Acknowledging the past harms perpetuated by transportation and infrastructure investments, racist policing, and discriminatory policies is necessary to achieve thriving communities. We must foster a system that ends transportation-related health, environmental, safety, economic, racial, and social inequities and provides unfettered access to all travel modes, for workers and users of all races, abilities, any actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, or immigration status. Acknowledging this harm is just the first step.

Action: Adopt language and frameworks that describe and operationalize this vision

• Example: The Bureau of Transportation in the City of Portland, Oregon, has adopted a frame of transportation justice, acknowledging deep systemic disparities and committing to proactive steps here and now to ensure that all Portlanders enjoy the same access to safe, reliable, and affordable transportation options.
• Example: Seattle Department of Transportation’s Equity Program

Action: Pass motions explicitly addressing systemic racism

• Example: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency adopted a resolution declaring Anti-Black Racism a Human Rights and Public Health Crisis in San Francisco. The resolution condemns and apologizes for government practices that have resulted in, and continue to have disproportionate impacts on Black people, and directs all agency staff to move beyond acknowledgment of injustice and take concrete actions that are visible in the reallocation of resources and work programs to improve the health and well-being of Black people.

Action: Create policies and allocate funding targeted toward addressing past harm from urban planning decisions

• Example: The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) Neighborhood Access and Equity Grants and Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant pilot program are intended to help neighborhoods divided by infrastructure.

The concept of safety must be reframed to include the human right of Black and Brown people and people who carry multiple identities and are multi-marginalized to engage in activities, be comfortable, safe, and secure in public spaces and to be free from the risk of structural and physical violence and harassment, including police violence.

Action: Remove the use of enforcement as the main tactic from safety frameworks and action plans

• Example: The League of American Bicyclists has officially and permanently removed “Enforcement” as one of the pillars of the Bicycle Friendly America program’s “5 E” framework.

Action: Update language on transportation safety to be more inclusive and equitable through a community-driven process

• Example: Sacramento City Council has proposed an expanded definition of “public safety” to align with the definition provided by Sacramento’s youth— that feeling safe means “having the freedom to live and thrive in a community environment that has the capacity and structure to protect and support their well-being socially, physically, mentally and economically.”

Action: Shift the narrative away from individual blame

• Consideration: The dominant narrative of traffic safety in the United States is focused on changing individual behavior because behavior causes crashes:

  • Example: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) often says “94% of crashes are due to human error.”
  • Towards Zero Deaths states “At the core of the vision of zero fatalities is the need for safe behavior by all road users.”
• Consideration: Instead, the dominant narrative needs to shift from changing behavior — often through enforcement — to providing safety through infrastructure, community support for marginalized people, and safer modes of transportation.
  • Example: Safe Systems is an approach to transportation safety that shifts the focus from individual decisions — that is, “safety individualism” — to higher level factors that perpetuate traffic injury, such as road and vehicle design.

Action: Address how traditional safety messaging perpetuates harm

• Consideration: Traditional traffic safety messaging is limited to individual behavior change and only considers costs to messaging agencies. This perpetuates harm by promoting insufficient interventions as very effective without addressing harms of enforcement related to those interventions.
  • Example: For bicycle safety, NHTSA says the most effective countermeasure for adult bicyclist safety is a helmet law and that a helmet law is low cost. This ignores the societal costs of discouraging the use of a safe form of transportation and the history of racially disparate traffic enforcement against bicyclists, including a 2016 Department of Justice report that found “Tampa police bike tickets burden blacks, have no benefit.”

Investment in law enforcement has proven to be harmful to many communities across the United States. By ending the use of law enforcement in traffic stops, on transit, and in the public right of way, cities could use these resources to invest in other social services that actually improve communities’ quality of life.

Action: Invest in essential community services rather than law enforcement and mass incarceration

• Consideration: Most cities spend more on policing and incarceration of local residents than on proactive investments in residents’ well-being such as transportation, housing, parks, libraries, health care, and community services that are essential to improved quality-of-life outcomes.

Action: Create partnerships between transit agencies and social services to focus on getting riders the support they need and to divert people away from the criminal court system

• Example: The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) first connected with nonprofit homeless outreach provider People Assisting the Homeless (PATH) in 2017 to offer services and housing resources for those experiencing homelessness using their system. This partnership led to the creation of the PATH homeless outreach teams, which are deployed across the system to help connect unsheltered individuals with temporary or permanent housing solutions. https://nationalcenterformobilitymanagement.org/blog/transit-assist-unsheltered-individuals/

Action: Stop funding police with transportation safety grants

• Example: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has funding and programs (23 USC 402 and 23 USC 405 programs and Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS)) that enable policing in the name of traffic safety.
• Example: Transportation Equity Caucus is working to shift funding in NHTSA 23 USC 402 and 23 USC 405 programs from policing to education and community solutions.
• Example: The Southern California Association of Governments uses NHTSA grant funding for its award-winning GO Human program: https://scag.ca.gov/go-human

Action: End the use of low-level vehicular and pretextual stops

• Example: The City of Philadelphia passed a law preventing police from pulling drivers/cars over for eight traffic offenses, and the law remains in place after the police union filed a lawsuit against it.
• Consideration: NHTSA funding + programs that can be used for traffic law enforcement (23 USC 402 and 23 USC 405 programs + DDACTS) lack safeguards against use for pretextual stops and likely encourage pretextual stops by promoting stops to address crime and traffic safety in a combined manner. Worryingly, these NHTSA-funded programs received increased funding in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law without adding any safeguards against their use for pretextual stops. Research has found that pretextual stops do not advance traffic safety.
• California is attempting to advance a bill (SB50–Bradford) that would limit the ability of police to use pretextual stops (failed last year, but advocates will try again this year). 

Action: Take police contracts out of transit agencies

• Example: Los Angeles City Council passed a motion to establish a Transit Public Safety Advisory Committee tasked with developing a community-based approach to public safety on the transit system to replace the current police-based approach (but have also increased police funding).

Action: Create new living-wage transportation jobs by creating safety programs that use agency staff as transit ambassadors

• Example: In 2022, the LA Metro Board created a Transit Ambassadors program, a first for LA Metro. About 300 friendly, welcoming guides will become the newest sets of eyes and ears, an unarmed patrol team equipped with radios to call in social workers for the homeless or other support teams.

Action: Move routine traffic and parking enforcement out of police departments

• Example: In 2023, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, created 125 new civilian jobs to take over work previously done by police officers.
• Example: In 2021, Berkeley, California, voted to explore shifting traffic and parking enforcement responsibilities away from the Berkeley Police Department. In 2023, two state bills were filed that would allow cities to authorize nonpolice employees to do that kind of work.
• Consideration: A study by the Los Angeles City transportation department concludes that enforcement should be done by civilians.

Action: Remove other safety agents (e.g., crossing guards, event and construction traffic directors) from police

• Consideration: In many places, crossing guards are employees of the police department, and police officers are performing routine traffic direction for overtime pay. These jobs could be hosted outside of police departments.
• Example: Washington State considered a bill to authorize flaggers to direct traffic without a traffic or police officer present (it did not pass).
• Example: In 2022, the Boston City Council held hearings to discuss amending police contracts to allow the City to hire civilian flaggers to direct traffic.

Action: Avoid automated enforcement (AE) as an alternative solution for community safety, and regulate it where it exists

• Consideration: High injury networks are overrepresented in low-income communities, Black and Indigenous communities, and communities of color because they have been historically neglected from funding for infrastructure improvements and education safety programs. AE does not address this root cause, and instead will subject these communities to surveillance and potentially exploitative fines and fees. To dismantle the structural racism that has led to traffic safety disparities will require investment, community-driven safety education, and infrastructure changes that address the safety of neglected communities rather than an extension of police enforcement.
• Consideration: Many organizations, municipalities, and others have taken or recommended steps to reduce the harms of AE programs, including program oversight by DOTs rather than police, warnings and low fines, and stronger surveillance regulations.
  • Example: A Seattle-based group, Whose Streets? Our Streets! has released these preliminary recommendations for AE programs in 2023.
  • Example: See report Appendix A, page 45 from LivableStreets Alliance regarding AE.
  • Example: The cities of Oakland, California, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Boston, Massachusetts, and San Diego, California have adopted limitations on surveillance and require an Annual Surveillance Report.
• Consideration: For more on AE, see our TEC AE Fact Sheet and our webinar, “How Automated Enforcement Can Perpetuate Inequities in Transportation.”

Action: Create incentives for infrastructure projects that reduce the need for enforcement

• Example: The Puget Sound Regional Council adopted new project selection criteria that included consideration for projects creating “reduced reliance on enforcement.”

Laws, policies, and practices that criminalize how and where people bike, walk, and roll are outdated and harmful. When good engineering cannot provide safe infrastructure in the short term, and enforcement is used to avoid traffic crashes and violence, methods should seek to remove police and human bias, and resolutions should account for ability to address and veer toward incentives over penalties and punitive measures.

Action: Legalize jaywalking

• Example: The State of Virginia changed its jaywalking laws to say that people shall cross at intersections or marked crosswalks “wherever possible.” The Virginia law explicitly prohibits police officers from stopping someone for jaywalking and throws out any evidence collected from an illegal jaywalking stop.
• Example: In 2022, the California legislature passed a bill that decriminalized jaywalking.
• Example: Kansas City, Missouri, repealed a local jaywalking law in May 2021, as well as two other laws that led to police stopping people walking and bicycling.

Action: End bike helmet and equipment laws

• Example: Tacoma, Washington, will no longer require people to wear helmets when bicycling, skateboarding, roller-skating, or riding a scooter in the city limits.
• Example: The Board of Health in King County, Washington, repealed decades-old helmet law after an analysis found that enforcement disproportionately targeted homeless people and people of color.
• Example: Kansas City, Missouri, decriminalized bike inspections and dirty wheels.

Action: Decriminalize/legalize riding on the sidewalk

• Example: NYPD Shifts Sidewalk Bicycling Tickets Out of Criminal Court
• Consideration: States and municipalities have varying rules around biking on the sidewalk, and many allow it with certain restrictions around business districts or yielding to pedestrians. Other places classify bicycles as "motor vehicles" and do not allow it.

Action: Decriminalize + reduce penalties for fare evasion

• In 2021, Massachusetts decriminalized fare evasion.
• Example: In 2018, Washington, DC, decriminalized fare evasion.

Action: Pursue progressive, income-based fines (e.g., day fines)

• Example: Finland, Argentina, Germany, and other countries use progressive fines. Rather than a fixed fee, criminal fines are levied as a percentage of income.
• Consideration: Some New York City Council Members have proposed making civil fines for things like parking tickets and traffic violations income based.

Action: Reform fines and fees

• Consideration: Ten cities across the country began enacting a roadmap for equitable fine and fee reform as part of the Cities and Counties for Fine and Fee Justice project.

Action: Change debt-based mobility punishments

• Consideration: Currently 41 states and the District of Columbia still suspend, revoke, or do not allow a person to renew their driver’s license if they have unpaid court debt, or fail to appear for a fines-and-fees related court hearing. States like New York and California do not suspend, revoke, or prohibit the renewal of driver's licenses for failure to pay.

Action: Offer incentives and resources for the behavior you are trying to change

• Example: “Lights On!” campaigns across the country give police officers the option to hand out repair vouchers rather than tickets for broken headlights or turn signals.
• Example: Washington State legislators are considering a bill that, in addition to ending traffic stops for nonmoving violations, will create a new grant to develop incentive-based programming to address underlying issues of those violations.
• Example: King County Metro in Washington offers free and low-income transit passes, and riders can waive a fare evasion citation by signing up.
• Consideration: Implement fare-free transit systems.

Speeding is the principal traffic safety threat to pedestrians, bicyclists, people using wheelchairs, transit riders, and motorists. Law enforcement and the threat of punishment are ineffective tools for managing vehicle speeds. Speeding will continue to be a safety threat because most American roadways have been intentionally designed to allow excessive speeds.

Action: Replace enforcement with “tactical” traffic calming strategies in order to reduce vehicle speeds and improve traffic safety

• Consideration: A pedestrian struck by a car at 50 mph is killed 90 percent of the time — this probability falls to 10 percent when the vehicle speed is 30 mph, and just 1 percent at 20 mph. The same safety improvements through speed management benefit all travel modes including the occupants of vehicles. An authentic traffic safety program must reduce vehicle speeds wherever collisions are likely (essentially, everywhere except on separated, limited-access freeways).

Action: Increase DOT funding for the design and construction of “self-enforcing” streets

• Consideration: Incorporate designs such as protected intersections, protected bike lanes, protected bus lanes, narrowed roadways, bulb-outs, leading pedestrian intervals, and accessible curb ramps. The redesign of curbs with loading zones should also be prioritized to lessen the need for parking enforcement.
• Example: Hoboken, New Jersey, has consistently cut the number of crashes and injuries while — and by — aggressively installing the things that are proven to make cities safer and more efficient for everyone: bike lanes, curb extensions, bus lanes, high-visibility crosswalks, and raised intersections. Other cities are seeing similar progress.
• Consideration: Existing roadways can be quickly and inexpensively redesigned to limit speeding, using “tactical” traffic calming approaches if there is the political will to do so. As an example, New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan implemented a dramatic and highly effective program in 2009.

Action: Require vehicles to have intelligent speed assistance technology as a standard feature

• Consideration: The National Transportation Safety Board just recommended that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration require vehicles to have intelligent speed assistance technology as a standard feature to help mitigate speeding.

When seeking to understand problems and designing solutions, programs, and implementation, we must center and share power with Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, especially youth and people with disabilities. In order for Black, Brown, and Indigenous residents to achieve full self-determination, they must be fully empowered at all levels of decision making. Community members should lead any and all processes that directly and indirectly impact or benefit them. Their voices and agency should drive planning, design, and implementation processes, and they should be regarded as experts in their own communities. Invest in solutions that directly locate power in communities to design safe streets and creatively develop transportation safety solutions.

Action: Create community-driven engagement planning processes

• Consideration: US Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Alex Padilla (D-CA) introduced a bill that would establish a pilot program to address the following: pursue community-driven decision-making where community-based organizations representing impacted communities have a direct role in the transportation planning process in partnership with local transportation agencies and Metropolitan Planning Organizations/Regional Transportation Planning Organizations.
• Example: In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Mobility Hub partnership between TransForm and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is engaging directly with residents of affordable housing projects to ensure greater community engagement in planning mobility hubs for those communities.
• Example: Los Angeles Walks developed their Promotoras program to help community members better engage and be represented in the transportation planning process.
• Consideration: Provide resources to communities for community-led traffic calming interventions.
  • Example: This community-led art installation had a goal of improving safety and reducing crashes in Oahu, Hawaii.

Action: Create resourced, frontline community advisory groups

• Example: See King County Metro’s Equity Cabinet, Seattle’s Transportation Equity Workgroup, and Puget Sound Regional Council’s Equity Advisory Committee.
• Example: See USDOT’s Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity, though this group is not compensated.

Action: Develop community-driven budgeting, planning, and decision-making processes

• Example: Co-designing equitable transportation planning, decision-making, and implementation processes with community partners (e.g., South San Francisco and Oakland).
• Example: Participatory budgeting and planning processes (e.g., Vallejo, California, and New York, New York).
• Example: Resource community-led safety solutions such as Newark Community Street Team.

Action: Partner with local community leaders and organizations

• Example: Oakland’s 90th Ave Repaving and Redesign Project, in collaboration with community-based Scraper Bikes.
• Example: Collaborating with a local artist to redesign Slow Streets to be reflective of community and culture in East Oakland.

Resource allocation should be prioritized based on need, address past disinvestment, and be intended to address existing inequities of fatalities and injuries in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities.

Transportation safety investments should focus on engineering and programming (e.g., community bicycle rides, neighborhood walking tours, open streets festivals, pedestrian audits, safe walking and biking networks, designing for safe speeds, affordable access to transit) that make it easy for folks to use the system without injury to themselves or others, rather than rely on enforcement and a punitive approach to reduce traffic violence.

At the same time, we must recognize that often investment in place without investment in people can result in gentrification and displacement. Infrastructure and programming must involve current community members to ensure it helps them stay rooted in place.

Action: Develop prioritization processes that use equity to drive investment

• Example: In Oakland, OakDOT uses citywide prioritization factors to better allocate funding based on need. OakDOT weighted equity — defined as investment in underserved Oakland — the highest of the nine factors that determine funding for road repairs.

Action: Increase federal funding for transportation education

• Consideration: Driver’s education requirements vary state to state. Some states do not require transportation education in schools and rely on the private sector to provide driver education. Strong public education is important so that everyone has access to education about how to safely get around their community. Integrating multimodal education, including bicycling, can improve people’s mobility and the culture of traffic safety, while reducing car dependency.

Action: Support community ride programs

• Example: Equiticity in Chicago offers neighborhood-based mobility justice tours hosted in partnership with community organizations. Every tour is explicitly designed to serve as a vehicle for social transformation — increasing mobility, advocating for equity and advancing justice, and serve as community engagement opportunities, connecting in an authentic manner with elected officials, stakeholders, and influencers at the neighborhood level. In addition, the tours will serve as economic development opportunities, actively seeking out chances for tour participants to patronize POC-owned businesses and organizations operating at the hyper-local level.

Action: Provide federal funding for active transportation and trail networks

• Consideration: The Connecting America’s Active Transportation System Act (S. 684) would provide $2.5 billion over five years to fund community efforts to build safe, connected networks for walking and biking with targeted investment in low-income communities and communities of color that have historically faced lack of investment.
• Example: US DOT’s Reconnecting Communities grant program also aims to support projects that remove, retrofit, or mitigate highways or other transportation facilities that create barriers to community connectivity, including to mobility, access, or economic development.

Much of the country’s enforcement data and information is not collected, not publicly accessible, or inaccurate, making it hard to change existing practices and systems. All existing policing and enforcement in transportation should collect and report out on stops, searches, arrests, citations, and whether citations are resolved or go to collections, disaggregated by race and gender.

Action: Require collection and reporting of enforcement interactions by race and gender

• Consideration: There is currently a small, underused federal program for racial data collection, Section 1906. Federal funding could be conditioned on this data collection.
• Example: The Office of the Missouri Attorney General is required, by law, to collect data on the demographics of the traffic stops made by law enforcement officers from across the state, and to report these findings to the governor and the public. This requirement has been in place since 2000 and the annual “Vehicle Stops Report (VSR)” is usually published in June or July for the previous year. 2022 Vehicle Stops Report.

Action: End qualified immunity both for police departments and for individual police officers

Action: Publish records of police disciplinary actions (other than unsubstantiated complaints and active investigations) through public records requests

Action: Analyze and improve existing enforcement practices

• Consideration: Analyzing existing data and practices is a powerful tool and is underutilized.
• Example: Require universal data collection that indicates who is affected by, and who benefits from, safety program funding. Full list of suggested data points available here.
• Example: A study by the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at the University of Connecticut is an example of enforcement data collection and analysis.

Action: Pass state laws that make records of police disciplinary actions available in all 50 states

• Consideration: Currently, 32 states limit access to police disciplinary records beyond active investigations and unsubstantiated complaints.

PolicyLink would like to thank the members of the Removing Enforcement Working Group of the Transportation Equity Caucus for their dedication and guiding vision. They were instrumental in co-developing the concept and co-authoring the publication.

A number of individuals have contributed to this publication, as authors, reviewers, and advisors. We are especially grateful to these individuals and organizations for their work on this document:

• Ken McLeod, League of American Bicyclists, who co-authored and helped the publication reach the finish line.
• Hester Serebrin, Transportation Choices Coalition, who co-authored and co-led the work group in the development of the publication.
• Oboi Reed, Equiticity, who also co-authored and co-led the work group in the development of the publication.
• Dara Baldwin, who co-chaired the Caucus and supported the work group in the development of the publication.
• Axel Santana, PolicyLink, who chairs the Caucus, supported the work group, and co-led the development of the publication. 

Additionally, the following individuals contributed to the document as well, serving as authors, editors, researchers, and advisors:

• Carlton T. Mayers, II, Esq, Mayers Strategic Solutions, LLC
• Carol Tyson, Disability Rights, Education, and Defense Fund
• Caron Whitaker, League of American Bicyclists
• Catherine Gleason, Livable Streets Alliance
• Chelsea Glass and Judy Greene, Decarcerate Memphis
• Dustin Roberston, formerly with Ride New Orleans
• Edward Engel & Brock Howell, Snohomish County Transportation Coalition (SNOTRAC)
• Ian Thomas, America Walks
• Josh Boxerman, formerly with Leadership Conference
• Marisa Jones, Safe Routes Partnership
• Sagirah Jones, Propel ATL
• Shirani Jayasuriya, Ride New Orleans
• Rio Oxas, RAHOK

The Transportation Equity Caucus is a diverse coalition of organizations promoting policies that ensure access, mobility, and opportunity for all. It is coordinated by PolicyLink.