Top 10 Things to Stop Doing to Advance Vision Zero

Over the past decade, Vision Zero Network has been honored to support thousands of people in hundreds of communities working to make their roads safe for everyone. We have had a front-row seat to the progress being made and to the common barriers that slow it down.

As part of our 10-year anniversary, we are celebrating how far the Vision Zero movement has come — and naming what is still holding us back. This means looking critically at the assumptions, habits, and practices embedded in how we approach road safety. Progress requires that kind of honesty.

So here are the Top 10 Things to Stop Doing to Advance Vision Zero — because getting to zero requires nothing less.

10 - Stop: Requiring Parking Minimums; Start: Designing for People

For decades, developers have been required to build a minimum number of parking spaces, a practice that quietly but insidiously shapes our streets in ways that undermine safety. Parking minimums encourage driving, increase the distances people have to walk to reach their destinations, and spread land use areas farther apart in ways that make walking, biking, and transit less practical. They also take up valuable space that could be used for higher uses, such as more housing!

Ending parking minimums is not about eliminating parking. It is about giving communities the ability to shape the places they live, work, and play and recognizing the outsized impact that parking decisions have on our everyday transportation choices, including safety. Encouragingly, a growing number of communities across the U.S. are taking action. Cities such as Minneapolis and Buffalo have eliminated parking minimums citywide, while others such as San Jose, Austin, and Raleigh have followed with significant reforms. Today, more than 100 U.S. cities have adopted similar policies, reflecting a broader shift toward safer, more flexible, and people-centered land use decisions.

9 - Stop: Calling It Vision Zero While Doing Business as Usual; Start Shifting the Paradigm

Vision Zero is not a slogan nor a tagline nor a rebranding of the standard approach. It needs to be understood and treated as a fundamental shift in how we think about road safety. Too often, communities adopt the name of Vision Zero without changing their approach. They mistakenly continue to treat severe crashes as isolated incidents rather than addressing the important trends, over-focus on individual behavior instead of addressing the underlying conditions that influence safety risk, like speed and street design — and work in silos rather than coordinating across agencies and disciplines.

Vision Zero requires something different. It means taking a proactive, systems-based approach. It means advancing an approach that anticipates human mistakes and designs streets to ensure those mistakes do not result in death or serious injury. It means prioritizing interventions where harm is most concentrated, using data to guide decisions, and centering safety over speed and convenience. It also means embedding equity into the work—recognizing that traffic violence disproportionately impacts certain communities and ensuring solutions do not create additional harm.

8 - Stop: Treating Community Engagement as a Box to Check; Start Valuing Lived Experience

The people most affected by transportation decisions, particularly those in communities that have been historically underserved and overexposed to traffic danger, are too often the least included in safety decision-making.

A general open house during business hours does not constitute meaningful engagement. And historically, traditional approaches of public engagement have tended to miss the people most affected. Advancing Vision Zero requires meeting where people are: attending neighborhood events, partnering with community organizations, and removing barriers to participation by offering childcare, meals, language access, ADA-accessible venues, and holding meeting during times that work for people with non-traditional schedules. Denver's Community Connector program is one strong example of this in practice. Instead of asking community members to come to city hall, the community connector program brings outreach directly into neighborhoods, meeting people where they already are.

If we value community insight, we need to invest in it. Community members who share their time and expertise to inform Vision Zero work should be compensated — just as consultants are. If agencies are willing to pay outside firms for community insight, they should be equally willing to pay the people who actually live and work in the communities being served. Safe Routes Partnership's Checklist for Facilitating Community Engagement offers practical guidance for agencies looking to strengthen this work.

7 - Stop: Victim-Blaming: Start Designing for Human Error

When someone is killed or seriously injured, the focus in police reports and media is too often what they did “wrong”: distracted walking, not wearing bright enough clothing, or crossing mid-block. This framing is not only often wrong, but incredibly harmful.

Research shows distracted walking plays a role in only 5% to 20% of pedestrian deaths and severe injuries, far less than speeding, driver inattention, or impairment. Yet the narrative persists, and it shapes public opinion. Research from Texas A&M and Rutgers shows that news coverage placing blame on the victim measurably reduces public support for the kinds of roadway improvements that would actually prevent crashes.

We need to stop telling incomplete stories and start acknowledging and addressing the many factors – including policies and vehicle design and street configurations– that shape behaviors and outcomes on our roads.

6 - Stop: Letting States Off the Hook; Start Engaging States in Accountability

More than half of fatal crashes in urban areas occur on state-owned roads, yet local Vision Zero leaders often have little authority to make safety changes on those roads. This is one of the most significant structural barriers to progress, as state-owned roads are more likely to be high-speed, high-volume arterials. They are also more likely to run through communities of color and low-income neighborhoods that already bear a disproportionate share of traffic violence. Leaving these roads out of local High Injury Networks or treating them as someone else's problem means neglecting some of the most important places to make significant safety progress. And if local communities are blocked from using proven safety tools by  outdated state policies, get proactive in calling for and making the needed policy changes. Our state partners need to live up to their safety responsibilities.

Tampa’s Action Plan offers a strong example of what it looks like to name this challenge. The city analyzed and shared data showing that these state-owned six-lane roads make up a significant portion of its High Injury Network and are linked to a disproportionate share of severe and fatal crashes. By making this visible, Tampa has helped build the case for cross-jurisdictional collaboration and stronger state accountability.

5 - Stop: Waiting for a Fatality to Act; Start Proactively Addressing Known Problems

One of the most fundamental differences between Vision Zero and the traditional approach to road safety is this: Vision Zero does not wait for people to die before taking action. The traditional, reactive model responds to crashes after they occur — often installing a stop sign or crosswalk or other intervention, only to wait for the next tragedy. A Safe System approach, by contrast, is proactive and preventive. It analyzes crash patterns and road design features to identify where serious crashes are likely to occur and prioritizes interventions before someone is killed.

This means moving beyond general crash maps that show only where past problems happened, and instead using that data to identify where the most dangerous streets are and similarly designed streets where problems are likely to emerge. It means treating predictable risks like high speed roads with a high prevalence of foot traffic as problems to solve upstream, not tragedies to mourn after the fact. The knowledge and tools exist. The key is to deploy these tools before the next crash, not after.

4 - Stop: Over-relying on the E’s; Start Using a Safe System Approach

The traditional "E’s" framework of Engineering, Education, and Enforcement, etc. has dominated traffic safety work in the United States for nearly a century. Specifically, education and enforcement have long been central to traffic safety, but they cannot carry the weight alone.

The deeper problem with an over-reliance on the E’s is that they imply that what needs to change most is individual behavior. This framing overlooks the structural reality that some communities, particularly low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, are disproportionately exposed to dangerously designed roads, missing sidewalks, inadequate lighting, and high-speed traffic, through no fault of their own. Telling people to "be safe" while walking on a road with no sidewalk, no crosswalks, and 45 mph traffic is not a safety strategy.

Enforcement, in particular, warrants scrutiny. Traffic stops often have only temporary effects, impose real costs, and—given well-documented patterns of racialized enforcement—can erode the community trust that Vision Zero efforts depend on. The Safe System approach redirects attention where it belongs: to the systemic, upstream conditions that make crashes predictable, rather than to the individuals those systems place at risk.

3 - Stop: Focusing only on Speeding; Start: Designing Streets to Manage Speed

Speed is the biggest factor in whether a crash is survivable. For decades, the dominant approach has been to focus on speeding or catching individual drivers who exceed posted speed limits. This is a downstream, reactive strategy with limited and temporary effects. What Vision Zero demands is an upstream approach: managing speeds at the system level by designing roads that naturally encourage appropriate speeds, setting posted limits that reflect safety rather than the behavior of the fastest drivers, and leveraging technology to support safe behavior across the entire fleet.

Small design changes can make a meaningful difference — narrowing travel lanes, adding protected bike infrastructure, installing daylighting at intersections, lowering speed limits. But these measures are most effective in combination, not in isolation. The goal is self-enforcing roads: environments where driving at a safe speed is a logical choice and indicative of the path of least resistance, not the result of individual willpower or the threat of a ticket.

2 - Stop: Propping up the 85th Percentile; Start Setting Speed Limits for Safety

For decades, many states set speed limits based on the 85th percentile rule: whatever speed 85% of drivers are already traveling becomes the posted limit. The logic sounds neutral, but in practice it is deeply flawed. particularly in urban environments where people are walking, biking, and living alongside traffic.

The 85th percentile rule, by definition, bases speed limits on the behavior of the fastest drivers, not on what is safe for everyone using the street. It treats speed as a given rather than as something to be managed, and it makes it structurally difficult for communities to lower limits even when the evidence clearly supports doing so.

However, there are bright spots of progress to move away from the 85th percentile. California's Assembly Bill 43 (2022) gave localities the authority to set speed limits based on safety, land use context, and the needs of all road users — not just prevailing driver behavior.

1 - Stop: Prioritizing Level of Service; Start Prioritizing Level of Safety

At the root of nearly every barrier to Vision Zero progress is this: for decades, we have designed our roads to move vehicles quickly rather than to keep people safe. The dominant metric has been Level of Service — how freely and quickly cars flow — and almost everything else, including the safety of people walking and biking, has been secondary. This has to change.

What if we measured Level of Safety instead? California has already moved towards vehicle miles traveled as a replacement for traditional level of service metrics, recognizing the environmental and public health costs of car-centric planning. Other communities can follow. Moving from Level of Service to Level of Safety may seem like a technical change, but it reflects a deeper shift in whose lives and well-being our systems are designed to prioritize.

These are not small changes. They are the shifts required to make Vision Zero real. The communities making the most progress are the ones willing to question long-standing assumptions and make different choices. After ten years of this work, one thing is clear: we know what needs to change.

Don't miss the rest of our 10-Year Anniversary series, including what is giving us hope and what still needs real attention after a decade of Vision Zero advocacy.