Throughout the history of pedestrian safety in Western Europe, it can be seen that the image of the pedestrian has gradually been changing from "a moving obstacle in the way of vehicles" to a means of transport of its own right, with its own constraints and travel objectives. Moreover, it has been recognized that cities cannot live without pedestrians, and urban streets have more uses than just accommodating car traffic, one of them being to provide contact between unshielded citizens... which means on foot! All along, research boosted and accompanied the changes, both by helping design and evaluate new solutions to improve pedestrian safe mobility and through European and International programmes which enhanced the work performed in some countries more advanced than others at one time and helped disseminate good practice (OECD Research Groups on Pedestrian Safety, DUMAS and PROMISING Projects, etc.). Learning from practice was also performed through direct exchanges between European practitioners and local authorities, who made a point of adapting concepts and programmes to their own context and requirements.uThe evolution in the way to think about walking, which has been instrumental in improving pedestrian safety, besides giving birth to new laws (30 km/h zones, laws establishing long term goals, etc.), has been incorporated into new dispositions of the Highway Code, for example in the Netherlands, where pedestrians are no longer required to cross streets at designated locations, while in other countries such as France, the existing law is now interpreted so that drivers are always allocated a share of responsibility in pedestrian accidents. The fact that laws and regulations have followed experimentation and supported the changes involved is the sign of a sustainable modification of attitudes. Another such sign is the promotion at the European level of cars with "pedestrian-friendly" fronts, a design which had been researched into since the 70s and has finally been acknowledged. Adapting urban roads to unrestrained vehicle traffic without giving "equal rights" to the vulnerable road users, as was done in the 60s and the 70s in Western Europe, has proved a great mistake and a lot of money has been spent in reversing the trend over the following decades. It is hoped that the same mistakes will be avoided in countries where motorization is now fast developing and current technologies facilitate fast changes in infrastructures. To this purpose, raising awareness and changing attitudes of both the decision-makers and the public will have to be done much faster than in Europe, and pressure from researchers and the civil society through NGOs as well as international cooperation to pass on basic concepts if not operational designs are greatly needed. However, prospects of global warming and petrol and gaz shortage may help in reversing the current trends of building for cars much more easily than expected. For the covering abstract see ITRD E138091. This paper is available from http://www.ictct.org/workshops/07-Beijing/34Muhlrad138149.pdf.
Samenvatting