Across the country, more communities are shifting to a Safe System approach, using road safety strategies focused on upstream changes. And many are seeing encouraging results. In 2025, traffic deaths declined by 12% compared to 2024, following smaller decreases of 3% in 2023 and 2% in 2022.
When we zoom in at the local level, we see an even more encouraging picture emerging. Specific strategies and investments are making streets safer in Vision Zero communities across the country. Read more in Vision Zero in 2025 Shows Progress: Lessons to Learn.
In our March 2026 webinar, We Know What Works: Small Steps with Real Results, we heard from Vision Zero leaders in Arlington County, Virginia; Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Alexandria, Virginia about their on-the-ground work – and what’s working best.
(see 1-hour recording and slidedeck from March 19, 2026)
Here are three takeaways that stuck with us:
1 - Leverage Safety Data to Manage Pushback
When Columbus’ Department of Public Service took on the East Broad Street safety project, they knew there would be pushback. This seven-lane corridor on the city's High Injury Network (HIN) was redesigned from six travel lanes to four travel lanes and protected bike lanes in each direction. Residents raised concerns about losing on-street parking and community meetings grew tense. The conversation began to drift off course ultimately fixating on the addition of bike lanes rather than the project’s central focus of improving safety.
In an effort to manage the pushback, the Division of Mobility & Parking Services consistently returned to the data. The parking spaces being removed had a utilization rate of only 3%, and they were functioning as a de facto passing lane contributing to sideswipe- and rear-end crashes that put East Broad on the HIN in the first place. And the street itself was a design relic: originally built as a major east-west connector, it had become redundant once the interstate system was built.
Source: Columbus Department of Public Service
The safety results speak for themselves: the street redesign reduced crashes by 54%. The bike lanes, which residents insisted no one would use, now see about 80 users per day, including people in motorized wheelchairs who previously didn’t have an option on that roadway.
"It's pretty hard to argue, when you are a community member complaining about your Christmas party parking, that we have taken away 54% of crashes along a corridor," Brian Ashworth, Columbus's Transportation Planning Manager, shared during the webinar. "The conversation went away pretty quickly when we were able to have some of those data points to back our decisions."
Another piece of advice Brian shared with those facing pushback to safety projects is to over-communicate the goal early and often. As projects become more complex, it’s easy for conversations to get sidetracked by constraints and competing concerns, so practitioners need to continually refocus stakeholders on the core objective of reducing injury crashes and fatalities.
2 - Communicate the Right Story
One of the more practical exchanges of the webinar arose from Alexandria, VA work shifting away from using Level of Service (LOS) as the primary lens for evaluating street design without abandoning the analysis altogether.
As Alex Caroll from the City of Alexandria described it, when people see an “F” Level of Service rating, they often assume severe congestion or failure, even though in an urban context it may simply mean that a driver waits a few extra seconds at a signal. The grade can suggest a level of breakdown that doesn’t match reality.
To address this, the Alexandria’s Vision Zero leaders are reframing how they communicate about performance. Instead of relying on letter grades, staff describe delays in plain terms, such as via seconds of wait time, and evaluate conditions over a broader 15-hour period, rather than focusing solely on the single most congested peak hour. This shift helps ground conversations in a more accurate and less alarmist understanding of how streets are actually functioning.
Carroll’s advice to other practitioners: adopt a policy if you don't already have one — a Vision Zero goal, a multimodal goal, something with official standing — because it gives your community something concrete to point to when projects get contested. This kind of policy foundation not only helps externally, but also supports the internal shifts needed to change how agencies evaluate and communicate about street designs and other changes.
As Carroll put it during the webinar, “You don’t always need to do more to make your streets safer. You just maybe need to do things you’re already doing a little bit differently.”
3 - Use Before-and-After Data to Scale Up What Works
Across the webinar’s Q&A, one theme that came up again and again was the value of collecting rigorous before-and-after data, not just to evaluate whether a project worked. But it also is what makes future progress possible. When practitioners can clearly show what conditions were like before a change, and how things improved after, they build credible evidence. That evidence helps justify scaling up similar projects, securing funding, gaining political support, and overcoming skepticism.
Arlington County’s commitment to strong before-and-after evaluation has allowed them to tell concrete stories that build and sustain support internally within the agency.
"It allows our leadership to then support us even more, when we can say, this is what we did, and here is the benefit of that. Because it's very concrete, and people can see that," Christine Baker, the Vision Zero Program Manager, of Arlington County.
Matt Gertz of Seattle described a similar dynamic at work in the city's arterial traffic calming program. After years of stepwise speed limit reductions, starting with a 2016 default speed limit change from 30 to 25 on targeted pilot corridors. They then shifted to a citywide expansion of lowered speed limits. Seattle then added physical safety measures, including speed cushions. Data from 11 corridors showed a 16% reduction in average speeds, and the share of drivers traveling at very high speeds dropped to just a quarter of a percent. This data, backed by a voter-approved levy, is what has allowed Seattle to keep expanding the program year over year. Now, the city is exploring opportunities to reduce arterial speed limits to 20 mph in areas with high pedestrian activity or where street redesigns support it. This next step is possible largely because the city has built a strong track record of results over time.
Matt put it simply when asked about the language that helps this work move forward: use plain language. "When you're talking about data, you're also talking about people."
We Know That Investing in Vision Zero Works
As we’ve seen in these examples and others, when we invest in Vision Zero, we see measurable safety results. Whether its pilot projects or large-scale citywide efforts, these efforts show that change is possible. And even small wins can build momentum for bigger changes. So, don’t forget to celebrate the victories – even the small ones – because this helps pave the way for more successes to come.
Do you have a success story you want to share with us? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Please share here.