| #e.22133 | Tuesday 2:00PM to 3:30PM
November 20,
2012 | CM | 1.50 |
Road Diets and Pedestrian SafetyHighway Safety Research CenterChapel Hill, NC Free event The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (PBIC) announce this free webinar on “road diets,” which are one of the nine proven countermeasures that FHWA is heavily promoting nationally.
Road diets, or the reallocation of road space through reduction in the number of regular traffic lanes, are of interest to communities that may be seeking to reduce traffic speeds, reduce crashes, improve accessibility for pedestrians and bicyclists, or achieve a number of other benefits. This webinar will present information about the safety benefits of road diets, particularly to pedestrians, and highlight examples of road diet implementation in the United States.
Libby Thomas, a researcher at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center, will provide a brief presentation on some of the research findings related to road diets. She will discuss many of the safety benefits of road diets, which have been shown to reduce crashes among all road users.
Mike Sallaberry, Transportation Engineer at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, will discuss the road diet experience in San Francisco, California. San Francisco has implemented more road diet projects within its 47 square miles than any other city in North America. This portion of the presentation will give some brief background on the history of road diets in San Francisco, focusing on how and why they are used. Mike will discuss how road diets have been used to create space for bikeways, pedestrian facilities, and transit, as well as how they are used for traffic calming purposes and to add landscaping and storm water management features to a street. The presentation will touch on some of the benefits of road diets but will focus more on how to get them approved, especially when they are controversial.
Gina Coffman, of Toole Design Group, will discuss the road diet experience in Seattle, Washington. The City of Seattle has successfully implemented over 30 road diets. Before and after evaluations have indicated up to 70 percent reduction in injury collisions and 90 percent reduction in aggressive speeders on corridors where such projects have been implemented. Gina’s presentation will explore the history, research, planning and design of road diets, offering tips to build stakeholder support through public process. Seattle case studies will include before and after data showing changes in traffic and bicycle volume, neighborhood diversions, speeding and collisions over the years.
The presenters will also participate in a question and answer session to discuss how to address barriers to implementation and answer questions from the attendees.
This webinar is one of the free webinars that FHWA offers quarterly as part of its Pedestrian Safety Focus States and Cities initiatives. FHWA's Safety Office is trying to aggressively reduce pedestrian deaths by focusing extra resources on the states and cities with the highest pedestrian fatalities and/or fatality rates. Webinar archives for this series, as well as listings of upcoming sessions, can be found at http://www.walkinginfo.org/training/pbic/pedfocus_webinars.cfm.
PBIC offers free, public Webinars approximately every other month. To register for upcoming Webinars and to access archived presentations, please visit www.walkinginfo.org/webinars.
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Instructors: Libby Thomas Libby joined the staff of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC) in 2001. As a senior research associate for the Center, Libby’s primary focus areas include bicycle and pedestrian safety, and crash causes, including environmental and driver risk factors such as speeding and aggressive driving.
Libby has served as the principal investigator or key researcher on a number of national, state and local studies that have examined roadway and behavioral crash factors, and identified appropriate countermeasures. She has also conducted pedestrian and bicyclist safety and access research, and worked with agency representatives and project staff to develop evidence-based case studies, published guides and interactive tools and resources to help states and communities make safety improvements. Results of her research have been presented at national conferences and can be found in a variety of published reports and articles.
In addition to her research work at HSRC, Libby is the founder and co-chair since 2011 of the joint sub-committee on Traffic Speed and Safety of the Transportation Research Board, a division of the National Academies of Science. Libby holds a master’s degree in biology from Wake Forest University and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from UNC-Chapel Hill. Virginia Coffman Virginia is a Senior Transportation Planner with Toole Design Group a multi-modal planning and engineering firm based in Seattle, Washington. She has five years of experience working as a transportation planner for the Seattle Department of Transportation Pedestrian and Bicycle Program where her primary duty was implementation of Seattle's Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plans including the implementation of road diet projects, bicycle lanes, pedestrian and bicycle wayfinding, bicycle counts, crossing improvements and complete streets improvements. Virginia has a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Washington. Mike Sallaberry Mike Sallaberry is a certified traffic engineer in California and has been working with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency for 13 years. He started there as the traffic engineer for the Bicycle Program and became the Traffic Calming Program Manager prior to his current position as a Senior Engineer with the Livable Streets subdivision, which oversees the pedestrian, traffic calming, and bicycle projects for the city. His past work includes leading the effort to standardize the shared roadway marking (the “sharrow”), creating space for bikeways and pedestrian facilities through the use of road diets, and the creative development of projects in a densely populated city where space is at a premium. He has worked on most of the 50+ road diet projects implemented in San Francisco.
Though he uses his bicycle as his primary form of transportation, he regularly uses a half dozen modes and believes a healthy city is one that provides its visitors and citizens a variety of quality options for moving about. (36 Ratings)
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