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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

elevated pedestrian crossing is the solution here. used across London with great effect.

anyway, there are many ways to calm traffic.

So “let’s make walking even more inconvenient but find ways to moan about how much they cost to boot”.

Sinking roads and giving all surface level to pedestrians would be an active improvement, though obviously not a cheap one. The great bit is when you remove the cars you can backfill the dig and forget about it entirely.

We used to have lovely speedbumps every 50 meters or so in our neighborhood. Can’t drive fast if it’ll make your car fly.

Such active traffic calming measures can be combined with more passive ones (lane narrowing, visual obstructions) to create a psychological slowdown effect in addition to the physical ones.

This works especially well combined with pedestrian and cycle passthroughs and such, including to avoid “drive-through” neighbourhoods without having to make the neighbourhood entirely impassable and a pain in the ass to residents.

>including to avoid “drive-through” neighbourhoods without having to make the neighbourhood entirely impassable and a pain in the ass to residents.

I suspect that Google Maps and the like have worsened the level of driving through residential neighborhoods as they route you through a maze of residential streets to save (in theory) two minutes.

Mostly Waze as it uses real trip times for its estimates and so can find “hidden shortcuts” through side streets. Though the rise of traffic avoidance in GPS likely contributed.

But that’s the point of traffic calming, they make trips take longer in real time so the route becomes less attractive as traffic avoidance, while not being a huge issue for “normal” local traffic.

The problem with speed bumps is they tend to make drivers speed up in between the speed bumps to make up for lost time; it's probably the least effective traffic calming measure. The most effective one would probably be shrinking the width of the road so that the lanes are narrower, which makes high speed difficult along the entire length of the road, not merely the stretches around speed bumps.

Municipalities have learned to just ignore requests for speed bumps and traffic calming stops because the same people who ask for them will be right back in front of them next month complaining about noise and pollution from all the accelerating cars. That is a problem to which there's really no good solution that the town can implement. The net result is the initial complainers are still not satisfied and the silent majority who thought the area was fine the way it was are now annoyed by the stops or bumps. From a "keeping the townsfolk as happy as possible given the resources we have at our disposal" it's an obvious waste.

as a pedestrian I've just found that the result of those in Georgia, USA is that drivers ignore pedestrians more slowly.

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