OHIO — People traveling on city streets which appear more like highways are paying a high price, a recent study published by Ohio State University researchers suggests.
Professor Harvey Miller, a co-author of the study and Director of Ohio State University’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, explained that researchers wanted to see if roadways which look like highways to drivers set the stage for more reckless driving and crashes.
In the end, Miller said they do, for several reasons.
“So the idea here is that we’ve been designing streets in the wrong ways for many decades in this country,” Miller said. “(B)ecause traffic engineers aren’t taking into account human behavior into their design specifications… we’ve actually designed roads in busy areas where there’s people, commercial activity, driveways, things like that.”
This has given place to drivers going faster, which has led to more serious crashes, he said.
While there are design challenges, Miller clarified what the environment looks like to drivers in certain areas plays a large part as well.
“In contrast, places where we saw like trees and where we saw trash cans, those are more signifiers of residential areas, where people drive more mindfully and drive more slowly and therefore we see fewer crashes,” Miller said.
Miller noted that traffic engineers need to design these roads in a way that leads to more mindful behavior.
