Complete Street Concept, and Ensuring Safety of Vulnerable Road Users

Abstract

Provision of sustainable and environmentally friendly transportation systems that creates adequate travel alternatives for end users is desirable in transportation industry. Complete streets, a system that is oriented towards designing streets to safely accommodate users of all modes and abilities has been seen as a potential solution to satisfy the need for variability in transportation mode choices. While complete street concept has great advantages, there is still concern about the safety of vulnerable road users sharing roads with high speed vehicles. Among other things, factors such as vehicle speed and lateral separation of vehicles from pedestrians and bicyclist has been found to affect the pedestrian level of service (LOS), as well as LOS for bicyclists. While there is interest in increasing the use of active transportation modes, there is also a great need to ensure that infrastructures for active transportation modes are not only safe, but also gives the end users a reasonable feeling of safety. Using basic principle of kinetic energy, this study evaluates some factors to consider when making policy decisions on sharing of limited road spaces. This study also presents pertinent research areas, and recommendations on how to achieve improvement in road, and vehicle designs, as well as driver behavior to result in overall improvement in transportation safety for vulnerable road users.