Can Long Island eliminate road deaths? What we learned from a D.C. suburb that's trying.

SILVER SPRING, Md.  — On a windy afternoon this winter, cars, pedestrians and bicyclists navigated a major intersection whose recent redesign, officials say, is saving lives.

The crossroad features raised islands at each corner, physically separating vehicles from bicycle lanes that line each street, as well as marked crosswalks. Drivers are forced to slow down and turn at a tighter angle, giving them, and pedestrians in their path, more time to react.

Some residents welcomed the changes. Others pushed back.

Shortly after the redesign, a driver pulled up next to county safety specialist Matthew Johnson and rolled down her window.

"This is the dumbest interchange I've ever seen. It's so hard to drive through, I had to go so slow," Johnson, standing in the intersection in an orange vest, recalled her telling him.

"And I was like, ‘That's the point,' " he said. “‘The whole point of this was to make you drive more slowly so that you'll yield to a pedestrian.’"

Lying between an area of handsome single-family homes and a downtown with apartment and office buildings, the neighborhood could have been somewhere on Long Island. But it’s suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, just northwest of Washington, D.C.

Eight years ago, the county of 1.1 million adopted a plan designed to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2030, part of a movement known as Vision Zero. Since then, it has rebuilt dozens of intersections and added more than 40 miles of sidewalks and 8 miles of protected bicycle lanes, with more in the pipeline. It has installed speed humps in residential areas and narrowed or even eliminated traffic lanes on major thoroughfares to reduce drivers’ speeds.

As part of its yearlong Dangerous Roads series, Newsday visited the D.C. suburb to see what lessons it can offer for Long Island, where crashes claimed over 2,100 lives and injured more than 16,000 people over a decade. Montgomery County's focus has produced successes, though officials concede not enough, and neighborhood battles that pitted the push for safety with commuters’ desire to quickly get where they’re going. It demonstrates a potential path forward if Long Island officials adopt the approach, but also forecasts setbacks and challenges.

The core tenet of Vision Zero, which began in northern Europe three decades ago, is that serious traffic injuries and deaths can be prevented. It tackles the problem from multiple angles, including better traffic enforcement, by educating drivers about things such as seat-belt use and impaired driving, and ensuring access to trauma care. But the most important piece of the puzzle — and what sets Vision Zero apart from most other safety approaches — is its emphasis on redesigning and modifying roads to reduce the likelihood of serious crashes.

While Montgomery County is still far from achieving its goal — it had 37 fatal crashes last fiscal year — the county’s roads are safer than the nation's, and its serious and fatal crash rate by population is about half of Long Island’s.

Evan Glass, the transportation chair for the county council, said the greatest challenge has been suburban car culture and its emphasis on speed at the expense of safety.

"There are going to be people who like the roads just as they are," said Glass, who grew up in Nassau County and sees numerous parallels between the two areas.

But "the fact is, hundreds of our neighbors continue to be hit, and if we don't make any change, we're only going to perpetuate that."

Wade Holland, the county’s Vision Zero coordinator, said major projects can cost millions of dollars, or even tens of millions of dollars per mile — especially if they involve moving utilities. But other projects can be accomplished quickly and cheaply, like adjusting pedestrian signal timing, using paint and flexible plastic posts to extend curbs or repurpose travel lanes, or adding speed humps on roads. The county has received $8.3 million in competitive traffic safety grants through the bipartisan infrastructure legislation President Joe Biden signed in 2021.

Mixed success amid U.S. headwinds

Governments that adopt Vision Zero set a target year for eliminating road deaths. They are also supposed to adopt a culture of transparency by publishing studies of the most dangerous roads, action plans for addressing them and regular updates on progress.

Sweden and the Netherlands were the first to adopt Vision Zero as official policy, both in 1997. While they haven’t yet eliminated traffic deaths, they’ve cut their per-capita fatality rates by around two-thirds and three-fifths, respectively.

Some U.S. urban areas, including New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, began implementing Vision Zero programs over a decade ago. By 2023, 86 large- and medium-sized American municipalities had adopted some form of the initiative.

The launches of Vision Zero came at a challenging time for traffic safety in the United States, coinciding with a national rise in road fatalities that began in the early 2010s. Experts debate what caused the uptick, which came after four decades of gradual improvement, but cited reasons include increases in distracted driving and cellphone use, drug use and speeding — the latter especially after roads emptied and ticketing rates plummeted during the pandemic.

In the face of those headwinds, American Vision Zero cities have seen mixed success. The square mile city of Hoboken, New Jersey, has not had a traffic death since 2017. But across the Hudson River, New York City has had a bumpier ride. After Mayor Bill de Blasio launched Vision Zero, deaths fell from 299 in 2013 to 206 in 2018, but then they rose for three straight years. Then, last year, deaths dropped to 205 — the lowest in more than a century.

On Long Island, a few governments have established Vision Zero goals but the movement has yet to gain much traction. Former Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone proclaimed Vision Zero as a goal and the county put up a website, but it has not yet published a safety study or plan for achieving the goal — essential first steps. In a statement, current Executive Edward P. Romaine's office said a forthcoming highway safety plan will "advance the fundamental goals of Vision Zero." The Town of Brookhaven in June published a plan for eliminating deaths by 2045.

Within the Vision Zero community, Montgomery County is neither a standout nor a laggard, but it is one of only a handful of suburban areas to try it out at scale. It adopted its first Vision Zero action plan in 2018, although it had previously implemented several countywide pedestrian and traffic safety programs.

Unlike Long Island, where only around 1 of every 10 miles of road is county-owned, Montgomery County controls the large majority of roads within its borders. Last fiscal year, serious and fatal crashes were just 5% below the 2015-19 average — an unsatisfying result, local officials say, though they point out it’s better than the nation as a whole.

Holland, the Vision Zero coordinator, said the most improvement has come on 18 dangerous corridors where Montgomery County has concentrated its safety efforts. On those stretches of road, serious and fatal crashes have declined 29%.

"We're not having a system-wide effect at this point, and we’re less than 10 years into this, but we are seeing an effect on our areas where we're trying to impact first," he said.

Montgomery County's record

Peter Gray, an advocate with the nonprofit Montgomery County Families for Safe Streets, is a supporter of Vision Zero, but has also been a frequent critic of the county’s implementation.

He praised a recent change along a six-lane thoroughfare, Veirs Mill Road, punctuated by white-painted "ghost shoe" and "ghost bike" memorials to the dead. To protect pedestrians and cyclists where a county trail intersects, officials installed a midblock signal, which stays dark until someone pushes the button, then follows a yellow-red sequence to stop traffic.

But Gray said he’s disappointed with the overall pace of progress.

Many of the pedestrian safety infrastructure projects are in wealthy places like Bethesda — where residents have "more disposable time and education" to lobby — with too few, he said, in poorer parts of the county, where people rely more on walking and public transit.

Gray said he was also disappointed with the county’s "safe routes to school" program, a prong of Vision Zero that involves not only educating students but also adding sidewalks, redesigning intersections and lowering speed limits near schools. The county says it has conducted walkability audits for around 60% of its schools, but Gray said it’s been slow to implement follow-up changes.

Despite these shortcomings, Gray said he’s been happy with the county’s transparency; it regularly posts crash data, plans and updates on its Vision Zero website.

Christopher Arndt, an avid cyclist and citizen adviser to the county transportation department, met Newsday at Pike & Rose, an area with lively restaurants and shops below mid-rise apartments and offices in North Bethesda. A short walk from a metro line into D.C., it’s one of several transit-oriented developments the county and state have encouraged in recent years to cut car use and — as a beneficial side-effect — reduce crashes. The county also introduced free buses last summer.

Arndt praised the county's progress adding bicycle lanes and redesigning roads, but said traffic enforcement is still lacking. Illustrating his point, several parked cars blocked a bicycle lane outside the restaurant where he sat.

"We need to have a real crackdown," he said, adding he’s especially concerned seeing so many distracted drivers on their cellphones.

Capt. Warren Jensen, who leads the Montgomery County Police Department’s traffic operations, agreed enforcement has "been lacking for years," which he attributed to staff shortages since around 2020.

But as part of Vision Zero, the police have tried to focus more on the riskiest driving behaviors along the high-injury network, said Jensen, who, like Glass on the council, grew up on Long Island.

Jensen also said the police are relying more heavily on speed cameras, which the Maryland State Legislature recently approved for use outside of school zones, where they were previously limited.

"Speed is what is killing people. So if we can lower the speeds, whether that's with a police officer or whether that's with a camera, I think that's going to make a huge difference," he said.

On Long Island, speed cameras are restricted to state construction zones.

Backlash to bike lanes

Redesigning roads, which advocates say is so critical to Vision Zero’s success, involves trade-offs.

Building sidewalks can help kids get to school safely, but that requires money and, often, overcoming opposition from homeowners.

"The perception of the household owner is, ‘You're taking away my lawn!’ " Gray said.

Projects that slow traffic can be equally, if not more, controversial.

Removing or narrowing vehicle lanes — often while adding a bicycle lane, a widened sidewalk or medians with trees or grass — is called a "road diet." Advocates argue just as a wide-open road can encourage speeding, a road diet can slow drivers, even in the absence of police or cameras.

Three years ago, Maryland state officials removed two vehicle lanes, built bicycle lanes and planted flex-posts to separate cyclists from drivers after several deadly bike crashes along a road connecting Montgomery County to Georgetown.

In regular follow-up monitoring, the state found across the 3-mile stretch, average peak-hour travel times increased 1.8 minutes in the morning and 2.5 minutes in the evening, but some say they've experienced longer delays.

"It gets backed up when the school releases and the buses hit the road. It's horrible," said Allan Ginsburg, a resident who has lived in the area 50 years.

Ginsburg said he'd like the bike lanes removed from Old Georgetown Road and other thoroughfares: "I have nothing against bike riders. Just ride where it's safe, protect yourself."

An online petition, which garnered thousands of signatures, called for removal of the "catastrophically dangerous bike lanes," saying the redesign diverts traffic onto residential side streets and delays access for emergency vehicles.

State monitors identified only one parallel side street that could potentially save time, where cameras tracked a few dozen drivers making the shortcut daily. In their poll of fire stations near the corridor, first responders voiced some concerns about response times but also said they were able to cross over the flex-posts to use the bike lane in emergencies.

About 117 cyclists used the bike lane on a single weekday last spring — far fewer than the roughly 8,000 cars that pass through each day. But safety advocates say projects like this improve motorists’ own safety too, by forcing everyone to slow down.

Gray acknowledged state officials "sort of bulldozed through the public process" on Old Georgetown Road, but he said the result was "for the greater good," noting there have been no more deaths along the stretch.

Holland, the county’s Vision Zero coordinator, said other projects face similar challenges: "You hear from the [safety] advocates on the front end. And then as you get further into the project, the opposition starts to mount. So the politicians have to decide then — who do they want to make mad the most?"

A vision for Long Island

What would Vision Zero look like on Long Island?

Brookhaven’s Vision Zero plan, published last year using a federal grant, outlines certain changes similar to Montgomery County’s — such as installing sidewalks, roundabouts and bike lanes, albeit without protective barriers, on town roads from Mastic to Rocky Point. It also calls for new traffic signals, vegetation trimming at intersections, speed limit reductions and lots more signage for motorists.

But the plan does not include road diets. Town Highway Superintendent Dan Losquadro doesn't rule out lane-narrowing in the future, but the plan actually proposes widening some roads to add left-turn lanes.

The priority projects — including Mastic Road in Mastic, Station Road in Bellport, Union Avenue in Holbrook and five other roads — could cost $12 million, or about half of the town's annual paving budget, Losquadro told Newsday.

But "these investments pay dividends," he added, noting federal and state safety grants can offset some costs.

Eric Alexander, executive director of Vision Long Island, a Northport-based nonprofit promoting walkable downtowns, said he'd like to see many improvements on county and state roadways, including improved pedestrian crossings, center medians and narrower lanes to slow traffic. On thoroughfares such as Route 110 in Amityville and Huntington Station, vehicle lanes can be narrowed without necessarily being removed.

It doesn’t even have to be called "Vision Zero," he added. His group prefers the term "complete streets" because people associate Vision Zero with New York City — and "Long Islanders just don't really do New York City things."

 

While small in scale, some examples already exist of Vision Zero-like road modifications on Long Island. Pedestrian bulb-outs — where the sidewalk protrudes into an intersection, shortening the crosswalk and forcing vehicles to make tighter turns — can be found along the North Shore Rail Trail in downtown Rocky Point and elsewhere. The state, Nassau and Suffolk counties have, respectively, implemented road diets on Main Street in downtown Smithtown, Austin Boulevard in Island Park and Great East Neck Road in West Babylon in recent years. 

Former Nassau County legislator Denise Ford, who pushed for the Austin Boulevard road diet, said some residents worried about traffic jams, but in the end, she feels the redesign was effective: "Maybe you go a little bit slow, but that was the whole point of it, because people were racing through that area, not realizing they're racing through a neighborhood."

Michael Shenoda, a traffic engineering professor at Farmingdale State College who is conducting a traffic calming study for Huntington Town, said he believes Vision Zero’s lofty goal is worth striving for, even if deaths may never be completely eliminated and even if some drivers oppose slowing down.

"Long Islanders are very good at the micro-perspective — how is this affecting my own life? They’re not as good at looking at the bigger picture and saying, 'You know, we're a much safer region now.' "