Sustainable safety:designing streets the Dutch way

What is sustainable safety?• Intrinsic safety or

lasting safety: safety by design not safety by regulation

• Streets become places where people aren’t pushed to the periphery by cars

Sustainable safety in the Netherlands• Idea introduced in early 1990s as a way of tackling road deaths and injury

• “The central issue is that people, even if they are highly motivated to behave safely while using the road, make errors that may result in crashes.” Advancing Sustainable Safety, SWOV, 2005

• “Sustainable Safety aims to ensure that road safety depends as little as possible on individual road user decisions. The responsibility for safe road use should not be placed solely on the shoulders of road users but also on those who are responsible for the design and operation of the various elements of the traffic system.” Advancing Sustainable Safety, SWOV, 2005

Who benefits?• Everyone!• Vehicles and people with

very different speeds and masses are not expected to share the same space• Urban environment

becomes more people-friendly.

Five principles of sustainable safety• Functionality• Homogeneity• Predictability• Forgivingness• State awareness

Functionality• All Dutch roads are

classified according to their function and fall into three categories: access, distributor and through roads

• These streets have a mono-functional design which is appropriate for their purpose

Functionality

• Idea comes from Buchanan’s 1963 report Traffic in Towns

Swav.nl taken from Traffic in Towns

Through roads• Fast roads carrying high

volumes of traffic• Motorways, trunk roads,

bypasses• Completely separate

facilities for cycling and walking and usually at a distance from the highway

Distributor roads• These connect the

access roads to the through roads• They carry more

traffic than access streets so a greater degree of separation of modes is necessary

Access roads

• These are typically residential streets • They are not through

roads and therefore carry very low volumes of traffic• They are designed to

slow down traffic

Homogeneity• Difference between

mass, speed and direction of travel of vehicles using same space is minimized

Predictability• Roads made predictable

by using consistent designs• Street design sets

expectations about how the space is used through use of materials and colour, and consistent design of crossings

Forgivingness• Anticipating mistakes

and accepting that humans are fallible• Making sure that

mistakes aren’t fatal

State awareness• Education becomes

an essential complement to sustainably safe road design • NOT a replacement

for good design

Can we do this here?

Yes!

Further information:SWOV – Advancing Sustainable Safety:http://www.swov.nl/rapport/dmdv/Advancing_sustainable_safety.pdf

Cycling Embassy of Great Britain:www.cycling-embassy.org.uk

Newcycling sustainble safety articles:http://newcycling.org/tag/sustainable_safety/