Ghost shoes are a form of roadside memorial meant to commemorate a location where a pedestrian was killed in a traffic collision. [1] Ghost shoes consist of a pair or multiple pairs of white shoes, often on a lamppost or telephone pole. Ghost shoes memorials may include flowers, and often include signs with the identity of the victim. [2] Ghost shoes first appeared in Montreal in 2016. [3] Since then, several of them, both in groups and as solo memorials, have been erected across the United States and Canada. Though there is no centralized organization overseeing either, ghost shoes are often related to ghost bikes, a form of memorial to cyclists killed in traffic collisions. [1]
Road traffic safety refers to the methods and measures used to prevent road users from being killed or seriously injured. Typical road users include pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, vehicle passengers, and passengers of on-road public transport.
Glenmont is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. The United States Census Bureau had combined Glenmont with nearby Wheaton to create the census-designated place of Wheaton-Glenmont, from 2000 to 2010. It had a population of 16,710 in 2020.
The Red Line is a rapid transit line of the Washington Metro system, consisting of 27 stations in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., in the United States. It is a primary line through downtown Washington and the oldest and busiest line in the system. It forms a long, narrow "U," capped by its terminal stations at Shady Grove and Glenmont.
The Metro Green Line is an 11-mile (18 km) light rail line that connects the central business districts of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota as well as the University of Minnesota. An extension is under construction that will extend the line to the southwest connecting St. Louis Park, Hopkins, Minnetonka and Eden Prairie. The line follows the path of former Metro Transit bus route 16 along University Avenue and Washington Avenue. It is the second light-rail line in the region, after the Blue Line, which opened in 2004 and connects Minneapolis with the southern suburb of Bloomington.
A multiple vehicle collision, is a road traffic collision involving many vehicles. Generally occurring on high-capacity and high-speed routes such as freeways, they are one of the deadliest forms of traffic collisions. The most disastrous pileups have involved more than a hundred vehicles.
Queens Boulevard is a major thoroughfare connecting Midtown Manhattan, via the Queensboro Bridge, to Jamaica in Queens, New York City, United States. It is 7.5 miles (12.1 km) long and forms part of New York State Route 25.
Bicycle safety is the use of road traffic safety practices to reduce risk associated with cycling. Risk can be defined as the number of incidents occurring for a given amount of cycling. Some of this subject matter is hotly debated: for example, which types of cycling environment or cycling infrastructure is safest for cyclists. The merits of obeying the traffic laws and using bicycle lighting at night are less controversial. Wearing a bicycle helmet may reduce the chance of head injury in the event of a crash.
A junction is where two or more roads meet.
A road diet is a technique in transportation planning whereby the number and/or the width of travel lanes of the road is reduced to calm traffic and achieve proven benefits, including a statistically attested crash reduction rate of 19% to 47%.
A ghost bike is a bicycle roadside memorial, placed where a cyclist has been killed or severely injured, usually by the driver of a motor vehicle.
Abandoned footwear, such as a lone boot or shoe, has often been noted in out-of-the-way places like ponds or by the side of roads. Sometimes the shoes may even be new and fashionable.
Transportation safety in the United States encompasses safety of transportation in the United States, including automobile crashes, airplane crashes, rail crashes, and other mass transit incidents, although the most fatalities are generated by road incidents annually killing 32,479 people in 2011 to over 42,000 people in 2022. The number of deaths per passenger-mile on commercial airlines in the United States between 2000 and 2010 was about 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles. For driving, the rate was 150 per 10 billion vehicle-miles: 750 times higher per mile than for flying in a commercial airplane. For a person who drives a million miles in a lifetime this amounts to a 1.5% chance of death.
State Route 48 (SR 48) is a north–south highway in Ohio that runs from SR 132 near Goshen to SR 66 near Houston, passing through Dayton.
Vision Zero is a multi-national road traffic safety project that aims to achieve a roadway system with no fatalities or serious injuries involving road traffic. It started in Sweden and was approved by their parliament in October 1997. A core principle of the vision is that "Life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within the society" rather than the more conventional comparison between costs and benefits, where a monetary value is placed on life and health, and then that value is used to decide how much money to spend on a road network towards the benefit of decreasing risk.
A traffic collision, also known as a motor vehicle collision, or car crash, occurs when a vehicle collides with another vehicle, pedestrian, animal, road debris, or other moving or stationary obstruction, such as a tree, pole or building. Traffic collisions often result in injury, disability, death, and property damage as well as financial costs to both society and the individuals involved. Road transport is statistically the most dangerous situation people deal with on a daily basis, but casualty figures from such incidents attract less media attention than other, less frequent types of tragedy. The commonly used term car accident is increasingly falling out of favor with many government departments and organizations, with the Associated Press style guide recommending caution before using the term and the National Union of Journalists advising against it in their Road Collision Reporting Guidelines. Some collisions are intentional vehicle-ramming attacks, staged crashes, vehicular homicide or vehicular suicide.
Worldwide, it was estimated that 1.25 million people were killed and many millions more were injured in motor vehicle collisions in 2013. This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of death among young adults of 15–29 years of age and the ninth most frequent cause of death for all ages worldwide. In the United States, 40,100 people died and 2.8 million were injured in crashes in 2017, and around 2,000 children under 16 years old die every year.
Alcohol-related traffic crashes are defined by the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as alcohol-related if either a driver or a non-motorist had a measurable or estimated BAC of 0.01 g/dl or above.
Vision Zero is a program created by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014. Its purpose is to eliminate all traffic deaths and serious injuries on New York City streets by 2024. On January 15, 2014, Mayor de Blasio announced the launch of Vision Zero in New York City, based on a similar program of the same name that was implemented in Sweden. The original Swedish theory hypothesizes that pedestrian deaths are not as much "accidents" as they are a failure of street design. Traffic-related injuries and crashes in New York City increased from 2014 through 2018, though traffic-related deaths decreased.
A stroad is a type of street–road hybrid. Common in the United States and Canada, stroads are wide arterials that often provide access to strip malls, drive-throughs, and other automobile-oriented businesses. Stroads have been criticized by urban planners for their safety issues and inefficiencies. While streets serve as a destination and provide access to shops and residences at safe traffic speeds, and roads serve as a high-speed connection that can efficiently move traffic at high speed and volume, stroads are often expensive, inefficient, and dangerous.