Tuesday, May 24, 2016

The Significance Of Vision Zero

By Daniel Young


Property worth billions is damaged and lives lost due to highway accidents that occur each year. As a result, a global initiative called vision zero was started to achieve road safety. The short form VZ will be used in this writing, although it is not a standard abbreviation. VZ has the key goal of achieving highway systems in which accidents resulting from road traffic are not fatal.

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.

In order to achieve the objectives of the project, certain limits have been suggested on speed. Suggested speed limits are based on the limits of human being and vehicles. For example, if an accident occurs in which a car knocks a person, if the car is well designed, the person can effectively stand a hit at a speed of 30 km/h. Frontal impact between cars on the other hand can be withstood to speeds not more than 70 km/h in well-designed cars. For side impact, one will be safe in a well-designed vehicle at up to 50 km/h.

If there is need for more speed in areas with high levels of pedestrian traffic, it is suggested that pedestrian crossings should be separated from vehicular traffic. Otherwise, vehicles should only travel at speeds less than 30 km/h when moving through urban areas. In areas where the road is designed to prevent any form of frontal or side impacts, the initiative suggests that car can move at speeds above 100 km/h.

Many ways can be used to ensure that there is no frontal and side impacts. For starters, opposing traffic could be separated by constructing crash barriers on the roads. Another method involves keeping vulnerable and slow-moving road users from high-speed sections of the road system. Additional techniques are use of grade separation and limiting access.

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 level of impact experienced from this project is highest in developed states. There has been a significant fall in the number of fatalities. The same is not true in poor countries where adoption has been slow and non-uniform while fatalities rise yearly. Achieving zero fatalities globally is a goal that is still far from recognition, but it is achievable.




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