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b'We have a public safety epidemic in America. And it starts and ends on our roadways. In 2017, over 40,000 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes in the U.S. More people are killed in traffic each year than by firearms. And a huge proportion of those crashes involve vehicles that are speeding\\u201426% of them, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.\\nPick just about any news report or radio or TV interview on this topic at random, and you\\u2019re likely to hear two solutions discussed: education and enforcement. By enforcement, we usually mean traffic stops.\\nUnfortunately, the most common way we enforce speed and other moving violations\\u2014through routine, \\u201cinvestigatory\\u201d traffic stops by police\\u2014ends up leaving road users, law enforcement, and communities all less safe, while potentially distracting us from the things we really ought to be doing if we want to bring that 40,000 statistic down dramatically.\\nA Call to End the Routine Traffic Stop\\nIn July 2016, Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn published a call for communities to end routine traffic stops. Marohn took this stance in the wake of the death of Philando Castile, who was shot and killed by an officer in Minnesota on July 6, 2016 after being pulled over for a broken taillight. Subsequent reporting revealed that Castile, a 32-year-old man, had been pulled over by police 49 times, usually for extremely minor offenses.\\nThis is not an uncommon experience for young black men, which Castile was, and is indicative of the way traffic stops are often used in low-income, high-crime communities: as a sort of surveillance tool that allows police to detect other illegal activity. Key to the usefulness of traffic stops as an all-purpose crime fighting tool\\u2014a pretext to pull over anyone you want to check out\\u2014is the fact that nearly everyone breaks traffic laws routinely.\\nSpeeding. Rolling stops. Turning or merging without signaling. Nearly everyone breaks traffic laws routinely.\\nIn this July 2016 episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, the 6th in our Greatest Hits series, Marohn delves into the reasons he called routine traffic stops a poor way to address both speeding and criminal behavior:\\nThey\\u2019re indiscriminate: It\\u2019s not uncommon to find roads all over America where the vast majority of drivers are exceeding the speed limit. In fact, we design our roads to all but ensure this: the engineering principle of \\u201cforgiving design\\u201d (where it\\u2019s the mistakes of the driver that are forgiven, not so much the pedestrian) means that a road with a posted speed limit of 30 miles per hour might have straight, even, wide lanes that make it psychologically comfortable to go as fast as 60 miles per hour. On such a road, given the constant focus it takes to keep to a lower speed, it\\u2019s no surprise that many drivers don\\u2019t.\\nThey\\u2019re dangerous for police: Traffic stops are the single most dangerous activity that many police officers themselves engage in. More officers are killed and injured doing these stops than doing anything else.\\nThey\\u2019re oppressive to heavily-policed communities: When traffic stops are used as a surveillance and crime detection mechanism instead of for the express purpose of catching the most reckless and dangerous drivers, it\\u2019s no surprise that enforcement targets some communities\\u2014and some demographics\\u2014more than others. Marohn thinks there have to be better ways to control crime rather than through this practice:\\n\\n\\u201cIf you\\u2019re telling me the only way we can begin to control crime in high-crime areas is to use traffic laws as a random pretext to get up in people\\u2019s business\\u2026 I\\u2019m sad. That was certainly not the intention of the founding fathers\\u2026 of the 4th Amendment. That\\u2019s not the type of civil society that any of us aspire to live in.\\u201d\\n\\nA Better Answer to Chronic Speeding: Fix the Design\\nThe way we deal with the mismatch between posted speed and design speed when we detect it is backwards. In the podcast, Marohn describes the 85th percentile rule: the'