Speeding up Technology Use for Setting Equitable Speed Limits

A 55-year-old hotel worker, Patrick Shannon, was struck by a speeding vehicle as he was bicycling home from his job at the Anaheim Marriott. He was found unconscious with severe head injuries and died six days later. This street violence happened in 2009. Ten years earlier 18-year-old Anaheim resident John Lee LaBord was bicycling home from his shoe store job and wound up being lodged into the broken windshield of a speeding car that continued to drive for another 13 miles before dumping the cyclists body.

These are two of many tragic events that occurred during my tenure as City of Anaheim Transportation Manager. The cyclists are long dead, but the memories don’t die. These are regrettable examples of the 35,000 to 40,000 road deaths happening each year in the U.S. – and the numbers are rising.

Speed Kills

Despite the trend of more communities embracing the concept of smart cities, which can lead to vast improvements for in-car safety technology – from electronic stability control systems to rearview cameras and additional airbags – as well as improved road sensor technology, 2016 saw a 6% rise in road fatalities compared to the year before. This increase is higher for our most vulnerable road users: pedestrians and cyclists.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), speed-related crash deaths numbered 112,000 in the U.S. between 2005 and 2014 – an average of 10,000 deaths a year. Millions more crash survivors are left with life-altering injuries. Vision Zero produces an interactive map showing tragic accidents that could have been avoided with better speed limit laws.

How could these deaths have been avoided, or at least reduced?

Aside from the more broad-brush moves by jurisdictions to promote lower speed limits in the fight against rising traffic fatalities, I would argue that the logic underpinning how current speed limits are set is outdated and must change.

Setting the Pace

Speed limits are set by state and local agencies, typically following guidance from the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. The most widely used speed-setting method in North America is called the engineering approach, whereby the speed at which 85 of 100 measured vehicles travel during uncongested times is the predominant factor used in establishing speed limits.

As I mentioned in my recent ITE Journal article on active transportation users setting safe speed limits, this base speed may be adjusted according to traffic and infrastructure conditions not readily apparent to the driver, such as high pedestrian or bicycle activity, but few if any jurisdictions have quantitative criteria for adjustments to the 85th percentile speed.

Old Habits Die Hard

The ludicrous thing about the 85th percentile approach, which has justifiably been described as laissez-faire, is based on 53-year-old research by David Solomon, whose 1964 study found that the risk of a vehicle collision increased at speeds above and below the mean speed of all traffic.

Despite Mr. Solomon’s study being confined to “main rural highways”, it is currently being applied across the U.S. for use in busy, urban street segments in dense and multimodal Smart Cities.

Calls for Change

Fortunately, leading up to the recent NTSB report, there has been a crescendo of calls for a change to the way speed limits are set:

• The National Association of Transportation Officials 2017 Policy has called for state laws and rules that set speed limits at the 85^th percentile to be repealed.
• Vision Zero Network’s 2017 Moving from Vision to Action report prioritization to directly and assertively manage speeds on roadways by collecting, analyzing and using data to manage speed to safe levels.
• California’s 2017 Toward an Active California State Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan’s strategy to research methods for setting and enforcing speed limits, other than the standard approach that now uses the 85^th percentile.
  

The Alternative Mindset

At the core of the drive to propagate the idea of Smart Cities is a desire to harness data and gain insights to solve urban challenges. If sensors are collecting vehicle data only, the data will not speak to the volumes of pedestrians and bicyclists using the street network – the vulnerable road users (VRUs) that are essential to Smart Community initiatives to expand transportation options, reduce transportation congestion and environmental costs.

To accelerate the relationship between data and action, smart sensors can be deployed to collect data on the mode shares of trips made by VRUs. De-risking the urban street network should clearly begin by setting safer speed limits where there are higher mode shares of VRUs.

The Road Ahead

As the NTSB report highlights, speed is a deadly problem on our streets and roads, and we must do more to address it. The NTSB concludes that expert systems such as USLIMITS2 can improve the setting of speed limits by allowing traffic engineers to systematically incorporate crash statistics and other factors, including quantified pedestrian and cyclist mode shares, in addition to the 85^th percentile speed.

The NTSB further recommends that the Federal Highway Administration revise the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices so that factors currently listed as optional for all engineering studies are required, and that the guidance that speed limits in speed zones should be within 5 mph of the 85^th percentile speed be removed.

The ubiquitous sensors that make cities smart can inform the speed limit setting process by confirming who the users of the roadway are, so that posted speed limits address the safety of all known road users.

The Bottom Line

Do away with the historic speed limit setting approach based on outdated research and save lives by embracing a data-driven alternative where pedestrians and cyclists count.

This article was originally published on October 9, 2017 at Meeting of the Minds.

About the Author

John Lower is associate vice president, Roadway Sensors at Iteris.

Connect with John on LinkedIn.