Citation

Wallace M, Kitson C, Ormstrup M, Cherian J, Saleh JH. Case Stud. Transp. Policy 2021; 9(2): 538-554.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, World Conference on Transport Research Society, Publisher Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.cstp.2021.02.009

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Atlanta, like other cities in the United States, has recently experienced a rise in accidents involving pedestrians, bicyclists, and users of other light individual transport, collectively referred to as LIT+. Efforts are made to redesign streets for improved LIT+ safety, but few studies have examined the effectiveness of these measures. This work contributes towards a better understanding of the relationship between street redesigns and safety outcomes. We first provide an overview of street redesign options and their implementations in Atlanta. Next, we examine citywide statistics for LIT+ accidents. We analyze safety outcomes pre- and post-renovation on three select streets and quantify the extent to which these projects have been effective at improving LIT+ safety relative to several control streets. We found in assessing accident rates that the situation has distinctly not improved, and in some cases has worsened post-renovation for LIT+ users. We conduct field observations and provide a detailed examination of the effectiveness of the renovations and the remaining accident patterns. Two renovated streets were found to be particularly hazardous, and we urge city planners to address their conspicuous accident pathogens. We provide recommendations based on our observations for city planners to consider in future street redesigns intended to improve LIT+ safety. We emphasize the importance of establishing evaluation and feedback mechanisms on the effectiveness of street renovations to help decision makers to improve their subsequent approach to LIT+safety.

Language: en

Keywords

Atlanta; Bicycle safety; Light individual transit; Pedestrian safety; Street redesign; Vehicle-pedestrian collisions