Planning for safer roads for pedestrians and bicyclists…we need your input!

The following entry illustrates the transformation of Southeast Michigan into a walkable, bikeable place. Please take a moment to complete our brief survey, which will aid SEMCOG and our region’s communities in making walking and biking more safe.

The Good

More and more, people want and need to travel around our region in different ways. Specifically, walking and biking are becoming much more popular not just for recreation, but for reaching the places people need to go.

Southeast Michigan has made great strides in recent years, adding to and realigning our transportation system to respond to these shifting trends. This means providing more opportunities to safely and easily reach a job, visit a park, or simply go for a pleasant bike ride.

To meet these demands, communities have begun planning and implementing locally appropriate facilities, such as:

• Buffered bike lanes with green pavement to remind drivers to watch out for bicyclists along Livernois Avenue in Ferndale;
• Protected bike lanes along East Jefferson in Detroit; or
• More than five miles of recent greenways and trails in Pittsfield Township.

Bike lane with green paint, Ferndale

To create safer, walkable connections to retail shopping in our downtowns or core services such as neighborhood grocery stores or health care facilities, communities are installing a wide-range of facilities to improve access and walkability, including mid-block crossing facilities and pedestrian oriented streetscapes. Examples include:

• Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons(RRFBs) along 14 Mile Road in Clawsons;
• High-Intensity Activated crossWalk(HAWK) signals along Michigan Avenue in Ypsilanti; or
• Simply widening sidewalks to make multiuse trails while slowing down traffic with road diets and medians, as seen along Dixie Highway in Monroe.

High intensity Activated crossWalk, Ypsilanti

Opportunities to recreate, exercise, and simply enjoy the outdoors are in high demand. Inter-agency efforts to build up regional and statewide trail networks are striving to meet this demand. The biggest example of this coordination is the ongoing development of the Iron Belle Trail which, when completed, will be a 2,000-mile trail, comprised of two routes stretching from Belle Isle in Detroit to Ironwood in the Upper Peninsula. On a more local scale, the impressive Blue Water River Walk in Port Huron provides more than a mile of trail and access to the St Clair River, and is part of the planned 54-mile Bridge to Bay Trail. This fantastic asset just received SEMCOG’s 2017 Regional Showcase Award!

Blue Water Riverwalk, Port Huron

The Bad

While our region continues to push the needle toward making our streets more accessible for all users, especially for walkers and bikers, we are seeing a troubling increase in crashes and fatalities involving these most vulnerable users. In fact, while crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists make up approximately one percent of all traffic crashes, they account for 30 percent of all traffic fatalities in Southeast Michigan. Additional and location-specific data on all crashes that have occurred in the region, including pedestrian and bicycle crashes, are mapped on SEMCOG’s recently launched High Priority Safety Locations map.

The following graphs show the relative rates of crashes (left) and fatalities (right) for road users.

Simply put – pedestrians and bicyclists are our most vulnerable road users, and they are much more likely to suffer an injury or fatality in a traffic crash than drivers. We know that infrastructure investments, such as protected bike lanes and pedestrian actuated signals at crosswalks, make our roadways safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. However, they cannot and do not account for potentially unsafe behaviors and actions of the driver, the walker, or the bicyclist. While it is true that we need to continue to make our roadways, sidewalks, intersections, and bicycle facilities safer, these improvements only go so far. A few statistics from the last five years make this clear:

• 65% of pedestrian fatalities occurred in the roadway and not in a designated crosswalk;
• 80% of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities occurred in dark conditions, with or without street light; and
• Slowing vehicle travel down saves lives; studies reveal that nine out of 10 pedestrians hit by a vehicle traveling 20 mph survive the crash, while only one out of 10 survive a crash when the vehicle is traveling 40 mph.

While this data does not account for the impacts of factors such as distracted driving or increases in the number of cars and bicyclists on our roadways, it does show that engineering and enforcement of laws can only go so far in reducing pedestrian and bicyclist crashes. Education and promotion of safe behaviors while traveling on roads are vital to saving lives and improving safety for everyone.

The Action

To create safer behavior, we must first work to better understand decision-making. How well do people understand the laws and infrastructure created to assure their safety? How often do people do things that are proven to increase their safety? How often do people take risks that increase danger?

To gather residents’ perceptions on pedestrian and bicycle safety in Southeast Michigan, SEMCOG and its partner organization, the Metropolitan Affairs Coalition (MAC) launched a survey. Responses to this survey will help guide how SEMCOG implements its Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety Education Campaign, which will kick off in May – appropriately, both National Bike Month and Detroit Commuter Challenge month.

Please take a few minutes and complete this survey and share it through your social networks.

We look forward to both reporting our findings, and more importantly using the results to implement our safety education campaign this spring and summer!