Saturday, September 02, 2006

Bicycle safety low hanging fruit? Lower traffic speeds!

Do you think I am an oddball for cheering traffic speed enforcment as a way to save bicycle user lives?

Then please check out these short road safety videos (Warning: some of them are a bit upsetting - which is why they are powerful)

Keeping traffic speeds down (especially to 50 km/h or even lower in places that have a lot of bicycles and pedestrians) is one of the key "low hanging fruit" of bicycle safety. It would also make the streets safer and less stressful for everyone.

Slightly lower speeds would save lives even if the LTA NEVER decides to do anything else to help cycling and even if we cannot get ANY road safety messages across to any of those badly behaved bicycle users out there.

And it is low hanging fruit because the traffic police are apparently ALREADY quite keen to do better on speed enforcement, as I mentioned before.



Image from Flikr user
GeKow (some rights reserved)