Making Vision Zero commitments and developing robust plans are important, early steps for communities working to advance safe mobility for all. The next step to making meaningful, lasting gains in road safety – an ongoing series of steps – is to institutionalize the Safe System principles that underpin Vision Zero in a community’s everyday work.
This involves setting policies, programs and funding streams that move beyond just responding to individual crashes after they happen and, instead, pivoting to proactively identify and address the underlying causes of traffic deaths and serious injuries. This Safe Systems approach shifts the work to focus on being proactive and using an injury prevention framework in everyday transportation planning, policies and decision making.
Good news: it is happening more and more across the U.S.
Join the September 10 webinar on the new Safe System Success Stories co-hosted by IIHS and Vision Zero Network. More info & registration.
Learn about on-the-ground examples in these new Safe System Success Stories – case studies of how communities – local and state, urban and rural – are making the Safe System approach their default, rather than an exception. Examples include how they evaluate risks on the roads, design streets, manage speeds, and prioritize investments.
Developed by road safety professionals, including IIHS, ITE, Vision Zero Network, UNC-Center for Highway Safety Research Center and Fehr & Peers, these newly released Success Stories are aimed at supporting people working in transportation agencies, policymakers and advocates.
The case studies share a powerful trait: They address the “trifecta” of exposure, severity, and likelihood simultaneously, producing compounding safety benefits.
Here’s a sampling of Safe System Success Stories:
- Santa Rosa, California is institutionalizing serious injury and fatality prevention at scale by shifting from project‑by‑project safety fixes to embedding Safe System principles across capital planning, street design and development review. This includes updating the city’s Capital Improvement Program to prioritize pavement maintenance and safety projects, especially within their high iInjury network and transit network. Projects that were not explicitly aligned with Vision Zero and community priorities for safer streets were canceled or updated. Read more.
- Arlington, Virginia is proactively addressing pedestrian injury risk by scaling up intersection safety improvements. The County paired these changes with multiple speed‑reduction measures that bring operating speeds closer to survivable levels, reducing the severity of crashes when they occur. Their tools include greater use of centerline hardening and leading pedestrian intervals to manage conflicts at intersections and to slow turning vehicles, as well as roadway reconfigurations, school zone speed safety cameras, lower speed limits and quick-build treatments to reduce speeds. The safety results are impressive - Read more.
- Georgia shows how lasting injury prevention goes beyond focusing on known hot spots. The State Department of Transportation uses network screening and near-miss data to proactively deploy countermeasures. Interventions happen earlier and more consistently across the network, preventing severe injuries and fatalities at locations that might otherwise be overlooked. Examples of tools that Georgia has deployed systemically include curve treatments, bus stop assessments, all-way stop-controlled upgrades and conflict analysis for pedestrian safety. Read more about this model for states.
Learn about these and additional Safe System Success Stories in these brief, pointed descriptions of what communities are doing (or ceasing to do) to make system-level changes that help the safest choice for people on the roads also be the easy, natural choice.