Mobilidade Urbana 9 | JosePauloEcon

A new study by the International Transport Forum examines safety aspects associated with e-scooters and other micro-vehicles.

Download the report for free: www.itf-oecd.org/safe-micromobility

Paris, 17 February 2020 – Existing urban traffic patterns are being challenged by a new phenomenon: Micromobility – the electric scooters, e-bikes, motorised skateboards and other light personal mobility devices that have become hugely popular, along with traditional bicycles, for short trips.

But is micromobility safe ? A new report published by the International Transport Forum finds that:

E-scooter riders do not face significantly higher risk of road traffic death or injury than cyclists.
Motor vehicles are involved in 80% of fatal crashes with e-scooters and bicycles.
Traffic will be safer if e-scooter and bicycle trips replace travel by car or motorcycle.
The fast-paced evolution of micro-vehicles challenges governments to put in place safety regulations that are future-proof.

How can authorities help ensure that micro-vehicle riders and pedesrians will not become crash victims?

The report offers ten recommendations for policy makers, city planners, operators and manufacturers:

1. Allocate protected space for micromobility
Create a protected and connected network for micromobility. This can be done by calming traffic or by creating dedicated spaces. Micro-vehicles should be banned from sidewalks or subject to a low, enforced speed limit.

2. To make micromobility safe, focus on motor vehicles
The novelty of e-scooters should not distract from addressing the risk motor vehicles pose for all other road users. Where vulnerable road users share space with motor vehicles, speed limits should be 30 km/h or less.

3. Regulate low-speed micro-vehicles as bicycles
Micromobility can make urban travel more sustainable. To prevent over-regulation, low-speed micro-vehicles such as e-scooters and e-bikes should be treated as bicycles. Faster micro-vehicles should be regulated as mopeds.

4. Collect data on micro-vehicle trips and crashes
Little is known about micro-vehicles’ safety performance. Police and hospitals should collect accurate crash data. Road safety agencies should collect trip data via operators, travel surveys and on-street observation. The statistical codification of vehicle types must be updated and harmonised.

5. Proactively manage the safety performance of street networks
Many shared micro-vehicles posess motion sensors and GPS. These can yield useful data on potholes, falls and near crashes. Authorities and operators should collaborate to use them for monitoring and maintenance.

6. Include micromobility in training for road users
Training for car, bus and truck drivers to avoid crashes with micro-vehicle riders should be mandatory. Cycle training should be part of the school curriculum. Training programmes should be regularly evaluated and revised.

7. Tackle drunk driving and speeding across all vehicle types
Governments should define and enforce limits on speed, alcohol and drug use among all traffic participants. This includes motor vehicle drivers and micromobility users.

8. Eliminate incentives for micromobility riders to speed
Operators of shared micromobility fleets should ensure their pricing mechanisms do not encourage riders to take risks. By-the-minute rental can be an incentive to speed or to ignore traffic rules.

9. Improve micro-vehicle design
Manufacturers should enhance stability and road grip. Solutions could be found in pneumatic tyres, larger wheel size and frame geometry. Indicator lights could be made mandatory and brake cables better protected.

10. Reduce wider risks associated with shared micromobility operations
The use of vans for re-positioning or re-charging micro-vehicles should be minimised, as they impose additional risks on all road users. Cities should allocate parking space for micro-vehicles close to bays for support vans.

Download the report for free: www.itf-oecd.org/safe-micromobility

by David Levinson from Transportist.org

This article is adapted from the book The 30-Minute City: Designing for access, and is about those small local decisions that are often overlooked as planners and engineers focus on major infrastructure policies and programs.

Cities are organised so that many people reach one another in a short amount of time. Residents reach other people, places, goods, and services on foot, or by bike, bus, train, ferry, or car. People don’t need planes or very fast trains to travel between places within a city, even though planes and very fast trains are faster than walking, bikes, buses, trains, ferries and cars. Cities optimise what people can reach in a given amount of time, in the face of modest speeds. We see this when we compare the average speed of travel inside Sydney — about 30 km/h by car after considering traffic signals and congestion — versus the 100 km/h that they can travel on rural highways. Rational people pay dearly to live in Sydney or Melbourne compared to rural Australia. This is not a criticism of Sydney or Melbourne. Despite their extreme congestion the access these and other great cities provide, and the value of that access, is what makes cities great.

Accessibility measures how many potential destinations (jobs, workers, stores, doctors, etc.) someone can reach from a particular point in a given travel time (say 30 minutes) by a particular mode at a certain time of day. The cumulative opportunities measure of accessibility is like the meter or kilogram in the metric system, it means the same thing regardless of where you are. We can talk to a politician and show her how many jobs can be reached from a location in 30-minutes by transit at 8:00 a.m., and we can compare that number with any other point, where the accessibility may be higher or lower. We can compare Los Angeles and San Francisco, or compare Los Angeles in 2019 with Los Angeles in 1973. In Australia, the ’30-minute city’ has been adopted by the Greater Sydney Commission, the planning agency for the Sydney region, as a centrepiece of its 40-year plan. The aim is that residents of Sydney can reach one of three important regional centres in less than a half-hour by walking, biking, or public transport. Doing so requires the thoughtful application of knowledge at hand, using modes of transport technology that have been around for more than a century. This includes wise choices about big investments in subways or elevated highways, and intelligently making small decisions about streets, intersections, and transit stops.

Not everyone works, or needs to get to or from work in a half hour. Different places have proposed 5-, 10-, 15-, and 20-minute neighbourhoods as well. For instance, the ‘pint-of-milk test’ (in New Zealand, the beverage in question isn’t milk) asks whether you can purchase a pint of milk within a 10-minute walk of your home; and a modified version of that test asks if can you do it at a place that doesn’t also sell petrol. The related concept of a 20-minute neighbourhood is about ‘living locally’ by giving residents the opportunity to access all the services they need with a 20-minute round-trip walk, cycle, or public transport trip. While the 30-minute city tends to focus on work and includes travel by motorised vehicles, these other tests ask about life’s other activities and emphasise non-motorised travel. If you can walk to a pint of milk or the local hotel or pub within 10 minutes, and get to your major services within 30 minutes, you are doing better than the average 62-minute trip now experienced by public transport-riding Sydneysiders.

Access and time

One way to examine accessibility is to measure how much additional accessibility some project or new service will provide. Another way is to examine how much accessibility is lost because an improvement has not been made.Prospect Theory teaches that we feel losses more significantly than gains. So, for example, if destinations reachable in 30-minutes is considered to be 100 percent of accessibility, if you lose 10 minutes of time out of that 30 minutes (because of delay or circuitous routes arising from poor system design), you lose more than half of your accessibility. That loss is so large because accessibility increases as a non-linear function of time. The area of the accessibility ring from 20 to 30 minutes (blue in Figure 1) is much larger than from 0 to 10 minutes (green), or 10 to 20 minutes (red). If we lose five minutes, we lose 30 percent of our accessibility, as shown in Figure 2. Every second counts. Even if a policy or design sacrifices only 30 seconds, this extra delay costs people not only their travel time, but a sacrifices opportunities they could have reached within that travel time.

Continue lendo “The 30-minute city: Small decisions for big gains”

Tag: Mobilidade Urbana

Safe Micromobility – 10 Recommendations

A new study by the International Transport Forum examines safety aspects associated with e-scooters and other micro-vehicles.

The 30-minute city: Small decisions for big gains

This article is adapted from the book The 30-Minute City: Designing for access, and is about those small local decisions that are often overlooked as planners and engineers focus on major infrastructure policies and programs.

Access and time