How one Massachusetts city cut traffic deaths to zero

Alessandra Seiter avoids driving. She doesn’t enjoy it, and concedes to not being very good at it. Seiter rides her bike to her job as a librarian at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and walks everywhere else.

That isn’t a risky lifestyle for Seiter to lead in Somerville. This densely populated Boston suburb has recently been on a streak: It’s gone three years without a traffic death, making it a prime example of what can go right in road safety.

“I’m not surprised to see Somerville really stand out as a traffic safety leader,” says Leah Shahum, founder and executive director of the Vision Zero Network, a national nonprofit that works to eliminate traffic deaths. “They’ve had really consistent and strong leadership in terms of really prioritizing safety over speed.”

Although traffic deaths in the United States have declined after surging during the pandemic, American streets remain hazardous. Some 36,640 people died on the road in 2025, according to government data. That’s about 100 people per day, and 12% higher than the country’s best year, 2014. The U.S. performs poorly compared with other developed nations, recording 12.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 2023. Only two other surveyed countries fared worse that year, according to the International Transport Forum.

Few places have had more success bucking those trends than Somerville. For roughly a decade, officials in this city of 81,000 people have focused on reducing car speeds, both by lowering limits and improving infrastructure. And it’s done so, proponents say, with a commitment to community engagement and working with volunteer residents to flag safety problems.

The city’s solutions are neither groundbreaking nor flashy. But they’ve worked. Last year, Somerville reported a 50% decline in car crashes causing serious injury, and crashes overall have decreased every year since 2022. Everything the city has done, transit activists say, can be