Equity in Roadway Safety: What the Crash Data Reveals

Traffic fatalities are not evenly distributed. Nationally, pedestrians in low-income communities are killed at significantly higher rates than those in wealthier areas. Communities with the fewest sidewalks, the poorest lighting, and the highest-speed arterials cutting through residential neighborhoods bear a disproportionate share of roadway fatalities.

This isn’t just a social issue. It’s a data quality issue. If your safety analysis doesn’t account for where harm concentrates relative to who lives there, your priority list may be systematically incomplete.

What the National Data Shows

NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and research from the Governors Highway Safety Association consistently reveal stark disparities:

• Pedestrian fatality rates are significantly higher in census tracts with higher poverty rates, lower vehicle ownership, and more residents who depend on walking for transportation.
• Black and Indigenous Americans are overrepresented in pedestrian and overall traffic fatality statistics relative to their share of the population.
• Rural communities experience higher per-capita fatality rates, driven by higher speeds, longer emergency response times, and less infrastructure investment.

The infrastructure context matters. Historically underinvested communities often have roads that were designed primarily for vehicle throughput — wide lanes, high speeds, minimal pedestrian infrastructure. These design choices have compounding effects: the communities with the most dangerous roads also tend to have the least capacity to apply for competitive safety grants.

These numbers aren’t abstract. They describe corridors, intersections, and neighborhoods that exist in every state’s crash database. The question is whether your analysis surfaces them.

The Shifting Policy Landscape

Federal policy on equity in transportation has shifted significantly since early 2025. It’s important for safety professionals to understand what changed, what didn’t, and what it means for practice.

What Changed

• The Justice40 initiative — which directed 40% of federal infrastructure investment benefits toward disadvantaged communities — was terminated by executive order in January 2025.
• SS4A selection criteria no longer include equity as a scoring factor. Prior rounds required equity analysis in Safety Action Plans and scored it in the competitive review. The FY2025 NOFO removed both requirements. Equity is still listed as a “program priority” but not a scored criterion.
• USDOT’s Equitable Transportation Community (ETC) Explorer was taken offline. It had been a primary tool for agencies to identify disadvantaged communities in their transportation planning.
• The EPA’s EJScreen environmental justice screening tool was also removed from the EPA website in February 2025.
• DOT internal orders on equity and environmental justice were revoked, and grant NOFOs across programs were updated to remove related language.

What Didn’t Change

• The IIJA is statute. Formula funding programs like HSIP continue to flow under the law as written. Executive orders can shift discretionary grant priorities, but they can’t override enacted legislation.
• Many states have independent equity mandates. California, Washington, Minnesota, Oregon, and others have state-level requirements for equity analysis in transportation planning that are unaffected by federal policy shifts.
• The crash data hasn’t changed. The underlying disparities in where fatal and serious-injury crashes concentrate remain the same regardless of federal scoring criteria.
• Key screening tools are still available. The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, Census data, and other non-USDOT resources remain fully operational (see next section).

Why Equity Analysis Improves Safety Analysis

Set aside compliance entirely. From a pure analytical perspective, equity-informed screening produces a more accurate picture of where safety investments will have the greatest human impact. Here’s why:

Volume-based metrics can mask real risk. Traditional network screening relies heavily on crash frequency, crash rate, and EPDO — all of which are influenced by traffic volume. High-AADT roads naturally produce more crashes in absolute terms. Low-volume roads through communities where residents walk, bike, or use transit may have fewer total crashes but a much higher per-capita crash rate.

Severity patterns differ by context. Crashes in underinvested communities are more likely to involve pedestrians and more likely to be severe. A corridor with 8 crashes per year — 3 of them pedestrian fatalities — tells a very different story than one with 20 crashes per year that are predominantly fender-benders. EPDO scoring captures some of this, but only if the screening is comprehensive enough to surface the lower-volume corridor in the first place.

Equity analysis reveals different priority locations. When agencies overlay crash data with community vulnerability indicators, the resulting priority list is not identical to a purely crash-based ranking. There is overlap, but equity analysis surfaces corridors that traditional screening underweights — locations where the per-capita burden of crashes is highest, even if the absolute count is not.

How to Incorporate Equity into Safety Analysis

Here’s a practical four-step approach that works regardless of the current federal scoring criteria:

Step 1: Identify Vulnerable Communities

Several tools remain available for identifying communities that may bear a disproportionate share of traffic safety risk:

Recommendation: The CDC SVI is the most practical and reliable option available today. It’s maintained by CDC/ATSDR (independent of USDOT policy changes), covers the entire U.S. at the census tract level, and includes the socioeconomic and demographic indicators most relevant to transportation safety. Supplement with Census ACS data for additional specificity.

Step 2: Overlay with Crash Data

Map crash locations against your equity indicators. The overlay doesn’t need to be complicated:

• Import SVI scores at the census tract level into your GIS or analysis platform.
• Classify tracts as high-vulnerability (e.g., top quartile SVI score).
• Identify crashes that fall within high-vulnerability tracts.
• Focus on crash severity and mode: pedestrian and cyclist crashes in vulnerable communities are the highest-priority signal.

Step 3: Adjust Prioritization

There are several approaches to integrating equity into your project ranking, depending on your agency’s goals:

• Equity-weighted scoring: Add a vulnerability factor to your existing screening formula. Locations in high-SVI tracts receive an uplift that reflects the disproportionate impact of crashes in those communities.
• Parallel priority lists: Run traditional screening and equity-informed screening separately, then compare. The locations that appear on both lists are your highest priorities. Locations unique to the equity list warrant additional review.
• Equity thresholds: Set a minimum percentage of your safety program that must be directed toward high-vulnerability communities (e.g., at least 25% of projects).

The right approach depends on your context. The key principle is transparency: whatever method you use, document it so stakeholders understand how equity influenced the results.

Step 4: Document Your Methodology

Even without federal scoring incentives, a well-documented equity methodology strengthens your safety program in several ways:

• Grant applications: Agencies with existing equity analysis are prepared if equity criteria return in future NOFOs — whether from reauthorization, new administration priorities, or state-level grant programs.
• Public accountability: Safety action plans that visibly address the communities bearing the greatest crash burden build public trust and political support.
• Better outcomes: The communities most affected by traffic violence are often the ones where relatively low-cost countermeasures — crosswalks, lighting, speed reduction, pedestrian refuge islands — have the most impact per dollar spent.

Moving Forward

Federal policy on equity in transportation will continue to evolve. Administrations change. Grant criteria shift. What doesn’t change is the underlying data: some communities bear a disproportionate share of traffic fatalities, and many of those communities have been underserved by traditional analysis methods that prioritize volume over vulnerability.

Agencies that incorporate equity into their safety analysis — regardless of whether a NOFO asks for it — are doing better engineering. They’re finding projects that traditional screening misses. And they’re building the institutional capacity to respond to whatever policy landscape comes next.

The data is clear. The tools are available. The question is whether your analysis reflects the full picture of where the harm is.