Highly-Visible Enforcement can Reduce Traffic Fatalities, NHTSA finds
Enforcement can make our roads safer — but only if it’s highly visible.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently released a review of over 80 academic studies on high-visibility enforcement (HVE), finding that it can reduce dangerous driving behaviors. This type of enforcement is consistent and conspicuous through signage and advertising. Automated enforcement is highly-visible when paired with signage and other communications.
Here’s how it works: If you know that traffic or parking officers don’t frequently ticket cars parked illegally in bus lanes, you’re more likely to park there. But if enforcement is automated and highly-visible through signage, you’ll think twice before parking in the bus lane.
Highly-visible automated enforcement has major safety benefits for people riding the bus. Vehicles parked illegally in bus lanes and in front of bus stops force riders to walk through active travel lanes to get on and off the bus, and make it impossible for people using wheelchairs or other mobility assistive devices to even board or exit.
While it’s well known that traffic enforcement is linked to fewer crashes, NHTSA specifically wanted to study how much enforcement is needed to make roads safer. NHTSA focused on high-visibility campaigns like drunk driving and seat belt checkpoints coupled with large media buys. They found that these efforts led to meaningful behavior change, especially in seat belt usage.
NHTSA’s findings are important, but there is a big gap in their research: they did not include highly-visible automated enforcement. Automated enforcement is cheaper to implement than police enforcement, which requires substantial law enforcement hours. It can also have a broader reach than police enforcement, as it’s not limited by law enforcement resources — which means it’s easy for cities to scale up traffic enforcement. Hayden AI’s traffic enforcement tools accurately detect and process every single traffic violation, without the need for on-the-ground law enforcement.
The urgency for effective enforcement is growing, as traffic fatalities in the U.S. are reaching unprecedented levels. Nearly 43,000 people were killed in crashes in 2021, a 10% increase from 2020. A huge and growing percentage of these crash victims are people walking and biking, reaching a 40-year high in 2021 with 7,485 people killed. Perhaps the most sobering data shows that the percentage of children younger than 15 killed in crashes doubled from 2018 to 2021, from 5.8% to 11.9%.
Enforcement alone is not the solution to our safety crisis: we need to design roads that are safe for everybody, whether you’re boarding a bus, riding a bike, or driving a car. But automated enforcement is a key part of the solution. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommends that states legalize automated enforcement for illegally passing stopped school buses, and many transit agencies are deploying automated enforcement for bus lanes to improve transit trip times and safety for people boarding and exiting the bus. Unfortunately, automated bus lane enforcement is currently only authorized in four states.
At Hayden AI, we’re proud to build automated enforcement solutions for public transit buses, school buses, and a host of other uses. Our solutions enable cities to deploy equitable, transparent, and highly-visible traffic enforcement that changes driver behavior. To learn more about Hayden AI’s Automated Bus Lane Enforcement (ABLE) solution and others, check out our website: hayden.ai
