Crosswalk safety has been on my mind for years.
Recent news about a death and some serious injuries involving pedestrians raised the issue again.
What’s the solution? Is it practical to take the elementary school approach and place crossing guards at every crosswalk? Can we ever make street crossing 100 percent safe for pedestrians?
Interestingly, people who study traffic for a living say marked crosswalks actually may undermine pedestrian safety. A 1996-2001 study by the Federal Highway Safety Administration seemed to bear this out. It found that marked crosswalks that don’t have electronic signals are not any safer for pedestrians. According to the Washington State Department of Transportation’s website, crosswalks may give pedestrians a false sense of security.
“Feeling safe, they may aggressively enter crosswalks without proper consideration of approaching traffic in the mistaken belief that the motor vehicle can — and will — stop for them,” WSDOT says.
An interesting, though seemingly counter-intuitive, experiment is underway in Europe. Call it the chaos approach.
According to a Nov. 16 article in the German magazine Der Spiegel, seven European cities have done away with most of their traffic signs and lights. Their hypothesis?
Creating less — rather than more — certainty in traffic rules actually improves safety because it forces drivers to take more responsibility for their own behavior behind the wheel.
According to the Der Spiegel article, traffic psychology dictates that “drivers will force the accelerator down ruthlessly only in situations where everything has been fully regulated. Where the situation is unclear, they’re forced to drive more carefully and cautiously.”
This approach has been tested in a couple of Dutch towns. Drachten, a city of 45,000, has done away with about half of its traffic signs and intersection lights. Drivers rumble (crawl?) along cobblestone streets, exchanging hand signals and eye contact with pedestrians and cyclists. There are two rules for drivers: yield to the right, and if you get in someone’s way you’ll be towed, the article says.
Supposedly, this less-is-more approach has resulted in fewer accidents.
It’s always struck me as odd that we have so many different variations on the crosswalk: some have walk signals, some don’t; some are marked, some aren’t. This jumble of crosswalk types seems to create more confusion than it’s worth. Perhaps when it comes to traffic safety, less really is more.
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