Let’s Throw Away These Rules of the Road

Think of it as a recipe book for the roads: The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, or the MUTCD, is an 862-page document that governs road markings and signs across the United States. 

The idea behind the manual is solid enough: Whether you’re driving in Hawaii or Oklahoma, a stop sign is easily recognizable as a stop sign.

But in practice the MUTCD’s influence is much larger. Devised by the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (NCUTCD), the book shapes public spaces across the U.S. in profound ways. While it’s an engineering manual, it bears the power of a federal regulation — it’s endorsed and administered by the Federal Highway Administration, and can shield engineers from liability when someone is hurt or killed.

The first MUTCD was published in 1935; it’s been updated and expanded about once per decade ever since. The current 10th edition appeared back in 2009, and in December 2020, in the final days of the Trump presidency, the FHWA released a draft of its 11th edition of the manual.

Objections followed soon after. A host of North American cities and more than a dozen advocacy groups, including the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), the League of American Bicyclists, the National League of Cities, the National Safety Council, and America Walks (where I’m currently working on a campaign around this) are now calling on federal transportation leaders to essentially scrap the draft MUTCD and start from scratch.

Why overhaul this MUTCD? For one, it is needlessly prescriptive, leaving little to no room for public feedback. The MUTCD is often used to shut down neighborhood-level campaigns for a new crosswalk or bike lane. (It happens so often, reform-minded traffic engineer Ian Lockwood dubbed this phenomenon the “technical brushoff.”) And perhaps most importantly, the manual subordinates pedestrian and cycling safety (and driver safety to a degree as well) to an all-encompassing focus on vehicle throughput, even as U.S. traffic deaths — especially for pedestrians and cyclists — have been mounting. 

“The Manual consistently prioritizes operational efficiency for motor vehicles over safety — leaving all other road users virtually unprotected,” as NACTO wrote in official comments. 

So far, the NCUTCD has reacted defensively to the criticism. Voting members of this group, who are appointed by an alphabet soup of powerful national engineering groups, have exercised enormous power over American roadways in near-total obscurity and aren’t used to public scrutiny. John Fisher, a former engineer with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, dismissed the effort to revise the draft as “cancel culture” and “political maneuvering,” as Jessica Wehrman wrote recently in Roll Call. 

So what would be the harm if this new MUTCD went ahead? Here’s a brief rundown of six of the draft’s biggest flaws, as outlined in public comments. 

It buries bike lanes in red tape

NACTO says the manual would add “unresearched new restrictions on how a bike lane can be designed,” including banning certain intersection treatments and requiring special markings at driveways.

Such guidelines will amount to a “poison pill” for bike lanes in a lot of cases, NACTO warns. Further, the restrictions go beyond the guide’s stated goal of “uniformity” in signs and signals to dictating design decisions that would better be left to local engineers. 

If these passages are approved, “hundreds of existing bike lanes in the U.S. would be instantly non-compliant,” NACTO says.

It lets speeding drivers determine the speed limit

To determine speed limits, the MUTCD has long advised engineers to follow what’s known as the 85th percentile rule, a controversial traffic planning principle that dates back the mid-1960s. The rule says that speed limits for a roadway should be set at the pace that 85% of drivers are driving below. 

Many traffic safety advocates have always objected to the idea that speeding drivers should determine the safest rate of travel, and in 2017 the National Transportation Safety Board agreed with them, denouncing the 85th percentile rule because it uses a process for establishing speed limits that operates as if pedestrians and bicyclists do not exist. It can also lead to “speed creep,” where speed limits gradually increase over time. But it’s still recommended in the new MUTCD. 

The updated MUTCD does offer some alternatives that are more city- and pedestrian-friendly, such as a method called USLIMITS2, which incorporates pedestrian activity, crash rates and other factors. But Craig Schoenberg, of the DC-based engineering consultancy Toole Design, says in his organization’s comments that this method for establishing speed limits should only be used on highways, not urban streets.

“Agencies should have the goal of minimizing injury clearly above any other goal, and Vision Zero principals and a Safe Systems approach should be used to determine the speed limit,” he wrote.

It lets engineers avoid installing “Walk” signals

The MUTCD has strict requirements about how many traffic signals are placed at stoplights. But it still treats pedestrian signal heads — with “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signs — as optional. That is despite a push by progressive engineers on the MUTCD committee a few years ago to ensure all intersections have this basic infrastructure. 

“There are very few signalized intersections that have zero pedestrians at them,” Schoenberg wrote. “This is a biased provision that prioritizes the needs of motorists above all others which endangers the most vulnerable.”

It discourages crosswalks in general

The new version of the MUTCD also retains one of the most odious elements of the older version: prohibitively high standards for the addition of signalized crosswalks. 

Before the manual says a new traffic signal and crosswalk is “warranted,” it must have almost 100 pedestrians per hour crossing the street. This, keep in mind, is a location that lacks safe crossing infrastructure. Failing that, the manual says engineers can go ahead and install a crosswalk and traffic signal if four pedestrians are struck and injured at the location over a three-year period.

In other words, speed over safety. 

“The Manual limits the installation of traffic signals because of the potential that they will slow car travel, and as [a] result the guidelines place pedestrians at risk of being injured or killed,” NACTO writes. 

It bans rainbow crosswalks

People like colorful crosswalks. Cities like Memphis and Atlanta have added them in LGBTQ neighborhoods, a phenomenon that Atlas Obscura described as “a symbol of unity and acceptance." A rainbow crosswalk, for example, was added in 2017 outside Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the site of the horrific 2016 mass shooting targeting LGBTQ clubgoers.

There’s no research stating they cause a safety problem. And crosswalks that use other non-standard colors and materials, such as brick, are fine, the MUTCD says. But the manual bans colorful painted examples. Engineers from the NCUTCD say they might confuse drivers or be less visible, or they might prompt pedestrians to linger in the street. 

The distinction is obviously rather arbitrary. But this colorful crosswalks fight gets to the heart of the matter. Organizations like America Walks and NACTO aim to redefine who has a right to the street. They want to create places where a pedestrian should be tempted to linger — and where drivers get a range of wider contextual signals that they should yield. 

It slows the rollout of bus-only lanes 

The treatment of red-painted bus lanes has been singled out as a double standard as well. EZ Pass lanes on highways, which are highway lanes painted with special markings to reserve them for passholders, are permitted without additional restrictions. But the red-painted bus lanes that cities have installed to give buses a low-traffic right of way and speed service are subject to requirements for relatively extensive study. The new manual appears to require an engineering study before a red bus lane could be installed that would demonstrate that the installation would improve service times or reduce illegal parking. Such studies can delay projects for years. 

“Without the red tape that the MUTCD has historically created, cities across the U.S. today would likely have hundreds more miles of red-colored transit lanes, making transit service more convenient, reliable, and accessible to the country’s essential workers,” NACTO says.

But it’s not too late to fix this

Beyond these six problems I’ve highlighted, there are other issues in the new MUTCD as well.

Some of them are very fundamental: The guide defines “target road users” — in other words, the people being designed for — as “alert and attentive,” “rational and prudent,” and “acting in a lawful manner.” But in reality, as NACTO notes, motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians often don’t meet that threshold, and designers shouldn’t assume that they do. Even non-impaired  “good” drivers are often tired, distracted and angry. Pedestrians break rules against jaywalking. Children, whose judgement is immature and sometimes irrational, use streets, as do people with mental illness, cognitive impairments and a whole range of complicating factors that are too numerous to list.. This goes against the principles of Vision Zero and the “Safe Systems” approach to traffic safety, which are globally recommended best practices for thinking about how to design roadways. These principles call for road designers to assume that some users will make mistakes, be irrational, or break laws sometimes — and that when they do, the wider system be forgiving enough to prevent deadly incidents.  

In addition, in a new chapter intended to accommodate autonomous vehicles that was influenced a great deal by industry representatives, the MUTCD recommends a series of universal and expensive new markings and changes, such as widening all edge lines on roads and highways from four inches to six inches. Such a recommendation would essentially create an enormous new unfunded mandate for transportation agencies, NACTO says, putting the burden for accommodating autonomous vehicles squarely on states and localities instead of expecting the AV industry to build vehicles that can safety operate in urban places designed for people.

We have an ambitious new director at the U.S. Department of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, and this is an area where he has broad authority, since regulations fall squarely under USDOT control, with no formal input from Congress. Rewriting the MUTCD to correct some of the mistakes we’ve made over the last few decades is a big opportunity to really make transportation work better for ordinary people. If Buttigieg seizes it, he could help define his legacy and determine whether the U.S. is able to pivot to a greener, safer, and more equitable transportation system. 

Comments from the public are being accepted through May 14. 

Angie Schmitt is a writer and planning consultant and author of Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America.