Comparing the road safety of neighbourhood development patterns: traditional versus sustainable communities

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has been researching a sustainable community development pattern — the Fused Grid road network. This paper reports on research to compare the road safety level of the Fused Grid with four other networks, including: traditional (1) grid and (2) culs-de-sac patterns, and, recently developed (3) 3-way offset and (4) Dutch sustainable road safety (SRS) patterns. Community-based, macro-level collision prediction models were developed and applied with data from Vancouver, Ottawa, and Victoria. The research used standard experimental design methods, including: control-trigger variables, sensitivity analysis, and cross-sectional analysis. Statistically significant results were obtained, and suggested that neighbourhoods built following CMHC's Fused Grid road network pattern would realize a 30 to 60% higher level of road safety than the commonly-used grid and culs-de-sac patterns, and a level of safety comparable to the 3-way offset pattern. Further research topics were recommended.