Real countries, real policies, and what the numbers did afterwards — including where it went wrong.
Sweden's parliament adopted Vision Zero in October 1997: the premise that people will keep making mistakes and the road has to be built so the mistakes are survivable. The signature measure is the 2+1 road — an ordinary two-lane rural road rebuilt with alternating overtaking lanes and a steel cable down the middle, so head-on collisions become physically impossible. About 1,800 kilometres had opened by 1 January 2008.
What happened. The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute evaluated the whole network. Fatalities on those roads fell 76%, and 79% on the road links themselves; fatal and serious injuries together fell 57% to 63% depending on the speed limit. Nationally, road deaths went from 591 in 2000 to 203 in 2025.
The catch. Barriers separate cars from cars. They do nothing for the 95 people out of 203 who died in 2025 outside a vehicle: 28 motorcyclists, 27 pedestrians, 25 cyclists. And 39% of the dead were 65 or over, an age at which the same impact is far more likely to be fatal. Note also that the two Swedish agencies disagree — the transport agency counted 208 in a January 2026 release, the statistics office 203 in April 2026.
Carlsson, 'Evaluation of 2+1-roads with cable barrier: Final report', VTI rapport 636A, 2009; Trafikanalys, Vägtrafikskador 2025, published 27 April 2026
The Netherlands did not mainly lower speed limits on paper; it rebuilt streets so the lower speed felt natural — narrowing, raised junctions, continuous footways, separated cycle tracks. By 2007 roughly 75% of Dutch residential streets sat inside 30 km/h zones. On 8 December 2023 Amsterdam extended 30 km/h to most of its main city streets as well.
What happened. The standard evaluations put the effect of converting a residential area from 50 to 30 km/h at a 22% to 25% fall in injury crashes. Amsterdam's own one-year assessment, published 5 June 2025, found motor vehicle crashes down from 926 to 823, a fall of 11%, and injuries down from 275 to 252. Deaths were unchanged at 4.
The catch. It has stopped working nationally. Dutch road deaths rose from 675 in 2024 to 759 in 2025. Of those, 281 were cyclists, at least 41% of them on e-bikes, and 118 were men aged 70 or over — 40 more than the year before. Street design cannot stop an 80-year-old falling. Note also that the European Commission published a 2025 rate of 35 per million for the Netherlands using only the first six months; the full Dutch year works out at about 42.
SWOV fact sheet 'Zones 30: urban residential areas' (January 2009), citing Elvik 2001 and Vis & Kaal 1993; City of Amsterdam, '30 km/h in Amsterdam' research report, 5 June 2025; CBS, 9 April 2026
On 17 September 2023 Wales became the first country in Europe to make 20 mph — about 32 km/h — the default limit on restricted roads. That meant almost every residential street changed at once, unless a council actively decided otherwise. It was a change to the default, not a building programme: new signs and a new starting assumption.
What happened. Transport for Wales measured mean speeds falling from 28.7 mph to 24.9 mph. In the first twelve months, casualties on 20 and 30 mph roads fell from 2,257 to 1,772, a drop of 26.2%, while casualties on roads limited to 40 mph and above rose 4.2%, from 2,164 to 2,257. Casualties across Wales fell 11.8%.
The catch. The politics cost more than the policy. A petition to repeal the order collected 469,571 signatures, the largest in the Senedd's history; the government reopened its guidance on exceptions and councils began restoring 30 mph on selected roads. Transport for Wales also warns that three years of data are needed before pedestrian and cyclist deaths can be read at all, because the annual counts are too small to be stable.
Transport for Wales, 'Default 20mph speed limit on restricted roads: national monitoring report', July 2025; Senedd Research
On 1 July 2018 France cut the limit on rural two-way roads without a central barrier from 90 to 80 km/h. Those roads carry the majority of French road deaths. The measure cost almost nothing to introduce: new signs and the cameras that were already there.
What happened. Cerema's evaluation, published July 2020, measured average speeds falling 3.3 km/h, from 86.4 to 83.1. It counted 331 fewer deaths on the affected network over the first 18 months and estimated 349 over 20 months, measured against a 2013–2017 baseline with the unaffected road network as a control.
The catch. This is the attempt that was taken away. Speed enforcement became the symbol of a distant state taxing rural drivers, and by 8 January 2019 the interior minister said nearly 60% of France's 3,200 speed cameras had been neutralised, attacked or destroyed. A 2019 law let departmental councils restore 90 km/h; from January 2020 they began doing so, Haute-Marne first. The lives were counted and the mandate was gone.
Cerema for the Interministerial Delegation for Road Safety, evaluation of the 80 km/h limit, July 2020; BBC News, 8 January 2019
The United States regulated the inside of the car and left the outside alone. From 2011 its fuel economy rules set each model's target by its footprint — track width times wheelbase — so a physically bigger vehicle is held to a weaker standard. Whitefoot and Skerlos modelled that incentive in Energy Policy in 2011 and found it could raise the sales-weighted average vehicle size by 1 to 16 square feet and cancel 1 to 4 mpg of the intended saving.
What happened. The fleet grew tall. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety analysed 17,897 crashes involving one vehicle and one pedestrian and reported in November 2023 that vehicles with a leading hood edge above 40 inches are about 45% more likely to kill the pedestrian they strike than low, sloping-fronted cars; blunt fronts of medium height add about 26%. US pedestrian deaths rose from 4,109 in 2009 to 7,080 in 2024, up 72% from the low point, while total road deaths fell to an estimated 36,640 in 2025.
The catch. Vehicle shape is not the whole story. Tyndall estimated in 2021 that if the growth in SUVs had been cars instead, about 1,100 pedestrian deaths would have been averted between 2000 and 2019 — real, but a fraction of the rise. Phones, higher speeds, more walking after dark and roads built with no footway are all in the same data. The claim here is narrow: a rule written about fuel changed the shape of the front of a car, and that shape is measurable in the mortality figures.
Whitefoot and Skerlos, Energy Policy, 2011; IIHS (Hu and colleagues), 14 November 2023; IIHS Fatality Facts 2024: Pedestrians, from FARS, posted June 2026; NHTSA, 1 April 2026