Houston walkers: beware

New study ranks metro areas

Vilas Bhuchar, Nov 09, 09.

UPDATE: Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood tells Transportation for America that a safety council will address pedestrian issues after the report.

The Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown area came in as the 8th most dangerous for walking in 2007-2008 according to Transportation for America. The Chronicle covered the story on the front page today, and that story notes that Harris County has a policy of not installing sidewalks when it builds a new road, unless a group or city provides the extra money.

“It’s an expense that doesn’t have to do with transportation,” said Mark Seegers, a spokesman for Harris County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia. “The county does not do sidewalks; it’s not what gets cars from point A to point B.”

Transportation for America, in conjunction with the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership, published Dangerous by Design: Solving the Epidemic of Preventable Pedestrian Death (and Making Great Neighborhoods), which ranks metropolitan areas based on the relative danger of walking and provides recommendations for making roadways safer for pedestrians.

Using a Pedestrian Danger Index (PDI), metropolitan areas with over 1 million people were ranked.  The Houston area’s statistics include:
1) Total Pedestrian Fatalities = 206
2) Total Traffic Deaths that were Pedestrians = 17.40%
3) Workers who Walk to Work = 1.60%

Every year, nearly 5,000 Americans die preventable deaths on roads that fail to provide safe conditions for pedestrians, the report says. Transportation for America emphasizes that the report focuses on preventable pedestrian deaths, “many of them occurring along roadways that are dangerous by design, streets engineered for speeding cars with little or no provision for people on foot, in wheelchairs, or on a bicycle.” 

The organization attributes the design of these roadways to the shifting of many cities and communities from walkable, downtown Main Streets to wide, fast-moving state highways that residents must use to access shopping centers, apartment complexes, and office parks.  Because of this layout, transportation departments are essentially forced to squeeze in as many lanes as they can and disregard sidewalks, crosswalks, crossing signals, on-street parking, and street trees so that cars can travel these arterial roads as fast as possible.

Finally, the report calls for safer design to both reduce these preventable deaths and promote health.  It includes the following policies and design guidelines as just a few examples of tools that communities have used to create more walkable communities:

Traffic calming and street design. Traffic calming includes a host of engineering techniques used to physically alter road design for the purpose of slowing traffic and improving safety for bicyclists and pedestrians. Beyond simply installing sidewalks, these improvements enhance safety through a focus on intersections with features such as pedestrian refuge medians, better road geometry, and signals that give pedestrians a “head start” when crossing roads. Depending on the type of measure implemented and speed reductions achieved, traffic calming has reduced collisions by 20 to 70 percent.

Complete streets. Where traffic calming seeks to improve safety by reducing traffic speeds, Complete Streets policies ensure that future road projects consistently take into account the needs of all users, of all ages and abilities, particularly pedestrians and bicyclists. Complete Streets designs vary from place to place, but they might feature sidewalks, bicycle paths, comfortable bus stops, median islands, frequent crosswalks and pedestrian signals. Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently endorsed the adoption of local and statewide Complete Streets policies as a strategy for improving safety and increasing physical activity among children and adults.

Safe Routes to School programs. Safe Routes to School programs take a comprehensive approach to improving safety around schools for children walking and bicycling. The program funds engineering upgrades like sidewalks and crosswalks, improved traffic enforcement and bicycle and pedestrian safety education. The intent is to address parental concerns about traffic dangers and get more children walking and bicycling to school, which improves their physical fitness and health. From a handful of pilot efforts across the country, Safe Routes to School has grown into a federally-funded program providing more than $600 million over five years for thousands of projects nationwide.

Walkable neighborhoods.Walkable communities are safe and inviting for walking and bicycling, while also featuring compact development and a variety of destinations, such as parks and public space and nearby schools, workplaces and other amenities like restaurants and retail facilities. The tools to increase community livability by improving walkability go beyond investing in pedestrian infrastructure, giving residents and visitors convenient destinations they can walk to.

(Photo Credit: Crystian Cruz )

 

 

 

More from Houston

Comments

Page 1 of 1 pages