Comment 38407

By A Smith (anonymous) | Posted February 23, 2010 at 19:56:28

kevlahan >> The main conclusion of the article is that one-way streets are more dangerous, the only question is why.

And you blindly accept that conclusion because it matches your goals, nice logic.

>> The authors themselves consider your socio-economic (SES) "exposure" argument, and reject is as explaining the higher injury rates on one way street:

It's not my argument. My argument would be to find out the total volume of traffic that kids are exposed to on one way streets versus two way streets. Once this number was established, you would then have an accurate data set to make comparisons as to the safety of each type of road.

If, for example, one way streets carried twice as much traffic per km of roadway than two way streets, then it would be expected that there would be twice as many collisions.

>> For example, the low SES group rate for all ages and both sexes was 33.3. The one-way street rate was 46.4 for all ages and both sexes suggesting that one-way street rates could account for a 12.1 excess rate of injury if we assume all other factors which might influence the rate are equal."

And if the authors hadn't diluted the traffic collision numbers between three SES groups, rather than two, both the high and low income groups numbers would be almost the same as the numbers for the street types.

For example, if we take the intermediate SES group collision numbers and divide it equally to the high and low categories, we get 45.55 for the low SES and 21.45 for the high. Compare that to 46.4 for one way streets and 19.6 for two way and there is not much of a difference at all. When you consider that even their SES groups are rough approximations of exposure to traffic, it hardly suggests anything conclusive about the relative safety of either one way or two way streets.

If I was cynical, I might even think the authors of this study presented the numbers in such a way as to produce the result they were looking for.

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