A new report from the Policing Project at NYU Law School is challenging long-standing assumptions about traffic safety, arguing that enforcement by police should be only one tool among many rather than the dominant strategy used in the United States.
Each year, more than 40,000 people are killed and more than 2 million injured in preventable car crashes, yet the report, titled “Right-Sizing the Role of Traffic Enforcement,” finds that U.S. traffic safety policy has remained heavily reliant on high-volume police stops and ticketing rather than evidence-based infrastructure and design interventions.
That reliance, researchers argue, has failed to significantly reduce fatalities while introducing new risks through police encounters.
As the report states, “We cannot enforce our way out of a deadly traffic crisis,” finding that enforcement alone is insufficient to address systemic safety failures.
The report further notes that “traffic enforcement should be one tool among many—not the primary strategy—for achieving roadway safety,” pointing to a need for a broader, more integrated approach.
The report builds on a growing body of research showing that roadway design, engineering changes, and systemic interventions are more effective at preventing crashes than punitive enforcement strategies alone.
Scarlet Neath, who leads the project’s traffic safety work, said the research reveals a disconnect between policy norms and what actually improves safety.
“Once you start digging into what actually does keep our roads safe, it is, in my opinion, astounding what we take for granted as just policy norms in this country that are really dissociated from what would actually produce road safety,” Neath said.
Among the alternatives noted in the report are safer speed limit policies, real-time driver feedback systems, and roadway redesigns that slow traffic and prioritize pedestrians.
“One example is that the kind of defacto way of setting speed limits is a rule called the 85th percentile that is setting them according to what the majority of drivers naturally drive on a road,” Neath said.
She pointed to simple interventions such as speed feedback signs and “quick build” infrastructure changes.
“Things like driver feedback signs that inform you of whether or not you’re going past those speed limits can have a really strong deterrent effect,” she said.
Neath added that smaller, lower-cost design changes can have significant impacts.
“There’s also a ton of smaller, cheaper things that are categorized by the transportation community as quick builds that can have a really powerful effect on how cars flow through communities and how safe all road users are around those cars,” she said.
These include speed humps, improved intersection visibility, and pedestrian-first signal timing.
“One of my favorite examples is that it’s something called leading pedestrian intervals where signals across the street at a crosswalk is delayed so that the car flow is delayed to let the prioritization of the people flow go,” Neath said.
The report also cites successful examples, including the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, which has achieved sustained reductions in traffic fatalities through incremental changes aligned with Vision Zero principles.
“It was a lot of small changes over time that made really incremental significant progress,” Neath said.
Beyond effectiveness, the report raises equity concerns, arguing that both traffic enforcement and traffic violence disproportionately impact communities of color. The report notes that “overreliance on enforcement can exacerbate existing inequities while failing to address the root causes of traffic violence,” reinforcing the need for structural solutions.
“We have a lot of systemic racism in this country that has created neighborhoods where highways were constructed in the middle of primarily black and brown neighborhoods that created really fast streets,” Neath said.
She noted that basic safety infrastructure is often lacking in these communities.
“Things like sidewalks and streetlights that are key for pedestrian safety are less likely to be in low income neighborhoods of color,” she said.
The cumulative effect, she said, is stark.
“All of those factors cumulatively add up to create a situation in where people of color are more likely to be affected by traffic crashes,” Neath said.
At the same time, those same communities are often subjected to disproportionate enforcement.
“They’re also more likely to be affected by disparate police enforcement that is too often not focused on the root causes of dangerous driving and crashes,” she said.
The report argues that relying primarily on enforcement in historically underinvested communities perpetuates inequities rather than addressing them.
“If you have a historically disinvested community and you’re only applying the individual level punishment focused intervention on that community and not addressing the kind of systemic inequities… that is a insufficient way to remedy the harms,” Neath said.
“We’re an organization housed within NYU Law School and we’re founded around the idea of what we call front end or democratic accountability in law enforcement, meaning that communities should have more input into how they are policed and police departments should be more accountable to the communities that they serve,” said Josh Manson of the Policing Project in an interview.
Manson said the group’s traffic safety work emerged from a broader critique of policing practices and their effectiveness.
“The idea of this work being that we as a country, as a society, have leaned really heavily on enforcement as our main traffic safety strategy,” he said. “And it has had negative consequences for everyone, for law enforcement, for traffic safety, for public safety.”
Manson argued that many traffic stops are not even primarily about safety.
“They are often used as a pretext to sort of create police community interaction so that police can then go fishing for evidence of actual crime,” he said, adding that such practices are “not effective again as a public safety measure or a traffic safety measure.”
The report does not call for eliminating traffic enforcement entirely but instead for recalibrating its role.
“I think when people think about traffic safety and dangerous driving, oftentimes the gut reaction is, ‘Well, we need more police,’” Neath said.
She said the goal is to shift toward a more comprehensive framework.
“This report is just presenting the whole context of how traffic safety is really created… and giving context for the targeted specific role that enforcement should play,” she said.
Under that model, enforcement would focus on the most dangerous behaviors rather than broad, high-volume stops.
“There’s no magic number to how much enforcement is needed, but it should be driven and informed by where crashes are happening and what driving traffic offenses are contributing to those crashes,” Neath said.
The report also explores technological solutions, including automated enforcement and vehicle-based speed controls, while cautioning that these tools must be implemented equitably.
“Police cannot be everywhere at once to catch all dangerous driving,” Neath said.
That limitation, she said, reinforces the need for systemic prevention strategies.
“It has to be part of a bigger, holistic range of solutions that prevent that behavior from ever happening as much as possible,” she said.
She pointed to emerging technologies such as intelligent speed assistance.
“It’ll ding for you when you go over the speed limit,” Neath said, noting that such systems are already standard in Europe.
Ultimately, the report aligns with the broader Safe Systems approach, which assumes human error and seeks to design roads that minimize the consequences of that error.
“The Safe Systems approach… takes as a principle and philosophy that there will be people who speed and we should account for that and build the system to prevent the danger that comes from that as best as possible,” Neath said.
Manson said the project’s broader goal is to bring together stakeholders across disciplines to rethink traffic safety policy.
“We have sort of built and are cultivating this community… to all come together and sort of reimagine what traffic safety policy can look like in this country,” he said.
As traffic fatalities remain stubbornly high nationwide, the report argues that rethinking the balance between enforcement and prevention is not just a policy preference but a necessity.
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