U.S. Cities Incentivize Safe Driving with Reduced Red Light Stops

For years, Albuquerque, New Mexico, battled relentless high-speed crashes along a key residential route. Traditional approaches, primarily punishing speeders, seemed ineffective in controlling the hazardous speeding.

The breakthrough came from an unconventional approach: incentivizing lawful drivers by minimizing their encounters with red lights.

The city attributes a significant decrease in accidents and injuries to this innovative method, a modern twist on the “rest in red” traffic signal strategy. This approach normally keeps lights red until a vehicle nears. Albuquerque, alongside Portland, Oregon, elevated this concept by integrating speed sensors that reward drivers adhering to speed limits with quicker transitions to green lights.

“The technology really speaks for itself,” remarked Jennifer Turner, Albuquerque’s municipal development director, about the new system implemented on Lead and Coal avenues, which are adjacent one-way streets. She explained, “Visitors quickly realize that speeding means stopping.”

Resident Isaac Romero has observed substantial changes. Prior to implementing “rest in red,” he often awoke to the chaos of drivers rushing through intersections or competing with one another. The aftermath was evident, including vehicles overturned, with one even landing in his neighbor’s yard.

“We had one accident where it’s even shaken the whole house because some guy slammed into a tree,” Romero said. “It’s a lot of change because now you don’t get as many people flying through there.”

Portland credits its ‘virtual speed bumps’

Portland recently rolled out the concept during the late-night hours on Southeast Powell Boulevard, a busy state highway with a long history of crashes, including fatal ones.

Peter Koonce, who manages signals and street lighting for the city, calls the new approach a “virtual speed bump” and said the early results are promising. At the first intersection tested, rest in red was able to lower the average speed from 39 mph (63 kph) to 30 mph (48 kph), which is the speed limit, he said.

Oregon State University researchers helped Portland choose its vehicle detection system for monitoring speeds, and now they’re assessing its performance. David Hurwitz, a professor of transportation engineering who leads the study, said it’s too early to draw sweeping conclusions.

“This choice that we are making to try to increase speed compliance seems like it’s working really well — seems like it has potential,” said Hurwitz, who stressed that further research is needed to ensure those gains aren’t offset by more drivers running red lights or other negative consequences.

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Potential negative consequences are also a primary concern of Jay Beeber, chief government affairs and policy officer for the National Motorists Association, a drivers advocacy group. Although he acknowledges that rest in red could be effective in certain places at specific times, he questions whether driver behavior can really change without a broad education campaign and believes there are simpler, less-intrusive solutions.

“I think it’s wishful thinking that drivers are aware enough and pay attention enough to really learn to change their speeds based on whether the light is gonna be red or not,” Beeber said. “I think people are going to end up at the light and just be frustrated. I don’t think they’re gonna know why.”

Many U.S. cities, including Albuquerque and Portland, have long used speed cameras to successfully prevent speeding. In fact, Albuquerque set up three near where it also deploys the rest in red approach, which has made that approach even stronger, according to officials.

LA briefly tried rest in red, but most cities haven’t

A few other cities including Boulder, Colorado, and Long Beach, California, implemented smaller targeted efforts to use the threat of more red lights to force speeders to slow down.

Rebecca Sanders, a national safety practice leader at the transportation consulting firm Fehr & Peers, led a 2019 report at Arizona State University and Toole Design looking at various strategies used across the country to manage speed. Of the cities surveyed, only Los Angeles was trying rest in red at the time, and it briefly experimented with using feedback signs to trigger a red light when a driver traveling too fast was detected.

Sanders said the concept seems to work best on roads built for high-capacity traffic during the day but much less congested — and therefore more conducive to speeding — at night.

A 2023 study on five rural and urban roads in North Carolina found a 43% reduction in total crashes after rest in red was implemented around the clock, said Aaron Moody, spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Unlike the systems being used in Albuquerque and Portland, this and other versions of the rest in red approach didn’t use speed sensors to turn lights green for law-abiding drivers, but instead kept lights red by default until vehicles approached, slowing them.

Despite their apparent effectiveness at deterring speeding, cities have been slow to embrace rest in red.

Romero said he’s visited enough neighborhoods through his home security business to know that the approach could work in many other places in Albuquerque and beyond. But it’ll take all drivers buying in, as the presence of just one speeder can trigger a red light.

“If everybody cruises to 30 calmly, I can promise you, you can get every single green light all the way down,” Romero said. “But the moment that one person is there, it changes that whole route for everybody.”