{"id":383,"date":"2010-09-20T21:14:32","date_gmt":"2010-09-21T01:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/trees-make-streets-safer.html"},"modified":"2010-09-20T21:14:32","modified_gmt":"2010-09-21T01:14:32","slug":"trees-make-streets-safer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/trees-make-streets-safer.html","title":{"rendered":"Trees make streets safer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/a>\nBeta New Urban Network reported 1 September 2006 that\n\nResearch: trees make streets safer, not deadlier<\/a>:\n
\nProposals for planting rows of trees along the roads \u2014 a traditional technique for shaping pleasing public spaces \u2014 are often opposed by transportation engineers, who contend that a wide travel corridor, free of obstacles, is needed to protect the lives of errant motorists.\n

\nIncreasingly, however, the engineers\u2019 beliefs about safety are being subjected to empirical study and are being found incorrect. Eric Dumbaugh, an assistant professor of transportation at Texas A&M, threw down the gauntlet with a long, carefully argued article,\n\n\u201dSafe Streets, Livable Streets,\u201d<\/a>\nin the Summer 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association. A follow-up article by Dumbaugh, in the 2006 edition of Transportation Research Record, will present further evidence that safe urban roadsides are not what the traffic-engineering establishment thinks they are.\n

\nThough engineers generally assert that wide clear areas safeguard motorists who run off the roads, Dumbaugh looked at accident records and found that, on the contrary, wide-open corridors encourage motorists to speed, bringing on more crashes. By contrast, tree-lined roadways cause motorists to slow down and drive more carefully, Dumbaugh says.\n

\nDumbaugh examined crash statistics and found that tree-lined streets experience fewer accidents than do \u201cforgiving roadsides\u201d \u2014 those that have been kept free of large, inflexible objects. He points to \u201ca growing body of evidence suggesting that the inclusion of trees and other streetscape features in the roadside environment may actually reduce crashes and injuries on urban roadways.\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\nThe\n\nstudy asks a key question:<\/a>\n\n\n

\nwhy does contemporary design guidance recommend practices\nthat the best available evidence suggests may have\nan ambiguous or even negative impact on safety, and\nparadoxically, to do so under the auspices that they\nconstitute a safety enhancement?\n<\/blockquote>\nBecause nobody ever got fired for buying IBM?\n

\nThe article goes into the history of how the current\npractices got started, going all the way back to John Snow\nand the London cholera epidemic of the 1850s.\nThe basic idea, promoted in the 1960s, was to\nengineer roads for safety in crashes.\nA laudable idea.\nToo bad they used too-little data from too-simplistic experiments\n(most vehicles came to a stop within 30 feet of a test roadway)\nin deciding what was “safe” (clear everything 30 feet on each\nside of the roadway).\nThey deliberately, and with the best of intentions,\nleft out any consideration that objects close to the roadway\nmight cause drivers to go slower and drive more carefully.\n

\nAnd now it’s nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.\n

\nToo bad, because empirical evidence about actual roads\nand streets demonstrates that objects close to the roadway\ncause drivers to go slower and drive more carefully,\nresulting in fewer accidents.\n

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