| Transportation Sciences Network

More still needs to be done to make SSA roads sustainable. So worrisome that in cities where VRUs are the majority, cars still dictate the roads. Ethiopia is rectifying this by reclaiming public space for NMTs. #DesigningCitiesForPeople https://www.wired.com/story/in-the-walking-capitals-of-the-world-driver…

A First Drive: Google's autonomous car project. The video shows a demonstration of the car featuring carefully selected passengers.

"Restrictions to use of private cars in cities and better structures for active mobility? or neither!? And how do we get people back on public transport? Do you want change or more of the same? old normal or new normal?" Periscope LIVE discussion by Matthew Baldwin (EU Coordinator for road safety/ sustainable mobility) & Karen Vancluysen (Secretary General POLISnetwork) https://www.pscp.tv/w/1OwGWQNnXyZxQ

1st EU Urban Road Safety Award in 2020
The speed limit was highest crierial which brings the first winner by help student go to school themselve. The 10-30 m/s at the school zones bicycles infrastructures and pedestrians. the winner is from Spain from about 26 aplications of awards. As Road safety expert there something to learn hear as any thing you do for traffic safety it has impact to the community safety.

I came across this interesting brief history of Pedestrianism as one of USA's favourite sports during the 1800s, by author, Matthew Algeo.

Hi, everybody; glad to join you
Matjaz

Often in cities, the price for development is usually paid by the residents of the city, one such example is that of the Mumbai metro which is being developed by MMRCL in India. The second phase of the project which included extensions of lines and development of new lines has led to massive public outcry due to the positioning of a new rail depot in Aarey Forest conservation zone.

Environmentalists and citizen have mounted protests in large numbers to shift the alignment in a manner that does not affect the green/forest zones within the city. But all efforts were in vain, as the supreme court of India granted MMRCL the permissions to move ahead after the stay order issued by the High court of the state. Cutting corners to serve large urban populations with new improved infrastructure isn’t a new trend in developing countries with booming populations, rather it is the way how development works. As we try to argue about environmentally sustainable modes of transportation, the real question still remains.

What is the true cost of Sustainable Transportation?

Source: https://www.thequint.com/news/environment/mumbai-metro-committee-says-n…

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/aarey-to-lose-2646-trees-fo…

Cities and urban formations often dictate the planning and form the transport networks take, but it can also be a vice versa effect. Designing metro maps in and of itself is a challenging and complex task, maintain the details all while trying to simplify the 2D form. Graphic Designer Peter Dovaks’ experience designing a transportation app helped him design these miniature representations of urban mass transit networks.

These 220 shrunken icons are a part of the Mini Metro series, which capture the likes of the urban forms of cities like Tokyo, Paris, NYC, London, Cairo, Sao Paolo and Delhi. The collection can be purchased printed on mugs, prints and maps for all transit fans.

Source: Article - https://plainmagazine.com/metro-mini-icons-peter-dovak/ by
Toby Orton

The effect an epidemic has on a metropolis like New York can be witnessed on the streets, ironic for a city that never sleeps. The striking image of a vacant Park Avenue – one of New York’s major traffic corridors, is eerily haunting. Although uncomfortable, the pandemic has bought about positive change in urban environments with cleaner air quality and significantly low CO2 emissions. The worse hit of the transport industry is the air transport sector, with the cancellation of multiple flights and entry bans on foreigners. New Yorkers have begun to realize what surrounds them, the smell of spring and the sound of birds – the usual city without the horns and fumes.

Source: Natgeo - Instagram

View this post on Instagram

Photo by Pete McBride @pedromcbride | It is remarkable to see the streets of the city that never sleeps—empty. Seeing this major NYC corridor vacant is eerily haunting, knowing what challenges it means for so many. The decreased traffic also represents cleaner air quality throughout many urban regions—but at great cost. And although CO2 emissions have dropped significantly, many experts warn it is not enough to alter climate change. When I was there, marooned briefly by cancelled flights, many New Yorkers commented on the weirdness of it all, including hearing the sounds of birds and noticing spring smells—a rediscovery of an earlier world, with fewer horns and fumes. As we celebrated the 50th anniversary of #EarthDay this week, it seems the planet is getting a chance to take a breath, as we ironically hold ours. #nyc #parkave #notraffic #lockdown #covid

A post shared by National Geographic (@natgeo) on Apr 26, 2020 at 12:08am PDT

http://www.roadsafe.com/events

http://www.roadsafe.com/events

Milan announces ambitious scheme to reduce car use after lockdown:
The city has announced that 35km (22 miles) of streets will be transformed over the summer, with a rapid, experimental citywide expansion of cycling and walking space to protect residents as Covid-19 restrictions are lifted.
-The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/milan-seeks-to-prevent-po…

In my opinion a great idea! My experience in Milan was: way too much cars and few cyclists.

Observing traffic safety working place is more important for reducing vehicle crashes and It should be done by considering the mitigation of traffic congestion.

Google goes Public Transport on April 14, 2020 to say Thank You: Public transportation workers
#GoogleDoodle

https://g.co/doodle/wz1ix?fbclid=IwAR2iHj61eM8HiCbpVn_KYO-JuwWYN_qfbSqn…

I met with Jacob Smith a couple of months ago at the second world youth assembly for road safety delegates in Stockholm, Sweden. He is an amazing human being. It's heartbreaking what happened to him but coming back from that horror crash and be a change maker like this is truly incredible. Thank you Jacob you are a true champion. Watch this short video its truly inspiring "A distracted driver hit our school vehicle head-on, which left me almost paralyzed." Jacob Smith was hit by a distracted driver while he was coming back from a student leadership conference. April marks his anniversary. www.nsc.org/justdrive

Are Aerial Cable cars the new transportation mode?
Cable cars in urban transport is fairly a new idea that is making rounds across the world. Find out the list of countries who are interested or tried in implementing this technique.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/transport/innovation-air-using-cable-cars-u…
https://www.worldurbancampaign.org/urban-cable-cars-%E2%80%93-future-ur…
https://www.curbed.com/2017/9/21/16340394/urban-gondolas-cable-cars-cit…

A country in Africa is considering this to be an alternate mode of transportation. Find out in the below link!

https://www.africanexponent.com/post/9827-aerial-cable-cars-for-kigali

How to Make Pedestrian-Friendly Streets?

A comparison of past and present cities from various nations, including the Republic of Korea, shows that car-oriented cities tend to lose vitality, but they become livable and lively urban spaces when people become the focal point.
The change in the transit system from being auto-oriented to people-oriented needs to start with re-prioritization—giving top priority to pedestrians and bicyclists, public transport users in the middle, passenger cars at the bottom. However, changes in public awareness do not come naturally. In the Republic of Korea, the pedestrian environment improvement was the result of aggressive civil campaigns that eventually led to the enactment of pedestrian ordinances and pedestrian acts.

https://development.asia/case-study/how-make-pedestrian-friendly-streets

Can COVID-19 teach us something for the road safety epidemic?
As the world struggles through the tragic COVID-19 pandemic, it may be also worth considering another health crisis, which has been silently going on for decades. COVID-19 and road crashes wreak suffering, loss, death, grief, and economic hardship. COVID-19 has already killed 119,000 with more to come especially as the pandemic hits low- and middle-income countries with low capacity to manage the crisis. Road crashes kill 1.35 million people and injure up to another 50 million people each year.

Various comparisons between COVID-19 and road crash deaths are being made, some suggesting that the scale of the road safety problem puts the seriousness of the COVID-19 crisis in perspective. Rather than comparing the extent of suffering and death wrought by these two horrific causes, there may be broader lessons we can learn to save many lives and much future suffering. Six such lessons for consideration after COVID-19 is gone, for the future of transport, work, and cities are suggested here.

1. Reducing exposure to road transport. While lockdowns have had enormous economic and social impacts, the benefits of reduced transport identified during lockdowns are profound and go beyond valuable decreases in road crash deaths and disabling injuries. These impacts on transport bring into sharp focus the value of exposure reduction as an intervention for road safety. Up to now, exposure reduction has been largely overlooked because road safety has been too narrowly focused on the road transport system itself. Moreover, reducing motorized private road transport brings a host of other benefits: less green-house gas emissions as well as noise and air pollution, greater opportunities for active transport, greater social inclusion and connection. We should seize on the future opportunities to capture these benefits as we re-think cities, mass transit options such as metros, water transport, and dedicated bus rapid transit systems in the aftermath of the pandemic.

2. Re-envisioning our working lives, transport and infrastructure. Many roles cannot be done from home. Nonetheless, creative adjustment has allowed many more of us to do so, from online classes in schools and universities to consultations with doctors, and many office jobs. In many cases working from home proved to be more effective than expected, presenting an opportunity to re-think the way our societies operate, with benefits that go beyond working from home. There are vital psychological aspects to this. Lengthy home-based work is possible now in part because of relationships we have built prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly through face-to-face meetings. However, face-to-face meetings do not require being in the office five days a week. It is possible to envision a world in which people physically go to work two days a week and concentrate face-to-face meetings into those days. We may even improve our use of non-verbal cues in electronic communications to strengthen empathy and bonds of trust in distance communications.

This could open opportunities for extraordinary re-design of our work and cities: Perhaps whole buildings could be ‘Hot Buildings’ instead of just a few hot desks. Companies could share office buildings, with selective security on intellectual and other property. Education could permanently become a greater mix of online and in-person experience, acknowledging that the latter will be essential for many aspects of education. The already developing move to online retail may accelerate.

All of this would impact transport deeply. Reducing the need for commuting and other travel may allow stronger incentives (or even regulation) to boost mass transit. Public transport would have less trips to manage and incentivize, though there would still be costs. Without such policy interventions, the share of commuters using private motorized transport may increase because of less traffic and congestion. To manage this, public space may be redesigned to reduce road space and allow its repurposing for more active modes of transport and separating micro-mobility for safety. Less commuting days may also change proximity to work as a factor residential real estate values more accessible, facilitating a broader array of lifestyles. Future family dynamics may evolve with more parenting at home. (There may be downsides to manage: domestic violence has increased with COVID-19.)

3. Maintaining our values. Failure to act powerfully on the road safety crisis which results in so many deaths does not warrant a lack of effort to save lives in the COVID-19, or any other, crisis. These arguments entice us away from the core values we might well strive to maintain, critically including the value of human life. In any potential crisis – whether it be COVID-19, road crashes, or lifestyle diseases, one death is one too many.

4. Embracing system accountability instead of touting individual responsibility. As a society we will be well served by appreciating that the numbers of people dying from crashes or COVID-19 are both largely determined by political decisions, and the blaming of individuals. This has been a common response to both COVID-19 and road crash deaths. Prior to lockdown orders, adopting social distancing measures has been left to individual responsibility. Similarly, in many cases politicians have transferred accountability for crash deaths by claiming that they simply result from people being irresponsible. Reliance on individual responsibility has been shown repeatedly to fail us, including for road safety and COVID-19. We are all imperfect - we all sometimes misjudge risk, make mistakes, and in various circumstances focus on our immediate desires instead of the broader good. Thus, we speed, take other risks, or we simply make mistakes. It may only take a momentary lapse of concentration to cause a fatal crash. As social beings who like to be with our friends, it may only take one inadvertent slip of social distancing or one visit with an asymptomatic friend to spread COVID-19. The victims may be entirely innocent: being hit by a driver who is speeding, or living with a person who has not followed social distancing.

Individual responsibility can help, but our collective health should not rely on every imperfect human knowing what to do, wanting to do it, and succeeding in doing it without error. Politicians can fix these situations, on the one hand with safer roads—including crash barriers, safer vehicles, and safer speeds—which reduce the results of human error from death to property damage, and on the other hand effectively enforcing lockdowns which greatly reduce infection rates and managing the risk of deaths from health systems overrun by COVID-19 cases.

5. Addressing the political dimension. Road safety has traditionally lacked political salience. We must learn from the effective community pressure applied for stronger public policies on COVID-19, including stronger advocacy for economic benefits. Road safety may gain from strongly holding politicians to account for road crash deaths, instead of our currently pervasive victim-blaming. In both crises, arguments for not locking down or for high road travel speeds have been naïvely based on lack of evidence. The COVID-19 experience has shown how disastrous this is. Analyses identifying the economic cost of pandemics and the economic value of lockdowns have received prominent mainstream, expert, and social media support. Similar analyses of the economic costs of road crash deaths and injuries, the economic costs of higher speeds, and the net economic benefits of lower speeds, have received much less attention. Scientific inquiry and advice on road safety are too often marginalized and the problem taken as intractable. For COVID-19, expert advice has been heeded, albeit too slowly in some cases, with trillions of dollars committed to the cause and supporting economies through the crisis. One difference which may facilitate the influence of science for COVID-19 is that it is an infectious disease, a class of problems on which we are in the habit of accepting scientific medical advice.

6. Developing stronger deterrence of lockdown breaches. Finally, the COVID-19 response also has something to learn from the road safety epidemic. Management of more effective lockdowns that minimize detection avoidance and maximize deterrence of social gatherings may draw lessons from successful cases in which road crashes were reduced by well-publicized, rigorous enforcement. Well-researched communications and enforcement not only transform behaviors but also enhance social norms. Social pressure may also help: Those not following lockdowns are extending the ordeal period for everyone, just as speeding adds risk for surrounding road users.

The current dramatic experience with COVID-19 provides guidance on re-design of our work and cities as well as generating revamped government accountability for health externalities caused by traffic, particularly road crashes and fatalities. Along with all the suffering, loss, and upheaval of COVID-19, we have the opportunity to evolve.

https://www.teriin.org/article/effects-covid-19-transportation-demand