Pedestrian City

Our city's public transportation is well known to be crap. Some people want to fix it and some people think "public transportation" is an oxymoron. If we could just vote public trans into existence we'd all be beaming around the city by now; safely, quickly, cleanly, but we've gotten stuck a few times on the actual building part. You can't just decide that someone should do it. You have to actually build something.

Like Portland. They actually built something. As a result, public transportation ridership has increased there by 32% from 1998 to 2004 and that's great, but what's really interesting is that the number of accidents involving pedestrians has decreased while the amount of actual pedstrians has climbed. The number of automobile accidents has dropped by 16% and the number of automobile accidents involving pedestrians has dropped 38%. A study by the Portland Traffic Office has determined that adding pedestrians to the streets makes it less likely that they'll be hit. The theory is that the more attention car drivers have to pay to pedestrians the slower they'll drive and the more likely it is that they'll obey traffic signals. Cascadia Scorecard also credits an improved pedestrian infrastructure:

Of course, infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, as well as traffic regulations and customs, also greatly affect safety. I suspect that Portland's reductions are due to both safety in numbers and infrastructure improvements because the number of car crashes dropped as well. But it seems as though investments in pedestrian and cyclist safety could generate a feedback loop of benefits: if a city increases safety with better intersections and more bike lanes, then more people feel safe to walk and bike, so walking and biking become even safer, so more people feel safe to walk and bike. Eventually it would reach a plateau, of course, but we have a long way to go to match pedestrian rates in other countries.