Safer for who?

carinebeing — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 02:30:19 +0000

Driving cross town today from the hip urban food cart her father works out to my ranch home in Tigard, my (almost) teen-aged daughter voiced her newest complainant. “God, I hate the suburbs,” she drawled to her friend. While on this matter I am mostly in agreement, I had to ask her why? Her reason: there is nowhere cool to go to in those suburban neighborhoods. This however was followed up by a comment on how she understood why people with families, especially “young” children like to live in the suburbs-they are far away from busy streets. This got me thinking about how people mistake frequency of traffic for safety. Just because a street has less frequent use doesn’t necessarily mean that the use is safer. And safe for who? The driver or a child playing in the street? Busy urban streets with numerous visual cues inform drivers that they need to pay attention and may actually slow traffic. Residential urban streets with narrower dimensions and onstreet parking require drivers to slow down and sometimes, sometimes even pulling over to allow passing. Compare that to the numerous broad stretches of suburban roads that now have speed bumps due to drivers speeding through their own neighborhood streets. Are these drivers not the same parents who want to live in suburban neighborhoods because they believe the streets are safer for their children? The most frequent users of the streets in my tree lined suburban neighborhood is definitely drivers, not children. Need I mention that most of theses drivers are also speeding and that my neighborhood has gotten not just speed bumps but a new stop sign in the past 5 years, despite the fact that no new housing has gone into the neighborhood to increase the amount of traffic on the streets. These measures have been implemented because although the frequency of automobile traffic isn’t great on our neighborhood’s streets, the speed of that traffic is unsafe for pedestrians and bicyclists. And it remains unsafe, as most drivers still only slow for the upcoming traffic devices and then increase their speed again to unsafe levels. As long as streets are built to give drivers cues to travel at higher than residential speeds, they will continue to do so.

http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm4.htm

Hello world!

carinebeing — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:07:43 +0000

Place Matters to People

Safer for who?

Hello world!