Abstract
Nowadays, traffic calming measures that are designed to influence the drivers’ behaviour in the first place and thus make them slow down (and increase the safety of traffic as a result) are used increasingly often in traffic engineering. As a rule of thumb, carefully planned street geometry and street furniture should advise the drivers of the traffic calmed area ahead of them, which makes them reduce the vehicle speed by influencing their perception. One of the most common treatments are road narrowings and horizontal deflections of the route of travel. The reduction of the vehicle speed increases the driver’s central visual area, which results in earlier and easier spotting of pedestrians that are about to cross the roadway. A reduction of noise and exhaust emissions is an additional benefit. However, the current sustainable design guidelines are not specific regarding how often the route should be deflected by alternate parking lanes and how frequently they should be placed in the home zones (woonerven in Dutch) in order to achieve the desired reduction of vehicle speed, noise, pollution, and exhaust emissions. This being so, the authors carried out a speed survey research on a chosen street that includes woonerf design features, as typically used in Poland, with carriageway narrowings being created by parking lanes differently sited along its length. Several speed measuring devices were deployed to automatically and simultaneously measure and record the vehicle speeds and volume of traffic at different test locations. The measurement data were subjected to statistical analyses, including conventional statistical tests. The alternative hypothesis, proposing that the vehicle speeds depend on the configuration of parking lanes and carriageway narrowings was confirmed in almost all cases. The results have confirmed that the siting of parking lanes is a relevant factor as far as speed reduction is concerned, with the degree of this reduction depending on the remaining travel lane width.
Highlights
In built-up areas calming of traffic in order to improve road safety is becoming an issue in an ever growing number of places
With the highly non-uniform results of the independence and median tests presented in Table 4 failing to determine whether the vehicle speeds depend on the traffic volume, a subsequent analysis was carried out for each test section with the results grouped in three traffic volume ranges in relation to vehicle speed distributions, this time being jointly considered for the two directions of traffic (according to hypotheses (4) and (5)) to check whether the speeds of traffic in the opposite directions can be considered jointly in further analyses
The last steps of the process of statistical analysis were independence and median tests on a part of vehicle speed data obtained at the subsequent test stations, considered separately for the two directions of traffic, in order to answer the question of whether the speed distributions depend on the siting of parking lanes and carriageway narrowings (as per the hypotheses (6) and (7))
Summary
In built-up areas calming of traffic in order to improve road safety is becoming an issue in an ever growing number of places. This problem became acute in the 20th century, when the social and recreational functions of urban streets were seriously disturbed by an increasing volume of vehicular traffic travelling at higher speeds and its increasing share in overall traffic volume, which affects the overall safety of traffic. In the further part hereof, only the Dutch term woonerf will be used to avoid confusion [8]
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