BlogsUncategorized

30 MPH Traffic Is Too Fast For Children To Judge Accurately, Study Finds

Author:

Philip Langdon

New Urban Network

According to researchers at Royal Holloway College, University of London, England, adult pedestrians can accurately judge the speeds of vehicles traveling toward them at up to 50 mph. But for elementary school children, it’s a different matter. This is because children don’t have the perceptual ability to make accurate judgments.

“This is not a matter of children not paying attention, but a problem related to low-level visual detection mechanisms, so even when children are paying very close attention, they may fail to detect a fast approaching vehicle,” said John Wann, a professor in the university’s Department of Psychology.

Wann led researchers who measured the perceptual understanding of more than 100 elementary school pupils, the university said in a news release describing the study’s results. The judgments of children of primary school age “become unreliable once the approach speed goes above 20mph, if the car is five seconds away,” the university said.

“These findings provide strong evidence that children may make risky crossing judgments when vehicles travel at 30 or 40 mph,” Wann concluded. However, he emphasized that “the vehicles that they are more likely to step in front of are the faster vehicles that are more likely to result in a fatality.”

Since completing the study, the researchers have begun looking at the potential for using virtual reality systems to make children more aware of their potential errors, the university noted. But the simplest solution, according to Wann, lies in traffic regulation.

The study, published in the international journal Psychological Science, is part of a larger project sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council to understand the perceptual factors that can lead to pedestrian accidents.

The Environmental Transport Association (ETA), a British organization that raises awareness of transportation’s impact on people and the environment, said, “The fact that children find it difficult to judge the approach speed of vehicles traveling at over 25mph is yet another argument for 20mph limits in the streets where people live, work and play.” As a result, the City of London is considering imposing a 20 mph speed limit in much of its center.

Technology to the rescue?

In many places, enforcing a 20 mph speed limit would be difficult. Consequently, ETA Director Andrew Davis argues for installing technology that automatically reduces a vehicle’s speed in certain conditions.

“Networks of average speed cameras would do the job, but lamp posts bristling with more cameras are hardly desirable,” Davis wrote in a commentary in March. He noted that more than ten years ago, the ETA and like-minded organizations founded the Slower Speeds Initiative, which aimed “to ensure that all road vehicles had variable speed limiters.”

Davis wrote:

Certain classes of road vehicles, like heavy goods vehicles and public services vehicles, have maximum speed limiters, but we want limiters extended to all vehicles.

… we want the limiter to reflect not just the national maximum speed – currently 70mph – but the maximum speed in any locality. Therefore the speed limiter will ensure the driver cannot drive faster than 30mph where that top speed applies.

A while ago, I drove such a vehicle. The accuracy was stunning. I entered London via the M1 at 70mph, and once the 50mph limit came into force, the car slowed to 50mph. On moving onto local roads, the speed was reduced to 30mph. If you imagine a dual-carriageway with a parallel access road a couple of meters away, I could travel along the dual-carriageway at 50mph; still, as soon as I moved to the access road, I was reduced to 30mph.

The ETA has long held that all vehicles should have variable speed limiters fitted as standard by law. As with cruise control, the driver could press through the limiter to pass above the speed limit; allowing such a level of driver control would help its earlier acceptance. Every time the vehicle returned to below the speed limit, the limiter would become active again.

A decline in walking

The United Kingdom has seen the number of children walking to school drop over the years, just as in the US. In a 2008 news release, ETA said, “The proportion of 7-10-year-olds making their way to school independently fell from 19 percent in 2003 to 15 percent last year. Only 13 percent of children can now cross the road alone.” ETA blames dangerous vehicular traffic for some of the decline in children walking to school.

Said an ETA spokesperson: “The fact that fewer and fewer children are allowed to cross the road or travel to school unaccompanied is a disturbing trend – everything else being equal, children who get some exercise on their way to school are healthier and perform better academically than those driven to school.”