Traffic calming historically began as a citizen’s movement in the early 1960’s in the Dutch city of Delft. The people of the city converted their streets into “woonerven”, which translates to “living yards”. They converted their streets into shared areas, outfitted with tables, benches, sandboxes, and parking bays jutting into the street. This helped in putting an end to the chaotic movement of cars on their streets, which was becoming the cause of fatal accidents suffered by pedestrians and children.
The streets now became an obstacle for fast-moving cars and they were forced to reduce speeds in order to manoeuvre through these “woonerven streets”. Traffic calming is an approach to reduce speeds, which, in turn, ensures fewer accidents and a lower degree of severity in the event of an accident occurring. The approach is helpful, especially for vulnerable traffic.
Considering the Indian scenario, the “traffic calming approach” holds a very high degree of relevance as our accident data over the years clearly revealed that the mishaps involve a very high percentage of fatalities and causalities among the marginalised group of vulnerable road users, including motorized two-wheeler users, cyclists and pedestrians. In fact, statistics on road accidents in 2016 reveal that less than 50 per cent of those involved in mishaps were in this group.
In our perception, though traffic calming has been associated with only providing humps or bumps at activity areas in order to reduce speeds, they have, often, become the very reason for accidents. Traffic calming is much more than just providing “humps or bumps” on roads.
In the early 1980s, Denmark and Norway wanted to curb the speeds of intercity traffic passing through small settlements. Due to a financial crunch, they couldn’t afford to build bypasses around those settlements.
Hence, Norway decided to adopt traffic calming as a policy decision for restricting the speeds of the intercity traffic passing through these settlements. Inspired by Norway, Denmark also adopted similar measures and they implemented prewarning signs/gateways at town entries and loaded the stretch of road with chicanes, chokers and roundabouts.
Traffic calming approaches began in Germany in the late 1970s. They adopted the area-wide approach in traffic calming. Notable examples of area-wide traffic calming approaches include Odense in Denmark; Goteburg and Malmö in Sweden; Groningen, Delft, Tilburg, The Hague, and Amsterdam in the Netherlands; Bologna and Parma in Italy; Zurich and Basel in Switzerland; and Osaka, Tokyo and Nagoya in Japan. Applications of these traffic calming measures are very common in Australia and northern Europe. Research demonstrated that the application of speed humps, widely used as a traffic calming measure in Masvingo City in Zimbabwe, helped reduce road accidents by about 70 per cent.
Various studies have found that well-designed infrastructure, such as roundabouts and protective barrier systems, can reduce fatal and serious injury crash outcomes by up to 80 per cent. This reduction can occur regardless of whether crashes were the result of human error. The department of Development and Planning at Denmark’s Aalborg University conducted a study on traffic calming in Delhi—a Feasibility Study of Traffic Safety Measures—in association with CUTS, and IIT Delhi. It suggests that traffic calming measures used in combination would yield better results than isolated measures. As the use of humps and roundabouts is already widespread, traffic calming schemes must stress not only on new kinds of measures but also on the combination of measures.
Therefore, it is extremely imperative to make effective intervention in the planning and design stage so that the road infrastructure becomes forgiving to the extent that impact road crashes are kept to the bare minimum and do not cause much injury to road users.
Prof P K Sarkar
Director, Transportation, Asian Institute of Transport Development, New Delhi