Traffic deaths are down, but not for the reasons we're being told

Everyone wants fewer deadly crashes, and any decline in fatalities is good news. But before we declare victory, we have to ask a crucial question: Is this decline real? Or is it simply a return to pre-pandemic conditions, misattributed to policy changes?

These are important questions because we risk learning the wrong lessons on traffic safety from our time in the pandemic.

The False Positive Problem

The pandemic gave us an unintentional traffic safety experiment. In the early days of COVID-19, with fewer people on the road, one might have expected traffic fatalities to drop. In fact, that is what the typical traffic engineer would have predicted. Traffic deaths are seen largely as a function of miles driven. With dramatically fewer miles being driven, deaths should have plummeted.

Instead, the opposite happened.

With empty streets, speeding surged and the fatal crash rate per mile driven increased dramatically. Strong Towns was among the first — and somewhat the only — organization to report on this phenomenon, warning that streets overengineered for high-speed vehicle movement become deadlier when drivers are free to push the limits of the design.

Public safety officials and advocacy organizations broadly attributed this increase in fatalities to reckless driving, impaired drivers or a lack of enforcement, but the reality was far more systemic. Wide, overbuilt streets — designed to accommodate high speeds — create an environment where even small mistakes have deadly consequences. Without the friction of congestion to slow vehicles down, the fundamental flaws in our street designs were exposed.

Now, as traffic congestion has returned to normal, we should expect fatal crashes to decline — not necessarily because of safety programs, but because congested roads slow drivers down. This is what is happening in Tampa Bay and in other cities touting similar results.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) reports that traffic volumes have fully rebounded from pandemic lows. In many places, they now exceed pre-pandemic levels. A recent Smart Cities Dive report shows that congestion levels in major U.S. metro areas are up 12% from 2019 levels. Cities like Tampa, Atlanta and Dallas are seeing more vehicle miles traveled than before the pandemic, leading to increased levels of congestion.

Congestion is frustrating, but it acts as a natural speed limiter. A dense line of cars inching forward on a packed roadway is not going to create a high-speed, fatal collision. If a city sees declining fatal crashes in this environment, it doesn’t necessarily mean their policies are working — it likely just means that more drivers are stuck in traffic.

Yet, rather than recognizing the role of traffic patterns in shaping crash outcomes, these cities and the USDOT are rushing to credit reductions to their own largely ineffective policies. They are leaving their deadly streets unchanged.

Learning the Wrong Lessons

The biggest danger of a false positive isn’t just misplaced credit — it’s what happens next. If officials believe their efforts are responsible for the decline in fatalities, they may double down on ineffective programs while ignoring necessary reforms.

Despite fluctuations in congestion levels, there remains a stubborn level of traffic fatalities that we seem unable to address. This was true before the pandemic, and it remains true now. Cities continue to overspend on overengineered streets that are ultimately unsafe. If we don't change our design approach, increased congestion may unintentionally save lives during peak periods, but our streets will remain really dangerous. This danger shows up during off-peak times, when most fatal crashes occur.

If we genuinely want to reduce these numbers, we need to learn the lessons that the pandemic revealed about the relationship between street design and traffic fatalities. This is why we yelled so loudly about how the reckless driver narrative was reckless and that we can't go around blaming the unvaccinated and other such silliness like our institutions did during the pandemic.

If we don't learn these lessons, we will continue to see a baseline of preventable deaths that no amount of enforcement, education or reactive policy can fix.

This past October, Strong Towns released the "Beyond Blame" report, our findings from 18 months of helping conduct Crash Analysis Studio sessions. The report provides a roadmap for cities to move beyond blaming individual drivers or pedestrians and instead take a systematic approach to preventing crashes. It outlined six key recommendations for cities looking to make meaningful progress on traffic safety:

1. Make Safety a Core Organizational Responsibility — Assign a dedicated person or team within the city government to actively advocate for traffic safety across all departments and decision-making processes.

2. Establish a Crash Response Team — Create a team to investigate serious crashes, gathering data to understand the causes and identify patterns to prevent future accidents.

3. Create a Crash Analysis Studio — Conduct in-depth analyses of fatal crashes to identify the many contributing factors.

4. Use Temporary Traffic Control Devices — Quickly address hazardous situations with temporary measures, using standard practices for lane closures and other construction projects while permanent solutions are developed.

5. Update Local Street Standards — Prioritize safety over traffic speed and throughput when designing and modifying local streets.

6. Conduct Bike and Walk Audits — Provide the same level of insight and awareness to the safety of people biking and walking as is routinely applied to people driving.

To make real progress on traffic safety, the people working in city hall need to fundamentally shift their thinking on crashes. They need a new understanding, a different baseline for their internal conversation.

The Crash Analysis Studio model was developed as a way for local leaders to redirect their staff toward a safe streets agenda. By asking their staff to systematically analyze crashes, identify systemic design flaws, and implement targeted safety improvements, local leaders can surface critical questions. Asking different questions — better questions — is how local leaders will move their city beyond the ineffective cycle of blame, beyond the feckless enforcement and awareness campaigns, and to an approach to street safety that works (and costs much, much less to implement and maintain).

We don’t need more announcements celebrating short-term statistical shifts. We need local governments that commit to real, structural changes in how they design and manage their streets. If that's you, we're here to help. I’d love to come to your city and help you get a Crash Analysis Studio started. If your local leadership is ready, sign up and we’ll talk.