Safe Urban Form: Revisiting the Relationship Between Community Design and Traffic Safety

Problem: While concerns about traffic safety were central to the development of conventional community design practice, there has been little empirical examination of the relationship between community design and the incidence of traffic-related crashes, injuries, and deaths. Purpose: We examine the relationship between community design and crash incidence. Methods: We present a brief historical review of the safety considerations that helped shape conventional community design practice and then analyze GIS data on crash incidence and urban form using negative binomial models. Results and conclusions: We find that many of the safety assumptions embedded in contemporary community design practice are not substantiated by the empirical evidence. While disconnecting local street networks and relocating nonresidential uses to arterial thoroughfares can reduce neighborhood traffic volumes, this does not appear to improve safety, but rather substitutes one set of safety problems for another. We found urban arter...