The Second Best Way to Get Safer Streets
Ideally, transportation planners could redesign roads to be less lethal to drivers and pedestrians. But in the real world, settling for less-than-perfect fixes can still save lives.
A police recruit practices traffic stops outside the San Francisco Police Academy in San Francisco in 2023. Small changes to traffic enforcement policy could have big effects on road safety.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergTransportation policy has not been short on big ideas. Whether the topic is congestion, emissions or equity, researchers and policymakers have formulated thousands of ambitious plans over the years. Some have even been trialed or implemented in full. One stubborn constraint is that most good ideas are not designed to pass through the eye of the relevant needle at scale. For example, our mechanisms of regulating land use and transportation leave a great deal to local discretion, which means reform efforts tend to provoke a fatal reaction from key veto-holders —transportation regulators, legislatures, courts, and hyper-participatory and unrepresentative factions of residents who are savvy in the ways of municipal government — that are structurally biased against changes.
This bias is too deeply embedded to be just voted out of office: What is needed are ideas that can succeed not by overcoming this barrier, but by sidestepping it.