In recent years have seen many posting about about a 'New Safety Paradigm' for highway safety which mainly tries to reduce or remove ANY fault of distracted, speeding, drunk drivers and put most of the fault onto the USA highway system design.
- As if one might be able to design a highway system which can accommodate speeding, distracted, drunk and other careless driver types.
Or - To put it another way: They think the design of highways in the USA has been haphazard and mainly focused on speed, volume and without consideration of pedestrians, bikes and mass transit.
- I posted that i believe 'death per capita' skews the numbers to areas with lower legal drivers and more mass transit.
- However goals are achieved by working within the present system, not trashing it and thinking you can somehow start fresh and new without any concern about budget and other concerns.
- They find fault with
- Lane widths
- They say studies show if you make them less width you reduce speed and/or placing speed limiters on roads
- Interstate Highways through city centers
- They say these were intentionally designed to destroy low economic areas in cities by running highways through them
- Lack of mass transit
- In the USA lack of convenient mass transit leads to folks driving everywhere! Yes true. However you can't magically implement new mass transit without a lot of money and inconvenience for the currently driving public
- Lane widths
- They find fault with
- The 2 items are:
- A New Traffic Safety Paradigm",
- paper by Todd Litman
- Killed by a Traffic Engineer,
- book bv Wes Marshall
- A New Traffic Safety Paradigm",
- In the meantime here was a quick review i wrote:
- (originally posted to Amazon and some edits, additions, etc.)
- Some interesting pieces and parts...however...a LOT of wasted pages and time to get through it!
The author needed an editor...the author created a mess consisting of 12 topics, 88 chapters and 373 pages...(so approx 4 pages per chapter!) and each chapter starts with quotes from 50, 70 and 90 year old reports and books, and also some very silly descriptions of movie scenes to try make a point and then a simple point and- chapter over,
only a few sentences of useful information and on to the next chapter!
- a historical summary/overview chapter,
- current state of the art chapter
- ideas for future improvements
- The painful meandering over and over with quotes from too many 50, 70 & 90 year old reports gets tiring…
His MAIN POINTS are:- transportation engineers need to prioritize safety in design which he thinks can be accomplished by first
- focusing on the safety of pedestrians (both young and old),
- focusing on the making bike and pedestrian pathways better and safer,
- encouraging mass transit and
- moving things closer to where folks live so there will be more walking, biking and busing/mass transit and less car car car travel.
- But wait...which comes first? the improvement of safety in the roadway design or the movement of businesses closer to all living spaces
HOW?
and- pedestrian and bike safety is IMPORTANT
and- we need more utilization of mass transit to reduce vehicular traffic
- chapter over,
Admirable points on reducing fatalities and injuries and crashes…
BUT
- Where’s a chapter of NEW ideas and information (and please more than 4 pages) on topics:
- HOW TO transform the current massive embedded system into homogeneous safe living and travelling spaces?
- And MOST importantly, SHOW ME THE MONEY as in HOW do you finance all these changes?