‘Safe Land Use:’ A Key to Road Safety

In an interview with Streetsblog for The Brake podcast, outgoing head of Washington state’s Department of Transportation Roger Millar describes why he believes including public health in Vision Zero discussions is key to saving more lives and making U.S. streets and roads safer and healthier for the people who use and live around them.

Discussing Washington’s “safe systems” framework — an approach that prioritizes road design that minimizes the potential harm caused by inevitable human error — Millar notes his focus on “safe land use.” In this view, “What all car crashes have in common is cars. And if you have a threat to public health, the public health community says the first thing you do is, you separate people from the threat.” 

For Millar, “if we can create spaces, communities, neighborhoods, centers that are built around mobility or access that does not involve an automobile, or that minimizes the use of automobile, we would be safer. We have to have this safer land use component to the safe systems.”