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Category Archives: Safety
QUESTIONING COMPLETE STREETS: An Open Letter to the Cambridge City Council
Having a vision of the kind of city you want is an essential foundation for purposeful and effective governance. Some cities do a coherent overall process, such as Somerville’s SomerVision or Boston’s forthcoming Imagine Boston 2030. Cambridge has constructed its vision together piecemeal, through policies around a variety of quantitative and qualitative issues. In either […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety, Walking
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JUMP STARTING COMPLETE STREETS: Focusing on Kids (and others) When Progress Slows
Every street should be safe for walking and bicycling. This is an essential component of the Complete Streets design philosophy that has emerged in recent years as the “new normal” for roads – although the gap between policy and practice often remains wide. Because the core issue is mobility, Advocates compliment this “everywhere for everyone” […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety
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COMMONWEALTH AVENUE: Grand Boulevard, Dangerous Street
Stretching from the Public Garden out to Weston, Commonwealth Avenue meanders past sculptured medians, historic parks, heartbreaking hills, ponds and rivers, and an enormous number of residences and businesses. Although various crossings are frustratingly congested, in general the number of cars has been steadily dropping while the number of trolley passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians, and runners […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety
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WALSH ADMINISTRATION NEEDS A TRANSPORTATION MAP: Which Way On Comm. Ave. Design?
Mayor Marty Walsh visibly cares about helping underserved communities. And he is aggressively promoting the continuing building boom and accompanying (construction) jobs, as expressed in his statement to the Chamber of Commerce that “we hit the ground running…in development, education, housing, public health, and infrastructure.” Unfortunately, it appears that the Mayor currently includes transportation as […] Continue reading
Posted in Boston Transportation, Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY
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THE DANGERS OF SAFETY: Why Focusing on Car Accidents May Hurt Our Health
Everyone officially puts “safety first.” Everyone wants to prevent accidents. Car crashes are treated as lead stories on TV news – the images are horrific and we all fear our vulnerability. But, in fact, our roads are safer than ever. In 1956, when Interstate construction began, the national fatality rate was 6.05 per 100 million […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Obesity, Public Health, Safety, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY
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TRUCKIN’ ON: Reducing the danger of Trucks and other Large Vehicles
Trucks are only 4% of vehicles in the United States but cause about 7% of pedestrian fatalities and 11% of cyclist fatalities. The disparity is even higher in urban areas – a London analysis found that the 4% of vehicles that were trucks were involved in nearly 53% of cyclist fatalities. In Boston, 7 out […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Safety, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY
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FROM BETTER TO WORSE ON COMMONWEALTH AVE: City Leaders Need To Step Up For Their Own Policies
For a while it was feeling like stodgy Boston was jumping back into the elite group of city’s whose actions around transportation (and its joined-at-the-hip land-use twin) set the pace for the rest of the country. Our environmentally-based Smart Growth policies were state-of-the-art, which became even more valuable as climate-change storms and rising sea levels […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety, transit, Walking
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A NOTE FOR THE NEXT GOVERNOR: Travel is the Least Important Thing about Transportation
Congratulations on your election. As you know, that was the easy part! Here’s something waiting for you: our transportation system is in crisis. We can’t seem to generate the political will needed to raise the money required to upgrade our decayed rails, roads, bridges, and sidewalks to meet the needs of today – much less […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform, Road Design, Safety
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TIME TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT SAFETY: Looking Beyond Traffic Lights
My tolerance may have been low because of the bicyclist who had been run over that afternoon, the 8th Boston-area death in the past two years – five by right-turning trucks, two by buses, one by a drunk driver – and I was thinking that it could have been me. But there it was, the […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, Road Design, Safety, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY, Walking
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SMART CITIES, POWER POLITICS, & QUALITY OF LIFE: Technology and What It’s Used For
Techno-utopians. It wasn’t long ago that we were being told that digital Information and Communication Technologies would solve nearly every problem and transform the world in wonderful ways, small and big. Cars would be routed around congestion; government would more accurately chart population needs. Although there were some efforts to broaden the scope of “smart” […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, Government Reform, Safety
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SLOWING TRAFFIC TO A TARGET SPEED: How To Make Our Streets Safer
We’ve all seen the graph: a person hit by a car going 40 miles per hour (mph) has an 85% chance of being killed. Reducing the speed to 30 mph cuts the odds of death in half; reducing speed to 20 mph drops the fatality rate by an astounding 94%. Even more dramatically, at 5 […] Continue reading
Posted in Advocacy, Commentary & Analysis, History, MassHighway/DOT, Road Design, ROAD DESIGN AND MODE CHANGE, Safety
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MassDOT’S HEALTHY TRANSPORTATION POLICY DIRECTIVE: Framing Economic Needs as Public Health Measures Strengthens Both
MassDOT’s recently issued Healthy Transportation Policy Directive could actualize the most profound transformation in the state’s transportation system since the anti-highway movement convinced Governor Frank Sargent to cancel the massive Inner Belt project (the first time any state had done this) and his Transportation Secretary, Alan Altshuler, got the state’s Congressional delegation to pass legislation […] Continue reading
Posted in Commentary & Analysis, CREATING SUSTAINABLE CHANGE, MassDOT Transformation, MassHighway/DOT, Public Health, Safety
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THE RIGHT TO BE ON THE ROAD: When Bicyclists Have To Pull Over, When Cars Can Pass
You might have the impression, as once did I, that the passage of a bill by the Legislature and it’s signing by the chief executive makes it a law. But trial lawyers know better. A law is just a bunch of words waiting for judicial interpretation. Case in point: It’s true that bicycles aren’t cars, […] Continue reading
Posted in bike culture, Commentary & Analysis, Safety, TRANSPORTATION HEALTH and SAFETY
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