Recent Streetsblog CHICAGO posts about safety

You Won’t Soon Forget These Photos of Ghost Bikes. That’s Exactly the Point.

By Tanya Snyder | Sep 11, 2015 | No Comments

You’ve seen them, locked to signposts on the side of the road. Maybe you’ve helped install one. Maybe you’ve cried at the sight of them. Ghost bikes memorialize people who have been killed while riding bikes. The bikes don’t usually stay up for more than a few weeks or months before the city removes them […]

The Appalling Rollback of Truck Safety Provisions in the DRIVE Act

By Tanya Snyder | Aug 28, 2015 | No Comments

A battle is brewing over the Senate transportation bill’s approach to truck safety. Though large trucks are involved crashes that kill nearly 4,000 people a year — a number that has grown by 17 percent over the past five years — the DRIVE Act actually rolls back what few protections exist. The bill would allow longer […]

Highway Safety Group Tells Pedestrians to Be Safe on Roads Built to Kill Them

By Tanya Snyder | Aug 27, 2015 | No Comments

The Governors’ Highway Safety Association wants you to know it’s working really hard on pedestrian and bicycle safety. The coalition of state road safety agencies just put out another report in a series of well-intentioned but a off-base attempts to draw attention to the issue. In Everyone Walks: Understanding and Addressing Pedestrian Safety, GHSA notes that pedestrian […]

Compelling Evidence That Wider Lanes Make City Streets More Dangerous

By Angie Schmitt | May 27, 2015 | No Comments

The “forgiving highway” approach to traffic engineering holds that wider is safer when it comes to street design. After decades of adherence to these standards, American cities are now criss-crossed by streets with 12-foot wide lanes. As Walkable City author Jeff Speck argued in CityLab last year, this is actually terrible for public safety and the pedestrian environment. […]

NHTSA Touts Decrease in Traffic Deaths, But 32,719 Ain’t No Vision Zero

By Tanya Snyder | Dec 22, 2014 | No Comments

Twenty-four-year-old Taja Wilson was killed near the Louisiana bayou in August when a driver swerved on the shoulder where she was walking. Noshat Nahian, age 8, was killed in a Queens crosswalk on his way to school in December by a tractor-trailer driver with a suspended license. Manuel Steeber, 37, was in a wheelchair when he was […]

Kentucky Threatens 17 Louisville Street Trees, Citing Safety [Updated]

By Angie Schmitt | Dec 18, 2014 | No Comments

Here’s a classic story of traffic engineering myopia. Officials at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet are threatening to remove 17 newly planted street trees in a Louisville suburb. As reported by Next City and Louisville’s Courier-Journal, the trees had been selected and planted in part to ameliorate the area’s growing urban heat island problem. Louisville has lost 9 […]

Four Reasons Pedestrian Injuries Have Plummeted Along Protected Bike Lanes

By Michael Andersen | Nov 14, 2014 | No Comments

Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. Protected bike lanes are good at making it safer to bike. But they are great at making it safer to walk. As dozens of thought leaders on street safety gather in New […]

Talking Headways Podcast: Zero Deaths, Zero Cars, Zero Tundra Voles

By Tanya Snyder | Oct 9, 2014 | No Comments

Special guest Damien Newton of Streetsblog LA joins Jeff and me on this episode to tell us all about the Los Angeles DOT’s new strategic plan, which includes a Vision Zero goal: zero traffic deaths by 2025, a vision all of our cities should get behind. He walks us through the oddities of LA politics and […]

Foxx: New U.S. DOT Bike/Ped Initiative “Critical to Future of the Country”

By Tanya Snyder | Sep 10, 2014 | No Comments

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx just announced to the Pro-Walk Pro-Bike Pro-Place conference in Pittsburgh that the department is “putting together the most comprehensive, forward-leaning initiative U.S. DOT has ever put forward on bike/ped issues.” He said the initiative “is critical to the future of the country.” The top priority, he said, will be closing gaps […]

What’s the Best Way to Make Biking Mainstream in a Car-Centric City?

By Angie Schmitt | Jul 16, 2014 | No Comments

How can you turn a car-dependent city into a place where most people feel safe cycling for transportation? Researchers in Auckland, New Zealand, created a predictive model to assess how different policies affect cycling rates over several years. In a paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives [PDF], they concluded that a combination of […]

Talking Headways Podcast: Helmet Hair

By Tanya Snyder | Jun 24, 2014 | No Comments

Did you wear your helmet when you biked to work this morning? Whether you did or you didn’t, it’s up to you. So why are there so many people shrieking about it? On one side, the 85-percenters, overstating the protection helmets offer against head injuries. On the other side, the 3-footers, claiming that it’s actually […]

Jury Awards “Precedent-Setting” $2.4 Million to Doored Cyclist

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 19, 2014 | No Comments

In a decision that local advocates say delivers a “strong message” to drivers, a Philadelphia jury awarded a cyclist $2.4 million in damages earlier this month for injuries she sustained in a 2011 collision. Ashley McKean was seriously injured when a driver doored her and she was then struck from behind by a van driver […]

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