Sustainable safety on our roads

What's remarkable about the Netherlands is that traffic calming is everywhere. In North America, traffic calming is only applied if there's enough demand for it. People have to die or a lot of people have to complain and maybe, just maybe, calming will be considered. It's reactive.

In the Netherlands, it doesn't matter if you're a major city or a suburb or small town, all non-arterial streets follow the same national guidelines. At pedestrian and cycling crossings, car lanes are narrowed, medians are placed, highly visual cues painted on the road identify the crossing and the crossings themselves are typically elevated to the level of the sidewalk and made of a material that sounds and feels different when driven over it, especially by a car. It's the sidewalks and bike paths that continue uninterrupted, not the roads, which also helps the elderly and others with mobility issues.

In the 1990s, a proactive approach called sustainable safety was introduced in the Netherlands. One of the assumptions of this approach is that humans make mistakes, so the road should be designed to protect people by making the mistakes less costly, with consistent, expected design cues to make it easier and more natural to do the right thing. A local access road is designed so that most people are naturally motivated to drive the speed limit, automatically slow down at crossings and be aware of other road users without having to be told to do so.

The calming measures are so effective, stop signs aren't necessary at low and medium volume intersections. Studies proved that stop signs actually make for more dangerous intersections for a number of reasons. For one, any time someone doesn't stop at a sign, the oncoming traffic, whether it's vehicle or not, makes an assumption that they would have stopped and often cannot react in time when they don't. Second, making a pedestrian or especially bike stop at an intersection more than triples the time it takes them to safely clear said intersection. With sustainable safety, pedestrians and cyclists feel safe walking and biking around. It's not an anxious experience. 

In my city, road engineers rely on what now seem like obsolete techniques like road narrowing and central islands to accomplish traffic calming. But studies in the UK found that speed only dropped from the normal 45-65 km/h to 40-55 km/h as the result of those approaches. Vertical shifts in the roadway like elevated plateaus (such as what you'd find with continuous sidewalks) had the biggest effect, dropping the speed to 18-25 km/h, with lateral shifts (chicanes) and roundabouts being the next best options.

We really need to hold our infrastructure designers to a higher standard to incorporate safer methodologies that take human nature into account and give us the safest roads possible. It's not an impossible dream, it's real, it works and in North America, we're really missing out.

Here's a YouTube video that does a great job explaining it.