Modernizing Federal Standards: Making the MUTCD Work for Cities

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Did you know that one federal document dictates what nearly every street looks like in the U.S.?

The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) governs all road markings, speed limits, stop signs, and traffic signals.

The Context:

The United States has a traffic safety crisis. More than 40,000 people die on American roads each year, far more than in other industrialized countries. Pedestrian deaths are at a 40-year high, and the costs are not borne equally: Black people are struck and killed by drivers at a significantly higher rate than white Americans.

Our streets are unsafe because of how they are designed. While all levels of government are responsible, the crisis stems in no small part from the Federal standards used to build our streets. The MUTCD has historically prioritized moving private vehicles fast above all other goals–like safety, climate, and access for people walking, biking, in a wheelchair, or on a bus. The 11th Edition, released in December 2023, makes important positive steps toward a Safe Systems Approach, but more needs to be done.

How did we get here?

So why is the MUTCD full of seemingly arbitrary, functionally dangerous rules? First, the manual restricts the use of any new street design not thoroughly studied by academia, even when there is overwhelming real-worth evidence for its application. Second, the manual uses engineering mandates to prioritize the steady flow of private motor vehicle traffic over the safety of people walking, biking, rolling, and taking transit.

What was initially a document to standardize signage on rural roads has evolved, awkwardly, to govern every street in the U.S. Every day, people in our cities and suburbs suffer the consequences, sometimes tragically, because of it. Urban streets serve a variety of functions and many users. The uniformity and rigidity of the MUTCD is valuable on high-speed highways and for critical features like stop signs and uniform traffic lights (green/yellow/red), but is challenging in the complex, vibrant contexts of city streets.

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Evaluating the 11th Edition of the MUTCD

In December 2023, the Federal Highway Administration published the 11th Edition of the MUTCD, the first updated edition in almost 15 years. The new edition takes essential steps toward a safer, more people-focused transportation system.

Highlights of the 11th Edition

Highlights of some of the changes include:

🟢 Modernize the method for setting speed zones: One of the most significant changes in the 11th Edition is to replace the discredited “85th percentile” method with a context-sensitive method that accounts for adjacent land use, pedestrian and bicyclist needs, and crash history. The MUTCD now encourages the use of good street design to prevent speeding and discourages the use of the 85th percentile method to set speed limits in all urban and suburban contexts and small-town main streets.

🟢 Make it easier to install crosswalks: The 11th Edition aligns with guidance and best practices for improving and installing crosswalk markings. If the street is too fast, busy, or wide for a marked crosswalk alone, the MUTCD supports making it slower, narrower, or raised. It also supports using higher-visibility crosswalks and provides guidance on which types to use.

🟢Explicitly allow the use of green bike lanes, red transit lanes, and asphalt art:

The 11th Edition embraces broad leeway to use green pavement marking color, removing many unnecessary restrictions in previous versions of the guide. However, the MUTCD restricts the use of solid green at intersections and green-backed sharrows. The NACTO coalition does not support these restrictions. Both of these pavement markings have been deployed in cities for years.
The new MUTCD allows the red pavement color in transit lanes and gives more explicit permission to use red in part-time bus lanes. However, the 11th Edition text is not clear about using red in transit lanes that cars can cross (to reach on-street parking, for example).
Asphalt art is explicitly allowed under the 11th Edition (with some rules) and is a big change from the previous edition. Art is not a traffic control device and can be used both in the roadway (e.g., in an intersection) and outside of it (e.g., in a paint-and-post curb extension, on sidewalks). This change reflects local policies and standards developed in partnership with the disability community. More information: asphaltart.bloomberg.org/faq.

Areas for Improvement

There are areas of the MUTCD that still need improvement:

🟡 Restructure the document as a proactive safety regulation: The NACTO coalition advocated for the 11th Edition to elevate the goal of eliminating serious injuries and deaths as a guiding principle of the Manual, ensuring a “safe system” approach throughout the document.

The document is framed more inclusively around safety, accessibility, and access for all modes of travel, especially in the introductory chapter. However, the 11th Edition continues to unrealistically identify target road users as pedestrians and bicyclists who always act “alertly and attentively”, “reasonably and prudently”, and “in a lawful manner.” This definition fails to recognize the inevitability of human error and the enormous range of urban street users. Most children, for example, would not meet this standard. Currently, the MUTCD implies engineers are only responsible for protecting road users who meet this impractical definition–out of step with the principles of Vision Zero and the Safe Systems Approach, which USDOT has explicitly endorsed.

The 11th Edition also continues to place the burden on cities to fund the research and data collection to advance best practices. This idea that more research is always needed and that no decisions can be made based on identified safety needs is a continued problem. The changes requested by the NACTO coalition not changed in the 11th Edition are rooted in best practices and research presented to FHWA during the last ten years, particularly with bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

🔴 Make it easier to install “midblock” signals: The MUTCD needs to more adequately address pedestrian safety, despite some improvements. FHWA removed older language from the Signals section that had recommended roadway widening at signals. However, the 11th Edition did not include pedestrian or bike network warrants for signals. The warrant system treats signals as a problem that should be avoided, rather than a tool to solve specific problems. Safety is secondary to free-flow traffic.

To justify installing pedestrian signals, the MUTCD still requires a very high volume of people to be crossing unprotected–or that transportation officials wait for multiple traffic injuries or deaths to occur. FHWA made small positive changes that unfortunately might not mean much in practice. For example, practitioners are allowed to assume that pedestrian crossing speeds are low, so a signal is warranted if there are only 66 people per hour trying to cross against a constant stream of one car an average of every two seconds. Even though this volume is half of the previous edition, this lower warrant is unlikely to be met.

Motor vehicle signals, meanwhile, are routinely installed simply based on traffic projections from a new development. Pedestrian warrant volumes are much higher than in other industrialized countries with far lower traffic fatalities, including Canada. The 11th Edition does not follow FHWA’s research about what kinds of streets aren’t safe enough to cross without a signal.

🟡Remove the new section on automated vehicles: The 11th Edition normalizes nascent automated vehicle (AV) technology without a clear understanding of impacts. The new autonomous vehicles section has been improved, but still should not exist. The AV chapter’s existence exacerbates concerns of cities where streets are designed for AVs instead of AVs being required to work on already-existing streets.

The Manual’s new chapter on Autonomous Vehicles absolves AV companies of the responsibility to build vehicles that keep road users safe within the existing transportation network. Proposed requirements for street markings could cost taxpayers billions of dollars; if the markings are non-compliant and an AV-involved crash occurs, taxpayers will likely foot the bill for that, too.

🟡Eliminate geometric restrictions for urban bikeways and refer to best practices already successfully used in cities: Safe street designs like best-practice intersections and separated bike lanes are now included in the manual. For the first time, there is clear guidance on using markings and signs for separated and buffered bike lanes. Protected intersections, green color, and many other things that cities have worked on for years are included in the 11th Edition.

However, the MUTCD now requires many new, and untested, signs, some of which have already given rise to confusion about how to implement them. Bike signals are in the 11th Edition, but they’re more restricted than what cities have been using for ten years now under interim approvals.

The MUTCD is not intended to be geometric design guidance, but it includes dozens of recommendations about geometric design details for bicycling, which overrides local context and local engineering judgment. Many of the urban bikeway geometric designs restricted in the 11th Edition have been contradicted by decades of safety and operational studies. These include restrictions on placing bike lanes to the right of a right-turn lane and unwarranted recommendations against using bike boxes. Rather than include duplicative, conflicting guidance, the 11th Edition falls short in embracing designs called for by best practice guidance such as NACTO’s Urban Bikeway Design Guide, developed with input from practitioners in dozens of North American cities with expertise in urban bikeway design.

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Before a new MUTCD: Current work to improve implementation of the 11th Edition

While there is still room for improvement in the 11th Edition of the MUTCD, NACTO is working to promote the changes and clarifications that bring it more in line with USDOT Safe System goals than previous editions. In 2024, NACTO is working to:

Educate member agencies and partner organizations on the changes in the 11th Edition: NACTO is hosting a series of webinars for members on a variety of topics including speed limits, crosswalks, signal warrants, bike design and signals, transit, and automated vehicles.
Track and advocate for state adoption: Each state has two years to adopt the updated MUTCD. NACTO is coordinating with member cities and partners to track the work in states across the country.
Get clarification: NACTO is gathering clarifying questions and requests for guidance concerning the new MUTCD, and circulating these to FHWA staff.
Change the update process to be more inclusive and transparent: The 11th Edition process was largely completed “behind closed doors,” with an 1,100+ page document announced in December 2019. While many of our member agencies and partners submitted comments, we had no way of knowing what FHWA was working on, if they had questions, or if there were issues we could clarify together. The final rulemaking for the 11th Edition released in December 2023 was the first time anyone had seen the updated text.
Prepare for future editions: By law, FHWA must update the MUTCD every four years. (The 10th Edition was published in 2009.) NACTO is hopeful that the energy and feedback from member agencies and partners demonstrated the need for a more inclusive and transparent process for future updates.

Letters

July 2, 2024: Letter to the FHWA on the 11th edition of the MUTCD

Bringing Practitioners Together

NACTO is working alongside users of the Manual—city engineers, planners, and designers—on a detailed review of the 1,150-page 11th Edition of the MUTCD. The NACTO National Standards Committee is a group of practitioners working to integrate NACTO design principles into national standards and guidance documents, such as the MUTCD and AASHTO geometric guidance, with the longer-term goal of affecting state standards and practices.

The goal is to remove institutional roadblocks that limit the ability of cities to quickly implement better urban street design and advocate for the creation of national standards that proactively support or normalize pedestrian safety treatments, all-ages-and-abilities bikeways, transit priority treatments, and complete street designs. If you’re a NACTO member and want to be involved with the National Standards Committee, please email Josh Naramore.

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A campaign to update America's street manual

In December 2023, the Federal Highway Administration published the 11th Edition of the MUTCD, the first updated edition in almost 15 years. In the years prior to the release, NACTO organized a campaign across our member cities, transit agencies, and dozens of partner organizations to call on FHWA to update the MUTCD into a proactive, multimodal safety regulation.

NACTO’s image library highlighted some of the absurd contradictions in the 10th Edition of the MUTCD. Click here to see more.

NACTO’s staff and 100 member cities and agencies combed through the 10th Edition of the MUTCD’s 1,000+ pages and developed over 400 specific edits to substantially reframe it as a safety and sustainability-first document.

Thank you to the thousands of people who pushed for better streets

There were over 25,000 comments submitted to the Federal Register during this once-in-a-decade opportunity to ask FHWA to make key changes to the MUTCD. This enormous volume of comments (a more than ten-fold increase over the last time the MUTCD was updated in 2009) demonstrates the degree to which Americans want change.

We thank every government agency, organization, and individual that made their voice heard, and the dozens of major US cities, transit agencies, and experts who submitted detailed, technical comments that underscore the high level of public concern about the poor safety record of US roads and a strong desire for FHWA to take decisive action to save lives and reduce transportation emissions.