Null toedliche Fussgaenger-Unfaelle - das ist eine Vision, die in Schweden mit Konsequenz verfolgt wird. Eine Utopie, meinen viele, aber die Zahlen zeigen eindrucksvolle Erfolge einer Strassen- und Verkehrsplanung, die konsequent an diesem Ziel ausgerichtet ist.
Nun wollen Staedte in den USA von Schweden lernen. Seit Hunderten von Jahren, so sagen Experten, wurden in den USA Strassen so geplant, dass eher toedliche Unfaelle in Kauf genommen wurden als vermeintliche Einschraenkungen des Geschaeftslebens.
Zeiten und Normen aendern sich, auch wenn alte Denkweisen sehr hartnaeckig sein koennen.
Aus
Did Cooper Stock really have to die?
Different traffic laws could have saved his life and the lives of thousands of others. What the U.S. can learn from Sweden.
Lisa Belkin Yahoo News
Cooper Stock was one of two pedestrians killed within blocks and minutes of each other on the night of Jan. 10. (The second, 73-year-old Alexander Shear, was struck by a tour bus at West 96th Street half an hour earlier.) That made him one of 11 killed in New York City in the first 15 days of this year, one of 37 citywide so far in 2014, and one of more than 4,000 expected to die this year across the United States. In all, 75,000 New Yorkers and some 100 million pedestrians worldwide have been killed crossing streets since Henry Bliss was struck (also by a taxi) in 1899, at the corner of 74th and Central Park West, the first recorded pedestrian death in the country. After each of those deaths someone probably wailed, “How is that possible?”
It is possible, even probable, experts say, because of the way Americans have designed their streets for hundreds of years — essentially viewing pedestrian fatalities as the cost of doing business, as the collateral damage of speed and progress.
“Traditionally we build assuming that drivers and pedestrians will do the right thing even though we know that humans are flawed,” says Claes Tingvall, the director of Traffic Safety for the Swedish Transport Administration, in an interview with Yahoo News. “You don’t design an elevator or an airplane or a nuclear power station on the assumption that everyone will do the right thing. You design it assuming they will make mistakes, and build in ways that withstand and minimize error.”
For nearly 20 years, Sweden has been building on that latter assumption, rethinking and revamping its transportation system, both the philosophy and the nuts and bolts. They call this 1997 legislation Vision Zero — meaning the goal is to reach zero pedestrian deaths in all of Sweden — and under the program people are valued over cars, safety over efficiency. Streets have been narrowed; speed limits have been lowered. Above all, the Swedes have declared an end to the argument over whether safety violations should be punished or prevented. Voting for problem solving over finger pointing, they view collisions as warnings that some fix — a differently timed light, a better lit intersection — is needed.
In these ways, Sweden has lowered its pedestrian death rate dramatically. It is now the lowest in the world, with 2.7 deaths per 100,000 people annually, compared with an average of 6 across the European Union and 10 in the U.S.
And now it may be poised to transform a city near you. Already, cities in 23 American states have laws incorporating some of the lessons from Sweden. In New York, for instance, much of Times Square is a pedestrian mall, and in San Francisco, police have stopped classifying pedestrian deaths as “accidents” (implying they are unavoidable), and now classify them as “collisions” (which require investigation). Until now, all these changes have been piecemeal, but at the start of this year, city officials in New York, San Francisco and Chicago announced they would embrace Vision Zero more fully.
http://news.yahoo.com/cooper-s-story--a-preventable-traffic-tragedy-200552242.html
Auch interessant:
In den USA sterben jährlich ungefähr 360 Personen bei Verfolgungsjagden der Polizei. Im Jahr 2002 wurden allein in Los Angeles 700 Verfolgungsjagden gemeldet.
In den USA werden zudem einige spektakuläre Verfolgungsjagden von Nachrichtenteams aus dem Helikopter heraus aufgenommen und live im Fernsehen übertragen.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verfolgungsjagd
Los Angeles officials urged television stations to curb their coverage of police car chases which have become a major source of entertainment in the freeway-bound US city.
Los Angeles has become the world capital of police car chases, with more than 700 pursuits reported in the city last year, most of them offering hours of live television coverage.
Televised coverage of chases has exploded over the last 10 years here, with news stations despatching helicopters and interrupting scheduled programming to offer live blow-by-blow footage of runaway drivers' antics.
In addition, a battery of internet entrepreneurs have developed an ancillary industry built around notifying police pursuit fans when a chase begins and which channels to watch it on.
February 28 2003
| http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/27/1046064169270.html?oneclick=true |
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