Are “Safer” Roads the Death of Pedestrians and Cyclists?
By Stephen Coulter & Krystyna Weston
The USA road fatality data just released from 2018 makes interesting reading:
- Deaths to car occupants are down 2.4%
- Cyclist deaths are up 6.3% over 2017 and up 25% over 2010.
- Pedestrian deaths are up 3.4% over 2017 and up 50% since 2009!
Road design for cars is a contributing factor. Roads are being made straighter, wider and better surfaced. Corners are wider allowing greater speed. Less space is allocated to pedestrians and cyclists.
- Cars can go faster.
- SUV adoption has made cars bigger.
- It’s easier to drive — drivers get distracted.
- Mobile phones are a major distraction.
America is not alone — cyclist and pedestrian deaths have also increased in Australia.
For Pedestrians, Cyclists, Scooter riders and others to be safe, changes need to be made, as some European cities are doing:
- Reduce speed limits in urban residential/commercial areas to 30kmh or less
- Make roads narrower and allocate space back to pedestrians, micromobility and the community
- Separate pedestrians from micromobility from heavy vehicles
- Ban private cars from community and transport hubs which can be better serviced by walking, micromobility and public transport.
- Remove street parking for private cars and replace it with community space and protected mobility lanes
Cities doing this are being rewarded and citizens recognising the benefits.
It sounds severe but it’s actually common sense.
Here are some links to recent articles with selected quotes from each.
What do you think?
Victoria Walks CEO — Ben Rossiter. states,
“I think it comes down to two things as research clearly shows — it’s poor road design or driver behaviour.”
The Bicycle Network chief executive, Craig Richards, said the report showed the current approach by states and territories “isn’t working and there needs to be immediate intervention”.
“Cycling advocacy group Bicycle Network has called for road upgrades to separate bikes and cars, as well as technological improvements in cars to avoid crashes, such as lane-keep assistance, autonomous braking and mobile phone blockers.
Just as scary as those figures is the fact that nobody’s quite sure how to explain them. “We don’t have any metric we could find,” says Richard Retting, who has spent decades studying traffic safety for the New York City DOT and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and is now the general manager of Sam Schwartz, a traffic engineering firm. The standard factors — how many miles cars are driving and how much people are walking — are up, but not by enough to account for what he calls “a complete reversal of the progress that had been made over 20 years.”
While automakers are getting better at protecting the people who buy their cars, they still aren’t doing enough to minimize the carnage inflicted by their customers. The American Automobile Association (AAA) conducted a series of tests recently using vehicles with automatic emergency braking and pedestrian detection alerts on a closed course with dummy pedestrians. The vehicles struck the dummy pedestrians that were crossing the road 60 percent of the time — and this was in daylight hours at speeds of 20 mph.
New car technology may be hit or miss during the daytime, but at night, it is almost always hit — and it’s specifically pedestrians who are the victims. Of the pedestrians killed in 2018, 76 percent were hit after dark, according to the NHTSA data. AAA’s test of high-tech detection systems found them to be almost completely ineffective at night.
Some of the biggest issues are unprotected bike lanes in major cities, which lead to cyclists getting thrown into traffic by dooring — when a driver or passenger opens a car door in the path of a cyclist. Dooring accounted for 203 cyclist accidents in San Francisco from 2012–2015.
“It’s speed and uncertainty that requires such wide roads for human-operated cars,” says Riggs. AV-optimized streets would require fewer signals and intersections — and fewer conflict points between different travel modes. “If city traffic travels slow enough, you could imagine a yielding pocket for vehicles to engage with smoother and operating on much less roadway. A gracious road for pedestrians and cyclists is promising as a feature for autonomous vehicles.”
