Every day, people across the United States walk, bike, take transit, and drive on streets that, in an ideal world, would be safe for everyone. Yet in 2024 alone, 7,080 people were killed while walking or bicycling, a staggering number that remains far higher than it was just 15 years ago.
For decades, transportation agencies have relied on a combination of engineering, education, enforcement, and emergency response to improve roadway safety. While these efforts have saved lives, they have not been enough to reverse the long-term rise in traffic deaths.
In recent years, transportation agencies across the country have begun embracing the Safe System Approach—a different way of thinking about safety. Instead of placing most of the responsibility on individual road users, the Safe System Approach recognizes that people make mistakes. The goal is to design roads, policies, and transportation systems that prevent those mistakes from resulting in serious injuries or deaths.
Many communities have adopted Vision Zero goals or Safe System principles, but moving from a plan to lasting change is often the hardest part. Staff turnover, limited funding, competing priorities, and agency silos can make it difficult to keep safety efforts moving forward over time.
To help address these challenges, Horizon 54 partnered with Fehr & Peers and VHB, with support from the Transportation Research Board, to develop a new toolkit focused on Institutionalizing the Safe System Approach in Planning and Programming.
Unlike many introductory Safe System resources, this toolkit is designed for agencies that have already begun their safety journey and are asking the next question: How do we make safety part of the way our organization operates every day?
The toolkit provides practical strategies, assessment tools, and case study examples to help transportation agencies:
- Evaluate how well Safe System principles are integrated into everyday decision-making.
- Identify organizational barriers that slow progress.
- Strengthen planning, funding, and project delivery processes.
- Build partnerships across departments and agencies.
- Create systems that support long-term, lasting improvements in roadway safety.
The recommendations in this toolkit are grounded in research that included a review of national and international best practices, focus groups with transportation practitioners from across the country, and collaborative workshops with safety experts.
Creating safer streets isn’t just about building better roads, it’s about building organizational capacity and consistently prioritizing safety in every decision. We hope this toolkit helps transportation professionals move beyond individual projects to create lasting institutional change that saves lives for years to come.
We are grateful to the Transportation Research Board, Fehr & Peers, VHB, and the many practitioners who shared their time and expertise throughout this research. We look forward to seeing how agencies use these tools to advance safer transportation systems across the country.
You can find the full report here.