Pedestrians

More than twenty percent of all traffic fatalities in California are pedestrians yet less than one percent of all transportation funds statewide are spent to make walking safer.  Creating more pedestrian-friendly communities and reducing the 700 deaths and 14,000 pedestrian injuries has become one of the hottest public safety and quality of life topics in California today. Recent state legislation and new local funding opportunities means that there's never been a better time to get involved in making your streets safer for everyone.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Safe Routes to School has become one of the hottest topics both within California and nationally. While two-thirds of kids walked to school just thirty years ago, today far less due largely due to parents’ fears about traffic and crime. Find out more about the movement to reverse this trend, school by school and neighborhood by neighborhood.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Neighborhood residents are taking aim at speeders and cut through traffic by employing a host of street design techniques known as traffic calming. Many California communities including Oakland, Sacramento, Santa Monica, Palo Alto, Escalon, and San Francisco have begun using traffic calming to slow the speed of traffic on residential streets, reduce traffic injuries and fatalities and improve the quality of life for everyone involved.
 
Traffic calming is one of the techniques that has been proven effective and which is advocated by many researchers studying pedestrian injuries and deaths. Though traffic calming has been widely implemented in Europe, it has not been in the U.S., where some see this as conflicting with the need to maintain or improve levels of service for roadways. Traffic calming includes a variety of changes that slow or divert vehicle traffic, separate pedestrian pathways from vehicle traffic, and make the road corridor more pleasant.

Common traffic calming measures include physical design measures that draw attention to the presence of pedestrians, such as raised intersections and crosswalks, and "bulb-outs" that extend the corners of the sidewalk into the street so as to shorten the crossing distance and make pedestrians more visible. Other measures include road narrowing, and the creation of zigzag routes and curves. Traffic circles and roundabouts are also used to slow traffic.

< Back