Some US cities have begun rewarding careful drivers with fewer red lights

Officials struggled for years to curb high-speed crashes along a residential corridor cutting through Albuquerque, New Mexico, but simply punishing the lead-footed drivers didn’t seem to work.

What ultimately did was rewarding the law-abiding ones with fewer red lights.

The solution, which the city credits for a dramatic drop in crashes and injuries along one busy stretch of road, is a relatively novel version of a longstanding traffic safety concept commonly known as “rest in red," in which traffic signals default to red until a vehicle approaches. But Albuquerque and Portland, Oregon, took it a step further by adding speed sensors that grant a much earlier green light to drivers traveling at or below the posted limit.

“We’re finding that the technology itself is kind of its best advertisement,” Jennifer Turner, Albuquerque’s director of municipal development, said of the strategy the city deployed on Lead and Coal avenues, parallel one-way streets. "If you come to Albuquerque right now and you’re driving that corridor, you will learn pretty quickly that if you are speeding, you stop.”

Isaac Romero, who lives along the corridor, said he has noticed a big difference. Before rest in red, he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of drivers racing to beat the traffic lights or one another. He saw cars that had crashed and flipped, including one that ended up in his neighbor's yard.

“We had one accident where it’s even shaken the whole house because some guy slammed into a tree,” Romero said. “It's a lot of change because now you don't get as many people flying through there.”

Portland recently rolled out the concept during the late-night hours on Southeast Powell Boulevard, a busy state highway with a long history of crashes, including fatal ones.

Peter Koonce, who manages signals and street lighting for the city, calls the new approach a “virtual speed bump” and said the early results are promising. At the first intersection tested, rest in red was able to lower the average speed from 39 mph (63 kph) to 30 mph (48 kph), which is the speed limit, he said.

Oregon State University researchers helped Portland choose its vehicle detection system for monitoring speeds, and now they're assessing its performance. David Hurwitz, a professor of transportation engineering who leads the study, said it's too early to draw sweeping conclusions.

“This choice that we are making to try to increase speed compliance seems like it’s working really well — seems like it has potential,” said Hurwitz, who stressed that further research is needed to ensure those gains aren't offset by more drivers running red lights or other negative consequences.

Potential negative consequences are also a primary concern of Jay Beeber, chief government affairs and policy officer for the National Motorists Association, a drivers advocacy group. Although he acknowledges that rest in red could be effective in certain places at specific times, he questions whether driver behavior can really change without a broad education campaign and believes there are simpler, less-intrusive solutions.

“I think it's wishful thinking that drivers are aware enough and pay attention enough to really learn to change their speeds based on whether the light is gonna be red or not,” Beeber said. “I think people are going to end up at the light and just be frustrated. I don’t think they’re gonna know why.”

Many U.S. cities, including Albuquerque and Portland, have long used speed cameras to successfully prevent speeding. In fact, Albuquerque set up three near where it also deploys the rest in red approach, which has made that approach even stronger, according to officials.

A few other cities including Boulder, Colorado, and Long Beach, California, implemented smaller targeted efforts to use the threat of more red lights to force speeders to slow down.

Rebecca Sanders, a national safety practice leader at the transportation consulting firm Fehr & Peers, led a 2019 report at Arizona State University and Toole Design looking at various strategies used across the country to manage speed. Of the cities surveyed, only Los Angeles was trying rest in red at the time, and it briefly experimented with using feedback signs to trigger a red light when a driver traveling too fast was detected.

Sanders said the concept seems to work best on roads built for high-capacity traffic during the day but much less congested — and therefore more conducive to speeding — at night.

A 2023 study on five rural and urban roads in North Carolina found a 43% reduction in total crashes after rest in red was implemented around the clock, said Aaron Moody, spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Unlike the systems being used in Albuquerque and Portland, this and other versions of the rest in red approach didn’t use speed sensors to turn lights green for law-abiding drivers, but instead kept lights red by default until vehicles approached, slowing them.

Despite their apparent effectiveness at deterring speeding, cities have been slow to embrace rest in red.

Romero said he's visited enough neighborhoods through his home security business to know that the approach could work in many other places in Albuquerque and beyond. But it'll take all drivers buying in, as the presence of just one speeder can trigger a red light.

“If everybody cruises to 30 calmly, I can promise you, you can get every single green light all the way down,” Romero said. “But the moment that one person is there, it changes that whole route for everybody.”

A sign notifies drivers that stoplights are set for a specific speed limit as part of the "rest on red" signal program in Albuquerque, N.M., Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

A sign notifies drivers that stoplights are set for a specific speed limit as part of the "rest on red" signal program in Albuquerque, N.M., Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

A vehicle heads down a corridor where stoplights are set for a specific speed limit as part of the "rest on red" signal program in Albuquerque, N.M., Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Vehicles stop along Lead Avenue where stoplights are set for a specific speed limit as part of the "rest on red" signal program in Albuquerque, N.M., Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

LONDON (AP) — Defending world champion Lando Norris has extended his contract with McLaren until at least the end of 2030, the F1 team said Saturday.

McLaren said the new deal features “a multi-year option to commit beyond that date.”

Financial terms were not announced. The Press Association news agency said the British driver's new contract could be worth up to $35 million a year.

The 26-year-old Norris secured McLaren’s first drivers’ title last year since Lewis Hamilton won his first championship in 2008.

“McLaren is my home, and I’m very pleased to be signing a new contract to keep me with the team until at least 2030," Norris said.

“When I started this journey nine years ago, I was clear about the goals I wanted to achieve: to get McLaren back to the front and to win championships. We’ve achieved that goal, but we want more; we want to keep on winning, and we know as a team that we’re capable of achieving it.”

The announcement came just over a week after his rival for the last two titles, Max Verstappen, similarly committed to 2030 with Red Bull.

These are very long contracts by F1 standards. Racing with McLaren into 2030 would mark 12 seasons for Norris with the team since his debut in 2019. That would match the current F1 record of Lewis Hamilton’s 12 seasons with Mercedes for the most by a driver with the same team, though Verstappen’s contract puts him on course to break that.

Norris won the Dutch Grand Prix on Aug. 23 after his victory in Hungary before the midseason break. He is currently fourth in the standings, trailing leader Kimi Antonelli of Mercedes by 83 points. Ahead of next weekend’s Italian Grand Prix, the back-to-back wins reignited talk of a successful title defense but Norris said he doesn’t yet have a car capable of vying for the championship.

“I know I’ve just won two races in a row and had two poles in a row, but at the minute I don’t have the car I need to fight for a championship,” Norris said. He added that the right changes to target McLaren’s troubles in slow-speed corners could set him up to chase down Antonelli.

Norris has raced in 163 Grands Prix for McLaren, more than any other driver in the team's history, securing 18 pole positions, 48 podiums, and 13 wins.

“He is an exceptional driver, someone who combines outstanding natural speed with maturity, consistency and a strong commitment to McLaren, but above all, he is a special human being who is valued by everyone in the team,” said Andrea Stella, the McLaren team principal.

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McLaren driver Lando Norris of Britain holds the trophy after winning the Formula One Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort , Netherlands, Sunday, Aug. 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Post)