Pedestrian Safety | “If a child cannot move there alone, the street needs to be redone”

Children who live in a healthy city can develop their independence and get around on foot, by bicycle or by public transport, without fear of being knocked down by the driver of a motorized vehicle, says Stein van Oosteren, international speaker on active mobility, author of the book Why not the bike? and spokesperson for the Collectif vélo Île-de-France, which is behind the great wave of securing active travel in Paris. The Press spoke to him.

Q. The cities of Quebec have experienced several pedestrian deaths, including a child killed on the way to school, and several serious injuries are to be deplored, including a school crossing guard caught while working. In concrete terms, how can streets be designed to reduce the danger posed by motorized travel in urban areas?

R. It’s simple: the street must reflect the Highway Safety Code. What does the Code say? That the most vulnerable road users have priority at intersections. But, in fact, the road improvements are in conflict with the Code, because they give priority to drivers of motorized vehicles, whereas they do not have it. This is what we have to work on.

A concrete example is to make crossing sidewalks. In North America, cut sidewalks are found almost everywhere, meaning that the sidewalk ends and the pedestrian must go down the street to cross. A crossing sidewalk does not stop, it crosses the street with the pedestrian and is compatible with the Highway Safety Code. Pedestrians are also more visible, because they stay higher than the street.

It’s the same thing with crossroads: cyclists and pedestrians are marginalized there. Creating a Dutch-style intersection, with islands that give space to cyclists and force drivers to make a bigger turn and slow down, is an excellent solution.

Q. It often feels like places like the Netherlands have always been paradises for walking and cycling. This is to forget that, in the 1950s and 1960s, the car was king there and active travel was just as dangerous there as elsewhere…

R. Absolutely. Children were regularly killed by motor vehicle drivers in the Netherlands, and cars were all over the streets. In 1971, 6-year-old Simone Langenhoff was killed by a driver as she was cycling to school. It was his father, Vic Langenhoff, who then campaigned to make active travel safer, and launched a national movement that put people back at the heart of cities.

Since the early 2000s, the number of pedestrians fatally struck by drivers of motor vehicles in the United States and Canada has increased enormously. Why ? Because there was no desire to calm the traffic.

There’s also the fashion for SUVs, which are deadlier in crashes because they have a high profile and hit people in the vitals, not the legs, and have huge blind spots. In town, SUVs are like blind elephants in a china shop: the worst way to avoid damage is to stick a little message on the china saying, “Be careful with the china.” The only way to make gains is to put up physical barriers and prevent the elephant from entering the scene. In North America, it hasn’t been done, the roads are huge, motorists are very encouraged to pick up speed and make turns that have been designed so that they don’t have to slow down. What we are sacrificing is a nice city, a city for our children.

Forget the labels “pedestrians” and “cyclists”… The question to ask is: “Do we want a city where a 9-year-old child can go to school alone? In the Netherlands, this is the case: three out of four children go to school alone. If we want that, we must radically accept our way of developing public space to make it an active space. Older people need moderate physical activity every day. Children up to age 18 need 60 minutes of physical activity a day. However, in the Western world, children have lost a quarter of their cardiovascular capacity over the past 40 years. The children are inside the buildings, in front of their screens, vegetating. For their movements, they are carried around on the back seat of a vehicle. It is bad physically, but also psychologically, because a child who is transported does not develop his mental autonomy. He gets used to someone else deciding for him.

Q. There are 168 “school streets” in Paris, streets that have recently been pedestrianized, greened and given back to schoolchildren and citizens after having been intended for motorized transit for a long time. How was this accepted by the population?

R. Car traffic was cut off in these streets, but they did it in a very impressive way. They didn’t just put up a barrier, because by putting up a barrier, you’re cutting off traffic, but visually you’re leaving intact what I call the “big dangerous black snake”, which is the old-fashioned street, designed for cars, which is like a snake that goes everywhere and which presses other users along the facades of buildings. What Paris has done is they have completely turned these streets into a kind of plaza. This is what they did in rue Éblé, near my office, which has become a square full of greenery where children play and learn to ride bicycles. Before, the middle of the road was the most dangerous place, after, the middle of the road becomes the nicest place where everyone wants to hang out, and that’s the key to making these projects work.