Pedestrian safety requires a new Vision

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/11/2016 (3340 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I hadn’t planned to take you back down the same old road by writing yet another column on traffic and saving little lives.

But then I received another personal and passionate email from a reader: my big boss.

It was a fresh take on the subject from Free Press publisher Bob Cox that pointed me beyond that well-travelled road to a model for safer streets that we should consider.

I had already written about the Calgary model for keeping kids safer by combining reduced-speed school zones with playgrounds, creating child-safety zones that operate 365 days a year.

Bob is advocating a plan called Vision Zero, which has a goal of eliminating fatal and serious traffic accidents. Hence, the “zero” in its name.

It’s a strategy recently embraced by Edmonton — another Alberta city we might learn from – although that’s not where Bob pointed for the best example.

Instead, Bob referenced Sweden — the birthplace of both Vision Zero and, not-so-coincidentally, his wife Lena.

He noted Vision Zero has been in place in that famously progressive country for almost two decades and it’s working.

“It is a full program that looks at all aspects of roads,” Bob explained, “from the way they are constructed to who uses them to how fast you should drive. It has produced a lot of study of what are appropriate speed limits and the conclusion has been that the safe speed limit in built-up urban areas is 30 km per hour.”

That’s the same speed Winnipeg posts in reduced-speed school zones, but only during the school year.

To put that speed in the context of safety, someone struck by a vehicle going 30 km/h has a 95 per cent chance of survival, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, although I suspect a small child’s survival rate might be less.

At 50 km/h, the chances of survival mirror that rate of speed; 50-50.

That’s why 30 km/h makes safety sense and, as Bob pointed out, in Sweden — where, for example, almost all the residential streets of a big city such as Gothenburg are posted at that reduced rate — the country has virtually no cases of children being killed while crossing the street.

“Why does it work?” Bob asked, rhetorically.

“One of the main reasons is consistency. You’re not constantly changing speed limits depending on whether you’re near a school or a playground or whatever. It just is the speed limit. All the time.”

But Vision Zero isn’t just about reducing road speeds.

As Bob suggested, it’s also about designing and building safer roads that are more about keeping people safe than moving them in a huge hurry. It’s about a country with a different mindset.

“Long before Vision Zero, my wife’s home town of Alingsas implemented a system that allowed cars and people to almost never meet — bike and pedestrian paths are separate from roadways,” Bob explained.

“They don’t even have level crossings, only underpasses or overpasses. On the residential street outside her parents’ home there is a sidewalk on only one side of the street — that way it can be twice as wide as a normal sidewalk, broad enough for both pedestrians and cyclists to use with no need for either to be on the street with cars. Signs that warn motorists of possible pedestrians depict a woman holding a child’s hand, a reminder of what’s at stake.”

So are we ready for 30 km/h zones on residential streets?

Are we ready for safer and more progressive approaches to designing and building roads, sidewalks and bike paths?

We’ve been down this go-slower road before with city administration — as recently has two years ago — and it has gone nowhere.

The problem is our own mindset. It, like the roads we’ve designed and built in the past — and even those we’ve constructed in more recent years — seems to be set in concrete.

It’s about what’s best for motor vehicles, not pedestrians and bicyclists. It’s more about reducing infrastructure costs than about reducing deaths and serious injuries.

All of that, alas, comes from a far different kind of vision zero.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca