The Bottom-Up Revolution
Most crash analysis studios didn’t start inside City Hall—they were sparked by local members, neighbors, and conversation leaders who refused to accept dangerous streets as normal. Instead of waiting on the next grant cycle, Strong Towns is helping cities take small, fast steps at their most dangerous intersections through community-led crash analysis studios. Norm and Edward share how this work tests changes on the ground, builds data, and supports local champions both inside and outside city government.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi there, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm of Strong Towns, and with me today is Edward Erfurt, our Chief Technical Advisor for Strong Towns. We want to talk about the Crash Analysis Studio—almost as a roundup of the many things that local leaders and individuals are taking time out of their day, taking time to bring people together in order to conduct Crash Analysis Studios, but also to begin to work together with cities to update and improve the methods that we are using when we conduct the early assessment and evaluation.
What can we do about the carnage on our streets—the challenges that we face, having people move through our communities in a way that's safe and dignified and really valuable for each person who participates in it? Edward, can you share where we are in the midst of building on community-led Crash Analysis Studios as a means of demonstrating that this is necessary, to now beginning to provide that next level of support for cities and municipalities to take this on, bring it within the system, so that it is a much more front-and-center activity that any city—and we truly mean any city—can and should be engaged in.
Most of the folks that are out there listening and have been following Strong Towns for some time have seen the work that we've been doing with safe and productive streets, trying to tackle that really difficult thing of: how do we make our streets safer? How do we lower the amount of crashes and reduce the amount of fatalities on all of our streets? Anybody who's been around City Hall knows that there are ways to do that, but they take years and millions of dollars, and we need to be more urgent about it.
About two years ago, we began a journey of developing an approach where we could help cities learn from crashes—not just blame folks, not just write tickets, but how could we actually learn from them so that we could fix those things and address the struggles that were contributing factors for crashes. We developed the Crash Analysis Studio. Strong Towns has hosted 26 of these studios. You can go to our website, download them, watch the studios, read the reports, and look at the photographs. There are dozens of other cities across the country where our members, local conversation leaders, and Strong Citizens have gone and hosted their own studios.
I go to different cities and hear about these studios and the work coming out of them. We have a high school group out in California at Campo High School that actually has a Crash Analysis Studio club. They're doing two Crash Analysis Studios a semester. I'm also working with students at Dort University with Professor Gingrich—we've written about the work he's doing there. The introductory course for engineering students on how to design streets is learning the Crash Analysis Studio.
As we've been working with this approach, and as our local conversation leaders and members have done crash studios, they've taken this work to City Hall and hit some barriers. I've also been meeting with folks in City Hall who have adopted Vision Zero programs, who are going through Safe Streets for All grant programs for design work and developing Safe Streets for All plans, people working around high-injury networks, and they've been struggling with how to apply this approach locally.
This year, Strong Towns was gifted some financial resources. We had a really generous donor who said, "We want to see the Crash Analysis Studio adopted as the standard of care across North American cities. What would it take to go do that?" We have a tested approach. We've developed a course people can take online to learn how to do the Crash Analysis Studio. We've got lots of case studies. We have cities that have taken the recommendations and done work. Now we're using this funding to go out to cities, and I'm looking to work with 10 cities across North America to adopt the Crash Analysis Studio.
I recognize this is not easy. It requires asking lots of tough questions and looking at what our current systems are. But what we're finding in cities is that more often than not, they have all the resources they need today to go and address a dangerous street—and they can do it with existing resources, and they can do it very quickly. This is the work that we're in right now, and I'm really excited. I've been talking to many cities. Several of them are working with us. I'm going to be going out to learn what they are actually doing in their communities. I've got local conversation leaders who have invited me in to talk to their city officials so we can share this approach. I hope that this time next year, I can tout 10 cities that have adopted the Crash Analysis Studio as their standard of care for the most serious crashes in their cities.
Can you describe some of the champions? That term may feel like too much of an accolade from their perspective, but from our perspective these are truly champions in their community. What are some of the features or characteristics that stand out to you? Part of my goal with this podcast is to help you see that you could be that person. In many different cases, if you're not employed by a city, that may be your opportunity to bring the pieces together and put people in touch with one another. But we also have folks listening who have a role within an existing city hall. What are some of the characteristics of these champions?
What's interesting is I have over 50 cities that we're in contact with right now. Of those, probably only five or six were actually staff-initiated. Many of these were initiated from our members—
—who are local conversation group leaders.
They heard us talk about this in the State of Strong Towns. What I find in all of our communities is that we have members who are engaged in their community. They know people on city council, they're on an advisory committee, they're on a board, they work with City Hall, their neighbor may be the transportation engineer or the Safe Streets coordinator for their city. They're sitting at home saying, "We are missing this connection point. We've all acknowledged this is a dangerous intersection. We know that there's been a serious crash here, so it's proven to be dangerous, but we're struggling with that next step of actually implementing an action—not just writing a policy, not just writing a plan, but actually implementing an action."
This is where that conversation is starting. For this round of cities we want to help, we're looking for cities that are prepared to put some skin in the game. We have resources to support cities and offer free training, but we want to work with cities that are willing to make some investment into it.
If your city has political support for safer streets—every elected official I talk to wants the safest streets in their community—that's the first good sign. The second piece is looking for engaged technical staff: staff that are curious, that can recognize they're struggling with these things. I assure you, even the most advanced cities working on Vision Zero still struggle every day with these projects. There are just different struggles than maybe cities at the beginning of this journey. We're looking for technical staff who are willing to put a little time in to think differently, to read some things and participate in this process.
Then: is your city willing to take action? Willing to take that step forward? Willing to carve out time to go through this process when there's a Crash Studio, recognizing that we're going to need a team to convene and work through this process? When we identify that low-hanging fruit of a contributing factor for a crash, are they ready to go out there and take action?
If that sounds like your community, if that sounds like a place where you live or work, I would love to talk to you about the Crash Analysis Studio. Some of the cities I talk to are just beginning to recognize and accept the fact that they have dangerous streets—they are just at an early stage of developing a Safe Streets for All plan or an early Vision Zero. Maybe it's a city where nobody at City Hall knows who Strong Towns is. That's fine. We have lots of great resources we can share for you to begin that conversation and help influence those plans. But if you've done some of that work, if you feel like you're just missing that one thing to get over the finish line, those are the places we're looking to talk to and work with.
You mentioned the Safe Streets for All program, and there are other types of grants that are available. My city is currently in the process of applying for more grants to be able to meet its Vision Zero strategy. The consequence of that is that a lot of things are just left waiting and hanging until we finally got to a state where we suddenly had permission and funding for 18 crosswalks. Strong Towns is trying to say there are many things we can currently be doing even while we wait for that next grant cycle to come along.
Can you describe what this is not? It is an important interim step—or, more positively, something you can just go out and do. Why is that so valuable at a point when many people feel like something needs to be done? I remember writing letters when I worked in the mayor's office that just said, "I acknowledge your sadness and the grief that you're dealing with right now. I want you to know that your intersection is now on a list." It was almost like the only thing I could offer them was that it was on a list.
I want to be able to tell people—and want mayor's staff and others to be able to tell people—"We may not get directly to your intersection, but there are already four that we're acting on right away, and we're taking those insights, we're learning from this, irrespective of our big grant cycles. We want to take action locally and work with what we have." One city said all of their intersections are red—as in, all of them have had serious crashes or fatalities. In a sense, they felt like they needed the next big top-down thing before they could do anything. But Strong Towns says: no, start with what you have. What does that look like?
When I talk to a city that has gone through this process, the term they use is "high-injury network." They've mapped out all the crashes. Several of our local conversations out in Denver have done this mapping. There are many advocates who have shared me this map, and they have little red dots of where all of these crashes have occurred in their city. When you look at it, it looks like a blood-spread map. It looks like every street is red, and it doesn't matter how big the dot—it's everywhere.
With cities, we have such limited resources—limited staff, limited budgets. We can barely keep up with our maintenance obligations, let alone take on another thing. I recognize that. So where do we start?
When Strong Towns looked at the Crash Analysis Studio, this is an approach you could use for every crash, for every dangerous street. But recognizing that if you had one time to trigger this, where would it be? It would be where there is the most serious and severe tragedy in your community—a fatality on your street. At that moment, we don't need to do another study. We don't need to analyze it any further. The system itself has proven to be dangerous, and the contributing factors to that crash are many. That's the first place we target this resource.
I recognize that when we've done a couple of these crash studios, the common thing I hear is: "Okay, if we fix that intersection, we have 80 or 90 other intersections just like that in the city, and now you're going to expect us to fix all of those." That sounds very cold, very inhumane. That is my initial reaction to it. But what's really being said is: we have limited resources. Where do we start? How do we begin when we're this far in a hole?
This is where we take a deep breath and say: okay, if we look at this one intersection, let's take the opportunity to do a couple of small bets to address what we think were contributing factors for a crash. What's the next smallest thing we could do—using straw bales and cones at that intersection? I use straw bales because that is the most temporary feature you can imagine. There are a lot of other tools that public works departments have. But what is that simple thing we go out there and use?
There's also this concern: if we have 80 of these intersections, now we have to interact with all of our community leaders, 80 intersections, 110 neighborhoods, 200 HOA groups. How do we deal with that? By looking at the one intersection that had the most serious condition occur—the worst tragedy for your community—and testing small bets using temporary pilot features, quick-deploy measures that we go and install and observe. That actually becomes the highest form of public engagement, because instead of asking folks their opinion of a street, instead of asking them to show up at City Hall on a Thursday night at 7 PM, we are actually putting something in the ground that everybody who drives, walks, rides, visits, or lives by that intersection will experience.
We can observe it. They can experience it. They can understand what we're doing. By doing that, we can build trust in our community. That's something we can then go and make semi-permanent or permanent at that location. It builds a data set for us to go to the next intersection. We'll have some of the same people from the first intersection who can speak to it. Now we build a coalition. There's nothing more powerful than a neighbor explaining to a neighbor what the pros and cons are of a pilot project. They can do that far better than I could from City Hall, far better than a PR firm could do on a website. This is the highest level of public engagement in everyday function. That's part of the next step of implementation—going beyond just setting a policy or putting out an ad campaign telling people to drive more safely. These are small bets we can do at scale across our whole city.
We de-mythologize the worry that change is going to be counterproductive, and we just say, "I dare you, drive through that intersection." People's own experience of it can be so valuable. Edward, where can people go to learn more?
Go to strongtowns.org/crashstudio—one word. If you go to the Strong Towns website, at the very top there is a "Tools for Action" pulldown. Look for the Crash Analysis Studio. You can get the report Beyond Blame, explore all the studio sessions, and sign up on our email list there to learn more about this opportunity.
Just as the Finance Decoder is helping finance teams as well as citizens to understand the long-term financial trajectory of their communities, the Crash Analysis Studio holds the potential—and we're already seeing this being implemented in more and more places—to really reorient the way that we respond to the needs we face in our community. Thank you, Edward. It's so good to be able to share this with our audience. Rather than interviewing 80 people who've all been doing this work—and it's actually much more than 80—I'm able to say, "What have you seen?" Thank you for sharing that.
Please do go check it out: strongtowns.org/crashstudio. Participate in your community. Help to level up your community, because cities must lead on this. Municipalities are the primary forces responsible for improving our streets. Take care, folks, and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.