Dangerous by Design 2011
Dangerous by Design 2011 spotlights the issue of pedestrian safety and the factors that make walking dangerous.
Dangerous by Design 2011 spotlights the issue of pedestrian safety and the factors that make walking dangerous.
In the last decade, from 2000 through 2009, more than 47,700 pedestrians were killed in the United States – the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of passengers crashing roughly every month. On top of that, more than 688,000 pedestrians were injured during that time as well – a number equivalent to a pedestrian being struck by a car or truck every 7 minutes.
Despite the magnitude of these avoidable tragedies, little public attention and even less in public resources have been committed to reducing pedestrian deaths and injuries in the United States. On the contrary, transportation agencies typically prioritize speeding traffic over the safety of people on foot or other vulnerable road users.
Transportation for America’s Dangerous by Design 2011 examines this problem and America’s streets that are “dangerous by design” — engineered for speeding traffic with little or no provision for people on foot, in wheelchairs or on bicycles.
This year’s edition of the report is accompanied by an interactive map that tracks pedestrian fatalities from 2001 to 2009 across the country. Type an address and click on any point to see the available information about the victim, the date, the location, the street type and even what the road looks like via Google Street View.
A lively conversation is underway on how transportation policy affects low income and minority children – and what can be done about it. Completing the streets, with a focus on the most vulnerable road users, has an important role to play in ensuring all children have access to safe streets.
Margo Pedroso, Deputy Director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, writes about the need for safe ways to walk and bicycle to and from schools across the country, and why complete streets is key to success.
The National Complete Streets Coalition participated in a meeting yesterday with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that centered on how Complete Streets can help create a safer environment for all road users.
A new report ranking the nation’s most dangerous metropolitan areas for walking finds that ‘incomplete’ streets are a major culprit in the deaths of thousands of Americans every year.
The report featured in last Thursday’s Washington Post (“Highway Conditions Contribute to Over Half of Fatal Auto Crashes”) got it half right: highway design does affect safety. But the argument that road and bridge widening is a cure for fatalities is wrong. That recommendation could have been written in 1959, and has been refuted on the ground in projects around the country.
Dangerous by Design 2009 spotlights the issue of pedestrian safety and the factors that make walking dangerous.