From UBC Reports, July 2010
Civil Engineering Professor Gordon Lovegrove is bringing Canada’s first research lab on Sustainable Road Safety (SRS) to UBC’s Okanagan campus.
The lab will be the first in the world to build, apply and validate expert systems that reliably predict road collisions associated with planned and existing community development patterns.
The World Health Organization estimates that worldwide, 20 to 50 million people are injured or disabled each year in road crashes. By 2020, the total number of road deaths is expected to increase by 65 per cent and become the third-worst global ‘disease.’
“To combat this ‘disease,’ reliable, science-based tools are needed to drastically improve road safety,” says Lovegrove. “The root-cause of the road safety problem lies in building communities that nurture over-use of the auto. One of the ways we can address that is by controlling land use so communities are more walkable, bikeable and busable.”
