Talking Headways Podcast: Our Roads Will Remain ‘Dangerous by Design’ Until We Hold States Accountable
This week, let’s talk to Steve Davis of Smart Growth America about the group’s most-recent edition of Dangerous by Design — the annual report on pedestrian traffic deaths in the United States and why we don’t improve safety.
But if you know anything about Talking Headways, you know we give you three ways to enjoy our content:
- Check out the unedited transcript, which may have some AI typos.
- Use your ears and the audio player below:
- Or you could read the cleaned-up transcript, which begins now:
Jeff Wood: There are actual consequences for not spending money or not getting the results that you want. So in transportation policy, how do we get real tangible consequences for folks that are underperforming in terms of safety. Because they’re obviously saying “safety,” but they’re not doing anything about it. For instance, when the speed limit went to 55 miles per hour, the government took away money if states didn’t do it.
In soccer, a team gets relegated to the lower level if it’s in the bottom three of a division. And so that team loses money from the TV contract. And so there is something to say about having some consequences, like the ability to say, “You didn’t do this correctly, and so until you improve we can’t help you in this instance” or, “We can’t help you more until you improve,” or something along those lines.
Steve Davis: We have a rough outline for what that could look like if we put any teeth on the system. Bear with me. We’re at the very tail end of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was passed in 2021 as part of a big infrastructure package, right? But go back to 2012.
The thing that all the states and AASHTO, their trade organization, has always wanted forever (and they will never stop asking for this), is more flexibility in how they spend the money. The federal transportation program is essentially a federally funded, state-administered block grant program. There are some restrictions on the funding, but for the most part, the feds hand blank checks to states. There’s not a lot of performance required.
So after years of saying, “We want more flexibility, we want more flexibility,” the law in 2012, MAP-21, essentially created a new structure for measuring safety performance. States were going to have to set targets each year for how many people are gonna die on their roadways.
And they did that. But the whole process got incredibly watered down during the rulemaking process. And essentially it is now a pretty worthless paperwork exercise that honestly we would be better off without.
The only use of this process right now is that it gives us some transparency into which states are at least thinking about safety in an ambitious way. If you go to the FHWA dashboard for all of these performance measures, you can see what states are doing. But 15, 20 states are still setting targets in the wrong direction: “In the next year, we are planning for more people to die on our roadways.”
And the problem with this system is that there’s no penalties. A state is free to say more people are going to die and continue to get an increased amount of federal funding.
When you meet those targets, you don’t get penalized. And you don’t get a reward if you’re a state that sets targets for fewer people to die on their roadways. Some states are indeed spending money to get to that outcome.
The main problem is that we’re getting an incredibly bad return on the money that we’re sending to states and even to metro areas. We’ve spent a trillion dollars in federal surface transportation funding over the last 20, 30 years and what do we have: The engineers say that our roads and bridges are in roughly the same shape as they were back then.
Safety has only continued to get worse and worse. Why are we pumping more money into a program that is not oriented around accomplishing anything.
We don’t even have to be prescriptive about how you get there, but we do need to say, “You have to reduce traffic fatalities or you’re going to lose money. And here is a whole suite of ways and solutions that are proven for things that you can go and do to make your streets and roads safer and try to get to those reductions that you say is your top priority.”
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