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Approximately 40,000 people will die on U.S. roads this year, andthousands more will be injured. A disproportionate number of thosetraffic injuries will befall people from lower-income communities.According to new research, pedestrians in the poorest neighborhoodsof Montreal were six times more likely to suffer traffic injuriesthan pedestrians in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Bicyclists andmotorists in poorer neighborhoods were also at greater risk; theywere four times more likely to be injured on the road. Researchers have proposed many explanations for social inequalitiesin traffic injuries, including differences in the prevalence ofdrunk driving, use of helmets and safety restraints, and drivingspeeds. The new study, published in the American Journal of Public Health , finds that the street environment may be largely to blame. "People don't think of traffic safety as an environmentaljustice issue," says Reid Ewing, a city-planning professorfrom the University of Utah who was not involved in the research."Low-income people are disadvantaged in a lot of differentways, including traffic safety." Lucie Laflamme, an injury epidemiologist at the KarolinskaInstitute in Stockholm, called the study design brilliant and saidin an e-mail that it demonstrates that inequalities in road trafficinjuries could be addressed by making environmental changes, notjust behavioral ones. The research, led by Patrick Morency, director of Montreal'sDepartment of Public Health, used ambulance records to study thedistribution of injuries across the city's road intersections. Theyanalyzed nearly five years of data, including 19,500 reportedinjuries, and then mapped those mishaps onto the road network . Morency's team found that lower-income neighborhoods had twice asmany intersections of major thoroughfares, which tend to carry highvolumes of traffic at high speeds. Even after controlling fortraffic volumes these intersections had, on average, 2.4 times morepedestrian injuries than did intersections of minor roads. Using amultivariate analysis, Morency's team calculated that if theintersections of major roads were replaced with those of minorstreets, pedestrian injuries would decrease by 58 percent; harm tocyclists and motorists would decline by 24 and 72 percent,respectively. Similarly, poor communities contained a higher proportion offour-way intersections than did wealthier neighborhoods. Four-wayintersections were responsible for 3.5 times more pedestrianinjuries and 4.7 more motorist trauma than were three-wayintersections. If poor communities contained the same number offour-way intersections as wealthier communities, pedestrianinjuries would decline by 71 percent for pedestrians, 58 percentfor cyclists and 79 percent for motorists. These results are part of a growing body of literature that shows road design has an impact on safety. For example, features such as narrowstreet widths, the presence of sidewalks, and buildings and treesthat are positioned nearer to roads can subtly influence people todrive more safely. This is the first study that has linked thosefeatures to social disparities in traffic injuries. Morency said that there are probably two reasons why poorercommunities are more likely to have less safe road designs:"It was easier to build expressways in the poorer areasbecause people didn't mobilize—and the land wascheaper," he says. "Once these designs are implemented,it reduces the land value, so it attracts poorer people."Similar processes are likely to be at work in U.S. cities as well. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as MEGAWIN 8051 Manufacturer , Ultrasound Generator for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits STC MCU.
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