Landscape improvement impacts on roadside safety in Texas

Environmental psychologists suggest that appropriately landscaped roadside scenes may have a reducing influence on travel-related stress or may improve attention, yet there is very little data available that establishes the nature of the relationship between roadside landscaping and driver safety. Traditional transportation researchers suggest that aesthetic enhancements are a problematic component of the roadside landscape because of the severity of vehicle/tree collisions and a perception that roadside aesthetics can distract the driver causing safety risk. Costly planning processes arise as members of the local communities debate with public utility and transportation management staff on the subject of appropriate roadside landscaping. To test the effect of landscape improvements on driver performance, this study used a comparison of before-and-after crashes as a quantitative measure of roadside greening. Researchers examined 61 road sections in Texas that were landscape designed as either urban arterials or state highways. The hypothesis tested was to determine whether landscape-improved sections of the roadway were safer compared to the same road section before landscape improvements at 10 sites were very well controlled as study sites. The findings of this study show a significant decrease in crash rate after landscape improvements were implemented at the 95% confidence level on 10 urban arterial or highway sites in Texas. The contribution of this study is to further investigate the effect that landscape features are having on driver behavior which appear to be associated with positive changes in safety result from design. However, these findings need further research to verify a relationship between driver's visual perception according to travelway corridor landscape treatments. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.