Traffic Calming

Converting fast-moving one-way streets to calmer two-way corridors may make them safer in more ways than one, according to a study by John Gilderbloom, a professor at the University of Louisville.

Streetfilms has wanted to profile Jason Roberts and the amazing work of The Better Block for a long time. So it felt like destiny when, a few weeks ago, we were able to sync up and chronicle the fourth anniversary of The Better Block in Oak Cliff, Texas.  This temporary pedestrian plaza is right next to the original site where Roberts and the team at The Better Block first showed how you can completely transform a street using temporary materials and your imagination.

On Sunday, New Yorkers who've lost loved ones to traffic violence gathered on the steps of City Hall in Lower Manhattan to launch Families for Safe Streets, a new initiative advocating for street designs and traffic enforcement that will save lives. In this moving Streetfilm, members of Families for Safe Streets talk about their goals and why they're speaking out.

Sneckdowns are having a big moment. In case you've missed the viral blog posts and major press coverage, sneckowns (a contraction of "snowy neckdowns" popularized by Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson Jr. and Streetsblog founding editor Aaron Naparstek) are leftover snow piles on city streets that show space that could easily be reclaimed for pedestrians.

Earlier this month, NYC DOT put out a major new report, Making Safer Streets [PDF], that collects before-and-after data from dozens of street redesigns and distills five key principles to reduce traffic injuries. The excitement of election week overshadowed the release, but this is an important document that livable streets supporters will want to bookmark. It's an accessible guide to how DOT approaches the task of re-engineering streets for greater safety.

The Federal Highway Administration classifies roads as either "rural" or "urbanized." But the "urbanized" label is deceptive, because it applies suburban street design standards to any street that isn't rural. So if you live in, say, downtown St. Louis, the FHWA applies the same standards to your streets as to the streets in Orlando's most distant suburbs. This contributes to a horrendous mismatch: Many city streets where walking should take precedence are in fact designed for moving massive amounts of traffic.

Motor vehicle crashes caused 28 percent of all deaths among people 24 and under in the United States in 2006. In 2009, nearly 34,000 people died on America's roads, and that was considered a big improvement over previous years. More and more, it seems, Americans are wondering why our country is so far behind on creating safe transportation systems.

Current methods of predicting the traffic-calming effects of mixed-use development are "woefully lacking" and risk underestimating the transportation benefits of more compact, diverse land use, according to a new report from the Transportation Research Board (TRB).

Have you ever idled in traffic or waited for a late bus while thinking: "The city government should put me in charge of fixing this mess"?