ACT Health established programs to encourage walking and cycling to school in 2012. A decade later, most schools still do not participate in these programs. The participation rate for secondary schools is much lower than for primary schools. The ACT Government is slow to improve infrastructure around schools for active travel. Roads must be perceived as safe for these programs to succeed. What will it take to change this?
Category Archives: safety
Making our cities feel safe so that we are encouraged to cycle and walk instead of taking the car.
TCCS fails our schools
A demonstration of a car centric culture is the preference to duplicate arterials rather than fix the infrastructure around our schools. Good local road infrastructure is what makes our suburbs walkable and rideable. For children to walk or ride to school we need good and safe infrastructure within a kilometre of all schools. First, we need to make the roads safe for kids, and only then will parents think about other alternatives to driving children to school.
National Road Safety Week: 15-22 May 2022
Drive so others survive! National Road Safety Week is coming up next week, 15 to 22 May 2022. Traffic injury is the biggest killer of Australian children under 15. Amongst vulnerable road users, children are the most vulnerable. We need our children to be safe crossing roads if they are to walk to school. Many schools regard the existing safety to be inadequate. Let TCCS do more and talk less.
High on speed: can we kick the habit?
Speeding has become the norm in Canberra. “In a 60 km/h speed limit area, the risk of involvement in a casualty crash doubles with each 5 km/h increase in travelling speed above 60 km/h.” 5 km/h above the speed limit is the equivalent of the blood alcohol concentration of 0.05. We have kicked the drink driving habit, can we now kick the speeding habit? A 25-year-old Australian study warns of the dangers of speeding.
Fix My Street repair delays
The average wait time for an issue to be resolved was 52.20 days. This is considerably longer than the answer provided before the PTCS Committee. What we should learn from this is we need to request data to monitor the quality of services. Opinions do not count.
Local Area Traffic Management in Kambah
Local Area Traffic Management is about identifying a range of measures to make streets safer – typically through traffic calming. For over a decade, TCCS is well aware of the importance of pedestrians and cyclists. Traffic calming is a way to shift the balance on our roads in their favour.
Why schools struggle to improve safety
Children do not walk to school because cars make it unsafe to do so. To improve road safety for children around schools, we require traffic calming measures, on all sides, and to create safe zones where children can move without crossing motor vehicles. Any approach will require some government expenditure and urban renewal. TCCS have named the process Local Area Traffic Management (LATM). Lyneham Primary School e-Petition is a typical attempt to improve safety around the school. The chances of any improvement, however, are low. 😦
Making intersections safe
Making an intersection safe may involve signalisation – in normal language, we would say traffic lights. Traffic lights work but are expensive. The price is justified in the case of high traffic volumes or many accidents (Black Spot Program). For side streets, the simpler and cheaper way is zebra crossing.
Community paths: audited around 700 from 3,000 kilometres
Transcript Of Evidence for the Standing Committee On Planning, Transport And City Services from 4 March 2021. The Standing Committee discusses transport and planning issues that related to cycling, but not all that often. The relevant information from the last time is found here.
Barriers to active travel: perceptions of a safety
Active travel faces many barriers. One is our perceptions of a safety, or fear. As a society, we seem to be getting more fearful. Our perceptions of safety are important. Psychology and neuroscience has come a long way to explaining our nature. The availability cascade is a contributing factor in our perception of risk.
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