Conventional wisdom in traffic safety gets a makeover with this new study that challenges past notions of what makes roasds safer...

"In 2005, the U.K. Department of Transportation unveiled a set of guidelines for what it called “psychological traffic calming,” a strategy to make the country’s roadways safer by giving them a surface-level makeover.

And, also, a tricky little study in semantics: The plan could make traffic calmer, the agency reported, by making the drivers themselves decidedly less so. Suggestions including painting patches of the road different colors, eliminating the lines dividing lanes, and other maneuvers to make the streets seem narrower, windier, and otherwise more dangerous, the Guardian reported at the time...

Earlier this week, a new paper seemed to validate the idea that the best driver is an unsettled one. In a small study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers from the University of Michigan and Brigham Young University found that signs that conveyed a greater degree of motion—think a running stick-figure pedestrian, not a strolling one—may raise drivers’ perception of risk, which may in turn translate to more caution and attention from behind the wheel."--By Cari Romm

Read more at The Atlantic