The Danish council of road safety research proposed in 1971 to the road authorities of the city of Copenhagen to carry out a joint research project. The aim of the project was an area-wide traffic replanning of a part of Österbro, a residential area with 17000 inhabitants. The aim of the scheme was to reduce the number of accidents by simple physical countermeasures. The project consisted of three stages: (1) collecting data and proposing a scheme, (2) implementing the scheme, (3) evaluating the traffic safety effect of the scheme. The evaluation of safety measures is primarily based on an analysis of the traffic accidents in the area, which have taken place before and after the implementation of the scheme. But also studies of the behaviour of the road users have been carried out in order to registrate whether or not the intentions of the countermeasures were obtained. In the before-period (1969-1971) 475 police reported accidents took place, and in the after-period (1977-1980) 370 accidents took place. However we are still dealing with small numbers of accidents, since the traffic scheme consists of 25 different countermeasures and each of them are directed towards specific (and more or less different) accident types. For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD abstract no 264967.
Abstract