Multidimensional Urban Traffic Fatality Profiles: Concentration, Persistence, and Implications for Systemic Road Safety

Hot-spot analysis identifies high-crash locations, whereas systemic analysis identifies recurring crash and facility characteristics across a network. This study introduces multidimensional fatality profiles as a descriptive bridge between those levels by grouping deaths into recurring combinations that agencies can subsequently map, diagnose, and connect to treatments. Fatality Analysis Reporting System records from 33 U.S. Vision Zero cities and 31 contextual benchmark cities (2010–2023) were classified by road-user group, functional class, junction context, and lighting. The primary equal-city analysis used two-year windows around verified formal-adoption or state-based pseudo-adoption years and included 12,454 fatalities. In Vision Zero cities, the 10 leading profiles accounted for 47.3% of fatalities before adoption and 51.6% after adoption, and nine pre-adoption top-10 profiles remained in the post-adoption top 10. Absolute fatalities increased from 4342 to 5081 in the selected Vision Zero windows and from 1339 to 1692 in benchmark windows; these counts are not exposure-adjusted and do not estimate policy effects. Benchmark cities showed a larger increase in concentration in the primary two-year window, but the relative direction varied across alternative windows. The results identify recurring fatality contexts for local investigation. This descriptive comparison did not establish a distinct post-adoption concentration pattern for Vision Zero cities.