DOT’s Section 402 grants prioritize citation volume as a performance metric rather than achieving meaningful safety outcomes, resulting in limited improvements in actual road safety.
The Department of Transportation (DOT) provides grants for traffic safety measures, but its reporting requirements often prioritize enforcement metrics over strategies to reduce traffic crashes and fatalities. This white paper examines and critiques the DOT’s reliance on enforcement-heavy approaches to traffic safety, the mechanisms it uses to influence states and law enforcement agencies, and the inequities that arise. It also explores the potential benefits of DOT’s Safe System approach, which focuses on safer vehicle speeds, improved vehicle design, and road engineering to prevent crashes, rather than relying primarily on arrests and citations. With hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding, DOT significantly shapes how state and municipal agencies prioritize traffic enforcement activities. A central finding of the paper points to DOT’s inconsistent guidance, mainly through Section 402 grants, which continue to prioritize traffic stops and citations over broader safety improvements. To counter issues identified, the paper offers six recommendations to federal officials, encouraging the adoption of alternative approaches that enhance both safety and effectiveness.
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Key Findings:
- DOT guidance through educational materials provides conflicting messaging to law enforcement agencies.
- Traditional enforcement-heavy approach conflicts with the Safe System approach, which seeks to prevent road risks through safer infrastructure and policies.
- The effectiveness of overall enforcement on crashes is unproven.
- Quota-driven traffic stops are seen as counterproductive to public trust and safety, diverting resources from evidence-based safety strategies and generating inequities.
Recommendations:
- Integrate a Safety Approach system that prioritizes measures to prevent the inherent risk of unsafe driving into DOT grants.
- Remove language that incentivizes quotalike practices and collects a broader scope of law enforcement metrics used in 402 grants.
- Regularly review, revise, and reconcile all safety guidance DOT uses or references to avoid conflicting messages.