Walkable City Rules #31: Focus On Speeding

Asbury Park is building a better Main Street and designing infrastructure for accessibility and safety for everyone. Asbury Park is committed to #slowthecars and implementing ways to achieve it.

“It’s the speed, stupid.” Roughly half of this book addresses different aspects of the street and how they are designed and managed. Many of these points may serve multiple objectives and audiences, but they all aim back, in one way or another, at a single issue, vehicle speed.

A Step-by-Step Guide for Fixing Badly Planned American Cities

An excerpt from Jeff Speck’s Walkable City Rules, a step-by-step guide to fixing America’s cities and towns.

JEFF SPECK OCT 9, 2018

Pedestrians walk over a crosswalk on Mass Ave in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 

Rule 31: Focus on speeding

Street improvements should be linked to keeping speeding in check.

“It’s the speed, stupid.” Roughly half of this book addresses different aspects of the street and how they are designed and managed. Many of these points may serve multiple objectives and audiences, but they all aim back, in one way or another, at a single issue, vehicle speed.

While many different factors influence the safety of humans in cities, none matters nearly so much as the speed at which vehicles are traveling. The relationship between vehicle speed and danger is, to put it mildly, exponential.
The diagram below is one of many that can be found to communicate this relationship. (Other diagrams show people falling out of buildings, with 20 miles per hour equaling the second floor and 40 miles per hour equaling the seventh.) The basic message to remember is that you are about five times as likely to be killed by a car going 30 as a car going 20, and five times again as likely to be killed by a car going 40.

Read more…

https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/10/5-rules-designing-better-more-walkable-cities/569914/?utm_campaign=city-lab&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2018-10-10T11%3A30%3A43

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