Frequently Asked Questions

Emergency Streets has been presented to, discussed with, and refined by over a hundred experts in transportation policy, governmental affairs, emergency prevention and response, public health officials, and advocates in transportation safety. We have consulted with dozens of such professionals internationally as well about the promise of an Emergency Streets protocol for fatal and serious crashes. 

These are areas of interest and discussion that have come up repeatedly in our discussions, and might be questions you have. 

Framing the Emergency

  • Over 43,000 people are dying on our roadways in the U.S. every year, and the number continues to climb. This number is on par with our nation's suicide rate, gun-related homicides, and far in excess of the public health emergencies recently flagged by the US attorney general for alcohol use, adolescent social media consumption, or gun violence affecting youth. Akin to contamination of the public water supply, or a wildfire approaching town, ES would treat fatal traffic incidents on the transport system as emergencies. We would expect trained public disaster personnel to act urgently, mandating protective actions (like filtering or purchasing water or evacuating neighborhoods) and countermeasures (repairing treatment facilities or deploying fire crews), even if these actions take days or weeks.

  • If people dying on roadways is the symptom of the problem, speed is pathologic agent. Once a lowering of overall speeds can be realized (i.e., reducing the overall temperature of the system), subsequent benefits result in many dimensions, recognizing that reduced speeds might affect economic prosperity and that’s one question that ES brings to the forefront. Importantly, lower speeds allow street users more distance to brake, less dangerous impact if there is an impact, and more time to perceive and react. Furthermore, mainstream and traditional transport planning processes continue to follow detailed guidelines to design streets to accommodate swiftly moving speeds on streets, even near where people live, shop, walk and park (future planning is making the problem worse). Overall, mainstream transport planning practices are pointedly critiqued on many grounds—and speed is the most costly to society. ES provides the opportunity to reflect on such damaging perspectives that have been handed down from past generations.

  • We are confident that Emergency Streets (ES) effectively teaches several things at once, regardless of whether crash patterns change within the temporary ES placement period. In fact, we don't anticipate a significant measurable decrease in crashes during an ES period, largely because these serious/fatal crashes can cluster along a known high-risk area, but don't tend to recur in identical locations. 

     

    The lessons from ES include:

    --that society can better learn from the crash, not return a roadway back to "normal" when someone just died during normal operations, and instill reformed procedures to address an growing epidemic,

    --that municipal officials can react quickly to traffic conditions that pose a risk of serious or fatal public injury, without years of planning or study,

    --that temporary street treatments and movable infrastructure can effectively change or guide driver behavior, without resorting to wholesale street reconfigurations,

    --that serious and fatal crashes are happening more frequently in a community than most drivers realize, because evidence of the crash is swiftly removed,

    --that reducing vehicle speeds is an effective countermeasure to serious crashes, regardless of other contributing crash factors, because it reduces the likelihood and severity of all crashes,

    --that the traffic system, writ-large, and individual drivers can tolerate modest levels of slower speeds, or even learn that driving slower poses little delay, relative to current practices on their regular daily travels.

  • The U.S. transport planning framework is in urgent need of bold, systemic change—engineering innovations, policy overhauls, and deeper structural rethinking. Where to begin, and with which policy levers, is a legitimate and complex question. Emergency Streets (ES) won’t solve everything; the issues run deep. This is a multi-faceted challenge that will take decades to truly redirect and ES provides that jolt.

     

    What provides ES its strength is its novelty and its scientific grounding. Adopting the protocol is intended to introduce a fresh lens through which to examine and address the structural failings of our current system—a way to highlight fragilities and quickly reorient future practices. While it’s not a silver bullet, it does offer a concrete method to interrogate and update our default responses. As Max Planck noted, new ideas often take root not by converting their detractors, but as a new generation grows up familiar with them. ES is part of ushering in that generational shift.

     

    We recognize the value of the Safe System approach promoted by FHWA and others. Yet in practice, it can feel like an attempt to retrofit an outdated machine—one never designed for the accessibility challenges communities are now facing. Safe Systems outlines a helpful set of principles yet it lacks a defined implementation strategy. ES can complement this approach by providing an actionable, site-specific starting point: it identifies when and where to act. A fatal crash, after all, serves as a red flag to prompt immediate attention. ES does not place blame—it redirects energy toward building a system that moves more slowly, and more responsibly, particularly in the wake of catastrophic failure. In that way, it becomes not just a tool, but a catalyst for reimagining the process by which infrastructure decisions are made in a community.

    For additional perspectives to frame this as a public health matter, see: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2024/07/02/opinion-americas-traffic-death-epidemic-is-a-public-health-emergency-the-surgeon-general-should-treat-it-like-one

  • Please read the ES White Paper available at: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/reports/9g54xk375

Why Business-as-Usual Isn’t Working

  • We are not aware of other cities or towns employing a strategy like ES in reaction to a fatal motor vehicle crash.

    When trains or airplanes crash and result in fatal injury, government agencies install emergency responses. Temporary measures are put in place to mitigate risk, followed by a permanent solution. Procurement standards are updated to prevent the issue from recurring, and existing tools with similar vulnerabilities are inspected, modified, or replaced.

    This process is not viewed as extraordinary. It reflects foundational principles of system safety that infrastructure and project management companies use widely: identify risk, intervene promptly, correct the system, and prevent recurrence.

     

    Such logic rarely extends to what’s happening in the public right-of-way on a daily basis—as applied to motor vehicle crashes. Traffic fatalities or serious injuries often result in no immediate change to the physical environment. Even when hazardous conditions are well known, intervention is slow, fragmented, or symbolic.

    The fact that we’re having difficulty, as a society, of recognizing the dire nature of the situation is additional rationale for needing to declare emergency status—if for no other reason than to be able to bring additional resources to the matter.

     

    Some of the cities we’ve spoken with have quick build protocol for some streets or extensive fatality review boards. However, none of the cities we know are installing ES type processes in response to fatalities or are done without extensive study and usual reactions (e.g., “let’s not prescribe anything radical right now, that’d be too disruptive”). At the same time, there are myriad examples of streets being repurposed, or drivers being instructed to slow down, in response to other problems/emergencies (like evacuations for wildfire, flood, landslides, etc., or rerouting of local traffic due to fallen utility lines or water main breaks) or to prevent injuries (school zones, highway or local road work zones). ES integrates these approaches by asserting that roadway deaths are emergencies deserving similar changes in roadway operations.

  • One of the major teachings of the Vision Zero/Safe Streets approach is that the input of various organizations with influence on the public sphere is necessary to seed reform; it has been a mistake to allow them to work without interacting. In particular, public health agencies have served a reactive rather than proactive role in the traffic violence epidemic: addressing the incident-by-incident trauma without much input in reforming the system that predictably causes such trauma. Similarly, transportation-focused entities have been directed to craft ideal transportation networks, while outsourcing to public health agencies the question of what to do when the ideal fails to counteract human fallibility: when drivers make mistakes and hurt other travelers. An organization like TRB best concentrates the talent we need to integrate both lines of inquiry and concern into a set of expectations about how our roadways can serve the public interest in transportation and preserving lives at the same time.

  • We question the value of new reports critiquing the failures of past urban transportation approaches, yet we understand the value of putting fresh ideas forward. That’s the role of task forces. To help kick the tires on these concepts and institutionalize them.

  • We encourage the continued use of "quick build" installations to tame dangerous driving or roadway (mis)design. In practice, even these "quick" tactics take months to plan and install, which is far better than the years for designing, engineering, and securing funding for permanent roadway redesigns for sure. But ES seeks to install traffic calming devices within hours, not weeks or months, of a fatal or serious crash, using available tools that are not designed to last more than two weeks. The quick build projects are usually intended to be fairly durable for a year or two while longer-lasting, more permanent infrastructure is planned for and funded. If anything, we would assert that ES fills a short term, immediate response gap in our current approach to ameliorate dangerous roadway designs and traffic conditions; it does not complicate or prevent mid-term quick build installations or longer-term permanent fixes on dangerous streets. 

How It Actually Works

  • Once a community establishes Vision Zero or similar street safety programming and staffing, ES administration would be incorporated into these measures following all fatal road crashes. First responders to a crash site already follow traffic incident management protocols; where a fatality has occurred, this protocol can include the ES coordinator to initiate installation of the ES countermeasures as an element of securing the scene. The ES/Vision Zero coordinator would supervise deployment of these elements:

    ·       lightweight, mobile, temporary bollards, barriers, speed humps or the like as physical corrective devices to narrow lanes or roadways so the natural response is to drive more slowly

    ·       temporary speed limit signage for motor vehicle traffic in all directions on roadways of a similar type  (arterial, interurban highway, etc.) within ½ mile radius of the crash site

    ·       temporary road markings, including tape, decals, or stencils, with Emergency Street messaging

    ·       public notification via standard social media and news channels of the change

    ·       where a municipality has determined that ES should receive dedicated enforcement resources, the,  coordinator will oversee scheduling and placement of the desired enforcement mechanism

    ·       two weeks after implementation of the ES protocol, the coordinator would direct staff to remove the equipment and/or markings, scheduling road workers as needed and handling redeployment of the equipment to a new location or storage.

               

    Fatal traffic crashes occur in a variety of places, with different road geometry and driving contexts, so the temporary physical infrastructure suitable for a given location (an intersection near a busy shopping center) might not work well in another (the shoulder of a four-lane highway). The ES playbook considers these different contexts to aid the ES coordinator in determining the most appropriate elements to deploy. (See the deployment schedule table in the draft playbook.) Messaging, signage, and other visual cues will communicate that this is an ES area, and that this section of road now operates differently because of a recent traffic fatality. This messaging will be as consistent as possible across all ES contexts with the use of consistent key phrases, colors, and icons.

  • The visual cues to a driver approaching an ES area would be similar to that of a highway work zone: prominent temporary signage before the start of the zone, a marker at the start/end of the zone, general communication to the public about the state of emergency and expected response by the community. The signs, in-road stencils or decals, and messaging will be as consistent as possible

  • For a city or town without any provisions for managing other disasters or unforseen problems, quite possibly yes. For a city or town that has committed to Emergency Streets, preparations for deploying these measures would include budgeting for resources and personnel to launch the response when it is required--similar to civic preparations for other known risks to public comfort and safety, like preparing for earthquakes, fires, snowstorms, etc. We don't know exactly when or where fatalities will strike, but we expect that they will, and our aim is to prepare for a successful emergency response strategy.

  • Emergency Streets makes countering these bad driving decisions no harder. Arguably, because it elevates general awareness of the frequency and severity of traffic crashes, it might strengthen the stigma attached to crappy drivers. We are grappling with this problem already, but it's not relevant to the discussion of whether Emergency Streets is a sensible fatal crash response.

  • Even the most responsible camper does not take offense when officials institute a campfire ban: it is the cost of caution to recognize the real danger posed by any flame. It's hard to make the case that in a place where one or more people just died in a motor vehicle crash, slowing down for a mile (90 second delay, at most) is too much inconvenience. Multi-ton vehicles traveling at pretty much any speed can be deadly, but slowing them down through an Emergency Streets response is the cost of caution to prevent another deadly failure of our transport system, right where one just happened.

     

    Furthermore, scientific research confirms how slightly reduced speeds have marginal effect on overall accessibility patterns across neighborhoods in metropolitan areas; such information is central to the theoretical basis of ES and more thoroughly informed decisions about how new developments and mobility changes combine to affect the accessibility of neighborhoods and regions.

  • See Tab B of the white paper. https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/reports/9g54xk375

  • If we can measure fire truck or ambulance response to the scene of an emergency in minutes, we can treat this traffic violence epidemic and roll out corrective countermeasures within a day. Sense of urgency and perspective is holding us back, not a lack of societal resources.