Reducing lanes lead to travel safety

A road diet involves narrowing or eliminating travel lanes on a roadway to make more room for pedestrians and bicyclists.(1) While there can be more than four travel lanes before treatment, road diets are often conversions of four-lane, undivided roads into three lanes — two through lanes plus a center turn lane (see figure 1 and figure 2). The fourth lane may be converted to a bicycle lane, sidewalk, and/or on- street parking. In other words, the existing cross section is reallocated. This was the case with the two sets of treatments in the current study. Both involved conversions of four lanes to three at almost all sites. More on this is at: http://www.hsisinfo.org/pdf/10-053.pdf