Cities Reward Safe Drivers With Fewer Red Lights

A handful of US cities have stopped trying to punish speeders and started rewarding everyone else — with green lights.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Portland, Oregon, have wired speed sensors into traffic signals that sit red by default and flip to green early for drivers traveling at or below the posted limit. Speeders get the red.

Albuquerque credits the setup for a sharp drop in crashes and injuries along one busy corridor. Portland says it cut average speeds at its first test intersection from 39 mph to the 30 mph limit.

How It Works

The underlying concept is old and known in traffic engineering as "rest in red" — signals default to red until a vehicle approaches. What Albuquerque and Portland added is speed detection, so the light rewards compliance instead of simply slowing everyone down.

Albuquerque deployed it on Lead and Coal avenues, parallel one-way streets running through a residential stretch where officials had struggled for years to stop high-speed crashes.

"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."

Portland rolled the idea out during late-night hours on Southeast Powell Boulevard, a busy state highway with a long history of crashes, including fatal ones. Peter Koonce, who manages signals and street lighting for the city, calls it a "virtual speed bump."

The Record So Far

2019: A survey of speed-management strategies led by Rebecca Sanders — now a national safety practice leader at Fehr & Peers — for Arizona State University and Toole Design found only Los Angeles was trying rest in red at the time. LA's version briefly used feedback signs to trigger a red light when a speeding driver was detected.

2023: A study of five rural and urban roads in North Carolina found a 43% reduction in total crashes after rest in red was put in place around the clock, according to Aaron Moody, a spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. That version kept lights red until vehicles approached but did not use speed sensors to reward slower drivers.

Recently: Portland launched its late-night program on Powell Boulevard, with Oregon State University researchers helping pick the vehicle-detection system and now assessing how it performs.

Smaller targeted efforts have also been tried in Boulder, Colorado, and Long Beach, California.