Crashes and the walkable city

If the problem of energy use can be solved by walkable cities why aren't we there already? Why don't we implement existing technologies, like golf carts, on 20 mph city streets now?

Because the challenges to overcome for a low CO2 lifestyle is this: Walking to save the planet risks getting run over by the kid in the monster truck. As a society we penalize people who don't fit out energy consuming lifestyle- we allow them to be killed without recourse. The message is drive a golf cart on our super highway streets and get run over by the Governors hummer and its your fault.

Each year nearly 1.2 million people die and millions more are injured or disabled as a result of road crashes. Excessive and inappropriate speed is one of the most important factors contributing to this tragic toll.

Slowing down city traffic is a solution and more specifically 20 mph speed limits are essential.

From the same source: Pedestrians or cyclists survive if hit by a car travelling at 30 kilometres/hr, (17 mpg), the majority are killed when hit by a car travelling at 50km/hr (30 mph). There is a significant reduction in road crashes - between 8% and 40% - in countries where speed limits have been lowered. Reducing average speeds by 4 km/hr (1.5 mph) can reduce the number of fatalities by as much as 15%. (Similar reductions from tighter control over particulate emissions.)

So why don't we have 20 mph cities? The law in CA is schizophrenic favoring the speed trap law over the prima facie speed and since every street and intersection is a violation zone enforcement is over extended. San Mateo Police Chief Manheimer is trying to authorize cheaper automatic speeding ticket writing cameras.

But CCAG, our regional money bag for road spending, doesn’t address safety, especially the safety of non motorized low carbon users. By only looking only at Level Of Service and Capacity in determining mobility, CCAG guarantees that roads will be capricious and dangerous for other road users, through speeding and distracted driving. "The overriding goal of traffic engineering has been to improve roadway 'levels of service' (LOS), so that more vehicles may travel at higher speeds. That often means designing roads with wide lanes and shoulders, large turn radii at intersections, passing and turning lanes, and other features (Ewing, 1995)."

The CA legislature protect drivers at the expense of low carbon users. Following a recent crash that killed two cyclists the San Jose Mercury wrote : A 2004 legislative bill that would have required blood-alcohol testing for anyone involved in a fatal auto accident did not pass out of an Assembly committee.

This despite more that half of crashes involve alcohol and make up a larger portion, $136B, of the cost to society from 6.5M annual crashes. The 2004 bill was written in response to the DUI crash that killed cycists Liu and maimed Mason in 2004 in Sonoma. Author David Darlington writes: Every time we take to the open road, we entrust our lives to a safety net of legal protection and basic human decency. That system has failed.

Finally the DA in San Mateo has not prosecuted drivers for the no fault deaths of cyclists and pedestrians as this letter from San Carlos Council Member Matt Grocott says. The DA feels that a jury will identify with the driver and not convict. Naughty drivers are nice folks.

So there are some simple changes that need to happen for basic human decency to function before the average person will risk venturing out on the public road as a pedestrian.