Impact of urban planning on safety
When accidents occur, we immediately jump to finding perpetrators and blaming drunk driving, old age, or inattentiveness for them, which is a path to nowhere. Human beings are naturally erroneous and while investigating the offender's fault in the accident is important, the number one priority should be creating systemic changes that could prevent such accidents in the future.
The USA records triple the number of road casualties than the average European country (2) and crash rates unprecedented in the developed world, despite not having significantly higher rates of motorisation (3). But why is this? The culprit is car-centric urban planning. In the US, wide, straight streets and stroads are commonly found in cities, suburbs, and towns alike. These types of roads encourage speeding and increase the chances of accidents happening.
The solution is creating dense and mixed developments along with implementing traffic calming measures . Dense developments discourage car ownership and lower motorisation rates which in effect reduces accident rates. Traffic calming measures directly combat excessive speeds, and inattention by making drivers more aware of their surroundings and forcing them to slow down.
The added safety benefit of building mixed, dense developments is related to the former. "Mixed" doesn't just refer to combining residential and commercial spaces but also age groups and most importantly income groups. Mixing socioeconomic levels is linked to alleviating poverty (4), which is connected to crime (5). Another benefit, linked to density, is the principle of natural surveillance formulated by Janes Jacobs in her works (6). She states that with "eyes on the street" in the form of residents in houses overlooking streets as well as pedestrians crimes are less likely to happen.
Komentarze
Prześlij komentarz