In Amerika is het aantal verkeersdoden sinds 1975 verminderd van 44.000 tot 37.000; in Nederland in diezelfde periode van 3.200 naar 800. Nu is de ‘fatality rate’ in Nederland 40 procent lager dan in de VS. In 1975 was die 20 procent hoger. Daarbij komt nog dat de verkeersdichtheid in Nederland hoger is dan in de VS. Oftewel je komt in Nederland vaker een tegenligger tegen.

minder verkeersborden in nederland

[..]A fascinating example is a major–20,000 cars a day!–intersection in the Dutch city of Drachten that used to look a lot a typical American intersection, with lots of bright paint and traffic signals and enormous signs telling you what and what not to do. Traffic planners tore that stuff out and went naked, just putting down a roundabout in the center. The sidewalks even disappeared as distinct structures. Everyone figured it out though. Fatalities at the intersection dropped markedly, as did travel times.[..]

Could Dutch-Style Roads Save 22,000 Lives Each Year In the US?

That’s the underlying suggestion of a recent post at the Project for Public Spaces blog, anyway, which compares Dutch and American road design strategies.
read on here>>
By and large, the US has taken the freeway as a model for all it’s roads, favoring big, straight thoroughfares with wide lanes and shoulders. In short, the kind of road that allows you to go fast and drift around a bit without slamming into an embankment or a parked car or something. The philosophy came out of freeway design and strategies for making high-speed driving safer. By the late 60s, there was plenty of evidence this “forgiving” approach was working on the Interstates, so traffic engineers sensibly decided that the principles should be applied to all our roads. With everything from suburban boulevards to city streets, we’ve essentially been creating mini-freeways. And our road fatality numbers have fallen 15 percent in the last 35 years — so what’s anybody complaining about, you might ask. After all, whatever we’ve done is making drivers safer.

Well, around the time we were embracing the “forgiving highway” model for all our roads, the Dutch–who also agree that freeways should be structurally forgiving of drivers–had a 20 percent higher overall fatality rate on their roads than than US did. But they opted for a different design principle for city streets. Urban roadways were made narrower and less hand-holdy for drivers and more accommodative of cyclists and those weirdos who for some reason like to walk. They set up a system where highways were for going fast, but city streets were different–they would get you to and from the highways and they would get you around town, but they were not mini Interstates. They frequently became stripped down affairs, without all the bright yellow markings and massive concrete dividers and towering stoplights that we USAers are used to. The philosophy is sometimes known as “naked” or “self-explaining” roads. In essence, a range of users are pretty much left to figure out the specifics of getting around according to their own good sense. As one author describes it, the purpose “is to make the street legible so users understand that it is a shared environment and behave accordingly.”

A fascinating example is a major–20,000 cars a day!–intersection in the Dutch city of Drachten that used to look a lot a typical American intersection, with lots of bright paint and traffic signals and enormous signs telling you what and what not to do. Traffic planners tore that stuff out and went naked, just putting down a roundabout in the center. The sidewalks even disappeared as distinct structures. Everyone figured it out though. Fatalities at the intersection dropped markedly, as did travel times.

That was just one data point in the larger national trend. While the US traffic fatalities have fallen by 15 percent, Holland’s have fallen by 75 percent. And, thus, the headline assertion: If America had matched Dutch fatality rates, we would have had only 15,000 deaths on our roads last year instead of 37,000.

Eric Dunbaugh of the Texas Transportation Institute has looked at the fatality rates on “livable streets”–broadly speaking, those that aren’t mini freeways–in the US and found that they are considerably lower (pdf). Apparently, using street design to wean drivers from highway-style driving habits really does save lives.

The rub, however, is that involves slower diving speeds. As Dunbaugh puts it: “The more basic problem appears to be that safety and livability objectives are often in direct conflict with the overarching objective of mobility, and its proxy—speed.”

We Americans do love our speed. Saying, “We’re going to take this wide smooth inky-black four-lane street with bright painted lines you’re used to–where you’re functionally encouraged to go 15 mph over the speed limit and all you have to worry about is staying in your wide well-marked lane and do what the traffic lights tell you–and replace it with a ‘naked’ street, where you’ll be jumbling around with everybody and just have to be a grownup and go slower and be considerate and observant,” will not necessarily be the beginning of an easy conversation. But it’s certainly an important one.

This entry was posted on donderdag, augustus 13th, 2009 at 3:32 am and is filed under American In The News, Lijstjes, World on the Dutch, Reizen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.