What Can Cities do to Make Roads Safer for Pedestrians?
Traffic fatalities are down, more and more cities are putting in bike lanes, shared-use paths, and implementing Vision Zero infrastructure policies that are aimed at protecting people from traffic injuries and deaths.
While these efforts are showing some positive signs, pedestrian deaths have gone up, some places by a few percentage points while in others, it has doubled. According to a report from the NHTSA, there is a 35% increase in pedestrian deaths in the U.S. in 2018. This is in line with a trend that started in the mid-2000s.
Today, many cities today are struggling with trying to determine how to get the fatality rates for pedestrians to decrease in the same manner as other traffic deaths.
Separation
The most obvious answer is to keep motorists and pedestrians away from each other. Recent data shows how successful this plan is when it comes to cycling. Most large cities in the U.S. have implemented Vision Zero that has an aggressive and laudable goal of reducing traffic deaths for all groups to zero.
However, pedestrian deaths have single-handedly been the fly in the ointment as they have kept the traffic death rates up for all auto-related fatalities and serious injuries to a level that seems to counter the hoped-for results of Vision Zero advocates.
When looking deep into the data, there is some good news, and it supports the idea that separation is key to driving pedestrian deaths downward.
Data from New York’s Vision Zero shows that bicycle infrastructure improvements have directly led to a decrease in cyclists' injuries and deaths. From 2009 to 2016, intersections that used separation safety upgrades showed a 34% decrease in cyclists’ deaths which was far greater than the 3% decrease that the city was enjoying in non-improved intersections.
How to Separate
This is the big question: how do cities separate pedestrians from motor vehicles? Protected bike lanes with physical barriers work well for cyclists, but another separated space along the streets just for pedestrians doesn’t seem feasible and certainly, there is no political desire to even consider them.
So this leaves the creation of walking paths, pedestrian bridges, and walkable communities.
Walkable Infrastructure
A joint study from Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition shows that communities that have designed walkability into the development enjoy decreased numbers of pedestrian deaths.
Philadelphia, for example, is considered the 4th most walkable city in the U.S. with a Walkability Score of 79. The strength of this score is some of the neighborhoods and communities that are designed to have just about everything one needs within a walkable distance. Those regions have great access to bus and rail lines as well as infrastructure that protects both cyclists and pedestrians.
Currently, the city is trying to reduce pedestrian injuries by reducing walking in remodeling and construction zones. Philadelphia’s disposition in address and fixing problems facing pedestrians goes a long way in explaining why they have achieved a high score in walkability.
Curbing Speeding
It’s impossible to keep cars and pedestrians perpetually separate given that the path between two points in a city is the city street. It turns out that it’s not just the proximity of cars and people that cause deaths, but drivers that don’t see pedestrians when they are nearby. In study after study, speeding is shown to be a significant factor in pedestrian deaths. Not only are pedestrians more difficult to see when the driver is going too fast, but even if the driver sees the pedestrians, there isn’t time to react.
The Fix
Once again, the fix seems simple: keep people and cars apart, and when you can’t slow down the cars. Once again it’s not easy. However, it can be done. Infrastructure improvements that force cars to slow down in high bike and pedestrian areas work in reducing deaths.
Designing communities to be walkable and self-contained can also attract more pedestrians which in turn forces cars to go slower and it makes pedestrians more visible. Plus, the more people are walking to get where they want to go, the fewer cars there are on the road.