Thursday, May 26, 2016

Significant And Goals Of Vision Zero

By Daniel Young


Highway accidents claim a lot of lives and destroy billions of dollars of property each year that they have become a major concern worldwide. Vision zero refers to a project that was initiated globally to assist in achieving road safety. The abbreviation VZ will be used in this article. The major goal of this highway project is the achievement of highway systems that lack serious injuries or fatalities due to road traffic.

The project operates under several principles that govern the construction and other aspects of the highway system. The four main principles are ethics, responsibility, safety, and mechanisms. Under the principle of ethics, human life is given priority over all other objectives of road traffic systems such as mobility.

The emphasis of the responsibility principle is shared responsibility between providers and regulators of road traffic systems. Under safety principle, consideration must be given to human fallibility to keep chances for error low. In case errors occur, their impact must be lowest. The emphasis for the mechanism for change principle is importance for change to achieve the goals of the project.

There are specific speed limits that are suggested by the project towards the achievement of its objectives. The speeds suggested are based on the limits of automobiles and human beings. For instance, human beings have a tolerance of 30 km/h if the car is well designed. Similarly, well designed cars remain safe at 70 km/h for frontal impact and 50 km/h in side impacts.

Pedestrian and vehicular traffic need to be separated in situations where vehicles must move at high speeds. Otherwise, it is advisable to constrain the speeds of all vehicles moving through urban setting to less than 30 km/h. According to recommendations of the initiative, speeds of over 100 km/h may be achieved if the design of the road does not permit side or frontal impact.

The possibility of frontal and side impacts can be prevented in many ways. The first method involves separating opposing traffic through the construction of crash barriers. Also, vulnerable road users and slower vehicles can be prohibited from accessing road sections on which vehicles are required to move at high speeds. Additional methods is limiting access and using grade separation.

VZ has been adopted differently by countries. The adoption has been done to all road systems in some countries while some countries have limited the adoption to certain areas and roads. For example, in Canada, Edmonton City adopted the initiative in 2015 way before other cities followed suit.

The impact of the project has been seen to be highest in developed countries where it has reduced the number of traffic fatalities significantly. In poor countries however, the adoption has been slow and non-uniform and traffic fatalities seem to continue rising. So far, the project is very promising and there is hope for achieving zero fatalities on highway road systems around the world.




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