Traffic calming interventions are best when they not only make the environment safer for everyone outside of a car, but when they do so in a way that reduces the mental load for drivers.
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A recent public health study out of Johns Hopkins has found that narrow lanes reduce crashes on streets, and recommends that lanes as narrow as 9 feet wide be the default.
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MDOT’s M.O.: create deadly streets, and then blame drivers for high traffic death rates.
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What do we mean when we say that street design is a large factor responsible for traffic deaths?
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Our streets are still dangerous by design. This report shows what we need to do about it.
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America’s deadly streets are a slow-rolling emergency, thanks in part to the engineering practice of designing city streets just like wide-open highways. A new video influenced by Strong Towns thinking explores the history of this disastrous idea.
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Learn to dispel the common myths you hear from transportation agencies with regard to safe streets. The guidance isn’t as sacred as they want you to believe.
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A Strong Towns member’s original research on where pedestrians are and are not hit by vehicles in his city of Rockford, Illinois, makes clear that street design matters. A lot.
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The “safety features” built into our modern streets are often downright dangerous. It's time to use the forgiveness of slow speeds instead of forgiving design.
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Our urban streets will not be safe until we slow cars.
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This is what success looks like when highway standards are applied to city streets.
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Texting while driving is a very real problem. The cause of the problem, however, isn’t recklessness but an incorrect perception of safety on behalf of drivers who feel little risk in texting. We can write all the anti-distracted driving laws we want but, at best, we will only displace the problem, replacing texting with some other distraction. To really address this problem, we need to be willing to incorporate driver psychology, including risk response, into our engineering approach.
Read MoreWhen we mix high speed cars with stopping and turning traffic, it is only a matter of time until people get killed. It is statistically inevitable because we are all normal people living normal lives. When things get bad on one spot – when a random sample of accidents becomes the inevitable statistical aberration in one place or another, the mistaken signal within the noise – professional engineers will propose some turn lanes or a lane widening or a greater clear zone. They will never propose the two things that would matter: designing non-highways in such a way that people drive more slowly and removing dangerous accesses from those highways where we want people to drive fast.
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