Planning has played the biggest part in reducing accidents. Roads in Sweden are
built to prioritise safety over speed or convenience. Low urban speed limits,
pedestrian zones and barriers that separate cars from bicycles and oncoming
traffic have helped. Building 1,500km (900 miles) of “2+1” roads—where each lane
of traffic takes turns to use a middle lane for overtaking—is reckoned to have
saved around 145 lives over the first decade of Vision Zero. And 12,600 safer
crossings, including pedestrian bridges and zebra stripes flanked by flashing
lights and protected with speed bumps, are estimated to have halved the number
of pedestrian deaths over the past five years. Strict policing has also helped:
less than 0.25% of drivers tested are over the alcohol limit. Road deaths of
children under seven have plummeted—in 2012 only one was killed, compared with
58 in 1970.
This is distinct from the sorts of 3-lane roads (more common in Europe than the US) where the central lane is designated simultaneously for passing in either direction. (Which conversely seems really dangerous.)
Note also that rural road costs about $1M/lane-mile in the US (double in urban areas) so 900 miles of 3-lane road is probably at least $2B. If the road lasted a decade, it would make the cost-per-life-saved on the high side of US value of life guidelines.
> This is distinct from the sorts of 3-lane roads (more common in Europe than the US) where the central lane is designated simultaneously for passing in either direction. (Which conversely seems really dangerous.)
It was somewhat common 40 or 50 years ago but it's gone pretty much entirely (replaced by either alternating 2+1 or 1+1 with turn lanes and the like in the middle) because it is, in fact, extremely dangerous.
In the US, I've never seen a two-way passing middle lane, only three lane roads where the middle lane is designated for making left-hand turns for either lane. Usually these are in the "strip" regions in towns, where there are strip malls and big-box stores lining both sides of the road.
Rt.53 in Hingham,MA has a suicide lane. This is the appropriate name for a single track bidirectional lane for turning left. It is not used for passing. Great fun when people enter the lane too soon and facing cars must pass before each turns left. this leads to last minute entry into the lane and many stale-mates with stubborn cursiing drivers facing each other with no where to go as the prevailing traffic passes them on both sides.
I have seen 3-lane roads where the middle lane switches direction depending on time of day, with clear lit-up overhead signage telling you which lanes are going which direction. During non-rush hours it acts as a standard protected turning lane as you describe.
It's not very good for safety: many drivers forget or don't see the signage, so driving even in the direction the sign tells you you're allowed can be dangerous.
Vancouvers Lions Gate bridge (the big green one) uses this system. I havent heard of a non-drunk ever getting that confused. If you cannot obey the 100s of lit signs, youll also be having trouble with hasic red-light intersections.
One cool trick is that the center lane can be shut both ways to allow ambulances and cops to rush the bridge when needed.
Never seen a three-lane road with shared overtaking lane here in Germany. Those seem positively dangerous. 2+1 is fairly common on Bundesstraßen, though. They typically don't have a divider but the signage makes it very clear who can use it.
Is this a regional thing? I've never seen them where I live (in Saxony). It should be noted though that I don't have a driver's license, so I'm probably not watching road types as attentively as a driver.
I came here just to say there was hardly any "how" in the article ((of this post), despite the title claiming "How Sweden Has Redesigned...". The hows in the article are common in many places - like low speed limits and more cameras.
I always found those 2+1 roads stressful, as it required unpleasant delays behind very slow vehicles and puts a limit on how many cars can overtake before the other side gets the middle lane.
Is this the price for saving lives, or do I misunderstand anything? Does the 2+1 road replace 1+1 roads (which is probably a lot more dangerous)?
The 2+1 roads mostly used to be 1+1 with no middle barrier, I believe. If you wanted to overtake a slower car, you had to time it well so you could use the opposite lane while it was (hopefully) empty of oncoming traffic. Or you'd hope the car in front, and the oncoming one were polite enough to move over to the curb. Some more winding roads had bad visibility, so you could never pass safely.
I take the 2+1 any day.
The newer 2+1 roads have cable barriers in the middle, so even a drunk or sleeping oncoming driver won't kill you. They just total their own car.
Yes. It's a cheap upgrade using the existing width of a wide (43ft/13m and up) 1+1 road with wide shoulder and wide lanes to make a 2+1 with narrow shoulder and a wire barrier on the same width.
Sweden was just lucky to have built such wide 1+1 roads as the norm, so a large part of the major highways were (realatively) easily and cheaply convertible.
The safety difference from 1+1 is huge, and the cost of conversion is negligible compared to a rebuild into a real 2+2 road.
In Cairo, most of the roads during rush hour are so packed with cars that you can't drive faster than 5km/hour. Those packed roads with slowly moving cars have the lowest accident rate in the country.
So yes, you can definitely reduce accidents by forcing everyone into high traffic situations where they have no choice but to drive extremely slowly.
In IT security, you can also reduce hacked computers by making so many security regulations that nobody can actually use the computers. It does work, but nobody really gets their job done.
Or at least, in the case of the state department, it works until your secretary of state moves all of her email onto her own server to avoid your regulations and you end up with a political firestorm.
At some point you probably want to try find solutions that optimize safety and actually getting something done at the same time. Creating traffic isn't a very good solution in the long run, I think.
> Those packed roads with slowly moving cars have the lowest accident rate in the country.
Well, they have about the same accident rate as walking, and walking is even faster!
> In IT security, you can also reduce hacked computers by making so many security regulations that nobody can actually use the computers. It does work, but nobody really gets their job done.
On the contrary, imposing ridiculous restrictions will cause users to become very creative in bypassing them, thus negating any positive effect they might have.
The article fails to answer the question its title poses. How has Sweden redesigned streets? "Uhh, it kinda has, and fewer people die. Also, cameras." Okay, thanks.
Here is the Wikipedia page of countries ranked by traffic-related deaths (the table headers are sortable) with data from 2013. Sweden has one of the lowest fatality rates per 100,000 inhabitants. But, interestingly, so does the UK with its much bigger population. Is there a common factor between these two countries that explains the low road fatality rates? Or maybe not?
Wouldn't you measure traffic fatalities by deaths per miles driven? Doing it by population completely ignores factors like the percent of people who actually drive and how much they drive each year.
If you use deaths per inhabitabt it wouldn't surprise me that NYC has a very low rate as well (hint: many people don't own cars in NYC).
From article: speed limits and cameras.
That's not the whole picture though.
Infrastructure planning: we have few plane 4-way intersections on high speed roads, most have been replaced with roundabouts.
Most wide highways with oncoming traffic (1+1) have been converted to 2+1 with central barrier, without changing the total width. This removes most high speed collisions. Still lots of accidents but they are now involving cars going in the same direction.
The most important one though is probably much safer cars in recent years. This isn't policy of course, and only tangentially related to Sweden. It's basically helping the bottom line "for free".
Also, not irrelevant: driving drunk is completely socially unacceptable, and the socially acceptable alcohol level is much closer to zero than the legally accepted limit.
As a Dutchman living in Stockholm I can tell you one thing: they should fix their goddamn bike lanes. Sure, they have them, which makes them better than 90% of the rest of the world. They're still shit. There's no separation of car- and bike traffic. To turn left a cyclist first has to cross parallel car traffic, making this unsafer for cyclists (and annoying for the people in cars, for that matter). Key issues:
- the cyclist and driver should meet at a (near) 90 degree angle, so neither requires eyes in the back of their head
- separate the goddamn lanes so neither car nor cyclist feels uncomfortably close to the other
- don't require extra space because every square meter counts in a big city
Well guess what, we've figured this out decades ago in the Netherlands:
In New Zealand they have a nasty habit of painting a bit of the road green, then painting a bit of the footpath green. So the "cycle lane" effectively veers on and off the road, or over busy driveways where no car is looking for cyclists on what to them is the footpath. It's extremely dangerous to follow the cycle lanes our government conjures up. I imagine they have some quota to meet like "X metres of cycle lane".
In general I'm flabbergasted as to why countries don't just look at what has been tried in other trailblazing countries with issues like this. In the case of cycling, the Netherlands and Denmark are so far ahead of the rest of the world that catching up should be a matter of asking us about everything that we've tried, about did (not) work and why, and then stealing the good ideas.
It's not a useful analogy, because seatbelts have a proven safety record, are apart of the vehicle itself (you don't have anything extra to carry around, or leave on the outside of the vehicle where it can be easily stolen or damaged), and aren't nearly as uncomfortable.
The safety record of bicycle helmets is dubious at best, adds an extra cost for low income people, and makes bike sharing programs near unworkable.
Yeap. I have a distinct memory of ending a shift at a temporary factory job, only to find my bicycle helmet had been somehow crushed or smashed while it was attached to the bicycle. The cost of replacing a helmet was worth about 3 hours of my labour at the time.
When I was living in the UK, I was lucky enough to have some separated cycling lanes. The only problem was that they accumulated trash. Generally speaking, you couldn't use them, because they were dangerous to ride on. This, in turn, made drivers (very reasonably) grumpy when you chose to avoid the cycling lanes. Cycling lanes with no dividers had no such trouble and I vastly preferred them. I suppose if you go the divided route you need to make sure you have the infrastructure to keep them clear.
BTW, growing up in Canada and spending most of the rest of my life in Japan, I was stunned by how courteous UK drivers (in general) are towards cyclists. When I hear people complain about cycling in the UK, praising the Netherlands, I've got to think it's some sort of cycling paradise. Cycling trip there is definitely on my bucket list.
To be fair, shitty bike lanes mostly appear in the inner city of Stockholm where bikelanes have been retrofitted onto existing roads using only roadmarkings.
Yes, the Dutch way of building bike lanes are superior, but there's also a lot more bikers in the Netherlands, so it's easier to justify spending money on rebuilding roads instead of retrofitting there.
It's more likely that it's flat enough. Denmark is the same, it's really flat (highest mountain: 150m), which makes biking to work or the store less work, so you don't arrive in a sweaty mess. It's easy to bike, so more people do it, so there's more demand and infrastructure for it.
Denmark also has an incredibly high spot-tax on cars, which makes biking even more attractive.
I have a bunch of friends in Stockholm though who bought electric-assisted cargo bikes, which make it easy enough to take the kids to school or get to work or go grocery shopping, so that might make biking more attractive overall.
It was an aggressive campaign for road safety stretching back to the 70's. The demand, in some form, was always there but it took a while for the road designs and technology to catch up.
I completely agree. Part of the problem I suppose is that the seasons are much more pronounced in Stockholm than in (say) Amsterdam, so the number of cyclists biking to work at rush hour tomorrow is vastly lower than the number you'll see a Monday morning in summer. That leads to poor utilization of the infrastructure in winter, should more of the (already limited) space be dedicated to cyclists. For cycling to be really viable I'd like to see cross town bike roads not just dedicated lanes on regular roads. A few streets have been shut down for road traffic already but I hope more will come.
May I ask why? As a year round bike commuter without a metro card I can not find any good reasons to chose bus/metro over riding a bike. The bike is almost always faster and gives me superior flexibility.
Haha, yeah, guess I've turned fanatic over the years. But really, I hear these comments all the time and I can't get my head around them.
1) It's definitely no colder than taking the metro. I put on significantly less clothes when I hop on my bike an hour from now and with proper clothing I stay dry and ventilated.
2) Snow clearance is prioritized on the bike roads. So far this year snow has only been a problem one day. That's when the snow chaos hit Stockholm. My friend got stuck in a car for 7 hours. My bike commute took 20 minutes longer than normal.
3) I have have studded tyres, I have not installed them this year though. Ice is hardly ever a problem. The bike roads are salted, which, ironically is the biggest problem of them all for me. Salt ruins the bikes, so I recommend using a cheaper bike in the winter.
It's faster, I get an hour of "free" workout each day and I can get to wherever I like inside the city without combining different modes of transportation using and app and standing in the cold waiting. When it's cold outside, I'd rather be moving.
In general I just feel liberated by having a bike, in the sense that I can quickly move from A to B on my own accord; unless you go directly from station to station, you can often beat the metro in terms of speed (without driving fast)). Depending on busses and subways for transportation makes me feel a bit uneasy (which is a bit unreasonable, I know, but the feeling is there). I also get antsy from just sitting all day at work and then on my commute too; the time spent waiting for and sitting in the bus/metro feels like dead time. By comparison, riding a bike makes me feel like I'm on the move and doing something.
But hey, I'm Dutch. My love of bikes is part of my culture. I can totally see how a long commute in the metro can be a moment of relaxation too, in-between work and family life at home; it just doesn't apply to me.
Thats still heavily subsidized. If you commute twice per day it's under €2 per way which is relatively cheap in a city where a beer is €8 and your lunch is €10.
The U.S. would drive you mad. Pun intended. But yeah, there's a lot of bike lanes without car/bike separation in U.S. cities. The best (worst?) example of this are lanes with sharrows.
This is madness for cyclist and driver. As a cyclist, I don't like basically taking up the whole line by riding right over the sharrow, which is what I'm supposed to do to avoid being doored. But then a car can't legally pass if there's a double yellow line. And yet they do pass in the U.S. in this case, because the average U.S. driver doesn't know this is illegal, they don't know it because the primary means of learning to drive: parents or family member > other people honking at you and you decide to change your behavior > traffic tickets. There's no mandatory 3rd party (government or private, accredited) school.
And on top of it, everywhere else there are no sharrows, increasingly people think cyclists are riding on those streets illegally, which is not true.
A motorist going 10 mph on a 30 mph speed limit street isn't breaking any law, neither is a cyclist. Driving slow on a single lane road is not impeding traffic anymore than red lights, yield signs, or left hand turns are impeding traffic.
Yeah, in California it is similar except you need to use the bike lane if there is one and it is safe. But you are allowed to leave it for debris or other reasons. On single lane highways with no passing lane, if 5 or more cars are behind you, you are expected to turn off so they can pass. But most will just illegally pass.
Year around bike commuter in Stockholm here... Thanks for that roundabout video, it was a freaking joy to watch. The bikes can cruise at a good speed while being separated from the cars and the pedestrians too.
Mark Wagenbuur's videos are spectacular, and they just keep getting better too. I wish every traffic planner and urban politician in the world watched them so they could see where the bar is set.
I think your requirements are fundamentally impossible to implement because they conflict with one another.
> - separate the goddamn lanes so neither car nor cyclist feels uncomfortably close to the other
This requires more space.
> - don't require extra space because every square meter counts in a big city
This requires less space.
Like, it's easy to gripe about any particular traffic design, but the domain is constrained by a large set of fundamentally opposed requirements, so it's always a big compromise in the end.
You could fit ten people side-by-side on there. There are a few areas where this is necessary. Most do not, and this is one of the latter. Also note how they squeeze a tiny strip of bike lane between parking and regular road. Even without any other change, there is no reason to prefer road/bike lane/parking over road/parking/bike lane.
You turn left by getting in front of the row of stopped cars, e.g. [1] in Amsterdam shows such an intersection.
This is a common pattern in The Netherlands, and the one I personally prefer to what you describe, since aside from a full roundabout it offers the best trade-off between safety and commute speed while on a bicycle.
Granted, my experience of The Netherlands is biased towards central Amsterdam, since it's the only place I've lived, but there's plenty of places there where car & bicycle traffic is mixed. It seems fine to me to mix car & bicycle traffic as long as you force the road speed down, or ensure that the bicycles have priority e.g. on left turns.
In my experience the fastest option is a short, separate simultaneous green light for pedestrians and bikes, like it's done in Groningen. Takes a while to get used to though.
Very interesting. I didn't know about that, or that as their FAQ[1] indicates that local city law can override general Dutch traffic law. I.e. instead of priority to the right applying to these intersections[2] nobody has priority.
Seems confusing, especially as their FAQ stipulates the same intersection will revert back to priority to the right at night when the yellow lights are blinking, but admittedly "priority to the guyw ho wins the game of chicken" is the way it works in the rest of the Netherlands anyway.
If a car almost hits a pedestrian when the car is turning right on a red, whose fault is it? According to Matts-Åke Belin, Sweden's traffic safety strategist, the blame is on whoever designed the intersection.
This. So much this.
This was kind of how I raised kids, moderated forums, etc. When people cannot get along without serious drama, someone running the system has some work to do.
Trying to find someone to blame -- "who started it" -- is a sucky approach. I generally want to figure out how to put a stop to it, not who to point fingers at. And it is an approach that gets uncommonly good results when followed faithfully/to its logical conclusion.
I was struck by their camera system, it would be interesting to have traffic cameras that recorded but did not attempt to enforce traffic violations. Then if you're in court for something there might be an additional piece of information about how safe of a driver you are given how often you've been recorded violating various traffic rules.
In Sunnyvale there are a number of the 'automatic' speed signs (they show you your speed and flash if it is over the limit) and on the streets near me they do seem to improve compliance when they are active. Of course given that they are two lane streets (one lane in each direction) one compliant driver can keep the entire block compliant :-).
I read about one place that trialled red lights that were shorter for roads where the drivers had kept under the speed limit. Push over the limit and you'll get a longer stop at the lights. Defeats the purpose of speeding.
We have a similar system on a specific road over here and what end up happening is there is always that "idiot" who doesn't know about the system and just triggers the penalty for everybody else on the road.
Another change recently was more fine grained speed limits. You now have speeds for each 10 km/h instead of 20. Some roads had their speed limit raised, like from 90 to 100 km/h. I think it has created a higher sense of fairness, and the limits are respected more as a whole.
Having both kmh and mph in two sentences next to one another is very confusing, articles should use one or the other as a primary unit and include the other, if needed, in parenthesis or an aside.
It is beyond me why the traffic strategist quoted in the second paragraph feels that it is necessary to absolve distracted drivers. It is not a prerequisite for what they are doing.
It can't be stressed how vitally important this frame of mind is when dealing with problems of a systemic nature.
It's about shifting away from an ideological frame of mind, where emphasis is placed on enforcing what's perceived as right and punishing what's perceived as wrong, to looking at the sum of parameters that affect an issue.
Way too much energy is spent trying to find the perfect punishment for single individuals in narrowly perceived circumstances.
Arguing that traffic enforcement doesn't work fails to point out that in practice it's loose to the point of worthlessness. You only need to look at drunk driving convictions to realize this.
One doesn't "accidentally" drive drunk nor "accidentally" text and drive. That's not a mistake, it's an all too common cause of traffic fatalities.
Yes, folks are responsible for not doing these things. But we know people do them nevertheless. Not taking this into account when designing roads and public transport seems like reality denial. All that work to get a product that only works in idealized conditions instead of designing roadways so that you get less deaths from things people are doing anyway.
It is not about absolving them, but recognising that people are retarded assholes and there will be human error as long as we have human drivers. So if we want to make driving safer, we must change the traffic environment.
It's a matter of practicality. They came to the conclusion that enforcement would not actually accomplish the goal they had in mind, regardless of the right or wrong of it.
It's not a prerequisite for what they are doing, but it's a prerequisite to get political buy in to go down that round rather than spend more effort on trying to enforce behavior that seems to be unenforceable. Of course you could try both at the danger time in theory but that seems like a much harder sell given most political systems.
> But unlike almost every other scheme to make roads safer, Vision doesn't try to blame the victim or the perpetrator.
Oh right, because the car safety tech responsible for the lion's share of the lives saved over the past few decades is all about blaming the perpetrator.
I think you misread that. It is not about blaming the driver, in the sense that we all know driver will continue to drive poorly. So if we want change, we can't just blame the bad drivers and go on designing cars and roads the same way. Instead we need to design the roads, knowing that bad drivers will be using them.
We in Sweden have some of the worlds highest standards for drivers tests. You could blame bad drivers and raise the standards even more. But you know what? Some people will drive without even having a license. You can't stop people like that unless you ban cars altogether.
No, I think you misread me. I am not arguing that we should do more blaming, I am arguing the writer is wrong to assert that this is some miraculous new insight. Most lives saved in recent decades have come from improved safety tech, which has nothing to do with blame and everything to do with minimizing the bad effects of bad driving.
>New York is actually pursuing a version of Vision Zero (though not without a few snags), so perhaps, one day, cars will no longer be able to turn right on red,
> the speed limits are set low, at 30 kmh, or 18.6 mph.
Pet peeve: 30km/h = 20mph. 30.0km/h = 18.6mph. 50km/h = 30mph, not 31mph. It's so annoying when people don't do significant digits correctly when converting between metric and imperial, it completely breaks the flow.
> 30 kph is a speed limit and thus an exact number, not an approximation to 1 SF. Thus, 18.6 mph is more correct than 20 mph.
No, because the imperial speed limit corresponding to 30km/h is 20mph, and imperial drivers would have encountered that and thus would have a clear and absolutely trivial frame of reference. Likewise 50km/h and 30mph.
18.6mph and 31mph is not correct, it's worthless pedantry completely missing the point to the disservice of the reader.
My pet peeve is that it is way too slow. Sorry but I don't want to spend an extra day a month in traffic so retarded teens can send sms back and forth without ending in a collision.
It's exactly that mindset that kills people by statistical inevitability. Each society is of course free to make the choice, and as a result the US has four times as many fatal accidents per capita as Sweden.
Also, 30km/h is used in the same places that would be 25mph zones in the US, i.e. residential areas and school zones on thoroughfares. The default speed on larger roads in cities is 50km/h, which is just below 35mph, a very common city throughfare speed limit in the US.
And on the flipside, many Swedish freeways have a speed limit of 120km/h, i.e. 75mph, which you're hard pressed to find in the US at all, and certainly not in California. It's only in the last decade they've changed the speed limit to 120km/h, but it's because freeways have been made safer, and cars have been made safer, so it makes sense to raise the limit.
Try getting the speed limit raised in California. I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting for that.
I don't think anyone reasonably expects them to eliminate fatalities in traffic. It's just a goal to work towards, or in other words it's a way to market the initiative.
