There's always hysteria about how streets are dangerous, with many public safety advocates always, well, advocating for things like separating cars from bikes from pedestrians... which results in our streetscapes being overwhelmed by cars and trucks (since they can kill people) while cyclists and pedestrians are relegated to the sidelines to fight over the scraps.
But what anyone who has seen "public safety" features removed can tell you, it actually improves safety because drivers become more freaked out that cyclists and pedestrians could come out in front of them, and so they drive slower, as has recently happened in London:
Give motorists wide roads with barriers separating them from other modes of transport, and it seems they turn into speedfreaks.Accident levels have almost halved in a London street where "safety" equipment such as guard rails, white lines and signposts were stripped out.
The redesign of Kensington High Street has been such a success that the "naked road" concept is set to be rolled out to other cities in Britain and around the world.
Engineers removed railings, scores of signposts and combined traffic lights with lamp posts to reduce clutter.
They cleared the road surface of superfluous white lines, re- aligned the kerb to follow the line of shop frontages and junked the different coloured surface materials used by other councils.
Now Kensington and Chelsea council aims to capitalise on its success by pressing ahead with a major new road scheme near South Kensington Tube station a key stepping stone towards a multi- million-pound redevelopment of Exhibition Road.
In spite of warnings from the Department for Transport that the scheme would worsen safety, figures obtained by the Standard show that the number of accidents in Kensington High Street has fallen from 71 a year to just 40 a drop of nearly 44 per cent.
Maybe David Engwicht is right about why bikelanes are inherently unsafe?
[story via and photo by: Streetsblog]
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