Areawide road engineering schemes for accidents reduction in Western Europe.

This article reviews some area-wide engineering schemes for accident reduction in Western Europe, and presents some recommendations for improving road safety, especially for children. Road safety studies of residential areas show that: (1) safety is improved by strictly differentiating streets according to their traffic function; (2) full separation of motor vehicles from pedestrians and bicycles results in very low accident rates; (3) the space-sharing approach reduces accidents to children and others by about 50%. The author concludes that: (1) area-wide schemes have been shown to improve road safety considerably, especially for children; (2) almost all of them have hitherto been in small residential areas, and only a few in large urban areas; (3) the schemes contribute only one element to solving road safety problems; (4) it is essential to find out how to teach children to participate in traffic systems and how to help them to overcome or adjust to their lack of traffic experience and understanding; (5) the achievement of road safety involves cooperation with local groups and individual road users, together with changes of attitude in society. The author suggests two ways of improving road safety even more: (1) development by local authorities of integrated programmes for municipal road safety policy; (2) presenting research results in a form suitable for effective local application by different 'consumers'.