Real Talk on Equity in Roadway Safety

It’s important to celebrate the progress that some U.S. communities are making to prioritize health equity in their Vision Zero work. Examples include Oakland, CA implementing the majority of safety investments and improvements in the communities experiencing the greatest burden of safety risks; Philadelphia, PA ending pretext traffic stops for non-safety related offenses because of evidence of racial bias; and Denver, CO hiring people who are actually from the communities experiencing the greatest safety burdens to act as community liaisons to inform City decision-making. 

Still, we know that most communities have a lot of work ahead of them to fully and meaningfully recognize and address disparities in roadway safety efforts and outcomes. 

In A Real Talk on Equity in Roadway Safety, our recent webinar in collaboration with the Road to Zero Coalition, we brought together a panel of experts for a candid discussion about what it will take to see the changes that are needed to cultivate transportation systems that are truly safe and accessible for everyone. (Check out the slides and recording of our one-hour discussion).

Thanks to our panel participants, listed above, who shared their insights and ideas on this important topic. Following are our key takeaways from the discussion, grouped in the following topic areas:

• We measure what we care about. We care about what we measure
• Think Broadly and Beyond the Silo of Road Safety
• Build a Collective Vision of Safe, Equitable Communities

We measure what we care about. We care about what we measure.

Just as we analyze WHERE traffic violence is occurring, we must analyze WHO is experiencing a disproportionate burden of traffic violence. Increasingly, communities are not only identifying their High Injury Networks (HIN) but also layering them with important community demographic data to better understand the relationships between road safety risks and other indicators of vulnerabilities and potential inequities. But, of course, it’s not enough to just measure how disparities show up. We have to track the impacts of our Vision Zero actions to assess their impacts on traffic violence overall and on disparities. Do they improve, worsen or uphold existing inequities? 

To better measure needs and progress in advancing equity in Vision Zero work, our panelists shared these recommendations:

• Use data to recognize who bears the brunt of traffic violence and to guide safety investments accordingly. As Jill Locantore, of Denver Streets Partnership shared,“the goals of “equality” and “equity” are often conflated but have important differences.Equality means giving everyone the same amount of something, such as road safety investments, while equity means scaling investments directly related to need. This is critical when we consider the legacy of racist policies and practices, such as redlining and federal highway expansion projects, which left many communities with dangerously built environments and limited safe mobility options and access. 

Equitable improvements in road safety means scaling up investments, such as building Complete Streets and connecting sidewalks and bikeway networks, to allow people to more easily access to healthcare, nutritious food, or school, including by transit, foot or bike. Simply put, when we look at the sum of Vision Zero investments, more should be happening where the need is greatest. (See Oakland’s 2022 annual report (p. 15) that tracks where the majority of the City’s road safety investments are occurring, with the majority in high priority equity communities.)

• Value and prioritize relationships and collaboration. Before quantifiable change, you must first assess the strength of your relationships with communities and community-based organizations increase. As Jamila emphasized, "You build relationships by building trust, and you build trust by keeping your promises." One way to begin doing this is by following through on “low hanging fruit” or addressing easy wins that communities have been asking for — and communicating openly, transparently, and consistently. This means sharing what work has been done that addresses their concerns. And if their concerns haven't been addressed, being honest about what challenges are keeping you from addressing their concerns. Equity-centered transportation work hinges on the strength and trust of your relationships with the communities you serve. Building this trust requires prioritizing community members’ lived experiences, keeping promises, meeting real community needs, sharing power, and continuing conversations and relationship-building after projects roll out. Progress isn’t just about the safety project itself — it's also about connecting with and serving the community. So, track how many people in high-risk areas you’ve heard from in meaningful ways. Do they feel that the agencies have delivered on their promises? Do people living in the area say the process and project is meeting their needs? Even if projects cannot meet 100% of everyone’s needs, which they usually cannot, find ways to measure whether trust with community members has been built up or eroded? (See Denver’s impressive example of hiring those with lived experience in the communities in which they are investing safety improvements.)
• Supplement quantitative data with qualitative data. The data that we're currently using to measure safety are incomplete. Police crash data are usually the go-to for road safety planning, but these data  do not tell the whole story. For instance, while communities of color are disproportionately impacted by traffic violence in the U.S., traffic injuries among Black and Hispanic people are underreported, even though they have higher hospital admission rates than white people. This over-reliance on purely quantitative, agency-centered data misses out on critical aspects of community experience and safety needs.To advance equity in transportation safety, we need to bridge this gap by also incorporating and centering "Community Data,” as Jamila Porter of the de Beaumont Foundation highlighted. “‘Community Data,' a term coined by the Coalition of Communities of Color, "is evidence generated by communities about their everyday lives." It refers to evidence in the form of numbers, words, art, music, sound, and maps…It can be a lot of kinds of data and information (including survey data). The key is that the data have to be community-centered and focused explicitly on community priorities that are connected to people’s everyday lives.”

Think Broadly and Beyond the Silo of Road Safety.

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

- Audre Lorde

We won’t reach Vision Zero – safe mobility for all people – without tackling the deep-rooted and interconnected inequities in our transportation system that put some people at greater risk than others. Still, for the most part, road safety efforts in the U.S. are still happening largely in siloes. And they continue to over-emphasize strategies that are piecemeal and overly focused on downstream, individual level strategies when what is needed are upstream, systemic-level solutions to systemic-level problems. Real change will happen when we can think bigger and more broadly about how transportation issues intersect with so many other issues, ranging from access to healthcare, jobs, school and healthy food to climate and economic justice. Examples include the following:

• Help rightsize the role of traffic enforcement in roadway safety work. Traffic stops for non-safety related offenses don't make our streets safer and perpetuate racial bias. And if we know this to be true, we have a moral responsibility to make change. As Keshia Pollack Porter, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, emphasized in our discussion: “Over policing is not acceptable. Police violence is not acceptable. Excessive force in transportation safety is not acceptable. Twenty million traffic stops per year is unacceptable. Racially biased enforcement is not acceptable.”

While racial disparities and violence related to traffic stops in the U.S. have been viewed as separate issues from transportation safety in the past, the reality is that we all have a responsibility to call out the unjust status quo and work for change. If enforcement actions being used in the name of Vision Zero are exacerbating inequities, then we need to be leaders for change. As Jamila Porter emphasized, “If we stay in our siloes, we will continue to have these conversations for decades and decades.”

Change may start with assessing traffic stops in your community: are they producing effective and equitable outcomes? If not, engage with community members to change policies to make sure road safety efforts don’t exacerbate inequities, as Philadelphia has done to deprioritize non-safety related traffic stops. Consider piloting alternatives to status quo traffic enforcement, such as requiring intelligent speed assistance devices for repeat offenders, as Washington, DC is doing, and scaling public-safety-related traffic citation fines to income levels. And the best option yet, replace poorly designed roads with self-enforcing roadways and lessen the need for reactive, punitive enforcement measures.

•  Integrate public health thinking and strategies into transportation work. We’ll advance Vision Zero goals faster and farther if we embrace and learn from public health principles. This includes focusing on strategies that can have a positive “population health” impact, meaning they are more likely to reach and improve the health of entire communities, regardless of potential social, economic or physical barriers.

  

Denver Streets Partnership’s Jill Locantore shared an example to address potential unintended consequences of road safety projects. For example, would the addition of bike lanes be perceived as exacerbating gentrification in a low-income neighborhood? What if that concern were addressed, in part, with dedicating funding for the community’s other needs, such as 1% of large transportation investments being directed to anti-displacement programs, just as a current program dedicates 1% to arts and placemaking efforts.

Build a Collective Vision of Safe, Equitable Communities.

Making change entails empowering communities to reimagine their neighborhoods – to develop visions beyond the status quo. Followard are ways our panelists recommend building a collective vision for safe, equitable communities:

• Empower people to re-imagine what is. Too often, what we see around us limits our vision of what could be. As Jacob Smith, of National Organizations for Youth Safety (NOYS), shared, "Our biggest missed opportunity is that the majority of our news, the majority of what we see is not reimagining what we want. And so if we’re not creating the opportunity for community members to be a part of that narrative change work then we’re always going to be having this missed opportunity.” As part of Vision Zero work, we need to offer people the opportunities and tools to envision how their ideal environments, neighborhoods and transportation systems look and feel. 
• Make more iterative improvements with ongoing feedback opportunities. The traditional method of transportation-related outreach — asking people to comment based on maps, diagrams and engineering diagrams — often falls short of meeting people where they’re at. As Jill Locantore emphasized, “People are experts in their lived experience. We are not experts in forecasting how our experiences will change.” By making more small, iterative safety improvements and offering opportunities for ongoing feedback, people have the chance to experience change on their streets in real time. then tweak it based on what they say. In doing so, you can better assess how reciprocal these changes are to their transportation needs. 

To achieve Vision Zero is to close disparity gaps in safety so that all people — regardless of where they live or their background — are able to reach their destinations without exposure to traffic violence. But to do so requires distributing resources and safety interventions according to need, which is also central to health equity work. And while many working in fields like engineering and planning might feel like equity falls outside their purview, the truth is that we can't actually reach zero without addressing inequity, structural racism, redlining, or white supremacy, all of which perpetuate disparities in safety risk. Equity-related efforts can and should be led by individuals, agencies, and institutions that have power – particularly government institutions. And while these concepts might be new for some, it is within our control to learn, to build organizational will, and to foster connections with communities and colleagues across other agencies to address the interconnected problems of traffic violence and health inequity.

“I believe that real transformational change to advance and elevate and center equity in roadway safety is possible,” Keshia Pollack Porter shared at the conclusion of our discussion. “And I think it’s possible by meeting people where they are to build trust, by elevating community voices, by truly shifting and building power, and in addressing those disparities that we started talking about with this conversation and really getting to those root causes. So, I think it’s possible and we can do it together.”

With this belief at the forefront, let's commit to the work ahead.