Category Archives: Safety

“Your streets are designed to kill people.”

Vision Zero Roads that are designed to kill, By Mark Rosenberg, August 18, 2009:
They said the speed limit should be 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.6 miles per hour) or less if we wanted pedestrians to have much of a chance of surviving.
That’s what people in Sweden say. In their country, roads are actually designed to be safe. Unlike ours:
“This is where you live? This is your neighborhood? Your streets are designed to kill people.’’
It’s not hard to find descriptions of Sweden’s Vision Zero for no road deaths:
Vehicle speed is the most important regulating factor for safe road traffic.
Hm, so slower is safer.

Quarterman Road (like many other rural roads in Lowndes County) is a local neighborhood road, with tractors, bicycles, dogs, deer, and mothers rolling babies in strollers. According to Claes Tingvall, Director of Traffic Safety, Swedish Road Administration:

The idea of ”shared space” between pedestrians and vehicles has been trialed successfully in Gothenburg and other cities, as long as the environment has been redesigned for slow traffic.
And a budget-conscious county may be interested that he also says this:
The new safety principle, to control kinetic energy, is by itself cheaper than accident prevention. And once that investment is made it produces benefits every year.
Not to mention the benefit of fewer traffic accidents, injuries, and deaths.

Cronkite on War on Drugs

Walter Cronkite died today. I’ll remember him by what he fought for:
It surely hasn’t made our streets safer. Instead, we have locked up literally millions of people…disproportionately people of color…who have caused little or no harm to others – wasting resources that could be used for counter-terrorism, reducing violent crime, or catching white-collar criminals.

With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on this effort – with no one held accountable for its failure.

Amid the clichés of the drug war, our country has lost sight of the scientific facts. Amid the frantic rhetoric of our leaders, we’ve become blind to reality: The war on drugs, as it is currently fought, is too expensive, and too inhumane.

But nothing will change until someone has the courage to stand up and say what so many politicians privately know: The war on drugs has failed.

Chip Your Chicken?

Shannon Hayes writes in an op-ed in the New York Times:
AT first glance, the plan by the federal Department of Agriculture to battle disease among farm animals is a technological marvel: we farmers tag every head of livestock in the country with ID chips and the department electronically tracks the animals’ whereabouts. If disease breaks out, the department can identify within 48 hours which animals are ill, where they are, and what other animals have been exposed.

At a time when diseases like mad cow and bird flu have made consumers worried about food safety, being able to quickly track down the cause of an outbreak seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, the plan, which is called the National Animal Identification System and is the subject of a House subcommittee hearing today, would end up rewarding the factory farms whose practices encourage disease while crippling small farms and the local food movement.

NAIS has been around awhile, but now Congress is proposing to make it mandatory. Hayes goes on to detail how much it would cost small farmers to chip every cow and chicken, calf and pullet.

Besides, NAIS is about controling disease by quarantine, which is locking the barn after the horses are out. Hayes gets to the root of the matter: Continue reading →

Neighborhood Watches Good in Bad Economy

Speed Limit 35 Neighborhood Watch CNN has an interesting interactive graphic about house safety:
When the economy goes down, crime often rises, says Al Lenhardt, CEO and president of the National Crime Prevention Council.
Lenhardt sums it up:
They reduce crime and they reduce the fear of crime …. It’s the golden rule — watching out for others.
Although it’s not well known, Lowndes County, Georgia does have a neighborhood watch program (see picture of a sign), as do some of the cities in it, including I think Valdosta and Hahira.

A Local Rural Road is Not a Collector

Quarterman Road is a local rural road through a rural neighborhood. Reclassifying it as collector and raising the speed limit would create a safety hazard.

The first map below is from the Lowndes County Thoroughfare Plan dated January 28, 2003; this is the version currently on the county’s public web pages. It plainly shows Quarterman Road (near the top center) as a local road.

Thoroughfare Map, Lowndes County, Georgia

The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) told me that it is possible to classify parts of a road differently, especially when the major source of traffic is (in GDOT’s example) a subdivision that is located closer to one end. This is confirmed by the second map, from the South Georgia Regional Development Center (SGRDC), Continue reading →

Slower is Safer

The public plan for paving Quarterman Road includes a 45 MPH speed limit. That’s too fast for a rural local road.

Speed Limit 35 Even the already-paved part of Quarterman Road currently has a posted speed limit of 35 MPH (shown at right). That’s the part the subdivision uses to go to work. I have never heard anyone complain that speed limit is too low. Why, then, would anyone need a faster speed limit on the rest of Quarterman Road, which has less traffic?

As mentioned in the previous post, I understand that county staff and commissioners are concerned about their certifications, liability, and even, as we heard at the public commission meeting, about getting telephone calls in the night. Here is evidence that turning Quarterman Road into a wider, faster, collector road would not reduce any of those risks to county staff or commissioners, rather, by decreasing the safety of the road and its residents, such changes would increase risks to staff and commissioners.

First note that AASHTO itself carefully distinguishes residential neighborhoods from highways: Continue reading →

Wider is Not Safer

Speed Limit 35 Neighborhood Watch Wider is not safer. Wider encourages drivers to go faster, which causes more accidents. On a highway, where the point is to go faster, wider is a good idea. In a neighborhood such as Quarterman Road with small children catching the schoolbus, teenagers visiting among themselves, bicyclists, farm equipment, dogs, and horses, faster is less safe, and wider is less safe.
“Over approximately the last 60 years, the design of streets has gone from those designed to accommodate a mix of transportation options, to that designed to carry the maximum number of automobiles as fast as possible. However, not all street types serve the same purposes. Highways, freeways and the Interstate Highway System are designed for the sole purpose of maximizing the speed of travel and convenience of automobile use. Residential design must be different to accommodate the character of the street. Unfortunately, streets in residential neighborhoods are now being designed using similar standards, yielding a situation that is not only inconvenient and inefficient, but also very dangerous. Streets must be designed to maximize overall safety.

“Municipal decision makers need to take responsibility for the overall safety of the streets in their community. According to the House Committee on Public Works (U.S. Congress) (as found in A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets: 2001 by AASHTO):”

—The Relationship between Street Width and Safety Essay

Now quoting from that last cited source: Continue reading →