Traffic and street safety improvements

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure it addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in traffic and street safety improvements. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in these interventions could help, examine the following:

• Access to transportation: Indexes for transit trips and transportation costs. These estimates are available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Location Affordability Index.

• Environmental quality: Examine air quality. These data are available from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index.

• Safety from trauma: Number of deaths due to injury per 100,000 people. These data are available from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Mortality File and the CDC’s WONDER database.

• Prioritize connectivity: Impactful interventions, especially in a pilot phase, focus on connecting two or more high-traffic areas, such as a train station and a school campus. Creating more efficient, safer routes between even a few key community locations can increase public support and compound the benefits of other public services by reducing barriers to access.
• Invest in community engagement pre- and post-implementation: During the design phase, community groups, religious centers, businesses, schools, and more can help identify the areas in which interventions will have the highest value. This may also include the specific types of intervention, such as the installation of safety barriers near school sidewalks. After implementation, community engagement remains important; projects often benefit from public awareness campaigns drawing attention to the changes.
• Incentivize demand by increasing supply: In many local contexts, cycling and walking are rarely considered commute options due to a lack of existing infrastructure. By prioritizing interventions in high-traffic areas, especially within reasonable non-driving distance of public transit stations, policymakers can stimulate pedestrian and cyclist demand on a relatively small scale, which may build public momentum for additional investments.
• Measure and evaluate financial, public safety, and efficiency impacts: Creating a strong data measurement and evaluation system from an initiative’s launch has significant benefits, including: informing design considerations, such as intervention locations and scale; demonstrating financial impact to policymakers and the public (often in terms of cost savings related to crashes or increased economic activity in business districts); and refining the intensity of a given intervention (such as adding more speed limit cameras). A foundation built on robust analytical practices will allow safety and efficiency efforts to continue to evolve alongside a jurisdiction.