Transportation Engineering: Road & Traffic Safety

Across the country, communities struggle to change decades of rules, practice, and politics that prioritize cars. The complete streets movement is based around a simple idea: streets should be safe for people of all ages and abilities, whether they are walking, driving, bicycling, or taking the bus. Completing Our Streets gives practitioners and activists the strategies, tools, and inspiration needed to translate this idea into real and lasting change in their communities.

The central theme of this ebook is how design principles can reduce the probability of an error while driving. The authors demonstrate how knowledge of human factors helps a road authority to better understand how road users behave. They argue that in many cases the design of the environment can be further adjusted to human capabilities, and that safety should be considered a system property to be built into the road system.

Road telematics and driver assistance systems offer a real opportunity to aid mobility and road safety. However, they also raise numerous questions. Problems related to the design and evaluation of intelligent driver support systems (IDSSs) and social perspectives related to their large scale introduction may only be fully addressed from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint. This ebook provides such knowledge from both a human and social factors perspective.

Contributions from different disciplines compose a collection that provides answers to prominent questions from various perspectives. The three parts of this ebook offer a comprehensive overview of the new state-of-the-practice knowledge about accident characteristics, risk factors, consequences and safety interventions. Combining knowledge from both road and occupational safety, and extending through various disciplines such as engineering, economics, medicine, and statistics, this collection explores enhanced solutions to safety problems that are a major threat to human life and cost millions to our society.

Complete streets accommodate pedestrians, bicyclists, transit, and cars, creating multimodal transportation networks. But how do communities achieve complete streets? What are the policies and practices that need to be put into place?Drawing on lessons learned from more than 30 communities around the country, this report provides insight into successful policy and implementation practices that have resulted in complete streets.