Accident-Zone: Poorer Neighborhoods Have Less-Safe Road Designs

[xchrom]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=accident-zone-poorer-neighborhoods

Approximately 40,000 people will die on U.S. roads this year, and thousands more will be injured. A disproportionate number of those traffic injuries will befall people from lower-income communities. According to new research, pedestrians in the poorest neighborhoods of Montreal were six times more likely to suffer traffic injuries than pedestrians in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Bicyclists and motorists in poorer neighborhoods were also at greater risk; they were four times more likely to be injured on the road.

Researchers have proposed many explanations for social inequalities in traffic injuries, including differences in the prevalence of drunk driving, use of helmets and safety restraints, and driving speeds. 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 environmental justice issue," says Reid Ewing, a city-planning professor from the University of Utah who was not involved in the research. "Low-income people are disadvantaged in a lot of different ways, including traffic safety."

Lucie Laflamme, an injury epidemiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, called the study design brilliant and said in an e-mail that it demonstrates that inequalities in road traffic injuries could be addressed by making environmental changes, not just behavioral ones.


*** IMO the issue of class really is everything.