The bigger picture

Expanding on 'A picture of Tragedy'

Tokyo, Japan

It was great to see SMH picking up the gauntlet on pedestrian casualties in this article, published today. Our president Marc Lane and former president David Levinson both contributed to the article.

We are less convinced than Newstead et al that the causes of pedestrian injuries lie with ‘careless pedestrians’ on mobile phones or otherwise. A Curtin and Monash University report "In Depth Analysis of pedestrian serious injury crashes" by Hobday et al, 2017 states "the cause of pedestrian crashes is often multifaceted, consisting of a mix of human, environmental and vehicular contributory factors".  These are researched and include poor judgement on both walkers (crossing midblock) and drivers (speeding).

Poor judgement is not the same as carelessness, however. Research by University of Royal Holloway, London in 2010 showed that primary school children cannot accurately judge the speed of vehicles travelling faster than 20mph (30km/h).  The Curtin-Monash report above also states that older people are "because of reduced cognitive skills due to ageing  ... more prone to making incorrect decisions about safe road crossing ... Partly due to poor assessment of car speed...".

This means both the young and old find it difficult to judge crossing time when cars are travelling fast[er than 30km/h]. The reduced motor ability of older people (or inability to run out of danger) was also flagged in the Curtin-Monash report (and the same was observed of children). Additionally, the Curtain-Monash report states "Older people are disproportionately represented...partly due to the relative physical frailty [but] aggregating data on all older pedestrians together will mask differences between the young-old and the old-old pedestrians, including higher hospitalisation rates". 

In other words, it is depth perception of fast cars, frailty and lower mobility that kills our kids and older people - intrinsic conditions that the road environment should be designed to compensate for. Worth noting, too, that it is informal midblock crossing (presumably because of the long distances between crossings in Australia) that is a dominant feature of fatalities and serious injuries to people crossing roads.

Now Vision Zero is also built around 'forgiving road environments', acknowledging that humans are fallible.  The primary action in TfNSW’s own NSW Road Safety Forum Summary Outcomes Report, published just this month, is lowering speed limits. This is because, whether or not the walker, driver or both exercise poor judgement, the walker dying should not be the result - and this is largely down to speed. We were therefore particularly disappointed that Sally Webb, in the SMH article above, seems to be defending higher speeds, despite her role ostensibly being about health and safety (another sign, perhaps, of the latent bias of TfNSW towards maintaining traffic above all else).

NSW data shows overwhelmingly the FSIs are 50km/h or below, with half of all injuries or fatalities at 50km/h (because this is the default speed limit). At 50km/h walkers have a 90% chance of being killed vs 40% at 40km/h and only 10% at 30km/h. This is why we are calling for the default speed limit to be lowered from 50 to 30.

Centre for Road Safety, Crash Survivability

In terms of the growing proportion of female vs male victims, an alternative view to the ‘more men at night’ hypothesis can also be found in the Curtin-Monash report, being greater risk taking in male children (taking gaps in traffic) and more frequent casualties involving alcohol in young adults (also overindexing with men).  Therefore, a closing gap points to, more likely, the relative success of the victim focused road safety campaigns, leaving behind the underlying causes (like driver fault) which do not differentiate their victims by gender.

Now if the Government is committed to Vision Zero and knows road violence is killing and injuring many people, and data shows the impacts of road violence for people walking or riding has flatlined, then something more than crossing guards is needed.  We need to look to the countries that have axhieved vision zero, or very low road deaths and see what they have done. Oslo, Stockholm and Tokyo have embraced 30km/h (see image at top), and have very low pedestrian fatalities.

The data provided by TfNSW could be much clearer too, for example allowing people to better understand deaths by speed limit, or victim details like SEIFA index, age. We need to dig deeper into the troubling sub-category of ‘pedestrians in toy cars’ - are we failing to protect eScooter riders, or kids, or both? We need the ‘value of a statistical life’ by TfNSW to better align to that used by NSW Health and the Federal Government, which are roughly twice as high, and for the walking and cycling health benefits be more in line with best evidence collected for NSW Health and Treasury (and not subjected to an arbitrary ‘rule of half’ that was designed to factor for induced demand reducing travel time savings, and is not a factor in health benefits.

Is it Violence? You may have noticed we used the term “road violence” in both the SMH article and above. This is the term championed by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet in ‘Movement’ - as we have become inured to terms like ‘fatality’ and no longer see these deaths for what they are - acts of deadly violence, that we tolerate somewhat exceptionally in the modern world.

Other cities have reduced road violence and stopped killing and injuring people eg: Hoboken in New Jersey, USA by building separated bike paths and reducing speeds - Sydney could achieve the same results using the same approach.

The simplest, least expensive and most effective way to stop road violence is to reduce speed. WalkSydney asked Councils across Sydney what they were doing to reduce speed on local roads by implementing 30km speed limits on high streets, in school zones or on local suburban streets. About half of Councils surveyed responded, overwhelmingly telling us they have no plans to reduce speed on any roads. TfNSW is responsible for speed limits on all roads – by keeping speeds too high TfNSW is allowing road violence to continue. TfNSW must do more to work with Councils to created safe and healthy streets and that means 30km please !