and not so complicated to have it installed
WRI Brasil explains six simple road design changes that can significantly improve road safety. These changes put people – not vehicles – at the center of design to reduce speeds, demand more awareness from drivers and create more opportunities for safe crossings. They can even help make cities greener.
thx WRI
watch on YouTube:
6 Road Design Changes That Can Save Lives
More: https://www.wri.org/publication/cities-safer-design
In Montgomery County, where more people are killed in road “accidents” than in homicides, problems, planners say, will be addressed in first-ever pedestrian master plan aimed at making walking safer and more appealing in this Washington suburb where the car has long been king.
More pedestrians and cyclists are dying. Nationwide, overall traffic fatalities declined in 2018, for the second-straight year, but the number of pedestrians and cyclists killed was up by 3.4 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Many are wrestling with a central tenet of Vision Zero: Redesigning roads to lower speeds and reduce the severity of crashes. Planners and traffic engineers are narrowing lanes, lowering speed limits, adding crosswalks and making crossings more visible with brighter paint or flashing lights. They’re also separating vehicles and people via more-protected bike lanes and wider medians for pedestrians who can get only halfway across the road before the pedestrian lights turn red.
Photo by Ricardo Esquivel on Pexels.com
Leah Shahum, the founder of the Vision Zero Network, said: ” he benefit of reducing speeds is just a matter of physics.”
A pedestrian struck by a vehicle traveling at 30 km/h has an 80-90 percent chance of surviving. If the vehicle is traveling at 50 km/h, the pedestrian’s chance of survival plummets to 10-20 percent.
“I truly believe there’s been a sea change in thinking,” Amy Ginsburg, the executive director of Friends of White Flint said. “Everyone is realizing people want to get out of their cars. Now it’s just a matter of undoing 50 years of car-centric planning to make that a reality.”
