COMPARISON OF SAFETY PERFORMANCE OF URBAN STREETS BEFORE AND AFTER LANDSCAPE IMPROVEMENTS

Environmental psychologists suggest that appropriately landscaped roadside scenes may have influence on travel-related stress recovery. In addition, it was revealed that landscaped center strips or median planting appears to reduce perceived land width and therefore, to discourage speeding. Generally, the discouraged speed is one of the contributing factors of decreases in crash rates or pedestrian accidents on streets. Based on the assumed safety properties of modern freeways, parkways, and landscape enhancement features, researchers hypothesized that parkway or landscape-improved sections appear to be safer compared to parallel freeway sections or street sections before landscape improvements. In addition, researchers compared the safety performance of parallel sections of freeways and parkways in terms of fatal accident rates, and the safety performance of urban arterial road sections before and after landscape improvements in terms of crash rates. The findings of this study show parkway or landscape improved sections are significantly safer than the compared parallel freeways sections in pairs or street sections before the landscape improvement. Particularly, urban parkway corridors show a significant decrease in fatal accident rate and accident cost compared to urban freeway sections. Crash rates at urban arterial road sections also show a significant decrease after the landscape improvement. In addition, median landscape treatments appear to be a meaningful safety measure. However, this study suggests further research is required to verify a relationship between driver or pedestrian visual perception according to travelway corridor landscape treatments and traffic safety effects.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • The symposium proceedings are available on CD-ROM.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Mok, J
  • Landphair, H C
  • Naderi, J R
• Conference:
  • 2nd Urban Street Symposium: Uptown, Downtown, or Small Town: Designing Urban Streets That Work
  • Location: Anaheim, California , United States
  • Date: 2003-7-28 to 2003-7-30
• Publication Date: 2003-7

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; Photos; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: 2ND URBAN STREET SYMPOSIUM: UPTOWN, DOWNTOWN, OR SMALL TOWN: DESIGNING URBAN STREETS THAT WORK, JULY 28-30, 2003, ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Arterial highways; Before and after studies; Crash rates; Fatalities; Freeways; Highway safety; Improvements; Landscape design; Medians; Operating speed; Parkways; Streets; Stress (Psychology); Traffic safety; Urban highways; Visual perception
• Subject Areas: Design; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I21: Planning of Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00989136
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Apr 4 2005 12:00AM