With ‘virtual speed bumps,’ these cities have reduced crashes by rewarding slower drivers with fewer red lights

Officials struggled for years to curb high-speed crashes along a residential corridor cutting through Albuquerque, New Mexico, but simply punishing the lead-footed drivers didn’t seem to work.

What ultimately did was rewarding the law-abiding ones with fewer red lights .

The solution, which the city credits for a dramatic drop in crashes and injuries along one busy stretch of road, is a relatively novel version of a longstanding traffic safety concept commonly known as “rest in red,” in which traffic signals default to red until a vehicle approaches.

But Albuquerque and Portland, Oregon, took it a step further by adding speed sensors that grant a much earlier green light to drivers traveling at or below the posted limit.

“We’re finding that the technology itself is kind of its best advertisement,” Jennifer Turner, Albuquerque’s director of municipal development, said of the strategy the city deployed on Lead and Coal avenues, parallel one-way streets.

“If you come to Albuquerque right now and you’re driving that corridor, you will learn pretty quickly that if you are speeding, you stop.” Isaac Romero, who lives along the corridor, said he has noticed a big difference.

Before rest in red, he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of drivers racing to beat the traffic lights or one another.

He saw cars that had crashed and flipped , including one that ended up 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.