The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) has launched a refreshed National Roadway Safety Strategy (NRSS), describing it as an interdepartmental plan to cut deaths and injuries on the country’s roads. The announcement was made on 5 August 2026.
US Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy presented the strategy, saying the department had spent the past year working with law enforcement agencies to step up traffic enforcement and had launched public education campaigns on distracted driving, drink-driving and seat belt use. Duffy said the new strategy would deepen coordination with police, expand congestion-reduction efforts and lean on vehicle technology to improve street safety.
Three stated priorities
According to the department’s announcement, the strategy is built around three objectives.
Safer People: strengthening safety in rural, urban and tribal communities, with additional support for transportation workers and first responders, and a renewed emphasis on working with law enforcement.
Safer Roads: more innovative road design, targeted bottleneck relief, tighter action on unsafe truck operators, and improved crash outcomes including secondary crashes.
Safer Vehicles: modernising federal vehicle safety standards, developing a national automated vehicle strategy, and investing in technology aimed at preventing crashes.
Federal Highway Administrator Sean McMaster said safety was the foundation of the agency’s work and that the strategy would target action where risk is highest. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator Derek D. Barrs pointed to unqualified and impaired drivers as a core enforcement priority.
NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison framed the agency’s goal as eliminating road deaths, citing its “Pathways to Safer Streets” work, which includes technology, law enforcement partnerships and prehospital blood transfusion programmes. The Federal Railroad Administration highlighted highway-rail grade crossings, where most rail-related casualties occur, while PHMSA pointed to the roughly 2.3 million hazardous materials shipments moving each day.
The numbers behind the announcement
The figures cited come from NHTSA’s early estimates.
| Measure | 2024 | 2025 (estimate) |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic fatalities | 39,254 | 36,640 (down 6.7%) |
| Deaths per 100 million vehicle miles travelled | 1.19 | 1.10 |
The 1.10 rate is the second-lowest in recorded US history, behind only the 1.08 recorded in 2014. The decline came despite an increase in driving: preliminary Federal Highway Administration data shows vehicle miles travelled rose by around 29.8 billion miles, or 0.9%. NHTSA estimates fatalities fell in 39 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, with increases in nine states.
Context: where the decline began
The department’s announcement attributes the 2025 improvement to the work of the current administration over the past eighteen months. That is USDOT’s own assessment.
The underlying data describes a longer arc. NHTSA’s own quarterly series shows fatalities began falling in the second quarter of 2022 and have declined largely without interruption since. 2025 was the fourth consecutive annual decrease. Deaths had risen sharply during the pandemic years and stood at 42,795 in 2022 before the sustained decline set in.
The strategy title is also not new. The first NRSS was published in early 2022 and put the Safe System approach at the centre of US federal road safety policy. The document released on 5 August is a refresh of that framework.
NHTSA officials have previously noted that, despite the downward trend, the US fatality rate remains high compared with peer nations.
Analysis: the two missing elements
The Safe System approach, as adopted internationally and by USDOT itself, rests on five elements: safer people, safer roads, safer vehicles, safer speeds and post-crash care.
The announcement foregrounds three. Safe speeds does not appear as a pillar. Where speed management might be expected, the text instead emphasises congestion relief and keeping traffic moving. Post-crash care appears not as a heading but inside NHTSA’s statement, via the reference to prehospital blood transfusion.
Speed management is among the most strongly evidenced interventions available for pedestrian and cyclist safety, which makes this framing choice worth tracking, particularly whether it reflects the full strategy document or only the emphasis of the press release. The full NRSS is published on the department’s website.
The announcement also presents enforcement action against foreign truck drivers as an achievement. That is the department’s characterisation. No independent analysis has yet been published on what effect those measures have had on crash outcomes.
Sources:
- US Department of Transportation press release, 5 August 2026: “Trump’s Transportation Department Releases New Strategy to Deliver Safer Roads for American Families”, transportation.gov
- National Roadway Safety Strategy, full text: transportation.gov/nrss
- NHTSA early estimates of 2025 traffic fatalities and final 2024 data (crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov)
- NHTSA quarterly fatality estimate releases, 2022 to 2025
- CDC and USDOT background on the Safe System approach and the 2022 NRSS
