For much of the public, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is synonymous with vehicle safety research, but it’s far from the organization’s only focus. Jessica Cicchino is a Senior Vice President at IIHS. She directs the Institute’s research on road user behavior and infrastructure, evaluating things such as road design, traffic laws and how drivers interact with their vehicles.

While vehicles are safer now than ever before, traffic fatalities in 2022 were nearly 30% higher than they were in 2014. Risky behaviors such as speeding, alcohol impairment and failure to wear a seat belt have contributed to a growing share of fatalities, wiping out many of the gains from safer vehicles.

At the same time, wins in vehicle safety have not benefited all road users equally. Deaths of pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists — people who are not protected by a vehicle’s structure — have seen their fatalities rise by 49% from 2014 to 2022.

Last month, this weekly article on traffic safety touted the IIHS’s “Vision 30×30,” an initiative whereby traffic fatalities (and crashes) would be reduced by 30% by 2030. According to Cicchino, to reach the 30×30 goal, we’ll need to take steps that can have an immediate effect — things such as deploying safety cameras or quick-build infrastructure.

When Maryland’s Montgomery County put speed safety cameras on its residential roads, the share of vehicles that were speeding by more than 10 mph dropped by 70% in about six months. Next door in Washington, D.C., putting up bollards and rubber speed bumps to slow left-turning drivers reduced conflicts with pedestrians by more than 70% a few months after they were installed. If stronger state laws governing alcohol-impaired driving, distracted driving or seat belt use are passed in the next five years, they could have immediate impacts on risky behavior.

Cicchino also advocates for push-back against dangerous legislative trends. Today, eight U.S. states have highways with speed limits of 80 mph or higher. Increases in top speed limits on our highways have cost about 46,000 lives since the early 1990s. To put that in perspective, the number of lives lost due to rising speed limits equals more than half of the lives that have been saved by frontal airbags through 2019. Meanwhile, 33 states lack all-rider helmet requirements for motorcyclists. The absence of such laws has cost 22,000 lives since 1976.

Cicchino says vehicle technologies, including intelligent speed assist and driver monitoring systems, have tremendous potential to keep drivers from speeding, driving while alcohol-impaired, driving unbelted or losing focus. Vehicles can be designed with vulnerable road users in mind by adding crash avoidance systems that are better at detecting user deficiencies, improving the ability of drivers to spot people outside the vehicle and designing front ends that are more forgiving to pedestrians and cyclists involved in crashes.