Road safety by design

By: Brent Bellamy http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/biographies/304929281.html

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/road-safet y-by-design-402202515.html

If flying were as dangerous as crossing the street, steamships and passenger trains would still be a thing.

On average, about 600 people die in plane crashes across the entire world each year, while in Canada alone, one pedestrian per day is killed in a vehicle collision. In Manitoba, a pedestrian is hit and injured by a car five times per week, resulting in death once per month.

We have engineered our Canadian cities for speed. Our streets have got bigger; lanes have got wider and traffic flow has been given priority over the safety of other transportation modes, such as walking and cycling. Speed reduces reaction times, increases stopping distances and has a significant effect on accident severity. A pedestrian struck by a car travelling 50 kilometres per hour has an 80 per cent chance of being killed, compared with only five per cent at 30 km/h.

Reducing vehicle speeds is key to road safety, but it’s not as easy as putting up signs and red-light cameras.

Drivers respond to the physical design of streets and surrounding conditions. Most of us have experienced driving on a road designed for high speeds with a low posted limit. It’s instinctively difficult not to go faster. If we hope to make streets safer, physical design will be a necessary part of the solution.

The residential areas of downtown are a significant point of interaction between high volumes of vehicles and pedestrians. A few simple design features could be implemented to make areas such as South Broadway, Central Park and the Exchange District safer, quieter and more comfortable urban neighbourhoods.

A first design idea might be to reconfigure the lower-volume, one-way streets in these areas back to two-way circulation. One-way streets are built to funnel traffic quickly, encouraging drivers to increase their speed. Without oncoming vehicles, driver concentration can be reduced, with less awareness of surrounding movements.

A study in Hamilton in 2000 found children are 2½ times more likely to be injured crossing a one-way street than a two-way.

Another important strategy to increase safety is to begin narrowing roadways where appropriate. As a driver’s field of vision expands, speeds intuitively increase. As an example, regardless of speed limits, we instinctively drive faster on Pembina Highway than on Albert Street.

A precedent for road narrowing is Donald Street, where in 2013 a lane was removed beside MTS Centre. The sidewalk was widened; trees were planted and benches and lighting were installed. This made the street feel more enclosed and intimate, a condition that could be replicated on many local downtown streets, having a great effect on pedestrian safety and urban quality without significant change to traffic congestion.

Road narrowing also provides an opportunity to install curbed bike lanes, further buffering pedestrians from traffic and protecting cyclists.

Where streets can’t be narrowed, curb extensions, or bump-outs, can be built to expand the sidewalk into the parking lane at intersections, where the majority of pedestrian accidents occur. This has the effect of increasing pedestrian visibility as well as reducing the distance and time it takes to cross. The Montreal Public Health Agency estimates that for every extra vehicle lane at an intersection, there are 75 per cent more injured pedestrians.

A design tool to increase pedestrian safety used in many cities is the elevated plateau crosswalk. This raises the street crossing to the height of the sidewalk, making pedestrians more visible as they cross and providing a physical reminder to drivers that they are entering a pedestrian zone.

The plateau is gently sloped on each side and much lower than a speed bump, making them easy to clear of snow in winter. They are generally the width of the sidewalk and are often marked with contrasting paint or constructed with paving stones to give the appearance that the sidewalk is continuous as it crosses the road.

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the gold-standard city for pedestrian and bike safety, raised crosswalks are a common element at intersections. Renowned Danish urban designer Jan Gehl has remarked that because of these features, when his granddaughter walks to school, she feels like she never crosses a street.

This anecdote demonstrates that raised crosswalks would not only be effective traffic-calming elements in downtown neighbourhoods, but they could also be implemented throughout suburban residential areas, particularly in school zones, where more than 4,000 Canadian children are hit by motor vehicles each year. A few Winnipeg schools have already begun building raised crosswalks as a model to study.

In response to recent pedestrian accidents, Coun. Janice Lukes has been calling for Winnipeg to follow other Canadian cities and adopt Vision Zero, a global initiative that promotes a holistic approach to road safety. A fundamental pillar of the strategy is to use tools such as these to design physical environments that intuitively calm traffic downtown and in residential neighbourhoods.

Slowing traffic is never a popular suggestion, but when designed carefully, these initiatives can be implemented without increasing congestion and may have valuable side benefits beyond pedestrian safety. Safe streets are inviting streets. Their slower pace creates a more comfortable physical environment that attracts people. This gravity supports commercial growth, increases property values and improves the quality of life in our communities.

Great walking cities have suburban subdivisions with sidewalks on every street, school zones and residential intersections that are prioritized to foot traffic and complete urban streets that are designed equally for all users: transit riders, cyclists, drivers and pedestrians.

*Brent Bellamy is chairman of CentreVenture’s board and the creative director at Number Ten Architectural Group.*