COMMENTARY
Black spots
Why we fight about black spots
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
P L Jacobsen
2771, 14th Street, Sacramento, California 95818, USA; jacobsenp@medscape.com
Accepted 4 October 2006
Injury prevention—need for a consensus between epidemiologists and traffic engineers
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In this issue, Morency and Cloutier1(see page 360) report that, over a 5-year period, motorists injured pedestrians at exactly one quarter of all intersections in central Montreal. Those of us alarmed over unsafe streets will not be surprised by this finding. But I suspect that many of those setting traffic policies will be.
That is because the roads agency in Montreal operates under a policy of fixing collision "black spots", where a "black spot" is an intersection with eight or more collisions in a 5-year period. Amazingly, seven motorist–pedestrian collisions in 5 years—that’s one in every 260 days—is not enough to brand an intersection as dangerous. The black spots approach fixes only 1% of the intersections where a motorist hits a person.
The unspoken premise of this policy seems to be that a high frequency of collisions is evidence of design problems unique to that intersection.
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- From targeted "black spots" to area-wide pedestrian safety
- P Morency and M-S Cloutier
Inj. Prev. 2006 12: 360-364.[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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