What Can We Learn from the Dutch Self Explaining Roads? from the sustainable cities collective has an interesting piece on how wider roads in urbanized areas (read Alameda) are not creating the safest environement for drivers, walkers or bicyclists. It’s an issue that is ongoing in Alameda, where our 25 mph roads continue to be engineered to the same standard (or even wider) than CalTrans requires for 65 mph freeways. The dutch have started going the other way, with the following results:
During the same period [when US auto fatalities went from 44K to 37K], the Dutch have reduced their fatalities from 3200 to 800. If we calculate out the rate per 1000 people, the Dutch fatality rate is 40% of the American rate. This is remarkable, particularly when one considers that in 1975, their fatality rate was 20% higher than the US rate!
So what is it that the dutch are doing differently?
There are three significant differences between their approach to safety and ours.
1. They rejected that wider, straighter and faster is better for non-freeways in urban areas.
2. They adopted a multi-modal approach to safety. Travel by bicycle or on foot is valued equally and bikeped accommodations are universal.
3. They are managing access to their “arterials” to a degree that many American access engineers would envy. The helps eliminate conflicts between mobility and local access, which destroys the capacity of our through roads and leads to substantial deterioration of safety.
Hopefully, someday, Alameda will actually start to revisit it’s street design standards (the planning board and the transportation commission have been asking for years) in order to better design roadways that are consistent with the Alameda we all want to continue to live in.
Let’s start with the rounded corners on curbs. Rounding off the corner to facilitate a high-speed turn doesn’t make sense in an area with high pedestrian traffic. Square it up! On corners with very high pedestrian counts, let’s even add bollards.
Many Alameda streets are well over a century old and most are established and already built out. There are no plans to bulldoze & recast to your liking anytime soon. You might find it easier to move to Amsterdam & enjoy their transit perfection than to keep advocating for the impossible here.
PS Per capita fatalities may be lower, but I suspect fatalities per mile driven are probably much lower here.
Dave,
The older streets are exactly what I advocate for. There are plenty of re-striping and redesign projects happening every year to could bring similar benefits to neighborhoods that we originally built for speed.
Streets like Otis (Park to Westline) have been discussed for road-diets and re-striping to bring them into character with their neighborhoods, etc.
Further, no matter what gets built at Alameda Point, Northern Waterfront, etc. new roads will be built and building them at a historically consitent, human scale, rather than what some city designers would like to see (think fernside blvd) will continue the benefits enjoyed by streets in the “century old/established” areas you mention.
Also, a large part of the drop in American fatalities in that period has been due to airbags & other safety improvements as well as increased awareness of drunk driving. WRT the drop in Dutch fatalties, the article assumes that all of it due to road design. That is a very flawed conclusion.
Alameda has fallen pretty far behind Berkeley and its other peers when it comes to street redesign. There are many streets–including Lincoln, Encinal/Central, Shoreline, and Otis–that would be candidates for road diets by eliminating one lane in each direction and replacing them with bike lanes and a middle turn lane. There really isn’t enough traffic currently to justify such a high capacity, and removing a lane would still keep traffic moving while slowing it down enough to self-enforce the alleged island-wide speed limit of 25mph. The bottom line is that Alameda seems like it has grown complacent in creating safer, more livable streets when there’s still so much more that could be done.