Hacker News Reader

Take a quick look at Google Maps and you'll see I-15 is a very short distance away. It's not like they decided to go full San Francisco and run major six-lane highway routes at surface level. The people using this sort of route are probably all locals. All of the through traffic is already on the freeway.

Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use (then again, it looks like they already made that decision with a bunch of single-family house subdivisions). Notice nearby that the stuff you can access from I-15 is a bunch of big roads, malls, car dealerships, and an Air Force base. Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise.

Plus, as we see in any majorly dense area, the freeways turn into buffers for inadequate local traffic capacity as they very quickly turn into parking lots. Low volume exits onto slow surface streets with tons of intersections jams everything up.

> Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use

Neither of these are necessarily true. Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times.

Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people. That encouragement doesn't guarantee high density will happen, builders preferences and peoples budgets will still dictate cheap single family houses most of the time regardless. But that's not something the freeway itself influences. (In the same way that a train station encourages high density, but many are still in suburban areas anyway).

The only real drawback is price. Ugly, space-wasting rural freeways at ground level are much cheaper. But they are worse for drivers and pedestrians, every bit as bad as what we see here for everyone.

> Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise.

The air pollution and noise is mostly unchanged (same exact cars making the same trips). And Electric Cars already fully solved both of these problems anyway, it's just a matter of time as gasoline vehicles get phased out.

It looks like their current solution to the crosswalk is to add a stoplight to it. Which ironically will actually increase air pollution, as previously-traveling cars will now often sit idling, right next to two schools...

Wide roads do cut neighborhoods in half and make them so much less walkable. We don't need freeways everywhere. While I like driving fast, there are other concerns than speed and even safety. I recommend strongtowns.org's article on "stroads": https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/3/4/the-stroad.html

I have a similar straight road with a school near my house. To make matters worse it's a main artery to the freeway. However, the city solved this much better. As suggested in the article the road is fairly narrow and there are physical separators in the middle of the road in the area where the school is. You can still easily go the speed limit, yet from my anecdotal experience of driving the road at least twice a day I'm pretty much the only person going slightly over the speed limit. I would argue that the road very much works as intended to transport cars efficiently and children safely.

> Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times.

Can you show an example? 280 in San Francisco comes to mind. The division is the underpass or the overpass, and the frontage roads required to support it. Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use. It's not limited to freeways, either -- you can achieve a similar effect with grade-separated railways.

Here's an simple / cheap example from my small hometown - https://goo.gl/maps/e6N42cBBH582 (Google Street View is out of date, there are mid-rises on both sides of the freeway now).

It's green, it's safe, it's pedestrian / bike friendly and they are always at grade, so it's accessible. Cars only go 10mph (the distance is so short, they couldn't go much faster anyway). The freeway takes up almost no land -- it's just a single 1 minute walk to either side. Plant bollards at both ends to block the cars, and it's now 100% safety for everyone at all times.

Here's a really creative example from Seattle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_Park

> Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use

I don't think that's inherently true, it's just the cheap way to do it. Freeways can be high density and pedestrian friendly too. They just usually aren't, for the same reasons buildings aren't -- it costs money.

Additionally, there doesn't need to be any distance between buildings to have a freeway. See Cobo Center in Detroit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-10_(Michigan_highway) or Washington State Convention Center in Seattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_State_Convention_Ce...

Your hometown and its metro area are almost entirely car dominated. >80% of workers commute to work alone in cars, >10% carpool to work, most of those with 2 people per car. About 4% work from home, 2% walk, <1% take a bus, and 0.3% ride a bike. (Data from the Census Bureau.)

I can’t easily figure out what proportion of other trips happen by bike/walking, what proportion of students walk/bike to school, etc., but I would be surprised if they match cities like NYC or Boston or most parts of Europe.

I don’t know what your neighborhood is like in person: how well trafficked is that underpass by pedestrians and cyclists in practice? Having some freeway underpasses near low-traffic streets be “pedestrian and bike friendly” doesn’t really help anyone if nobody walks or bikes anyway because there is nothing nearby to walk to because nearby places are extremely spread out and largely designed with the expectation that people will visit them by car, e.g surrounded by giant parking lots, with inconvenient road plans, etc.

The Southern CA town I grew up was similar low-density suburban with freeways passing through, and there were various ostensibly pedestrian-friendly freeway crossings here and there, but in practice few people ever walked anywhere except in the small downtown area or maybe exercising their dogs or going to one or another park (a decent number of kids <16 rode bikes around though). One of the nicest low-density suburban places I know of, but life for kids without cars was necessarily highly structured and relatively isolating.

You picked a spot right near the downtown between a low-density residential neighborhood and a commercial area, but looking at a satellite view and map search most of the residential areas in the city and surrounds seem to be relatively far from shops, restaurants, grocery stores, schools, ..., (at least compared to denser cities) so in practice many trips probably require a car. I’ve never been there so I can’t tell you what it’s like in practice.

But anyway, with that said, as low-density suburban development goes, Grand Rapids looks pretty nice, just judging from satellite view. Not my personal cup of tea, but definitely better than lots of places in the US.

I was definitely not a fan of Grand Rapids for the 2 weeks I spent there. Walking around the block (despite there being decent sidewalks) was basically unheard of, and crossing the street was akin to running across a freeway.

The worst part though was getting off work late and tring to go for a nice walk, only to find the sidewalks and half the street flooded from the heavy irrigation! I get that rain storms there flood things, but this was a consistent "lets flood a lane on either side of the street watering our lawn".

I5 through downtown Seattle is absolutely a division between downtown and Capitol Hill, and it's a 10 minute walk from the convention center exit to the next pedestrian building entry. That's a terrible example for your point.

You seem to define 'pedestrian friendly' as 'not totally impassible by pedestrians'. A dark, unlit cave that requires a pedestrian to potentially walk several blocks out of their way (e.g. from a house on North Avenue to the McDonalds) is not 'pedestrian friendly' in my book.

And this is the best-case scenario, where the highway is relatively permeable because it's next to downtown.

The Columbus freeway cap is a far better example of integrating a freeway into a neighborhood: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/.a/6a00d834518cc969e... https://www.google.com/maps/place/Columbus,+OH/@39.9740161,-... But it's an expensive enough project that it can't be possibly be duplicated on every street crossing, and the freeway infrastructure surrounding it still profoundly separates downtown from its neighborhoods.

What Strong Towns is about is prioritizing cheap, maintainable infrastructure that supports walking and biking— and freeways are not remotely cheap, especially when designed to be anything but an awful experience for those not in a car.

Thanks for posting the examples. The one from your hometown still looks like it cuts the neighbourhood apart, though. (But it probably counts as a good solution by American standards.)

Electric cars don’t solve the noise problem. A substantial proportion of car noise at highway speeds comes from the tires. They improve it quite a bit but it’s far from fully solved.

> Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people.

High speed transportation of people is the exact opposite of what encourages high density land use. If you can live 30 miles from work, and get to work in 30 minutes by freeway-driving, that's acceptable. If that same trip would take two hours, perhaps you'd consider living closer to work.

> Perhaps they could have built the elementary school and high school on the same side of the street?

Given how politically acerbic your comment is towards StrongTowns and their efforts to save lives, your argument is incredibly badly reasoned. These are separate schools with separate facilities serving separate age groups. It is unlikely the reason this young junior high student was crossing the street at 8:30pm[1] was to visit the elementary school.

There are not that many schools along typical commuter routes. It seems unlikely that calming traffic along this one would seriously impact the "transportation needs of real [sic] citizens everyday."

[1] https://www.ksl.com/?sid=43931746&nid=148&title=syracuse-tra...

They probably share sports fields or other facilities.

There is a pretty obvious solution — put in a traffic light controlled by a button. Lights have high compliance.

Strongtowns is what it is. They have a particular agenda and they present questions that fit their answers.

It seems dangerous to isolate a discipline from all other externalities in this way. Transport infrastructure cannot just exist in isolation to other factors. It can have wide reaching effects beyond just transport.

This seems like a weird abdication of responsibility. Sure, the schools probably shouldn't have been built there. Let's accept the premise that was the main error. That still doesn't excuse the traffic engineers - fault is not indivisible.

You say they can't with away the people's lives. True, but they can't wish away the bad decisions made by others either. They still have a choice to make, between allowing a dangerous situation for children or a worse traffic circulation. And it's valid to judge that decision.

It seems like the existence (and requirement for) freeways and fast, pedestrian hostile roads is a self fulfilling prophecy.

If we didn’t have them, people would live closer, we would have better public transport, better walking and cycling infrastructure, and we wouldn’t have a wasteful, excessive driving culture. And to many people steeped in the toxic car culture, riding a bike either means you got a DUI or you are crazy and deserve to die.

I used to live there. I hadn't heard about this loss, but if it's the schools I'm thinking, the open fields are either active farms, or used to have a church when those schools were built. The speed limits are reduced to 20 during school crossing hours. The schools were both built when Syracuse had fewer than 5000 residents and no need for major arteries.

The article is blaming all the wrong factors.

I don't get it, how does your post rebut the article? It talks neither about the fields nor the school construction (that was the parent poster), and it specifically says that posting a speed limit is not enough as a deterrent.

It's not meant as a direct rebuttal because the article is so far off it isn't even wrong, due to a lack of context around the town's history, and it completely ignores the schooltime 20mph speed limit posted with big flashing signs and enforced by city police. Those schools were both built years or decades before the city even had its first stoplight, long before the other 90% of safe neighborhood streets even existed. There were only farms on a one-mile grid system in most of the city.

Then over time developers built neighborhoods and the population exploded, so as the population grew the roads had to be expanded. Traffic planners had to move people somewhere, and they compensated for the wide streets with 20mph school speed limits, volunteer crossing guards, extensive education of children and drivers, and regular active enforcement of the school speed.

So the article comes across as clueless, seemingly almost deliberately so to exploit a tragedy.

I don't understand the relevance of the town's history. Either the crossing is safe, or it isn't. The history may explain why it's unsafe, but it can never be a justification. That there's some reason behind the configuration is not something that must be pointed out - it's obvious that nobody chooses the locations of streets and schools by throwing darts at a panel. What the author is saying is that the situation is not acceptable - however it may have originated.

As for the 20mph speed limit - besides the fact that he specifically says they are irrelevant, since drivers don't respect them -, how would that have helped, considering it was 8:30pm when the accident happened? And I'm betting the "volunteer crossing guards" weren't around either. Apparently kids sometimes leave schools outside "schooltime" - who'd a thunk it.

Finally, if we're talking about what he left out - maybe you should add the other detail he didn't mention: that there had been already 15 accidents in the crosswalk in question in the last five years. So maybe it should have been clear by now that the methods weren't working.

(By the way, "the population exploded and the streets had to be expanded" is false. Governments have tools to control the growth of the population, like permits and zoning.)

I don't understand the relevance of the town's history.

Clearly.

The decision not to put in a pedestrian bridge to me speaks more than the location of the schools.

A highway cuts through my city, largely because it used to be very poor and it was politically expedient to prioritize interstate traffic at the expense of city dwellers (there's measurably higher rates of asthma near highways).

Its not just "StrongTowns hates them", it's that a lot of cities have gotten the shit end of the stick, transportation-wise, and people who actually live in the city don't want to live next to a fucking highway for the convenience of suburbanites. It's not a conspiracy, there's political support for these policies in cities.

Just use park and ride, cut throughs can go fuck themselves, you sound entitled as hell. It's not your God given right to shit up other peoples' home with your car.

You haven't even established the timeline here. In any case, it doesn't matter, someone decided to put a crosswalk across a four-lane 40 mph road. There is no world where this is acceptable design backed by evidence.

And in any case, if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars" I'm sure where an engineers opinion will fall. But traffic engineers aren't all that.

> if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars"

It never was. The suggestion is "don't put kids in the few areas of the city specifically marked as dangerous".

It's like building a school inside of a river, watching kids drown, and suggesting the water is at fault and should get out of the way. Or building a school on an airport runway and complaining the noise scares the children and suggesting the airplanes are at fault and should land elsewhere.

We mark areas as "dangerous" and thats it? A kid is dead, but really, its noones fault?

I'm afraid your thinking on this is roughly 60 years behind. Of course vehicular deaths are not "natural".

>A kid is dead, but really, its noones fault?

You don't don't seem to be reading what the OP is writing. They are clearly laying the blame at the feet of the people who decided to build 2 schools on opposite sides of a dangerous street. Where are you getting "it's no ones fault"

Nobody cares there are schools there. It has no bearing on the safety of street design. There are sidewalks, the infamous crosswalk over 40 mph lanes: clearly it's a residential area.

To blame the school placement (likely decided by the very same governmental body doing the street design) is the epitome of the problem here: "what are the pedestrians doing on my street".

You just completely ignored my post . You don't seem to be reading what people are writing.

I think there are plenty of people who can shoulder this blame, the city planners that put two schools on what is basically a highway come to mind.

Look, the schools are already there, no sense tearing them down now and traffic calming is a fine solution but it shouldn't have been like this in the first place. There are plenty of areas marked as too dangerous for pedestrians when it comes to zoning decisions and this should have been one of them.

FTA:

>The teen was crossing from the junior high Monday about 8:30 p.m. when a southbound car struck him

This didn't happen during normal business hours.

I don't understand, what does that matter to safe engineering?

To answer, I need your help.

What does "safe engineering" mean and how is that different than "engineering?"

Where are the bold road markings, excessive signage, radar based speed display signs, photo radar, etc?

Rarely are these things difficult to mostly solve, but it requires at least some minimal effort. Sadly, that is too much to ask of most people in North America.

I agree. The anti-car rhetoric in the US is simply ridiculous. The US is simply not built for any other lifestyle. Maybe Manhattan and certain very tiny parts of other cities that are already unaffordable to the middle class, let alone the poor. We don't have public transportation and we don't have the proper legislation in place to do anything else. We don't build enough and we don't build densely enough.

These problems are widely known and currently, they have no solutions in sight. Most people want to keep the status quo, but even if there was a mass movement to change this situation, I doubt the money would be allocated. The money most certainly exists, but much of it is currently wasted (defense, bailouts, tax breaks for the rich, weapons, more weapons, etc.), at least at the federal level. I don't think any state currently has the budget to even begin to make a dent in car culture. Hell, we can't even replace hundred year old critical infrastructure bridges, yet anti-car people want a whole new infrastructure (either that, or they're delusionally thinking that everyone can cram into downtown somehow). Car culture is here to stay. That's what the market dictates in the US, anyway.

> I agree. The anti-car rhetoric in the US is simply ridiculous. The US is simply not built for any other lifestyle.

Er...yes. That's the reason there's anti-car rhetoric.

But you're also overstating the problem, which I wouldn't have thought was possible. Car culture is pervasive, but plenty of major American cities have decent-ish public transit.

Your whole argument is weird. It seems like you're saying "This problem is real, massive, and pervasive, therefore we need to stop trying to fix it and ignore it completely."

This got down voted so much I could barely read it... But it has an actual argument that's not even being contested, that's a horrible way to down vote.

I replied to the argument. mnm1 agrees that car culture is a problem, so we're on the same page there, but they conclude that the problem is impossible to fix so we should all just stop trying and embrace it, which makes no sense to me.

And, living near Seattle as I currently do, the notion that we'd need to completely rebuild everything for public transit to work at all is not accurate. Plenty of major cities have decent public transit already. There may be a few cities that are beyond saving, and it wouldn't work in small towns, but that's true anywhere; no one in rural Germany is taking the bus to work, no matter how great it is in Frankfurt.