The city of Somerville, Mass., recently hit a milestone. Three years have passed since anyone died in a traffic collision on its streets.
That streak of fatality-free years overlaps with other trends in street safety. The overall number of crashes has gradually shrunk for the last three years, while serious traffic injuries decreased by 50 percent last year. The number of pedestrian and bike collisions are both trending downward over the last decade.
It’s a stark contrast to what’s been happening in other parts of the country. In the years since the pandemic, American streets have become more dangerous, reversing years of improvements. In 2022, pedestrian deaths around the country hit a 40-year-high amid an increase in speeding and distracted driving. Pedestrian deaths have ticked downward again since then, but remain about 20 percent higher than they were in 2016, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. Overall traffic deaths peaked at the beginning of the pandemic as well, with nearly 47,000 deaths in 2021, up from a recent low of about 35,400 in 2014, according to the National Safety Council. There were 42,789 traffic deaths in the U.S. in 2024.
Somerville officials are pleased that their indicators of street safety are going in the right direction. They’re not exactly surprised. Since the city officially committed to Vision Zero in 2017, signing on to a global campaign to eliminate traffic deaths, it has gradually built out a strategy for reducing traffic collisions based on best practices in roadway design and enforcement. Interventions that naturally force drivers to slow down to navigate the roadway have been found to be much more effective than simple enforcement measures or education campaigns. Somerville has lowered speed limits all over the city, repainted and shortened crosswalks to reduce the amount of time pedestrians are in the roadway, added new speed humps, fixed sidewalks, expanded its bike-lane network, installed new bus stops and bus lanes and stepped up ticketing for distracted driving.
The city is “emerging as a national Vision Zero leader,” says Maha Aslam, the transit and streets program manager at LivableStreets, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass. LivableStreets recently published a report assessing the last decade of Vision Zero work in Somerville, Cambridge and Boston. It praised Somerville’s approach to community engagement around traffic-calming projects, which involves working closely with community-based advocacy groups and being firm about making safety a priority over other goals.
“That approach is very, very effective. It helps communities build their expectations around how their feedback will be used,” Aslam says.
Somerville officials acknowledge that the strategies they’re using aren’t unique or original. It’s the same playbook being used in Hoboken, N.J., another small, transit-rich city that has gone more than nine years without a traffic death. It incorporates many of the traffic-calming strategies promoted by the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
“As a city we can never guarantee that something tragic isn’t going to happen, but we can reduce the chances,” says Somerville Mayor Jake Wilson.
Last year alone the city installed more than 70 traffic-calming features on its streets, including speed humps and painting stripes on crosswalks to increase visibility. It has monitored the impact of its infrastructure projects using automatic traffic recorders, and found many of them, particularly speed humps, to be effective at reducing vehicle speed, which is the primary cause of traffic injuries and deaths. On several streets, the city’s projects resulted in massive reductions in speeding, sometimes almost eliminating it. More than 80 percent of all vehicles were clocked above 25 miles per hour on parts of Cameron Avenue before a traffic-calming project was installed, according to a city report; after the project was completed, only 2 percent of cars exceeded the speed limit.
“Speed kills,” says Brad Rawson, the city’s director of mobility. “Signage and posted regulations can keep honest people honest. But physical traffic calming, meaning designing streets that are relatively narrow and cannot be driven comfortably fast … those are the things that are moving the needle.”
Somerville has invested significant local resources into its street-safety strategies. It has local staff dedicated to planning, designing and evaluating street-safety improvements. It has integrated its Vision Zero strategies into its broad street repaving program. It has pushed other parties, from private developers to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, to adopt its street-safety tactics when they’re completing projects in the city as well.
The city won a nearly $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All program, which was established under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, for fiscal year 2023. Grants awarded under that program and some others have recently been subject to extra scrutiny, delays and in some cases rescission by the Trump administration, which has targeted federal programs it says are focused on equity or climate goals. Rawson says Somerville has not yet been able to submit for or receive reimbursements for work done under the scope of its Safe Streets grant.
Bigger cities may have a longer way to go to eliminate traffic deaths. They often face pushback from a greater array of stakeholders, as well as more bureaucratic hurdles. Many cities also have less access to transit and other kinds of transportation infrastructure. But advocates say it’s the same set of tools that will make any city’s streets more safe.
Somerville’s residents and community advocates pushed the city to commit to Vision Zero a decade ago. Officials say they continue to demand more progress year by year.
“This is a clear community value that gets expressed electorally,” says Wilson, the mayor. “There’s a tradition of voters electing people who are committed to making it safe to get around our city.”