TRAFFIC CALMING - ENGINEERING THE HIGHWAY FOR SAFER SPEED

This paper discusses Oxfordshire's experience of and experimentation with traffic calming schemes. It concentrates on examining ways in which roads and their associated environment can be engineered for safer speeds. The County spends only about 1% of its total budget on traffic calming, and uses it only to reduce accident casualties, not to embellish the environment. Since 1986, it has introduced almost 70 traffic calming schemes, almost all in residential areas and based on simple road humps. Results so far are very encouraging; by 1993, fatalities had been reduced by 30% and serious injuries by 64%. The paper describes some before-and-after studies of road hump schemes in the small town of Banbury, the Oxford suburb of Kennington, and the village of Sutton Courtenay. Several types of road humps were tested. In 1993, Oxfordshire started a programme of experimental traffic calming, using a series of new features, including gateways, rumble strips, chicanes, lining, surface texture and colour changes, and signing. These measures were sometimes used in isolation, and sometimes in combination. They all had relatively low cost, and were applied at sites with speed-related accidents. It is too early to estimate casualty reduction, but the lower speeds achieved at some sites are encouraging. For the covering abstract see IRRD 866185.