Question

Identify any one busy street on your community with large volumes of surface traffic comprised of vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. Explain how you would carry out problem identification, and if a problem is found to exist, discuss how you would assess the need for a solution.

Answer 1

create streets and communities where people can safely walk and bike to get to their destinations. It costs less than building streets for cars, saves us money on healthcare and lost productivity, and is a crucial way to improve air quality and reduce climate change emissions.

So, what are the key steps in improving safety for people walking and biking in cities and towns? First, we need to implement the core building blocks that we know work for safety. Second, we need to get more people walking and biking. Third, we need to be smart about enforcement. And fourth, we need to ensure that technological changes happening in the transportation arena put walking and biking first.

. We need to slow cars down; create separated places for people walking and biking; and build walking, biking, and transit networks, not just isolated pieces of sidewalk or bike lane.

When cars are moving at a reasonable neighborhood speed – say 20 to 25 miles per hour, or slower – drivers have time to react to someone in the street by hitting the brakes, there is time for the car to slow, and there is less likelihood of doing serious damage in the event they make impact. Controlling speed doesn’t mean creeping along with your foot on the brake as you go about your busy day. Instead, it means designing so that the street encourages us to drive at a safe and steady speed. Narrower lanes, trees and bushes on the side, sidewalks, and clearly marked or separated bicycle lanes – all of these work together to encourage us to drive at a safer speed.

Particularly for those who are less confident, like children or newer bicyclists, people on bikes are far safer and more comfortable when they aren’t sharing the same space with two-ton motor vehicles. We need separated places to walk and bike on our roads. As a mom who regularly bikes around with very competent and yet frequently distracted six-year old, I can tell you that creating safe places for walking and biking requires that we build in safety margins. We can’t expect people to walk or bike by choice if a slight swerve or instant of inattention results in death.

We need to build networks for walking, biking, and public transit, so that people can safely get all the way from their origin to their destination.

For many people, the deciding factor in whether to walk or bike isn’t whether there is one really awesome stretch of bike lane or sidewalk on the trip – instead, it is the least safe link in their journey. If we want families, kids, and normal, death-averse people to bike and walk, we need to think about how to design crossings so that people can safely and conveniently get from any area of town to any other.