Recent Streetsblog CHICAGO posts about safety

More than 112,500 people were killed in speeding-related crashes from 2005 to 2014 . Image: NTSB

NTSB: Speed Kills, and We’re Not Doing Enough to Stop It

By Stephen Miller | Jul 27, 2017 | No Comments

More than 112,500 people lost their lives in speed-related crashes from 2005 to 2014, accounting for 31 percent of all traffic deaths in America over that period. In a draft report released earlier this week, the National Transportation Safety Board says excessive speed is a deadly problem in our nation's transportation system -- one that federal and state officials aren't doing enough to address.

Are Reckless Driving and Biking Morally Equivalent? An Ethicist Weighs In

By John Greenfield | Jul 6, 2017 | 41 Comments

Cars have exponentially more potential for death and destruction than bikes, but all road users are capable of harming others. How should these facts influence government policy, as well as personal conduct?

In cities like Copenhagen, with bicycle-friendly street design, mobility education, and traffic laws, few people wear helmets, but bike fatality rates are much lower than in U.S. cities. Photo: Wikipedia

A Bike Helmet Manifesto in Four Paragraphs

By John Greenfield | Mar 1, 2017 | 88 Comments

If lots of people are wearing bike helmets for moderate-paced commuting in your town, that’s probably a symptom of the fact that it’s a dangerous place to ride.

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Portland Wants to Rethink Speed Limits By Factoring in Walkers and Bikers

By Angie Schmitt | Aug 25, 2016 | No Comments

For cities trying to get a handle on traffic fatalities, dangerous motor vehicle speeds are an enormous problem. Once drivers exceed 20 mph, the chances that someone outside the vehicle will survive a collision plummet. But even on city streets where many people walk and bike, streets with 35 or 40 mph traffic are common. Cities looking […]

Advocates: Let’s Shift Focus From Pushing Bike Helmets to Preventing Crashes

By John Greenfield | Jun 6, 2016 | 35 Comments

[Last year the Chicago Reader launched a weekly transportation column written by Streetsblog Chicago editor John Greenfield. This partnership allows Streetsblog to extend the reach of our livable streets advocacy. We syndicate a portion of the column after it comes out online; you can read the remainder on the Reader’s website or in print. The paper hits the […]

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Retired Fire Chief: Make American Firetrucks Fit City Streets, Not Vice Versa

By Angie Schmitt | Mar 22, 2016 | No Comments

It’s a sad irony that fire departments, while essential to public safety, are often a major obstacle to safer streets in American cities. When cities try to redesign streets to reduce traffic injuries and get drivers to travel at safer speeds, the local fire department often steps in to prevent changes that it believes will hinder the movement of its enormous trucks. Fire departments […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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