We’re designing risky roadways
by Jamie Stuckless, Executive Director, Share the Road Cycling Coalition
On March 6th, TVO’s The Agenda hosted a segment titled “Ontario’s Risky Roadways”. Share the Road was part of a panel that spent 30 minutes in discussion with host Steve Paikin about what makes our roadways so risky. The discussion covered enforcement, education, engineering and policy change. To simplify a complicated matter — we believe that our roads are risky because we are designing them that way.
The full panel discussion can be viewed online on the TVO website.
We are grateful that The Agenda hosted this important conversation and we thought we’d use our blog to expand on the topic of “risky roads” and to share some of the resources mentioned during the show.
Our risky roadways
In Ontario, there were 51 traffic fatalities during the first 8 weeks of 2018. Each of these fatalities was someone trying to get from point A to point B in our communities. This is alarming and unacceptable. Getting around should not be a risky activity.
We should absolutely be prioritizing safety on our roads. And this doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice convenience, as is sometimes debated. It just means we need to think about it in a different way because we can design our roads to be both safe and convenient.
Roadway capacity — people per hour
We often think of efficient roads as moving cars and other motor vehicles from point A to point B quickly. Because of this we also think that adding space for people walking, cycling and taking transit is a tradeoff that is only palatable if travel times don’t increase for cars. But our transportation system is meant to move people, not just cars, and we can move people around more efficiently and safely when we design safe spaces for everyone.
During our segment on The Agenda, I referenced the work that the City of Vancouver is doing to increase roadway capacity and improve mobility for residents. As you can see in the image below, roads have a greater capacity to move people who are travelling by foot, bike and transit than people travelling in cars. These modes take up less space. As our population grows and more people are using our roads, this is an important issue.
There are more and more people needing to get around, but our roads are typically the same width and the same design as they were decades ago when there were fewer people using them. This causes congestion. The Toronto Board of Trade estimates that congestion is costing us $500 million to $650 million each year. We need to get moving more efficiently, but most cities don’t have the space to add more road width. We will need to accommodate this increased demand by focusing on moving people.
The next image from Vancouver below shows how — without changing the width of the road — the capacity increases from 20,000 people per hour to 50,000 people per hour. By making walking, cycling and transit safe and convenient choices, they become real options for people who want them. This doesn’t mean everyone has to walk, bike or take transit, but if we allow people who want to make a change to get out of their cars, it increases the people-moving capacity of our roads. It also frees up vehicle lane space for people who want or need to drive. It also helps more people move around our cities.
[As a side note here, we pulled these slide images from a presentation by Dale Bracewell, Manager of Transportation Planning for the City of Vancouver. Dale will be the Keynote speaker at our 2018 Ontario Bike Summit. We hope that you will join us for that event to continue this conversation. You can register online and learn more details at www.sharetheroad.ca/OBS]
Our roads aren’t perfect, let’s not be afraid to make them work better
It is false to suggest that adding space for one user group inevitably takes something away from another. If research tells us anything, it’s that we all stand to benefit when we design safer roads that accommodate the needs for all road users.
Interestingly, a new satisfaction survey found that drivers in The Netherlands were the most satisfied drivers in the world. The Netherlands is a notoriously bicycle-friendly place where 28% of trips are made by bicycle (Statistics Netherlands) and the rate of traffic deaths is nearly half of what it is in Canada — 3.4 deaths per 100,000 residents compared to 6 deaths per 100,000 in Canada (WHO’s Global status report on road safety). We can make our roads both safe and convenient for everyone. But we have to start making different decisions.
As Janette Sadik-Khan said recently in her keynote address at the OGRA Conference — no one can argue that our streets are perfect and should not change in any way. This struck me because it’s true. We have “risky roadways” because we are designing them to be that way. But we don’t need to be. If we want to build communities where it’s safe for everyone to get around — and our economy isn’t losing billions of dollars because of congestion — it’s time to change the way we design our streets and to focus on moving people instead of only moving cars.
The Agenda also has a segment looking specifically at Vision Zero, which is also available online, and you can check out our previous blog post about Vision Zero here.
