How do we identify and use the most effective, cost-efficient and equitable tools to make real and lasting road safety progress?
This is the high stakes question we delved into during our August 2026 webinar, City Steps: Rightsizing the Role of Traffic Enforcement. We learned how Oakland, California and Minneapolis, Minnesota are actively assessing and, where needed, updating which traffic enforcement strategies best advance their Vision Zero goals of safe streets for all.
The discussion drew on Vision Zero Network’s new report, Right-Sizing the Role of Traffic Enforcement: Prioritizing Effective, Cost-Efficient and Equitable Improvements to Road Safety, developed with the Policing Project at NYU with contributions from dozens of groups and researchers working on traffic safety and criminal justice reform.
Watch the one-hour webinar recording and see the slides.
The following three themes emerged:
1 – Certain road safety tools are more effective at addressing certain situations than others.
The message of Right-Sizing the Role of Traffic Enforcement is not to cut out traffic stops but to optimize police time to deliver the most effective, cost-efficient and equitable safety results. Evidence shows that upstream safety efforts provide longer lasting benefits and cost less over time compared to over-relying on traffic stops. Upstream efforts include designing self-enforcing components of streets to physically deter dangerous speeding, setting speed limits and timing traffic signals for safety over vehicle throughput, and leveraging technology for safety.
Why? These upstream measures can be “on duty” consistently at all hours of the day and night.
As Jasmine Pomar, Chief of Staff of the Oakland Department of Transportation, shared during the webinar: What people want is an outcome. They want safe streets. Understandably, they complain when people drive too fast on the streets where they live and spend time because it feels – and often is – unsafe. For most people, the most obvious solution to call for is more enforcement. But no community will ever have police officers everywhere they’re needed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
So, we can help people recognize other strategies to help get the outcome they want: safe streets. Pomar explained that the tools her transportation department wields and those of the police department should not be considered either/or strategies, but rather as “force multipliers.”
Plus, as more 24/7 solutions are used, such as traffic calming, the more of law enforcement’s time is freed up for other community priorities. She emphasized that rightsizing enforcement is not about supplanting police jobs but to reduce their load of work writing traffic tickets, which is not most officers’ preferred task anyways.
“We often fall into these conversations about the ‘right amount’ of police,” Pomar said. It’s not about taking the moral high ground, but rather about what’s the best way to use the resources we have to improve traffic safety.
Leaders in Minneapolis also emphasize these are not either/or conversations. In the webinar, Ethan Fawley, Transportation Planning Manager with Minneapolis’ Public Works agency, explained that the way people think about enforcement varies widely: some wanting more and others wanting less. And those variances do not fall along clear, easy-to-understand lines of geography, race, income or other factors.
Fawley focuses on being objective and fact-based in trying to address what people are really asking for – safety on their streets. As a transportation professional, he can use the proven tools he has control over, including redesigning streets to be more self-enforcing and developing a new speed safety camera pilot, while also working with police and recognizing their staffing and time constraints. (Read Vision Zero Network’s Fair Warnings: Recommendations to Promote Equity in Speed Safety Camera Programs.) A core tenet of Minneapolis’ Vision Zero work is to improve safety with as many effective tools as possible, ultimately reducing the long-term need for traffic enforcement.
2 – Not all traffic stops are created equal.
Focusing enforcement on safety-critical behaviors most linked to serious crashes – such as speeding and impaired driving – delivers bigger safety benefits than spending police time on making low-level, non-safety stops, such as a minor vehicle defect or registration issue (see examples below). Understanding the difference between safety stops and non-safety stops is an important step to help communities rightsize their enforcement efforts.
Crash data shows that non-safety stops, often referred to as pretext stops, are implicated in just 0.2% of fatal crashes nationwide. Research also shows that traffic stops are not proven to reduce other crimes, as is sometimes argued. They rarely yield useful crime-solving information but do often create unnecessary flashpoints of confrontation that endanger both officers and road users. See the Center for Policing Equity’s Factsheet: Which Stops Impact Serious Crashes?
Analysis by Oakland’s transportation and police departments found that the majority of the city’s fatal and injury crashes relate to a small handful of dangerous driving behaviors – as is often the case in communities. For Oakland, these include failure to yield, unsafe turning, unsafe speed, and disobeying signs and signals. To respond to this, Pomar said, police make a conscious and deliberate effort to focus on these – the most dangerous moving violations – and also focus on the highest-crash locations. Over time, they have significantly reduced the number of non-safety stops they make.
Oakland prioritizes three factors in analyzing its traffic safety strategies: Is it effective? Does it last? And is it equitable? After that, they compare cost-effectiveness.
Pomar explains: “Your infrastructure does eventually pay for itself in reducing the need for traffic stops…If you don’t need to police a corridor as much, how much money is your city budget saving year over year? Because the infrastructure stays there – and is there constantly.”
3 – Right-sized enforcement can address racial & economic disparities of traffic stops.
In the U.S., Black drivers are more likely to be stopped by police while driving, more likely to be searched once stopped, more likely to have force used against them, and more likely to be killed by police, especially when unarmed.
Minneapolis’ Vision Zero work includes explicit steps to advance procedural justice in traffic stops and to address racial disparities in traffic stops (as were identified as part of a 2022 Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation). This includes no longer conducting stops for expired tabs, most items dangling from a rearview mirror, and inoperable license plate lights (see the official police policy 7-601 for details). Police track race in traffic stops to monitor trends over time and to build transparency and greater trust with communities. And the City’s new speed safety camera pilot program is run by the public works and regulatory services agencies, that also manages parking enforcement, and not by the police department.
In Oakland, too, traffic safety work is intertwined with issues of race. This is, in part, because most of the traffic violence in the city happens in Black & Brown neighborhoods, with Black Oaklanders being three times as likely to die in a crash than White Oaklanders.
Source: Oakland Citywide Crash Analysis
“So many of the streets that run through Black and Brown neighborhoods are designed to get you through that neighborhood and not to that neighborhood,” Pomar explained in the webinar. “They’re functionally speedways … they are built for speed, built to move cars through a neighborhood and really cut it up and divide it.”
As in so many cities, these historically under-resourced neighborhoods are often over-policed in ways that neglect needed investments and solutions such as redesigned roads to improve safety long-term.
Pomar explained it as “kind of a raw deal” for community members, in general. “[Over time] we built all these streets. They’re way too big. They’re overbuilt. They encourage dangerous behaviors. They encourage speeding. And then the community turns around and asks you to fix the problem that historical engineering caused.”
She continued: “We don’t build buildings that are highly flammable with non-insultated wiring…And just let them burn down, then say, ‘well, we just need to hire a bunch more firefighters.’ We have fire codes to stop buildings from lighting on fire in the first place.”
This slide from the August 2026 webinar shows actions to consider on the path to rightsizing traffic enforcement in your community.
Links to the videos referenced above: Decreasing Non-Public-Safety Traffic Stops & Interview with John Choi, Ramsey County Attorney
Fawley of Minneapolis shared: “As a transportation person, you don’t control your police department directly, but you can make a big difference in this space. However you want to do that – by asking good questions, collecting good information, pushing to that self-enforcing street...really listening too and helping them to find those solutions that are less focused on enforcement and can be the most effective possible.”
Missed the conversation? Watch the recording to find out how Oakland and Minneapolis are putting these ideas into practice — and what change could look like in your own community. Big thanks to Jasmine Pomar of Oakland and Ethan Fawley of Minneapolis, Minnesota for sharing their experiences and insights.
>> Stay tuned for the next in our Rightsizing Enforcement webinar series – happening in October 2026.