Re: “New Seattle intersection designed to make it safer to share the road” [May 20, A1]:
The Dutch-style intersection design is clearly safer for cyclists and architecturally splashy. Nevertheless, this explicit intersection has the east-west by automobile site visitors on Thomas Road blocked by a concrete island, so the potential variety of conflicts for autos and cyclists is considerably lessened vs. that of the everyday intersection. This distinctive facet can be extraordinarily controversial at virtually any intersection aside from very low quantity ones.
Curiously, the high-visibility jacket worn by a strong bicycle owner within the first photograph is for my part essentially the most important security characteristic of the whole article, and it isn’t acknowledged. A really massive examine demonstrated a 55% discount in vehicle-cyclist crashes when “hi-vis” clothes was worn. If the bicycle owner and engineering group had been critical and sensible about Imaginative and prescient Zero, we’d promote laws requiring extremely seen day and night time reflective wearables. This challenge additionally applies to pedestrians throughout darker parts of the day and, after all, at night time.
I submit the dying and damage reductions of that straightforward program would vastly outperform that of additional bodily design modifications of contemporary signalized intersections. The associated fee can be infinitesimal, the financial savings are probably infinite.
Invoice Popp Sr., Bellevue, transportation planning engineer
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