NYC DOT Shares Its Five Principles for Designing Safer Streets

by Ben Fried, Streets Blog

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• Make the street easy to use by accommodating desire lines and minimizing the complexity of driving, walking, and biking, thus reducing crash risk by providing a direct, simple way to move through the street network.
• Create safety in numbers, which makes vulnerable street users such as pedestrians and cyclists more visible. The same design principle, applied to arterial streets when traffic is light, reduces the opportunity for excessive speeds.
• Make the invisible visible by putting users where they can see each other.
• Choose quality over quantity so that roadway and intersection geometries serve the first three design principles.
• Look beyond the (immediate) problem by expanding the focus area if solutions at a particular location can’t be addressed in isolation.

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