Traffic calming

Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, car drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. It has become a tool to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe (especially Northern Europe), but less so in North America. Traffic calming is a calque (literal translation) of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau.
In its early development in the UK in the 1930s, traffic calming was based on the idea that residential areas should be protected from through-traffic. Subsequently, it became valued for its ability to improve pedestrian safety and reduce noise and air pollution from traffic.
For much of the 20th century, streets were designed by engineers who were charged only with ensuring smooth motor vehicular traffic flow and not with fostering the other functions of streets. Traffic calming initiatives have grown to consider other design functions as well. For example, it has been shown that car traffic severely impairs the social and recreational functions of public streets. The Livable Streets study by Donald Appleyard (1981) found that residents of streets with light traffic had, on average, three more friends and twice as many acquaintances as the people on streets with heavy traffic which were otherwise similar in dimensions, income, etc.
Traffic engineers refer to three "E's" when discussing traffic calming: engineering, (community) education, and (police) enforcement. Because neighborhood traffic management studies have shown that residents often contribute to the perceived speeding problem within their neighborhoods, instructions on traffic calming (for example in Hass-Klau et al., 1992) stress that the most effective traffic calming plans entail all three components—that engineering measures alone will not produce satisfactory results.
Engineering measures involve physically altering the road layout or appearance to actively or passively reduce traffic speeds by one of several means:
Measures include speed humps, chicanes, curb extensions, modal filters, and living street and shared space type schemes. The town of Hilden in Germany has achieved a rate of 24% of trips being on two wheels, mainly via traffic calming and the use of 30 km/h or 20 mph zones. In 1999, the Netherlands had over 6000 woonerven where cyclists and pedestrians have legal priority over cars and where a motorised "walking speed" limit applies. However, some UK and Irish "traffic calming" schemes, particularly involving road narrowings, are viewed as extremely hostile and have been implicated directly in death and injury to cyclists and pedestrians.
A number of visual changes to roads are being made to encourage more attentive driving, reduced speed, reduced crashes, and a greater tendency to yield to pedestrians. Visual traffic calming includes lane narrowings (2.7–3.0 m (9–10 ft)), road diets (reduction in lanes), use of trees next to streets, on-street parking, and buildings placed in urban fashion close to streets.
Physical devices include speed humps, speed cushions and speed tables, sized for the desired speed. Such measures normally slow cars to between 16 and 40 kilometres per hour (10 and 25 mph). Most devices are made of asphalt or concrete but rubber traffic calming products are emerging as an effective alternative with several advantages.
Physical traffic calming can include the following engineering measures, grouped by similarity of method:
Quite often residents have used a variety of homemade devices ranging from faux enforcement camera signs and even faux speed cameras and including dummy police. Some Canadian communities erect flexible bollards in the middle of the street in school zones. The bollards have a sign affixed indicating a 40 km/h speed limit.
There are primarily two implementation options for the creation of traffic calming measure: capital reconstruction versus operational changes.
Enforcement and education measures for traffic calming include:
Speed reduction has traditionally been attempted by the introduction of statutory speed limits. Traffic speeds of 30 km/h (20 mph) and lower are said to be more desirable on urban roads with mixed traffic. The Austrian city of Graz, which has achieved steady growth in cycling, has applied 30 km/h limits to 75% its streets since 1994. Zones where speeds are set at 30 km/h (or 20 mph) are preferred by some as they are found to be effective at reducing crashes and increasing community cohesion. Speed limits which are set below the speed that most motorists perceive to be reasonable for the given road require additional measures to improve compliance. Attempts to improve speed limit observance are usually by either education, enforcement or road engineering. "Education" can mean publicity campaigns or targeted road user training.
Speed limit enforcement techniques include: direct police action, automated systems such as speed cameras or vehicle activated signs or traffic lights triggered by traffic exceeding a preset speed threshold. One cycling expert argues for placing direct restrictions on motor-vehicle speed and acceleration performance. An EU report on promoting walking and cycling specifies as one of its top measures comprehensive camera-based speed control using mainly movable equipment at unexpected spots. The Netherlands has an estimated 1,500 speed/red-light camera installations and has set a target for 30 km/h limits on 70% of urban roads. The UK has more than 6,000 speed cameras, which took more than £100 million in fines in 2006/07.
Traffic calming has been successfully used for decades in cities across Europe. For example, a living street (sometimes known as home zones or by the Dutch word woonerf, as the concept originated in the Netherlands) towards the end of the 1960s, initially in Delft, is a street in which the needs of car drivers are secondary to the needs of other road users; traffic calming principles are integrated into their design. From the Netherlands, the concept spread rapidly to Germany, starting in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1976, and had become very widespread by the early 1980s. The ideas and techniques also spread to the UK towards the end of the 1980s, and practice there was advocated by academics such as Tim Pharaoh and Carmen Hass-Klau. The guidelines published by Devon County Council (of which Tim Pharaoh was the principal author) in 1991 were particularly well received.
In the United Kingdom, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods incorporate traffic calming and filtered permeability. In 2020, some LTNs were introduced with emergency funding from the government, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A study found that people living in LTNs in Waltham Forest became less likely to own a car and were more likely to walk or cycle.
School Streets are another UK scheme which involves part-time restrictions on motor vehicles during school pick up and drop off times.
In Ireland, traffic calming schemes have been implemented on national roads since 1993, typically on those with a hard shoulder, on the approach to towns and villages where the speed limit is reduced from 100 km/h to 50 or 60 km/h. This is done by reducing the width of the hard shoulder and the carriageway, various landscaping and installation of 'gateways' in order to reduce the driver's field of view, which results in a reduction of their speed. A gateway marks the transition from high-speed to low-speed road and may feature a pavement, cycle lane, central island (where the road is sufficiently wide enough) or all three, and is accompanied with town/village entrance and speed limit signs as well as bollards and a lamppost in the island.
An evaluation of 91 traffic calming schemes implemented between 1997 and 2002 showed that they were successful in reducing road collisions, the number of which decreased by 13%. The number of fatal collisions was reduced by 52%.
By 2017, San Francisco's Vision Zero program, which heavily features traffic calming, has reduced fatalities by 33%.
A 2018 study found that traffic calming measures in Portland, Oregon reduced excessive speeds, reduced daily traffic volume by 16% and increased home prices by 1%.
Various forms of traffic calming are used in Japanese cities, particularly in large cities like Tokyo and Yokohama. Tokyo's narrow streets force automobiles and pedestrians to be close to one another; a common traffic calming technique in Tokyo is to change the surface material and/or texture of the shoulder of narrow roads, which helps define the boundary between cars and pedestrians, while allowing cars to use the shoulder to pass each other after yielding to pedestrians.
A Cochrane Review of studies found that there is evidence to demonstrate the efficacy of traffic calming measures in reducing traffic-related injuries and may even reduce deaths. However, the review found that more evidence is needed to demonstrate its efficacy in low income countries.
Media related to Traffic calming at Wikimedia Commons