Save Lives & Keep Moving: Seattle's Successful Safety Redesigns
- Feb. 15, 2015
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Cathy Tuttle
February 15, 2015
If you think a "road diet," or safety redesign, will slow you down, think again.
Walking in Seattle blogger Troy Heerwagen poured through data from a half dozen Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) evaluation reports and found huge benefits for everyone using our shared public right-of-way.
SDOT engineers have learned smart new techniques to make high-capacity streets safer and more efficient. After a safety redesign, streets still carry as many vehicles as they did prior to their road diet. If fact, our streets are in better shape and can take on even more vehicle volume after a safety redesign. Another benefit? Aggressive speeding, the kind of behavior that kills people, falls dramatically. And not surprisingly, collisions and crashes of all sorts drop precipitously too.
Since safety redesigns are often a matter of mainly repainting travel lanes, they are also one of the quickest and least expensive road safety improvements around.
We call that a great investment in our future!
Check out Troy's work in this Tableau-generated infographic.