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Society USA21. February 2020

The Easy Way to Prevent Accidents: Drive Less (Scientists Find Out After Studying 1,700 Cities)

Researchers have analyzed the road designs of 1,700 cities to come up with ways to create safer streets and reduce road injuries. The solution, they found, is improving public transportation – as fewer drivers will always equal fewer accidents!

Each year finds over a million deaths and tens of millions of injuries caused by global road traffic accidents. The study – recently published in Lancet Planetary Health – split cities into nine design types, and road designs incorporating more public transit, such as Western European cities like Paris, London and Amsterdam, proved to have a much better “city footprint” for reducing injuries than those with dense, tight road networks as common in Southeast Asian cities.

“What this work very strongly suggests is that the best approach is to get people out of cars in the first place, and to design cities in ways that people are using motor vehicles less,” says Christopher Morrison, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, USA and one of the study authors. “It’s quite clear that places that tended to have more available public transit, particularly rail transit, tended to have lower incidents of injuries.”

Lead researcher Jason Thomson from the University of Melbourne emphasizes the importance of urban planning to reduce road injuries. But officials from around 100 countries will additionally meet at the end of February in Stockholm, Sweden to discuss more ways, according to the World Health Organization, to halve their road deaths and injuries by 2030.

Source:
Fast Company

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