Safe Systems Civil Engineer

Shouldn’t housing appreciate year to year like a bar of soap?

Homes should be a stable investment for families, but affordable for the next generation.

This worked when homes cost 3× income, now it’s 7–9× and our kids can’t buy where they grew up.

The goal isn’t lower prices overnight but to let supply grow so incomes can catch up over time.

#BackTo3

The Dutch logic is to use the busiest roads only when you can make them genuinely safe and low stress, and otherwise route bikes on calmer, more forgiving links. A truly safe bike network is built around low stress continuity, not simply corridor prominence. Focus on the safe network.

Lots of hard work and a couple of good books helped greatly !!

Interesting to me is the difference between inner London and Greater London. I bet when you exclude inner London part of Greater London , the rate is twice as high in outer area of Greater London. 3x lower density in outer London. Helps explain our uniquely American traffic safety problem

Most interesting to me is the big difference in safety between inner London and outer area that is part of Greater London.

I always see per capita stats by country. We need to apply them to incident locations as well. Higher density places are inherently safer. Inner London twice as safe as outer London. Increase density. Helps solve affordability too.

Provincial level planning g and zoning helps

Unique with our terrible arterials where we’ve gentrified more poor to have to live. A big part of the rise is people walking mid block in these terrible more suburban roads.

Density better in Canada - more multi family and really good, effective camera enforcement in Aussie

Huge density differences. The only state that approximates the density of the Netherlands is New Jersey.

Density better in Canada - more multi family and really good, effective camera enforcement in Aussie

We need to also measure underlying low metro wide density, lack of affordability and scarcity, that mandates ever more driving

"An elegant weapon for a more civilized road” - Obi Wan

Major upgrades to the bike safety flag project!
🧵

“Conflicts between bicycles and cars are minimized by avoiding the alignment of major bike routes with major car routes.”

“Conflicts between bicycles and cars are minimized by avoiding the alignment of major bike routes with major car routes.”

Officer having anxiety attack took ambulance sent for man dying from police shooting, report says A man who was shot by Connecticut police last year and later died had to wait 10 extra minutes for another ambulance to arrive at the scene, after another officer having an anxiety attack took the first one.

A man who was shot by Connecticut police last year and later died had to wait 10 extra minutes for another ambulance to arrive at the scene, after another officer having an anxiety attack took the first one.

Data shows roads safer after congestion pricing in NYC. Rather than mantra of “speed kills” one should say higher impact speeds make crashes more lethal but crash risk is also shaped by traffic volume, conflict points, street design, turning movements, visibility, signal timing, and user behavior.

“Ontmoetingen tussen fiets en auto worden geminimaliseerd door drukke fietsverbindingen zo min mogelijk te combineren met drukke autoverbindingen.”
www.fietsberaad.nl/CROWFietsber...

Land use controls density and need for busy arterials

Partial picture

So much variance between states too

And we drive 2x + more

A simple acknowledgement that our land use plays a big role…

In the U.S., total road deaths did not drop during COVID. They rose in 2020 and then rose again in 2021, even though people drove less in 2020.

From Cato Institute

We talk about “dangerous corridors” like they emerged naturally.

They were policy outcomes.

Lower cost housing was most often pushed there instead of quieter neighborhoods.

The safety trade-off wasn’t hidden. It was rationalized.

Performative capacity produces some units while protecting the rules that prevent enough units to actually fix the problem.
Curation of access.

We keep adding symbolic guardrails that make reform politically passable while keeping it too small to move prices. Akin to expensive non profit housing

Low density land use creates low density vehicles

It’s hard to believe that missing middle housing once grew organically in dense, walkable neighborhoods and only became hard or illegal to build under postwar auto-oriented, exclusionary zoning.

The year when U.S. housing prices started diverging from wages almost perfectly matches the year states began allowing widespread large-lot zoning.