The Style Guide for America’s Highways
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It could even be argued that the MUTCD is awful for driving in an urban area. MUTCD designs streets similarly to rural highways, and this can create conditions where people speed when they need to be driving slowly, because the design of the street doesn't reflect the speed the sign says you need to be driving.
The MUTCD needs a different approach to urban streets. One that creates an environment where making a mistake doesn't lead to death. One where the design of the street reflects the posted speed limit. It will make the experience better for everyone.
https://americawalks.org/how-the-mutcd-creates-unsafe-condit...
https://nacto.org/program/modernizing-federal-standards/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-05/it-s-time...
then you don't need to rely so much on speed limits, signs, and signals, because you've segregated (most of) the cars from people.
So we can just do all the multi-modal mobility stuff and just skip the car-tunnel part
people react viscerally to moving away from a sole reliance on cars, but most people intuitively enjoy human-centered environments more than car-centered ones. i wouldn't advocate taking away cars, but rather providing a more human-centered environment that de-emphasizes cars in our lives so that we can better build relationships and communities with each other.
Edit: point being, if your taxes are super high, it's usually a combination of very high income & owning very expensive property.
Edit 2: if you have very LOW income and own very expensive property, then you could end up with astronomical tax rates overall if you include property taxes. But that's usually not what people talk about in this context, and is kind of a separate problem (cost of housing).
https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...
Not even an argument for tunnels, people just have really warped views of tax burden in the US.
Keep in mind that low-density sprawl is likely to * create much higher infrastructure costs (in terms of streets, utilities, etc) per capita (I believe Strong Towns has written extensively on this topic); * force more people to buy, drive, & maintain a car (and spend more time commuting) when they would not otherwise need to (if you like driving, good for you, but it isn't for everyone).
You’ll notice throughout history that things like earthquakes, fires (see Chicago) or wars (see parts of Europe) have had extremely major effects on redevelopment.
Of course, we don’t want disasters because they cause total disruption, but when we talk about redeveloping an area, you can’t compare two entirety different places and just say “oh we can do it because we have more money” — you always need way more money to redevelop than to develop the first time.
>i wouldn't advocate taking away cars, but rather providing a more human-centered environment that de-emphasizes cars in our lives so that we can better build relationships and communities with each other.
You can't have it both ways. If you make it possible for everyone to have a car, then it becomes impossible for people to not have a car. You can do what we have here in Tokyo: make car ownership extremely inconvenient and impractical, by making the streets narrow and basically eliminating parking, or having a small amount of very expensive parking. Then, the only vehicles using the streets are mostly taxis (they don't need parking) and trucks, not personal cars. Narrow streets + no parking lots means buildings are much closer together and the city is dense enough for walking and cycling (with the help of subways of course).
you'll never get change if your goal is to make cars so inconvenient that it pisses off the overwhelming majority of voters. cars are here to stay, so let's accept that reality and work around it. what you can do is demonstrate a better version of the world that people can get behind. but yes, it's not to create more car infrastrastructure, but actually less, because tunnels are expensive, so we'd be more selective about where to put roads. then we can also strategically reduce street area dedicated solely to cars (particularly street parking, but also lane number and width), reclaiming much of our limited surface area for people first.
> "Then, the only vehicles using the streets are mostly taxis (they don't need parking) and trucks, not personal cars. Narrow streets + no parking lots means buildings are much closer together and the city is dense enough for walking and cycling (with the help of subways of course)."
yes, let's build denser/closer together, build trains/dedicated busways, and let's not build (surface) parking lots. that's not incompatible.
off of the underground roads, you can put central, underground parking to serve urban neighborhoods and eliminate the need for permanent street parking (obviously services could still have surface space for intermittent parking). you could have fun little green alleyways aboveground (like in japan!) to access the central parking lot. you could even use a single underground car alley under the middle of a primarily residential block to provide access to underground garages under homes/apartment buildings. imagine how cool it would be to replace the street between you and your neighbor and set up a sports field or a garden or a picnic area, or any number of possibilities (even a whole row of new housing could fit down most "residential streets" in many places).
What world do you live in? In my world, cars are extremely inconvenient. They're expensive, the parking is very limited and expensive, and to go anywhere you usually have to take toll roads, which are expensive. As a result, most people don't have a car, and use the subway, or take trains between cities.
>apan also has tunnel infrastructure for cars. one of my most vivid memories of visiting there is driving in and out of many-miles-long tunnels, and coming out of the last one smack dab in the middle of kobe. it was magical.
They're not highly common in Japanese cities. There are a bunch of car tunnels in the mountains though (no subways there). They tend to be really narrow; there's no way to pass in them.
>then we can also strategically reduce street area dedicated solely to cars (particularly street parking
Do you have any clue how much it would cost to build gigantic underground parking garages? Or how much the parking fees would be? This is lunacy.
it would be roughly $600B to build enough neighborhood parking garages in LA to serve all its residents. that's just half a year's worth of GDP, which is not nothing, but certainly within reach. with just that, LA could remove all on-street parking in neighborhoods and turn it into bike lanes and/or extend the curbs to add more trees and sidewalk.
Not Just Bikes covers this shortfall in a video on speed limits[1], and it really opened my eyes on the relationship between rules and actual behavior.
Essentially, speed limit signs affect driving speeds slightly, but the street design is important. Wide, open, straight roads naturally prompt drivers to drive to highway speeds, even in more suburb areas. It's amazing how often I check the speedometer and find that I'm driving much more than the posted speed limit when following the flow of traffic.
This is an issue in New York's Chinatown for example, where old bilingual street signs that need to be replaced have to be replaced with English-only signs.
Case in point. A major avenue near me has no lines at all. There’s a small component of a turn lane, that’s it! Why don’t they just paint lines?
Well… the city has to hire an engineer for $900k to send a couple of $25/hr engineering technicians to measure stuff for a few days, then they think about it and produce one or more designs for lanes and signage. The engineers are required to accommodate ADA requirements and offer multimodal options to accommodate bikes, etc. So instead of $20k for stripes, we have a $6M capital project to replace crossings, which requires state and federal highway funds. This was delayed by COVID chip and labor shortages and, is excepted to start in August 2023. (It started in late 2018)
In the meantime, there’s a front end collision 2-3 times a month.
I had to spend like $15k on top of a kitchen remodel to replace a panel, install spark breakers and whole house ground fault gear for a pretty marginal benefit.
Good read about how MUTCD stymies ped/bike safety improvements for everyone: "...the Manual creates sewers of constant, fast traffic that impede walkability and safety."
>
>It could even be argued that the MUTCD is awful for driving in an urban area. MUTCD designs streets similarly to rural highways, and this can create conditions where people speed when they need to be driving slowly, because the design of the street doesn't reflect the speed the sign says you need to be driving.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding about what the MUTCD is for. It's mainly about traffic signs and pavement markings. Road design is covered in the AASHTO publication "A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets"
My largest personal pet peeves with the MTUCD is the requirement for far side signal heads. Far side signal heads cause crosswalk encroachment. If signals were near side only like in EU, crosswalk encroachment would be impossible because you lose sight of the signal head.
https://streets.mn/2021/04/30/thinking-outside-the-pedestria...
If you check out my second link in my first comment from NACTO, near the bottom there is a table of various cities and their specific issues with the MUTCD. Mine (Madison, WI) is here: https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258
> Pavement markings, including lane widths,
With commercial vehicle traffic, lane widths cannot be more narrow than the vehicle. At the body, a commerical vehicle is 8.5 feet wide. Adding mirror width makes them over 10 feet wide. In any case, looking at the scatter plot in this particular study[1], you can see that the 85th percentile speed doesn't really change regardless of whether the width is closer to 10 feet or 12 feet (the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 37 to 50 mph in both cases
> bike lanes,
The MUTCD doesn't really specify the minimum width of a bike lane, but the AASTHO Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities does specify a minimum usable pavement width of 4 feet, despite the fact that they say that a cyclist has an operating width of 5 feet.
The MUTCD, unfortunately, allows for a straight through bike like to the right of a general purpose lane that allows for right turning traffic, which leads to the situation that increases the risk of right hook collisions for cyclists. NACTO does not really address that problem with conventional bike lanes as far as I've seen.
> counter flow bike lanes
These shouldn't be allowed mainly because vehicular traffic will not be looking in the direction that counter flow cyclists are coming from and will fail to yield to them as can be seen here[2]. The other problem with contraflow bike lanes is that it increases the cyclists exposure to glare from automotive headlamps because the standard asymmetric beam pattern directs more light to the right and allows for a higher horizontal cutoff. This can basically make it very difficult for cyclists to see where they're going and will make it difficult, if not impossible to spot road hazards in time to avoid them.
> My largest personal pet peeves with the MTUCD is the requirement for far side signal heads. Far side signal heads cause crosswalk encroachment. If signals were near side only like in EU, crosswalk encroachment would be impossible because you lose sight of the signal head.
Wouldn't that lead to more red light running?
> https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258
>> The draft 11th Edition of the MUTCD takes away tools that engineers can use to improve mobility and safety for vulnerable users in challenging and complex urban settings, such as counter flow bike lanes next to parallel parking and the use of HAWK signals (Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons) with bike signals. Lack of these treatments will make many locations more dangerous and harder to access by vulnerable road users
One difference between cyclists and walking pedestrians is that cyclists move much faster. This means that they're further from the intersection when a motorist is making a turn in a situation where they may need to yield.
Normally, a pedestrian is very close to entering the intersection, meaning that a motorist can see them without having to turn their head to look down the sidewalk/path to check for any approaching pedestrians. On the other hand, a cyclist could be 30 feet away from getting to the intersection and out of sight of the motorist unless the motorist makes a conscious effort to look down the sidewalk/path in order to see any approaching cyclist. Most motorists aren't going to do the latter, which means that cyclists are at increased risk of a collision in those situations.
The best option is to enforce protected movements through the intersections with traffic signals and not rely in yielding at all. Unfortunately, most pedestrian and cyclist facilities rely on mutual yielding between them and motorists, which doesn't really work out that well. But if we were to use signals, then everyone will experience significantly more delay and there would be a problem with non-compliance with the signals.
[1] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/review_lane_width_and_speed_pars... (figure on page 6)
I don't think so. Obviously, the signal heads would have to be placed in a certain way that the MUTCD also prohibits in order to ensure near-side signals are easy and prominent when stopped at the stop bar (for example, minimum signal head distance from ground).
On the contrary, I actually think the MUTCD enforced far side signals create dangerous situations where certain signage, like "no turn on red" is less visible, especially on arterials where most traffic deaths and severe injury occur, because the signage is literally 140 ft away on the opposite side of the intersection on the far-side signal head monopole.
140 ft is very far for any signage placed at this distance when the driver is stopped at the stop bar, especially if you're not specifically looking/familiar with the area.
I was actually hit by someone driving a month ago on a multi use path because a driver turned right on red, despite not not being allowed. I believe that signal head placement led to this, because the no turn on red signage is very hard to see here (again, 140 ft away).
This is in contrast with the Netherlands, for example, which their overhead, near-side signal heads are only 20-30 ft away from the driver, very prominent and easy to see out of the windshield, and any signage next to the signal would be extremely prominent, despite the intersection size being similar (140 ft). NL obviously doesn't allow turns on red in the first place, but that's a whole other discussion...
Sorry I don't have photo examples on this computer atm. But this is something I've been discussing with local city engineers. It's a recurring problem, and they're aware of it, but any solution has to work around the MUTCD.
I do agree with you that signals are incredibly inefficient and ideally we would be getting rid of them wherever possible-
> “Traffic signals are the most mindless and wasteful thing Americans routinely install to manage traffic. Removing nearly all of them within cities would improve our transportation systems and overall quality of life.”
https://gettingaroundsac.blog/2022/03/16/too-many-traffic-si...
Re: bike lanes, I think it they need to do more to distinguish bike lanes from just extra pavement beyond the white lines. There should be a different color line to make it clear to expect bikes there and not to use it as extra margin if the oncoming traffic is close to the line, etc.
The feds are killing off Clearview, the new highway sign font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11039770 (29 comments) -- https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/4/10919686/clearview-highway...
America's Sudden U-Turn on Highway Fonts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985709 (17 comments) -- http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/01/official-united-state...
> Highway Gothic’s problems rested in the interstices (spaces) of its “a”, “e” and “u”, and when reading them at higher speed, these vowels would present more like an “o”. In addition, lower case letters like “i” and “l” were indistinguishable, with halation further heightened by the glare of headlights at night.
> ...
> But herein lies a mystery. In its Federal Register notice, the FHWA concluded that although Clearview worked well for white lettering on a dark background, it was ineffective on dark lettering on white background. Moreover, it determined that the “retroreflective” material used on freeway signs created more of a problem than did the font of choice when it came to nighttime readability. Finding no benefit that could be remedied by simply replacing older Highway Gothic font signage, the FHWA reversed course.
and some more digging finds that research / testing: Penn State History Lesson: The Drama Behind The ‘New’ Highway Sign Font - https://onwardstate.com/2021/08/26/penn-state-history-lesson...
https://thelandmag.com/richard-ankrom-guerrilla-public-servi...
The Public Service: Guerrilla Public Service 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clgl63CWOkM
However, I wonder how much trouble people get in practice for putting up signs on less-trafficked public roads (e.g., signs like "Slow, children at play" or pedestrian crossings). I'd like to think that a well-intentioned sign on, say, a quiet suburban street would be allowed to exist.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-signs-man...
That's without various design specs, such as for the Transport font used on signs:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-signs-wor...
I wonder if there is a concise summary of differences between the federal and various state guides.
As someone who learned to drive in Europe I've always been extremely confused by the signage and road layout of American roads. There is a pretty big difference in quality between state roads and federal roads. The former seem to have no coherent style, layout or identity while the latter seem pretty consistent. Given the above documents I can see there is a consistent style but the style does not seem to translate to a consistent user experience.
The three things that stand out to me are the amount of text on each sign, the lack of standardized rule about entries and exists, and the lack of road markings, specially at intersections.
The first one isn't necessarily a big problem but it's very weird to have all this text when you could have instead a very recognizable sign that you can understand from afar (the one way sign is a great example), instead of a white sign with black text that you can only read once you're close to it and only understand if you know English.
The second one makes highway layout extremely confusing and, at least for me, feel dangerous and stressful. Some Signs can tell you to take an exit with make 20m of notice and it's a 90° right turn and you also need to go from 120 kmph to 30 in that span. The reduced speed sign is only visible after you've turned so if you dont know the area you're almost always going too fast. Because it's a 90° turn with trees in the sides you can't anticipate what the traffic is like after the turn. If you know the area you probably have no problem handling this situation, but driving there for the first time feels like driving through a minefield. There are other instances of this with left exits, overtaking from both sides, turn right on red, stop sights everywhere, no priority system, and more.
The last one is incredibly frustrating when you come from Europe because over there, most intersections have redundant signage and markings. Intersections have street lights that tell you where to go, the road layout is advertised on a sign well in advance, and the paint on the road tells you how to turn and where to stop and even indicates speed limits or directions. Intersections in americas provide no such affordances. Intersections are basically a free for all between the incoming trafic, the people turning right on red and the pedestrians. I was expecting a lot more from a country which is built for cars.
It feels like roads are built for cars but not for drivers.
There should be a sign for this situation, for example:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6277564,-122.3289325,3a,73.1...
Also FWIW: https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/htm/2009/part2/part2c.htm#table2C...
Europe does tend to have better signage in intersections. But the concept of a national speed limit and then not marking the speed limit when it's in effect seems brain dead. How are you supposed to know what it is if say you just rented a car from the airport?
The other thing that kills me is not using a different color for separating lanes that run in the same direction vs different directions (white vs yellow in the US) How do you know at a glance if a road is one way?
Yeah. Have you driven in France? On regular roads, there's no "national speed limit". Depending on the department, it can be 80 or 90 km/h.
> How are you supposed to know what it is if say you just rented a car from the airport?
Nul ne doit ignorer la loi (no one may be ignorant of the law).
> How do you know at a glance if a road is one way?
If there are only two lanes, you look at the line on the left border of the road. If the line is continuous, both lanes go the same way. If it's dashed or there's no line (and your side doesn't have one either) you're on a two-way road.
If there are multiple lanes, there will be a double continuous line separating the ways. The double line can sometimes appear on two-lane roads, it always means the road is two-way.
Yellow markings exist, they usually mean road-work / temporary signaling.
Best rule of thumb: if you're not clearly on a highway, it's very likely a two-way road. Clearly means there's no other separate set of lanes close by. We don't have as much space as in the US where the lanes going the other way are so far away you can barely see them.
I got a parking ticket once in a place that had parking signs and a parking meter. Turned out that particular parking meter was only for cars with a specific permit. How could I have known that? Because there was supposed to be a painted 1" green circle around its base. Even if I had known what that meant, the circle had worn away probably years prior. No, there was no mention of these circles or their meaning on any of the parking signs.
Sure, but humans aren't clairvoyant. You can make the effort to look it up, or the road authority can just put up some basic signs.
To stay on the topic of speed limits, there's a national speed limit for towns / cities, 50 kmph. It's usually not posted as such, but there being a sign with a town name means you must observe that.
Other peculiarities you have to know: when you enter a town, there may be a different speed limit posted than the national limit, typically 30 kmph, very rarely 70. It matters if the speed limit sign is physically attached to the name sign, or if it stands on its own. In the former case, it means that's the speed limit for all the streets of the town. If not, it's the regular limit, meaning until the first intersection, when the default one comes in effect.
The signs are otherwise identical.
[0]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_speed_limit...
By learning the traffic rules before you rent a car, how else would you know what else is different than what you are used to?
Not marking the national default speed limit is done to limit the amount of signs
I agree completely, I've lived with it all my life and I don't understand it either. How you know? You don't, always. When in doubt, keep right.
50 years ago my dad had an accident precisely on account of this. He got confused about what stretch of road he was on, changed lanes into oncoming traffic, and hit a truck head on.
Good thing he was driving a Volvo. He bruised his knee.
I wonder if the MUTCD has a section on keeping the graffiti consistent nationally as well.
Totally agree with you on exits though, especially left exits. Since moving to Texas I've become a big fan of frontage roads, but not everyplace has the room for that.
As for right-on-red, I think (as a Brit) it's awesome, but I don't think I've ever seen a single person come to a complete stop before going right, in the 20 years I've lived here. At best, it's slow-down-while-I-check.
For example, in France (and most of Europe, I think), the default is for traffic coming from the right to have right of way. So if you're coming from the left and see the back of the sign, you know you don't have to yield.
The ones I can think of that are words only that might have a better symbolic notation are Dead End, No Outlet, and No Passing Zone.
Some like "cross only at cross walks" or "no pedestrian crossing" are not a sign at all in EU. They are either implied by general traffic rules, or implied by traffic rules for given road category, or enforced with infrastructure.
"One lane bridge" EU has specific signs for lane cross section (not for bridges specifically). "Pavement ends" I even consider funny. What comes next after that? "A meadow starts?"
A handful of good comparison examples there - notably no pedestrian/no vehicle signs, which use clear imagery in Europe
But I've driven in both the US and Europe, and while a lot of the European signs are easy to figure out, a lot of them seem not only non-intuitive but also inconsistent, as well as difficult to read.
For example, "no stopping" is a red circle with a blue background and an X, while "no parking" is the same red circle with the same blue background and a slash, or half the X. Not only is all of this totally arbitrary, but there's almost zero contrast between the red and blue, so the opposite of being fast to recognize, or pleasant.
And then a slash in some cases means "end of" (end of no passing zone) but in other cases it means "no" (no left turn). So it essentially means both "allowed" and "not allowed", but I guess it's based on the color or orientation or something of the slash, or multiple thin slashes vs one big thick one?
I find myself very much preferring the help of "wordiness" in this case. The top priority while driving is clarity in messaging, not economy of space. What the US does, which is actually to combine symbols in many cases with text, gives both quick recognition and unambiguous information.
It makes sense if you think of "parking" as sort of a "long term stopping". That is: no stopping at all (includes no parking), short stops only (stopping allowed but not parking), stopping fully allowed (both short stops and parking).
I got my driver's license in EU first (Slovenia). Then had to pass it again in USA (San Francisco).
The US test was a joke. No parallel parking portion, no highway portion, no complex intersection portion, no hill start portion (in SF!!!), no first aid portion, no ... many things were missing actually. But I did have to show hand signals!? Lol what.
The US test took 10 minutes and we drove around the block. The EU test took an hour, came with mandatory 30 hours of licensed instructor training, and the instructor had to certify on pain of losing their license that I spent at least 3 hours driving at night during training.
Nowadays the EU license, at least in Slovenia, requires passing a "stunt driving" course within 2 years of getting your license. It's been decided knowing how to control a skid in icy/snowy conditions is mandatory, for example.
> a lot of them seem not only non-intuitive but also inconsistent
There is a visual language you have to learn as part of the licensing process. You spend about 5 hours of classroom instruction before even getting your permit to start learning how to drive. There is a logic behind how the signs are structured and you don't have to memorize.
Different countries do use different signs but the iconography is very similar for the most part.
> The top priority while driving is clarity in messaging, not economy of space
I find the EU signs faster to recognize because pictograms are easy. I've got most US signs memorized by now so they work like pictograms. But when you do have to read the sign, takes a lot of attention away from driving imo.
I think part of the difference may also be that in USA you need to drive to participate in society (fundamental right -ish) whereas in much of Europe driving is seen as a privilege, albeit a very useful privilege.
When one is driving at 100km/h, “wordiness” is not really that useful.
I much rather prefer signage in Europe. Colours are consistent with the meanings (red is always “forbidden” or “not allowed”, whereas blue and white means the opposite). Same goes with geometry. There is little to no need for any more descriptive signage.
In the US, I find myself having to read three line signs almost constantly, some of them comically complex. There is even a joke in Futurama about that: https://youtu.be/-sHKlVRnfag
Really don't know what you mean. Signs are large and visible from a long distance away. You've got plenty of time to read, and we're talking about short phrases like "EXIT ONLY" or "TOLL PLAZA 2 MILES". Not paragraphs of literature.
In most countries in Europe that is just a phone crossed by a red line.
A red border on the sign is the beginning of something "not allowed" (no parking) or of some limitation (maximum speed limit 50 km/h). Those signs are round.
The limitations are lifted when you see a similar black and white sign, usually barred.
If the sign is triangular with a red border, it means some danger is coming up.
If the sign is a blue background (only, no red border) it's an obligation to do something (must turn right).
Square blue background is usually some kind of "information". Like "parking". You don't have to park. But you may. Sometimes, this information may have other implications, like "one way road, going your way". You don't have to keep moving. But you know no one will be coming from the front.
A black and white sign with a slash means "end of prohibition", a red sign with or without a slash means "probition" or "restriction". The issue is that a slash is already used to mean "prohibition" so there needs to be a different kind of slash to indicate the end.
> I find myself very much preferring the help of "wordiness" in this case. The top priority while driving is clarity in messaging, not economy of space. What the US does, which is actually to combine symbols in many cases with text, gives both quick recognition and unambiguous information.
I have to ask "What if you didn't understand the language of the state?", it seems the wordiness only works if you understand the language, and if you don't then you're kinda fucked. I wouldn't understand any signs in say Slovenia were they written in Slovenia, but with the current system it's not an issue as the signs look like what I have at home.
I wouldn't deny not all the signs are intuitive, but it's a language with a grammar, and once you get it down, it becomes easy.