How Sweden Has Redesigned Streets to Route Around Bad Behavior(fastcoexist.com)

    Planning has played the biggest part in reducing accidents. Roads in Sweden are
    built to prioritise safety over speed or convenience. Low urban speed limits,
    pedestrian zones and barriers that separate cars from bicycles and oncoming
    traffic have helped. Building 1,500km (900 miles) of “2+1” roads—where each lane
    of traffic takes turns to use a middle lane for overtaking—is reckoned to have
    saved around 145 lives over the first decade of Vision Zero. And 12,600 safer
    crossings, including pedestrian bridges and zebra stripes flanked by flashing
    lights and protected with speed bumps, are estimated to have halved the number
    of pedestrian deaths over the past five years. Strict policing has also helped:
    less than 0.25% of drivers tested are over the alcohol limit. Road deaths of
    children under seven have plummeted—in 2012 only one was killed, compared with
    58 in 1970.