Final answer:
Engineers must focus on adequate lighting and pedestrian safety, including traffic signals, to design safe highways. Well-placed traffic signals can reduce vehicle speeds and accidents at intersections, thus ensuring safer crossings for pedestrians, especially around high-traffic areas like campuses.
Step-by-step explanation:
To develop safe highways, engineers must plan carefully for multiple factors, with a key focus on ensuring the safety of both vehicles and pedestrians alike. Adequate lighting is an essential aspect of safe highway design, as it increases visibility and reduces the likelihood of accidents. The importance of pedestrian safety cannot be overstated, particularly in areas with high foot traffic where people are crossing to or from campuses or other pedestrian-heavy zones. Strategically placed traffic signals play a critical role in controlling vehicle speeds and providing safe crossing points for pedestrians, which is crucial at busy intersections, where a lack of adequate safety measures can lead to a high number of accidents, and in severe cases, fatalities. From historical data, it is acknowledged that the evolution of transportation has led to increased demand for well-designed road systems. This has spurred significant construction efforts across local, state, and interstate highways. For instance, a traffic signal at the intersection can cause vehicles to slow down, thereby reducing the chances of speeding-related accidents. This contributes to the all-important goal of reducing traffic accidents, which in some cases, have resulted in the tragic loss of life.