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.