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Reports: Safety

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Research: trees make streets safer, not deadlier
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New Urban News Article with images, table, sidebar, 9/1/2006
Proposals for planting rows of trees along the roads — a traditional technique for shaping pleasing public spaces — are often opposed by transportation engineers, who contend that a wide travel corridor, free of obstacles, is needed to protect the lives of errant motorists.
Increasingly, however, the engineers’ beliefs about safety are being subjected to empirical study and are being found incorrect. Eric Dumbaugh, an assistant professor of transportation at Texas A&M, threw down the gauntlet with a long, carefully argued article, ”Safe Streets, Livable Streets,” in the Summer 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association. A follow-up article by Dumbaugh, in the 2006 edition of Transportation Research Record, will present further evidence that safe urban roadsides are not what the traffic-engineering establishment thinks they are.

Key to safer roads is identified in California study
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New Urban News Article with images and table, 1/1/2009
A review of fatalities in 24 cities shows that safety grows as street networks become denser.
Transportation researchers Wesley Marshall and Norman Garrick fed the facts from more than 130,000 vehicular crashes into their computers in recent months, hoping for a systematic answer to a life-and-death question: How can America’s streets and roads be made safer?

Study demonstrates roundabouts’ safety
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New Urban News Article with images, 9/1/2002
A study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has determined that roundabouts — popular among many New Urbanist designers — are much safer than other kinds of intersections.
The Institute examined 24 intersections in eight states that were converted from stop signs or traffic signals between 1992 and 1997. The results that emerged are remarkably favorable:
• Vehicular accidents overall declined 39 percent.
• Accidents resulting in injuries fell 76 percent.
• Accidents resulting in death or incapacitating injury plunged 90 percent.

‘Context-sensitive design’ makes headway with planners, engineers
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New Urban News Article with images, graphs, tables, 6/1/03
Since the 1980s, new urbanists have been trying to persuade state and local governments to approve narrower, slower-moving streets — key elements in walkable places. Considerable progress has been made toward this goal, which is central to the development of sociable, human-scale communities. But state transportation departments — powerful arbiters of much that gets built — have a long way to go.

‘Shared-space’ streets cross the Atlantic
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New Urban News Article with images, 10/1/2008
Cities in the western and eastern US are starting to let motorists and pedestrians deal with one another more intuitively.
Up and down the West Coast and in parts of the East Coast, a select group of streets is going through a radical makeover. The street surfaces are being raised to the same level as the sidewalks. Curbs are being eliminated. Trees and vegetation are extending into what had been the domain of the automobile.