Skip to main content

Right urban design can cut traffic accidents – report

Building and retrofitting urban environments and reducing vehicle speeds are the key to creating safer streets and cutting traffic fatalities, a new report says. Cities Safer by Design, by the World Resources Institute (WRI) Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, offers practical guidance for urban planners and policymakers, and includes more than 30 specific urban design recommendations.
August 28, 2015 Read time: 2 mins

Building and retrofitting urban environments and reducing vehicle speeds are the key to creating safer streets and cutting traffic fatalities, a new report says.

Cities Safer by Design, by the 4722 World Resources Institute (WRI) Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, offers practical guidance for urban planners and policymakers, and includes more than 30 specific urban design recommendations.

The report focuses on improving infrastructure for pedestrians, cycling and mass transport, and outlines two ways to improve traffic safety in cities.
First, by building and retrofitting urban environments to reduce the need for individual vehicle trips; and second, by reducing vehicle speeds in areas where cars, pedestrians and cyclists mix.

'It’s often children, the elderly and the poor who are most at risk for traffic accidents,’ said Ben Welle, senior associate at WRI and one of the report’s co-authors.

‘As cities around the world rapidly expand, there’s an urgent need to design communities that are compact and connected, with calm traffic and streets that promote walking, cycling and access to transit,’ he added.

The report includes examples from specific cities and provides examples from Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, New York, Paris and more.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Here: AI has place in ‘privacy by design’
    June 23, 2020
    Artificial intelligence may improve traffic in cities and keep location data private, but Here Technologies shows that it only takes four points of anonymous data to predict your identity.
  • Considering accessibility costs little and pays dividends for all travellers
    August 8, 2017
    Catering for those with disabilities can be cost-effective and improve services for all travellers, as David Crawford discovers. Clearer understanding of the economic value of accessible transport is essential if we are to speed up the current slow deployment levels, according to the Paris-based International Transport Forum (ITF), which staged a 2016 round table on the ‘Benefits and Costs of Inclusion in Transport’. It wants to see greater availability of data on levels of actual and unmet demand for acces
  • Annika Lundkvist of Pedestrianspace.org: "How are you moving today?"
    March 8, 2024
    It’s easy to say that people should embrace active travel – but it’s often not as simple as that. Advocates must beware of a disconnect with people’s lives and options on the ground, says Annika Lundkvist
  • Transport in the round
    October 13, 2015
    The ITF’s Mary Crass tells Colin Sowman why future transport demands will require governments to overcome the silo effect of individual single-modal authorities. The only global multimodal transport policy organisation,” is how Mary Crass describes the International Transport Forum (ITF), which is housed at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As head of policy and summit preparation at the ITF she says: “All other organisations are either regional or have a modal focus, we cove