Safety

CURA report: Less traffic is leading to more speeding in Ohio’s major cities during the Coronavirus pandemic

The Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA) released a report that compared traffic data for Ohio’s three major cities for March-April 2020 versus 2019.  Less traffic during the Coronavirus crisis is leading to more speeding, especially extreme speeding.

CURA research report: Evidence Of Increased Vehicle Speeding In Ohio’s Major Cities During The Coronavirus Pandemic

This report is featured in several news sources:

  1. Ohio State News
  2. WOSU Public Media
  3. The Columbus Dispatch
  4. Columbus Underground
  5. WEWS TV5 Cleveland

Road diets in the Cbus

Back on September 12, I posted about the magic of road diets – a relatively inexpensive way to achieve many good outcomes in urban transportation such as walkability, bikeability, increased safety and traffic calming.

A great example of a road diet is the Nationwide Boulevard project in the Arena District of Columbus (my fair city): Nationwide Boulevard Road Diet on Track for Fall Completion.  This project is also a great example of public-private partnerships, with funding coming from the City of Columbus and adjacent property owners.

Way to go, Cbus!  Now let’s talk again about protected bike lanes in downtown…

Road diets are magic

The (quite wonderful) CityLab blog from The Atlantic has an article describing “what has been called ‘one of the transportation safety field’s greatest success stories'”: the road diet.  [So What Exactly Is a ‘Road Diet’?].

Road diets are inexpensive ways to achieve good transportation outcomes, such as increased traffic safety, as well as better walkability and bikeability.  Despite popular conceptions, it does not necessarily increase traffic congestion.  And did I mention they are cheap?

Road diets are as close as we get to a “magic bullet” in transportation planning.  As planner Charles Marohn writes:

Why, when our leadership has expressed so clearly the enormous financial gap we have in funding a “world class” transportation system, are road diets not an obsession of transportation departments everywhere?