Key to safer roads is identified in California study
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?
Highway departments have typically focused on “finding the most problematic locations and fixing those roads or intersections,” say Marshall and Garrick of the University of Connecticut’s Center for Transportation and Urban Planning. But the conventional approach doesn’t go far enough, the two researchers assert. They felt it was time for “a more comprehensive approach to road safety that takes into account the complete street network.”
Consequently the two gathered data on nine years of road safety records for 159 California cities of 30,000 to 150,000 population, and ultimately zeroed in on 24 medium-sized cities with some of the best and worst crash frequencies.
Their conclusion: The most unsafe cities in California, in terms of traffic fatalities, are the newest ones — those developed primarily since 1950. The cities with the fewest fatalities, by contrast, are those with significant portions built before 1950.
