Comment 101775

By kevlahan (registered) | Posted May 29, 2014 at 09:33:12 in reply to Comment 101733

Well, the Coroner of Ontario disagrees:

http://news.ontario.ca/mcscs/en/2012/09/chief-coroner-releases-pedestrian-death-review.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/lo... http://www.therecord.com/news-story/2613...

and he has looked carefully into the statistics of pedestrian fatalities, in particular "among its findings were that two-thirds of the deaths occurred on roads with posted speed limits higher than 50 kilometres an hour, while only five per cent occurred below that limit."

And this report from the American DOT also disagrees

http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/resea...

"Reductions in vehicle speeds can have a very significant influence on pedestrian crashes and injuries. Pedestrians suffer much more serious injuries when struck by high-speed vehicles than when struck by vehicles going more slowly. Also, many pedestrian crashes would be prevented entirely had the vehicles been traveling more slowly, since driver and pedestrian would have had more time to perceive the threat and react to the risk, averting the crash altogether."

The idea that lower speed limits (e.g. 30km/h) combined with road re-design to make it uncomfortable to drive faster does not reduce the number and rate of pedestrian deaths and serious injuries is completely contrarian and not backed up by the actual data. I've quoted the case of Paris numerous times as an example of extremely low pedestrian fatality rate in a City with low traffic speed, lots of traffic and huge numbers of pedestrians. And they are going to 30km/h and 20km/h on all except the major arterials to reduce the injuries and deaths even more.

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2014-05-29 09:39:09

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