Why, Rewriting a Deadly Traffic Manual

abstract from a paper by Haward LAw Review

With these car-centric priorities, the Manual (= Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways)has helped generate a nearly constant and fast-moving stream of vehicle traffic that renders road users like pedestrians, wheelchair users, and cyclists vulnerable. Moreover, by giving preference to driving over other modes of transportation, the Manual has indirectly facilitated a rise in transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions that are the single largest contributor to climate change.

Rewriting Our Nation’s Deadly Traffic Manual

REWRITING THE MANUAL

We propose several changes to the Manual so that it promotes, or at least no longer impedes, the paramount goals of safety, climate action, racial justice, and prosperity. In this Part, we identify and explain three areas of urgently needed reform: elimination of the 85th Percentile Rule, which undermines safety and the rule of law; withdrawal of a proposal to render millions of miles of American streets ^39×39. As of 2019 there were 4.1 million miles of public road in the United States, just over 2.9 million of them paved.

Show More more hostile to vulnerable road users in the name of an unproven technology; and the application of principles that reflect broader policy goals and are informed by all the stakeholders affected by the Manual — especially those, like pedestrians in communities of concern, for whom the Manual’s rules can mean the difference between life and death.

CONCLUSION

Improving safety for all road users is essential for progress on economic prosperity, climate, and racial justice in the United States, yet the current Manual undermines those bedrock goals. The Proposed Manual is no better, and, in several ways, it is worse. It doubles down on the mistakes of prior generations of the document, which embody an early-twentieth-century goal of increasing car ownership and vehicle miles traveled. In addition, it adds an entirely new chapter to accommodate a technology, automated vehicles, that remains experimental and problematic. The biases enshrined in the Manual undermine safety, equity, and economic development, and its continued narrowness reflects a decisionmaking process that has remained closed to diverse input for nearly a century.

We believe fundamental changes to the Manual and Proposed Manual are imperative. A freshly rewritten Manual can advance rules of design that minimize rather than amplify the unique dangers to which speeding motorists expose vulnerable road users like pedestrians, wheelchair users, and bicyclists. As that process gets underway, we suggest that the FHWA also act swiftly to engage its authority under the Administrative Procedure Act to withdraw the 85th Percentile Rule for raising speed limits.

Let children reclaim the streets

“Lockdown has been brutal for children,” says Tim Gill, author of a new book, Urban Playground: How Child Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities. “It has seen an extreme acceleration in what’s been happening to children’s lives for the last 50 years: the total erosion of their everyday freedoms. I really hope the pandemic will be a wakeup call for people to see the broader impact of this form of incarceration that children have been living with for decades.”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/feb/25/set-children-free-are-playgrounds-a-form-of-incarceration

Gill’s book is brimming with examples of how we might plan a healthier post-Covid world. Unsurprisingly, many of the case studies come from Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, where the rights of children have been at the forefront for decades. One chapter is dedicated to Rotterdam, a city Gill says has arguably devoted more time, money and energy to child-friendly planning than any other. Removing parking spaces, widening pavements (specifically on the sunny side of the street), dotting play features across the public realm, opening schoolyards out of hours, and extensive greening have all led to an urban landscape that feels safe and attractive for children to roam.

Should cars come with health warnings like cigarettes ?

Viewpoint: It’s time to end our love affair with cars

ANDREW SIMMS, AUTHOR & CO-DIRECTOR, NEW WEATHER INSTITUTE

I think cars should come with health warnings like cigarettes. Why? Consider this… What cigarette do you smoke doctor? It might sound incredible now, but there was a time when doctors appeared in adverts encouraging us to smoke. You could smoke in restaurants and pubs, buses and planes. Now, cigarette packets come with stark and graphic warnings about the impact of smoking on your health – and on those around you.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/viewpoint-its-time-to-end-our-love-affair-with-car/p08s48hr?playlist=sustainable-thinking

I think we need to reassess our relationship -you could call it a love affair – with the car. What’s interesting about our response to the threats from both smoking and the pandemic, is how we acted and changed our behaviour to help protect each other’s health. We don’t blow cigarette smoke in each other’s faces anymore. Or light up inside. With the coronavirus, we quickly learned to give each other space, wear masks, wash our hands – and we got used to all the signs reminding us to do so. It’s normal where there’s a threat to life for us to change our behaviour and do whatever it takes to protect friends, family and other people. So why do we put up with the air pollution pandemic, when there’s something we can do about it? Why don’t we have reminders on cars about the consequences of street level pollution, and encourage us to walk or cycle more?

Studies have shown air pollution – much of which comes from cars – contributes to the premature deaths of almost half a million people in Europe every year.

Since 2010, SUVs have been the second biggest source of rising carbon emissions. If SUV drivers were a nation, they’d be the world’s 7th biggest carbon polluter.

Putting health warnings on cars would be a stark and clear visual reminder to all of us about the devastating impact on people and the planet. And it might just help shift our attitude to cars once and for all.

Initiatives to pedestrianise streets and reclaim space from traffic for walking are happening overnight.

Initiatives to pedestrianise streets and reclaim space from traffic for walking that for decades have been seen by most cities as too hard are happening overnight.

We are living through a period during which cities are changing much faster than usual. Lengthy and conservative cycles of planning, consultation, policy development, budgeting and implementation are being bypassed by accelerated delivery frameworks and temporary interventions…….

 

James Evans, Karen Lucas, Jim Walker and Bronwen Thornton, June 2020

whole article

Air pollution and COVID-19

From Polis Webinar:

Early evidence shows that pollution from transport might have played a role in worsening the impact of the virus, highlighting a clear need to reduce pollution not just during COVID-19 but also to deliver long-term health benefits for Europe. Sustainable urban mobility will play a key role in reducing air pollution and solutions are now needed to ensure that cities and regions enjoy good air quality now and in the future.

Air pollution can have serious effects on every organ in the body and can even adversely affect unborn children. Many chronic diseases, such as asthma, type 2 diabetes, lung cancer and respiratory infection are known to be caused by or made worse by air pollution. 

Post-Lockdown Mobility webinar report   whole article from Polis 

Fewer cars on the road during the pandemic has meant cleaner air, but not necessarily fewer traffic deaths.

The Traffic Trade-Off

By Tanya Mohn     NY-Times

Fewer cars on the road during the pandemic has meant cleaner air, but not necessarily fewer traffic deaths. Can we have both?

Milan in late April. The city has reallocated some lanes for bicycles and pedestrians.     Credit…Daniele Mascolo/Reuters

As we now know, the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown has been a silver lining for another global crisis: climate change. Sharp decreases in traffic and better air quality have been reported around the world, and hundreds of jurisdictions from Berlin to Bogotá are reallocating space to make it easier for walkers and cyclists with permanent and emergency solutions, like “pop-up” bike routes.

“We are at a moment of change that we have not seen since World War II when cities needed to reinvent themselves,” said Claudia Adriazola-Steil, global director for the health and road safety program at the World Resources Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. “The longtime goals of reducing the number of cars on the roads and unacceptable levels of air pollution was achieved in a few weeks. You can see the Himalayan blue skies for the first time in 25 years.”

more: whole article from Tanja Mohn

ECF Recommendations 4 the COVID Recovery

The European Cyclists’ Federation’s  4 Recommendations for the COVID Recovery

 

1. Cycling infrastructure networks

A well-designed network of bicycle infrastructure is essential to the promotion of cycling as a safe, efficient and healthy mode of transport.

  2. Reduce traffic speed limits

Road safety experts agree that speed is one of the major threats to safer streets. Reducing traffic speed in cities to 30km/h (if not lower) is the first step to achieve that goal and would not make overall mobility any slower.

 3. Incentivise positive change, disincentive business as usual

Together with Cycling Industries Europe and several other bicycle organisations in Europe, we are calling on the European institutions to create a €5 billion centralised EU e-bike Access Fund.

 4. Cycle logistics

Right-turning trucks in urban areas are one of the leading causes of deadly and life-changing accidents with cyclists. Also, over 90% of all commercial vans and trucks currently circulating are diesel-fuelled. The promotion of alternatives such as cycle logistics for the last-mile delivery is essential.

whole article from ECF

Protecting Car Industry More Important than Saving Road User Lives?

You would think that people dying on the road would attract a furore of voices for change. But somehow we just accept those deaths as the accepted  collateral for ease, timeliness and convenience, just a side effect of car use.

Statistics  also show that SUVs are twice as likely to kill pedestrians because of the high front end  profile, but this information has not been well publicized.

From 2009 to 2016, in the US pedestrian deaths have risen 46 percent and are directly linked to the increase of these large vehicles on the road.

It is the weight and size of the vehicle and bumper height that are crucial for pedestrian and cyclist survival of a crash. But surprise! The NHTSA’s bumper regulations are written to “limit vehicle body damage. It has nothing to do with protecting people hit by said bumper. Nor do any regulations exist for vehicle hoods to absorb energy efficiently (cushion the victim)  during a crash”.

And that is a huge ethical inequity that should not be tolerated.

whole article by Sandy James Planner

pricetags.ca

Decarbonizing transport: COVID-19 has brought immediate challenges.

As we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day and prepare to rebuild the world’s transport sectors in the aftermath of COVID-19, decarbonization should be a top consideration. The tools are there to move towards cleaner transport that also promotes green economic growth, jobs, opportunities for the poor, and better infrastructure services for all.

Decarbonizing transport and increasing its resilience require a long-term perspective, but COVID-19 has brought immediate challenges.

Transport’s emission problem is not mode-specific but most emissions come from road transport, such as trucks and cars.

International finance institutions such as the World Bank must set the example by making it possible for countries to invest in low-carbon mass transportation and non-motorized modes, such as walking and cycling.

World Bank Blogs

 

 

NO2 levels as a contributing factor to coronavirus fatality ?

An interesting analysis from 

In this study, the concentrations of the tropospheric NO₂ which were extracted from the Sentinel-5P satellite were used in order to explain the spatial variation of fatality cases of Covid-19 in four European countries.

These results indicate that the long-term exposure to this pollutant may be one of the most important contributors to fatality caused by the COVID-19 virus in these regions and maybe across the whole world.

According to these results, more studies should be conducted which focus on additional factors such as age and presence of pre-existing and background diseases along with the impact of pre-exposure to NO₂ and hypercytokinemia in order to verify their impact on fatalities due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

whole article