Through diligence and innovation, New York has been able to make the city's streets the safest of any big city in America. This month, it published a guide to help livable streets supporters anywhere replicate its success.
"Earlier this month, NYC DOT put out a major new report, Making Safer Streets [PDF], that collects before-and-after data from dozens of street redesigns and distills five key principles to reduce traffic injuries," reports Ben Fried. "It’s an accessible guide to how DOT approaches the task of re-engineering streets for greater safety."
"The DOT team hopes the report will serve as a reference not only for planners and engineers, but for any city resident who cares about street safety and wants to evaluate how streets are functioning and what would make them better," he adds. "It’s written in accessible language and comes in at under 30 pages, with a raft of graphics and photos doing much of the communication."
NYC DOT has organized its recommendations around five key principles:
- Make the street easy to use
- Create safety in numbers
- Make the invisible visible
- Choose quality over quantity
- Look beyond the (immediate) problem
FULL STORY: NYC DOT Shares Its Five Principles for Designing Safer Streets
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Economic & Planning Systems, Inc.
UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research