NEW YORK — The American Civil Liberties Union and the Policing Project at New York University School of Law released a new report today concluding that the United States’ “current approach to traffic safety has failed to reduce roadway deaths, while imposing significant financial and human costs on communities,” while offering new policy recommendations to lawmakers, according to an ACLU article.
The article notes that “more than 40,000 people are killed and more than 2 million [are] injured in preventable car crashes” each year. The report, Safe Roads for All: Evidence-Based Strategies for Keeping Our Roadways Safe, argues that the current approach “fails to prevent injuries and deaths from car crashes” and cites statistics on fatal crashes, deadly crashes and pedestrian deaths from 2013 through 2022.
Scarlet Neath, director of reimagining public safety at the Policing Project, said “if lawmakers are serious about preventing avoidable traffic deaths, they should prioritize evidence-based policies—like speed reduction policies and smarter roadway design—that have a proven safety impact.”
Current traffic safety strategies focus more on “individual enforcement through high-volume police stops and ticketing,” despite strong evidence “demonstrating the effectiveness of common-sense infrastructural and road design measures.”
Additionally, the report highlights that current approaches do not prevent car crash casualties but instead heighten the “risk of harmful encounters” with law enforcement.
“Lawmakers must commit to these smarter safety strategies,” said Emily Reina Dindial, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. She added that “using traffic stops as a policing tool is completely ineffective in terms of reducing crime or advancing public safety, and excessive stops are a true threat to civil rights and liberties.”
The report also states that these ticketing practices “trap millions” in vicious cycles of debt because they prioritize profit-driven enforcement “over road safety.”
“The current system prioritizes profit activities over safety activities,” the report states. Research found that “in smaller cities, where the courts’ capacity is typically limited, pressure to collect fines and fees diverts resources that could have gone toward addressing public safety.”
Dindial said citizens “should not have to choose between safe roads and our constitutional rights, and this report makes clear that there are myriad road safety strategies that achieve both.”
Leah Shahum, founder and executive director of the Vision Zero Network, added that “we owe it to our communities to use the most effective and equitable strategies to prioritize safe mobility for all.”
Highlighting multiple traffic safety alternatives, such as “street design improvements, incentives for vehicular safety and safe driving, thoughtful use of technology, and shifts in police responses to minor traffic issues,” the report outlines approaches that could significantly enhance roadway safety.
Such solutions are important to making roads safer for all, the report argues, because decade-long policies have prioritized car flow, “enabled far-reaching enforcement on the roads,” and used local governments to generate revenue.
Neath said that “pretextual traffic enforcement is an outdated political relic from the War on Drugs that doesn’t make our roads or our communities any safer.”
She and others call for six evidence-based strategies to keep roadways safe, including prioritizing safety in public spaces, reforming municipal finance, addressing enforcement discretion, piloting models of civilian enforcement, incentivizing vehicular safety and safe driving, and leveraging technology.
The report concludes with a call to action for policymakers at the local, state and federal levels to shift “away from the current system’s shortcomings and build toward a future where roadways account for predictable human errors by design, multimodal transportation is the standard, and police enforcement is the exception rather than the rule.”
The ACLU and the report’s authors call “for a transformation in road safety policy to one that more effectively advances safety and equity.”
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Yeah, um, right.
Sure, $100’s of billions of dollars, *after* you *actually* change lawmaker’s minds — which is needed, and never.
In the meantime, groups like ACLU and the attitude of the Vanguard and police saying FU to society we have created a no-enforcement paradigm that creates a culture of danger for all modes. As Rich Rifkin ride-along article a few years ago stated, the cops in Davis admitted they don’t enforce any ‘minor’ traffic laws, because they don’t want to deal with race lawsuits. So instead people die.
Nice society we’ve created.