Fears about pollution of the environment and increases in chronic ailments as people become less active have led to increasingly coordinated efforts to encourage walking, biking, and use of public transportation. The series of articles in this newsletter discuss various programs and approaches to increase physical activity through walking and biking, and highlight that no program will be successful unless it can be implemented safely.
"Can Pedestrian-Friendly Planning Encourage Us to Walk?"
The newest theory in urban and transportation planning encourages less use of private automobiles in favor of walking, biking, and using public transportation, which can be achieved by "making cities more compact, streets more connected, and mixing residential and commercial uses." This is just one of the goals of "smart" or "sustainable" growth. However, just because communities are designed to be more "walkable" than others doesn¹t necessarily mean that they are.
The proponents of sustainable growth generally agree that the most effective approach is to minimize sprawl by increasing transit options and population density in already built areas through housing infill and mixed land use. These practices are in theory supposed to lead to more walking, which has been shown to have substantial beneficial health effects. However, these effects can be offset by potential dangers to pedestrians in the form of pollution, traffic, and crime.
The perception of a safe environment is key to encouraging walking and bicycling. People have been shown to feel safer in areas with wide sidewalks, bike lanes, and crosswalks that they can traverse safely. Areas that encourage people to walk and have more pedestrians actually have fewer pedestrian injuries per person than areas with lower pedestrian levels. The primary reason is that drivers tend to drive more carefully in areas where they perceive more pedestrians and bicyclists.
One way to introduce more pedestrian-friendly elements into the built environment is to clearly delineate the pedestrian area of the street, such as with densely planted trees at the edge of the sidewalk. This is sometimes hard to integrate into existing street standards, however. The point is that local needs and travel needs should be balanced on any given
street.
"Safety in Numbers"
New research conducted by TSC using Space Syntax showed that intersections with higher volumes of pedestrians are actually safer, resulting in fewer collisions per pedestrian, even though their overall number of collisions may be higher. This conclusion can be extended to include bicyclists. This is because drivers drive more carefully when they observe large numbers of walkers or bikers on the road. The research suggests that to make the streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists, more walking and cycling should be encouraged. By extension, other additions to communities that cause drivers to be more careful, such as bike lanes, dedicated pedestrian streets, and more visible crosswalks may well increase the safety of non-motorists.
"Safe Streets for Older Adults and Everyone Else"
"Healthier Kids, Safer Neighborhoods"
These two articles discuss various tactics for increasing walking among seniors and children. Some of these methods include walking clubs or designated "walking school buses," neighborhood task force meetings to assess current walkability and future projects, and walkability audits to identify environmental barriers to walking. California¹s Safe Routes to School programs concentrate their efforts on finding ways to make walking or biking to school attractive and safe for kids.
"Safety and a Sense of Place"
Elizabeth MacDonald discusses what works in making neighborhoods walkable and the barriers that can prevent this from happening. The traditional model is to think of street planning, along with things like zoning, as single-use designations. MacDonald thinks that to make neighborhoods truly pedestrian-friendly, we should move away from that model into the idea of mixed uses for streets. Some ways to encourage pedestrians to use multi-use boulevards are to eliminate or modify restrictions on sidewalk trees, narrow lanes, and to balance designing for local needs and activities with through travel.
UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center, "Safety, Physical Activity, and the Built Environment," TSC Newsletter, vol. 2, issue 1, Spring 2004, available at
http://www.tsc.berkeley.edu/newsletter/Spring04/TSCNewsletter_Spring04.pdf.
No comments:
Post a Comment