Mean StreetsMarch/April 2020 147
from cars and redesigned them for crowds o pedestrians. Using
brightly painted movable barriers, a road-safety team created safe
waiting spaces and simpli¥ed the process o crossing the street. After
the modi¥cations, o¾cials noticed a 53 percent increase in sidewalk
use. More important, 81 percent o people surveyed said they felt
safer at the location as a result o the project.
Similarly, between 2018 and 2020, Milan under Mayor Giuseppe
Sala transformed ten squares that were once clogged with parked
cars into community-friendly spaces, with benches, tables, and plant-
ers. Where cars once roamed, children now play ping pong and
neighbors greet one another.
Most o the time, urban planners do not have to reinvent the wheel.
They have the experience and testimony o others to draw on. For
instance, the Global Street Design Guide synthesizes the real-world ex-
perience and practices o experts from 72 cities spanning 42 countries.
The guide has now been adopted by 100 cities and several nongovern-
mental organizations focused on tra¾c safety. It represents a sea
change for street design, putting pedestrians and cyclists, rather than
freight and private vehicles, at the top o the street hierarchy.
Often, all it takes to make streets safer is paint, planters, and basic
materials already in stock in city depots, such as stones, signs, and
exible tra¾c posts. Even so, given the scale o the changes, munici-
pal governments will require sustained investment to expand on these
proven safety practices and turn the tide on tra¾c deaths.
THE ROAD AHEADI low-tech solutions can have such a tremendous impact on human
health, what about high-end technologies? The driverless-car industry
contends that it is at the forefront o the tra¾c-safety charge—prom-
ising that autonomous vehicles could be programmed to maintain safe
speeds no matter the environment. They point out that a combination
o ±Ä ́ data and sign-recognition cameras in cars can limit a vehicle to
the posted or o¾cial speed limits.
It’s all well and good to claim that driverless cars operating in a
closed, connected system would be safer. But everything is dierent
on the open road, where those cars would need to drive alongside hun-
dreds o millions o human-driven vehicles, whose operators are still
speeding, cutting one another o, and jockeying for position. There
has been only one death involving an autonomous car, but even one