.C., Richmond VA and San Francisco, traffic fatalities decreased after Vision Zero was implemented. But deaths actually increased in 22 of the 27 cities with Vision Zero programs in place by 2019.
"Talking," not "doing"
Reduction in the number of crashes and fatalities in the immediate areas or street segments where Vision Zero projects have been completed is well documented. But critics say there aren't enough finished projects in enough cities to make a significant change to overall fatality rates.
"There's a lot of people dying each year and so that's deeply concerning," said Beth Osborne, a former acting assistant secretary at U.S. DOT. "We spend about $50 billion a year on our roadway system and we have separated out spending on those safety considerations as a specialized small part of that funding, which shows you that that is not a priority."
Osborne said the vast majority of projects funded by U.S. DOT have focused on making America's roads faster and more efficient, not safer.
"I would argue so long as you can easily pick out the safety projects, that's a problem," Osborne said. "They should all be safety projects."
Osborne now serves as vice president for transportation and thriving communities at Smart Growth America, a national nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. She said when it comes to changing U.S. roads and highways, there is a lot of talk from policy makers but very little action.
"I grew up in the South where we would say we were always 'fixing' to do good things," Osborne said. "But when you're 'fixing' to, you're not actually doing anything."
CBS News found of the 1,132 Safe Streets projects initiated nationwide in the last two years, 7.5% were classified as "implementation," which means making physical safety changes to roads, highways or intersections. The rest of the projects (92.5%) were classified as activities such as "planning" and "demonstration," rather than permanent and comprehensive physical changes.
While 70.4% of the funding did, in fact, go to those few "implementation" projects, CBS News found the cities where the projects were implemented still saw little or no improvement in their overall traffic fatality rates.
Osborne believes the projects simply aren't being implemented on a large enough scale.
"Vision Zero is an approach to your entire transportation system that says the faster things go, the more you want to reduce the places where you'll find typical mistakes," she said. "We want to design for human behavior and we just simply haven't implemented that."
"We are in a state of crisis"
U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CBS News the results of traffic safety programs in this country have not been as strong as he would like. He said he expects projects scheduled to be implemented in the summer of 2024 may help reverse the fatal crash trend.
"We are in a state of crisis, and it does not get nearly enough attention," said Buttigieg. "I don't just care about this as a policymaker, I care about it as a pedestrian. I care about it as a parent."
To emphasize the human cost, he compared the number of lives lost on U.S. highways to a full commercial 737 airplane crashing every single day.
"The fact that every one of us can name people we know and care about who have been lost in a car crash tells you everything you need to know about how urgent this issue is," said Buttigieg.
He said he will only accept a goal of zero roadway deaths — Vision Zero's stated mission.
"Americans are used to just thinking of [traffic deaths] as 'a cost of doing business,' or something that can't be avoided," Buttigieg said. "But I don't see how we can accept that, especially because if you look at our peer countries, they're getting much better results. That tells us that we can and must do better."
Automated cameras as part of a solution
As the number of traffic deaths rise, some cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago and Washington, D.C., have recently recommitted to Vision Zero. In Washington, D.C., a key tool in achieving traffic safety goals is the use of automated traffic enforcement cameras. In recent years, the District has deployed nearly 500 cameras, which issue citations for violations including speeding, running stop signs and red lights, and blocking bus lanes.
"We really hope that the cameras will, will hit people where it hurts in their wallet, and then they'll stop doing the behavior," said Sharon Kershbaum, interim director of the District Department of Transportation.
Drivers caught on speed cameras receive citations by mail with fines ranging from $100 to $500, depending on how fast they were going.
As an example of how the camera program has succeeded, Kershbaum described the progress on the 4000 block of Wheeler Road, where about a quarter of drivers were typically speeding 11 mph or more over the limit. She said within a few months of the camera installation, the number of speeding tickets issued dropped by 75%.
"It's working," said Kershbaum. "People are driving slower."