2001-03-19 Special Called Regular Meeting and Public Hearing

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, . . , t ' .' IS.;.; ,.: ex- rds, ific ble, than ,eer- {or a sand :ttoO dying tmost Xlsure ~icle- dentia! safety t of all reetsin bicycle dleand nghbor- Ifer than of roads (OECD, (980),in~ Jeldomis ~tor-type 'arranged reets with tticts with en parked dldren and s is greater ~of30 e ,.@ e ", RESIDENTIALNEIGHBORHOODS--,-- uu . Road safelY is greater in newly built residential districts than in older neighbor- hoods. The safely of children is of particular concern. It is difficult to prevent children from occasionally playing in the street or, more frequently, from running into the roadway in the progress of play; it may, in fact, be desirable to have children ride bicycles in the road- way as a learning experience for the time when they will use bicycles as a general transpor- tation mode. The safety literature on traffic accidents involving children includes the following findings: , ' Most accidents involving children occur in the vicinity of their homes, as might be expected. One report (Bennett, 1974) reports that 84 percent of children aged less than 10 in four London boroughs were injured within 800 meters of home. Similar findings were reported in Verkeer and Waterstaat 1982, SWOV 1980, and Wade et al. 1982. In Germany, 55 percent of accidents involving children happened on roads in residential areas (pfundt, 1977). Seventy percent of all accidents in the Netherlands involving children under 6 occur on streets carrying fewer than 3,000 cars per day (Bakker 1974). In a study of over 2,000 pedestrian accidents in 13 U.S. cities (Snyder and Knoblauch, 1971), slightly over 50 percent of all accidents involved youngsters under 15 years of age. In Great Britain, a 1978 report showed that pedestrian deaths for children aged between 5 and 9 represented 18.6 percent of all traffic deaths in this age group, compared to 5 percent for the total population; for the 10- to 14- year age group the percentage was 11.4 (Foot et al., 1982). Accidents involving children up to 5 years old often occur between intersections on local roads, while older children are more often involved in intersection ac- cidents and on busy streets (SWOV, 1980, Verkeer en Waterstaat, 1982). From safety research, with special emphasis on traffic safety of children, the Or- ganisation for ECQnomic Co-operation and Development (OECD) drew the fO,llowing con- clusions (OECD, 1983): Strict differentiation of streets according to their function leads to safe residen- tial areas; Full separation of vehicle, pedestrian, and cycle movement is accompanied by very low accident rates; Cul-de-sac streets are safer than loop streets ancrconsiderably safer than ordi- nary through streets; On those roads providing a distributive function, accident rates are minimized where frontage access is prohibited and the layout of the residential develop- ment is such that pedestrians and cyclists have no' need to use routes that run alongside highways. Space-sharing techniques like "Woonerven" (see Chapter 4) make drivers more aware of their responsibilities toward the more wlnerable groupS.... Conflicts The concern for safety on residential streets is a guiding factor in street design. The problem of safety, however, is rooted in the conflicts that exist among users of street space. Streets are public property, and therefore belong to everyone. In reality, however, some users have ~