AMHERST – Fire Department Capt. Chris Buchanan knows a lot of transportation and safety.

A firefighter for more than 12 years, Buchanan has responded to more than his fair share of traffic accidents and fatalities.

“I’ve been here for a long time and that’s how I got into transportation safety,” he said. “Being involved in car accidents and cutting people out of cars and things like that here in Amherst and Milford and Wilton, we’re unfortunate to have Route 101, which is a nice connector but has some serious design flaws.”

Buchanan said a study done by the Nashua Regional Planning Commission and the Department of Transportation, along with a private firm, concluded in 2002 that there is a 250% higher mortality rate on this corridor than on a regular highway.

“That’s factual, and that was in 2002,” he said. “And it’s only been confirmed time and time again since then.”

Buchanan added that the mortality rate is not worse in one direction, versus the other.

“This is the cornerstone of what are committee is doing,” he said. “I’m on the bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee – I’m the chairman. And we’ve been working for about a year and a half to come up with multi-modal solutions, that being on a bicycle, a skateboard, a horse, feet, etc. Right now, we have been building our roads in a very particular manner – for cars. There are some known design flaws.”

Buchanan said the common understanding of transportation safety is incorrect.

“There’s all kinds of counter-intuitive stuff that goes into transportation safety,” he continued. “A lot of people’s efforts to make our roads safer actually makes than more dangerous, objectively so.”

The report stated in part, that “as bad as these problems are today, they will get worse if nothing is done. Traffic projections anticipate 35 to 50 percent more traffic in 20 years.

The result will be more congestion, with level of service failure on the bypass, in western Milford, and in Amherst north and east of the bypass. This will result in more short-cutting through residential areas, more accidents, and a continuing barrier dividing the towns, particularly in Bedford where the highway passes through the town center. It will be more difficult and hazardous to enter and leave side streets and businesses. Commercial development with direct highway access will continue to occur, particularly in Bedford and Wilton, potentially changing the character of the highway.”

“What we know from that is there are three categories of road,” he said. “That’s the underpinning of our 50+page master plan, that has been accepted by the board of selectmen.”

Buchanan said they’ve been working on the report for a year and a half, and a draft was published in June, and accepted in July.

“There are a couple of things worth mentioning,” he said. “I think if you look at roads today without some of this knowledge, commonly, people draw a lot of conclusions. For example, why are people speeding through my neighborhood? Or through the village? These are problems that are universal in small towns – Milford, Amherst, etc. It doesn’t even need to be New Hampshire; it could be around the world.”

“There are reasons why people behave as they do,” he continued. “The most powerful governor of behavior isn’t signage or enforcement, but the design of the road itself. This is what people should be really understanding.”

There aren’t bad drivers (there could be) but whatever you don’t like about drivers’ performance, it is the direct result of what the driver perceives they can or should do on the road.

“Why are people speeding?” he asked. “It’s because they feel as though the road can accommodate that speed. Often times, people who don’t understand the behavioral psychology that goes into influencing driver behavior, people will say we need more police enforcement, or we need more signage. Unfortunately, certain traffic calming methods are very effective while others are completely ineffective. Oddly enough, people’s favorite strategies often make things worse.”

Transportation safety came from the Federal highway administration.

“They made highways in the ’30s and ’40s, and people were dying a lot,” said Buchanan. “Because they looked a lot like 101. High speed traffic with one line of paint on the ground, and there were no seatbelts or airbags.”

So, the FHA came up with techniques, such as wider lanes, consistent paint markings and guard rails.

“The human body isn’t really designed to travel at high velocity,” Buchanan said. “So, we need these tools to in order to make high speed travel safer. Wider lanes accommodate the variation that a car might have. The markings and the signs and things like that tell the driver what they have to know so they can just focus on driving. Those things are very important for highways.”

But, he continued, “the thing that people don’t know is there is the highway world, and then there is our public realm like a village, or an oval or downtown Nashua. The driver behavior that we should be seeking is not consistent with any regard to that of a highway. But people see these highway safety techniques and they think it makes the road safer. And it does. But then they widen the road on a village street, and you’d think that makes it safer but people only drive faster.”

Buchanan said lines also communicate to drivers that the space between those lines belongs to the driver, which is another misconception.

“If you stay in between those lines, you’re safe,” he said. “That’s not a reality. It’s just not true.”

Measures that Buchanan’s findings suggest, with guidance by the Federal Highway Administration, and other traffic safety experts, is that if you strip away elements of the highway world, then counter intuitively, the driver feels as though the road is more dangerous but in reality, it’s just a reflection of reality.

“If you make the road more narrow, from 10′ lanes as opposed to 12′ lanes, it can accommodate two fire trucks passing each other,” he said. “But every time the driver sees another car coming, they wonder, ‘is there enough room?’ There is, objectively, but it’s an illusion. It’s a feeling that the driver has. And the result is a 6 or 7mph reduction in speed. Just from a feeling. Get rid of the center line- the same thing happens. No more sense of territory, no more reluctance to go around a cyclist. No more false comfort, that the oncoming driver will stay on their side of the road. It’s these psychological traffic calming techniques that we have taken from guidance, that we are looking to roll out through scheduled roadway construction.”

The designs themselves should designate to drivers how they should drive on any given road.

“Legally, speed limits matter, and enforcement matters,” said Buchanan. “But it is objectively secondary to the message that is communicated by the road itself. The best way to constrain the speed of a driver, is to enshrine the desired actual speed in the roadway design. We have methods to do that. For a local road, we’re trying to keep people below 30mph; for a connecting street, we’re trying to keep people below 50mph. And above that, it’s a highway. The thing about the highway design that we have, is that you have to separate it physically. Head-on collisions are absolutely fatal here. That’s what happens all the time on 101. It’s undivided. You have highway traffic with on-ramps and off-ramps. The only thing that protects you from a head-on collision is hope.”

Buchanan said his committee is not advocating for sidewalks everywhere, for example.

“What we are looking for is to systematically change the way that we reconstruct roads,” he said. “Which is a constant and recurring event, especially in New England, where roads are dug up constantly. And if you examine a road, and take a look at its fundamental properties, you can then re-make the road with the desired design.”

Buchanan’s committee’s plan has been accepted by the board of selectmen in July, but he called that, “a theoretical gesture.”

“Our intent is to interface with the DPW in town, to say, ‘when you’re going to dig up a road, let’s modify it,'” he said. “We know now what roads are going to be like in 2020. Of these roads, we’d like to do everything but we need to start with examples. That’s what we’re looking to do. And if the board of selectmen, and they find it to be satisfactory, it will go to the voters in one form or another in March, where they can vote – I don’t know if it will be part of the town budget – but there will likely be a consideration to modify our road designs of next year.”