TSC Director David Ragland proposes an agenda to "tack to the wall" for making walking and biking safer while promoting non-motorized travel for the health of the planet—and its people.

Comparing the negative consequences of unchecked motorization to a "tsunami" of global proportions, Traffic Safety Center Director David Ragland laid out a seven-point traffic safety and multimodal research agenda to ensure that new measures to encourage more sustainable transportation modes such as walking, biking and transit also address traffic safety.

Ragland outlined his arguments in a presentation, "Safety In Multimodal Transportation Systems" (2.6 MB PDF), delivered October 31 at the PATH-UTC conference," On the Road to Sustainability: From Research to Practice," held in Berkeley.

"This is an agenda I want to tack to the wall," he said. "If we want people to walk and bike for the sake of the planet, for the sake of their own health, we need to make it safer."

The need to reduce reliance on traditional motorized modes is clear, because of their energy and environmental impacts and public health effects, he said. "These are tsunamis." But alternative fuels and alternative vehicles alone will not solve the problem.

Using transportation systems that burn no fuel or considerably less is another path that figures in most policies to address global warming. And that means greater use of bikes, walking and transit.

Spandex and Mass Transit: Biking to BART

A key item on Ragland's research agenda is redefining the transportation system.

He showed how it could be done by looking at Contra Costa County, a bedroom community east of the San Francisco Bay Area, where Ragland lives. A typical post-War suburb where the car is dominant, it also enjoys an extensive network of scenic trails along abandoned rail lines and canals. Currently, they're used primarily for recreation, but, Ragland pointed out, some 30,000 to 50,000 people live within half a mile of these trails. And a station on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) line is located within easy access.

He noted several studies and pilot projects to study the effectiveness of programs to make it easier to reach the Pleasant Hill BART station without using a car. One program, Easy Connect, has set up a system where businesses provided their employees with access to Segway™ Human Transporters, electric bikes and conventional bicycles to make the final connection between their homes and BART.

Even in this relatively sheltered setting, however, safety is a concern, Ragland noted. "The trails are used by people with baby carriages, runners, joggers, walkers, occasionally a wheel chair. I’ve observed one very serious bicycle injury on this trail. And I'm sure there are others. The problem is we don't have knowledge of them. The police don’t record them. We need to go to emergency rooms and get records.

"We don’t want to solve one problem by decreasing the fun of that trail. Nevertheless, for a great deal of time that trail doesn't have a lot of users, especially during the early morning commute."

Unfair Share of Dangers When Sharing the Road

Currently, as the illustration below shows, the share of injuries and deaths for people in less industrialized countries who are walking (red), riding bikes (yellow) and riding motorized two-wheelers (black) is much higher than in industrialized ones.

From left to right, red to green, the proportion of injuries and deaths by increasingly motorized mode—walking, bicycle, motorized two-wheelers, four-wheelers, and "other"; from top to bottom, countries in descending order of industrialization, where the least industrialized have highest rates of injuries for the most vulnerable road users. (Slide by UC Berkeley transportation planning and engineering master's student Wendy Tao).

"Traffic fatalities are projected to increase by almost 70 percent by 2020, and the World Health Organization has estimated that traffic injuries will be the number three cause of disease of the planet," Ragland said. Most of this increase will occur among people who are traveling in the vulnerable red, yellow and black modes in the chart.

Even in the U.S., this vulnerability is apparent. In California, roads that are part of the state highway system account for 29 percent of the pedestrian fatalities in the state. California's pedestrian fatality rate is roughly half again higher than the nation's; 18 percent of California traffic fatalities occur among people on foot.

What Remains to Be Done

In addition to redefining the transportation system as suggested by the Pleasant Hill BART-trail experiment, Ragland identified six additional tasks central to the research agenda he is "tacking to the wall:"

• Establish estimates of exposure and risk by transportation mode;
• Establish estimates of benefits by transportation mode;
• Determine models of conflict/collisions in multimodal environments;
• Develop countermeasures to increase safety of non-motorized modes;
• Improve methods for evaluation of countermeasures;
• Institutionalize safety for non-motorized modes.

Among the efforts already underway that address some of these topics is the creation of inventories of sidewalks, walking conditions and trails to see where gaps exist and where they can be bridged to make walking safer and more appealing. Efforts are also underway to establish a rigorous method of measuring risk by mode, though much needs to be done in this area, due to a lack of data that can be accurately compared. Another project is to establish a protocol for measuring pedestrian exposure, which is the first step for assessing risk. Pedestrian volume modeling efforts are underway to determine how much pedestrian activity is actually taking place. People are not counted nearly as often or as well as cars, so it is hard to identify areas where pedestrians tend to congregate and travel. A final area is estimating benefits and risks of different transportation modes for the individual and for society.

"If we want to sell these programs based on health impacts, we need to know whether they do the job or not," Ragland said. "We need to know the safety risks and benefits, and we need to communicate this to people we’re asking to do this.

"If we are asking people to do this, we need to make this safe."

—Phyllis Orrick

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