Jan Gehl on Safety

Famed architect Jan Gehl presents excerpts from his book Cities for People over at Streetsblog. This time, he's focusing on street types and traffic solutions, and (of course) taking a human-oriented approach:

"A number of recent urban planning ideologies deriving from accident statistics contend that the risk of accident can be reduced by physically mixing types of traffic in the same street under the heading of 'shared space.'

The underlying idea of these so-called shared streets is that they will give trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians of all ages the opportunity to travel quietly, side by side and with good eye contact. Serious accidents will rarely occur under such conditions, or so it is thought, because pedestrians and bicyclists need to be extra vigilant at all times."