Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the safety behavior of others. As long as the environment alerts us to
do so, we will focus on others and anticipate their behavior. The fact
thatroaduserstakemorecareintheabovesituationisalsoareflec-
tion of the average speed, which is automatically reduced without
physical obstacles like speed ramps.
More vigilance and safety with fewer rules.
Those who visited London 10 years ago could see small fences along
the streets everywhere; they prevented pedestrians from suddenly cross-
ing the street. In streets with moderate traffic (less than 8000 cars a day)
the number of accidents with injury was reduced to almost 50 percent
after removing these small fences (Webster, 2007). Above the 8000 cars
a day, it is safer to separate the lanes and to disentangle the routes of the
different road users. Many local communities in Sweden, Denmark, The
Netherlands, France, and Macedonia have applied this principle when
organizing their public space (Hammerin, 2006; Palmblad, 2008).
The general conclusion is that fewer accidents happen in situations
where different streams of traffic are mixed in such a way that every-
body easily notices that the streams are mixed.
Although traffic is a specific area within safety management, this
concept of Shared Space shows that wherever people need to align
their activities to those of others, creating a need for understanding
behavior of others is much more effective than regulating behavior via
rules. The traffic discipline is too specific for drawing general conclu-
sions for safety management in general, but it definitely shows that
