Many agencies are taking encouraging, early steps to adopt the Safe System approach. What comes next, though, is even more important to make meaningful and lasting Vision Zero progress: institutionalizing Safe Systems, so that safety is the default, not the exception, in all plans, policies and practices going forward.
This was the emphasis of our July 2026 webinar, Institutionalizing the Safe System Approach: Strategies for Local Action, co-hosted with Fehr & Peers. They helped develop an important new resource – the Toolkit for Institutionalizing the Safe System Approach – that lays out 30 tools for making road safety the default in everyday decision making.
To help bring these ideas to life, we heard from practitioners in Portland, Oregon; Montgomery County, Maryland, and the State of Georgia, who each shared ways they are embedding safety as a sustained organizational priority – moving beyond a project-by-project approach.
Read the full Toolkit for Institutionalizing the Safe System Approach, which is a research product of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP Project 08-171).
View the Webinar Slides
What Does Institutionalization of Safe Systems Mean?
As Taylor Whitaker of Fehr & Peers framed it, the hardest part of the Safe System approach isn't the engineering – it is the paradigm shift within an organization’s culture and everyday actions, in what gets planned, funded and built, that makes the change stick. Many agencies have adopted the five elements of the Safe System Wheel (see above) in name only, (exs: safer people, safer roads, safer vehicles, safer speeds, and post-crash care) treating them as a checklist of separate elements rather than embracing the six underlying principles that hold them together: that death and serious injury are unacceptable, that humans make mistakes and are vulnerable, that responsibility is shared, that safety must be proactive, and that redundancy is crucial. When the elements get adopted without those principles, safety stays siloed and reactive.
What the Safe System approach does differently is shift the focus upstream - from responding to individual crashes to addressing the conditions that create risk in the first place. As the Safe Systems Pyramid below illustrates, the most impactful interventions come from system design at the socioeconomic and built-environment levels, the base of the pyramid rather than from individual behavior at the top.
Another key feature of the Safe System approach is recognizing that at the center of it all is kinetic energy: the root cause of serious injury. Too often, speed is considered one among many components, or not even seriously considered at all. But, in reality, this is where the emphasis needs to be. (Read more in our Preventing Unsafe Speeds primer.)
Higher vehicle speeds exponentially increase both the likelihood of a crash happening and the severity of a crash for multiple reasons. First, higher speeds worsen a drivers’ reaction time and braking distance, making it harder to respond quickly to risks; second, higher speeds limit a driver’s field of vision; and most notably, the higher the speed the more kinetic energy it releases in a crash and the less the human body can withstand it.
So managing kinetic energy is where we can most improve safety. Speed is the biggest driver of that energy - but it isn't the only lever. As described in the webinar and the new Toolkit, planners and practitioners can manage kinetic energy risk across three levers: exposure (how much people drive), severity, which includes how fast vehicles travel and how heavy they are, and likelihood of a crash (how often road users come into conflict). The image below breaks down each.
The new Toolkit for Institutionalizing the Safe System Approach recommends 30 tools around four themes, offering agencies a range of options of where to start:
- Building a genuine culture of safety;
- Safe System–aligned policies and budgeting;
- Design and project procedures; and
- Land use and transportation integration
The three webinar presenters each brought their experiences with some of those tools to life.
Portland: Contextual Speed Limit Setting
Portland, Oregon’s story is a case study in patience – proof that incremental steps are sometimes the best, and maybe the only, way to advance big policy priorities. When the City adopted Vision Zero in 2015, speed limits were governed by the traditional "85th-percentile rule," which rests on how fast drivers are already traveling, too often locking in prevailing speeds and leaving out consideration of context, such as street design, land use, and crash risk.
Portland recognized that setting speed limits at the appropriate speeds was key to advancing their safety work. They worked to establish new procedures that set limits based on valuable context and risk factors – aiming to be proactive in encouraging safer speeds, versus reacting to how fast people were already driving.
So Portland chipped away at the not-insignificant change. In 2017, it passed a state law to allow 20 mph residential speed limits. Then, they piloted a design-based approach on collector streets that reduced approval times to lower speed limits from 12 months to 3 months, which helped shape a new 2020 statewide speed limit setting methodology built on land use and crash history. Since 2017, Portland has lowered speed limits on more than 200 miles of arterials and collectors and about 1,600 miles of residential streets.
As Clay Veka of the Portland Bureau of Transportation described it, the work is to set a clear safety vision and work over time to improve the system, overall. You don't need to be Portland, or a big city, to begin this systemic speed management work. Whether your community is large or small, rural or urban, the approach is similar: not a quick fix or an all-or-nothing leap, but rather a matter of setting clear safety goals, recognizing that systems take time to change, and putting in consistent energy over time. (Read more examples of communities of all sizes successfully shifting to Safety Over Speed policies.)
Georgia: Implementing safety countermeasures systemically
The Georgia Department of Transportation (DOT) is showing what proactive, data-driven safety looks like at the state level, acting on where risk is building, instead of waiting for crashes to pile up at known hot spots. They use network screening and near-miss data to deploy proven countermeasures systemically, so risks get addressed earlier and more consistently – addressing locations that a reactive approach might otherwise ignore.
The traditional (non-Safe Systems) approach mostly depends on crash history and volume counts to find safety gaps, but as Georgia DOT Safety Engineering Manager Ron Knezevich explained in the webinar, that data is often thin. "Pedestrian crashes represent less than 1% of our crash data, but 20% of our fatalities,” Knezevich said. “Small data set, big problem." Given that, in some places, pedestrian crashes are rare, underreported, and hard to predict, and volume counts rarely available, relying on them alone can miss real safety problems. So Georgia built a predictive approach that forecasts where people are likely to walk, estimates where crashes are most likely and most costly, and combines that with actual crash history to rank the riskiest locations. Those top-ranked locations then get prioritized for proven, lower-cost countermeasures - deployed systemically across many similar sites at once, from bus stops to school zones to trail crossings.
This systemic framing is what helps an agency get ahead of long streams of complaints. Waiting until crashes reach a certain threshold delays improvements at actual high-risk locations, especially in rural and overall low-volume locations where the crash sample size may be relatively small but the potential severity of crashes is high. "A lot of times people react, and it's all just about answering some citizen complaint," Knezevich said. “But if you get ahead of it and you have these systemic strategies… that allows for the conversation to shift to, yes, we can do that." Read more about Georgia DOT's Safe Systems work in the new Safe System Success Stories.
Montgomery County: Making Safety the Rule, Not the Exception
In Montgomery County, Maryland, the goal is to design each street to match the context of the place it runs through. So, the speeds and street design suit the context - whether it's a neighborhood, a downtown, or a busy corridor - and hold speeds to survivable levels. To make that durable, the County is writing safe street design into its laws, rather than something negotiated project by project.
Its Thrive Montgomery 2050 Plan focuses growth in downtowns, activity centers, and along major corridors, and emphasizes more walking, biking, and transit trips. By offering people more options to drive less often and less distance, this reduces exposure to the risks that come with vehicle travel. Building on that, the County's Complete Streets Design Guide - developed jointly by Montgomery Planning and the County DOT, sorts streets by land use and function and assigns each a target speed, as low as 20mph in neighborhoods, along with design details such as lane counts, crossing spacing, and buffers.
As Alex Rixey of Montgomery Planning emphasized, target speeds aren't just posted limits - they're the speed a street is designed to encourage, the pace that feels natural given its width, crossings, and design cues. Rather than carry auto-centric designs forward, the County shapes streets to fit how communities live and move today, so the comfortable speed is also a survivable one by tying design directly to the risk of severe injury and death. And crucially, both the street types and their default target speeds are written into the County Code, not just guidance that can be set aside. The Complete Streets Design Guide is the shared playbook for planners, project staff, and development reviewers alike - that puts road safety first.
Start Where You Are
A common thread across these three communities is that institutionalizing the Safe System approach does not require perfect conditions, a big budget, or a wholesale overhaul. It is usually an incremental journey with a lot of different places where one can start – check out many options in the new Toolkit for Institutionalizing the Safe System Approach.
And while much of the webinar conversation shared examples on urban streets, the presenters were clear that these Safe System tools travel. For example, contextual speed setting and street-design reforms can be applied on rural roads, alongside taking more proactive approaches to identify locations that need safety fixes, such as trail crossings and rural school zones.
Whether you start by aligning your safety and pavement programs, updating how you set speed limits, or writing target speeds into local policy, the point is to begin where you can. Explore the new toolkit to find the tools that fit your community, and view the webinar slides.
To learn how more communities are putting these ideas into practice, read about other Safe System Success Stories and join the September 10 webinar co-hosted by IIHS and Vision Zero Network. |