Safe Streets

Greater Greater Washington has an excellent excerpt from Jeff Speck’s new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time:

Contrary to perceptions, the greatest threat to pedestrian safety is not crime, but the very real danger of automobiles moving quickly. Yet most traffic engineers, often in the name of safety, continually redesign city streets to support higher-speed driving.

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As with induced demand, the engineers have once again failed to comprehend that the way they design streets will have any impact on the way that people use them. By their logic, just as more lanes can’t cause more driving, high-speed lanes can’t cause high speeds. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the second great misunderstanding that lies at the root of most urban degradation today. Widening a city’s streets in the name of safety is like distributing handguns to deter gun violence.

As with everything else in our suburban experiment, our street designs are based on one thing: making things better for cars. We need to get past the idea that cars are fundamental to life and start designing for people again. This doesn’t mean that cars need to go away - it just means that cars need to be tamed through design that doesn’t emphasize the car at all costs.