The numbers come first. In Albuquerque, officials credit a new traffic-signal strategy with a dramatic drop in crashes and injuries along Lead and Coal avenues, two parallel one-way streets that had for years seen high-speed wrecks. In Portland, at the first intersection tested on Southeast Powell Boulevard, the average speed fell from 39 mph to 30 mph — exactly the posted limit — according to Peter Koonce, who manages signals and street lighting for the city.
The mechanism, known as 'rest in red,' defaults traffic signals to red until a vehicle approaches. Albuquerque and Portland added a twist: speed sensors that grant drivers traveling at or below the limit a much earlier green light. Speeders wait longer. Compliant drivers move faster. Koonce calls it a 'virtual speed bump.'
'We're finding that the technology itself is kind of its best advertisement,' said Jennifer Turner, Albuquerque's director of municipal development. '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 Albuquerque corridor, said he used to wake up to the sound of drivers racing to beat the lights, and saw cars that had crashed and flipped, including one that ended up in his neighbor's yard. 'It's a lot of change because now you don't get as many people flying through there,' he said.
Albuquerque paired the system with three speed cameras nearby, which officials say made the approach 'even stronger.' Portland rolled out its version during late-night hours on Powell Boulevard, a state highway with a history of fatal crashes. Oregon State University researchers helped select Portland's detection system and are now studying its performance.
'This choice that we are making to try to increase speed compliance seems like it's working really well — seems like it has potential,' said David Hurwitz, the transportation engineering professor leading the study. He cautioned that more research is needed to confirm the gains hold up and aren't offset by drivers running more red lights.
Not everyone is convinced the behavioral fix works as advertised. Jay Beeber, chief government affairs and policy officer for the National Motorists Association, questions whether drivers can change habits without an education campaign. 'I think people are going to end up at the light and just be frustrated. I don't think they're gonna know why,' he said.
Smaller versions of the idea have surfaced in Boulder, Colorado, and Long Beach, California. Rebecca Sanders of Fehr & Peers, who led a 2019 study on speed-management strategies, said Los Angeles briefly tested a related concept years ago and that rest-in-red works best on high-capacity roads that are far less congested — and more tempting to speeders — at night.
What these cities have stumbled onto is a market logic applied to asphalt: instead of writing more tickets or expanding surveillance, they changed the incentive structure so that the fastest way through town is also the legal way. Capital rewards clear rules, and so, it turns out, do intersections. A driver who follows the posted limit gets a tangible benefit — less time stopped — rather than merely the absence of a fine.
That is a meaningfully different approach than the reflexive instinct in much of local government, which is to solve every problem with more enforcement, more cameras and more revenue-generating citations. Albuquerque and Portland instead let behavior respond to a positive incentive, and the crash data followed. For a citizenry weary of being treated as a revenue source, that distinction matters.
