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MUTCD is great if you're in a car on a grade separated highway. But it's staggeringly awful for when you're outside of a car.

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...

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> 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.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc

I agree. Not only does compliance to stuff like this create bad solutions into contexts where they don’t belong, but they make things worse by making normal maintenance activities capital projects.

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.

Meanwhile, we have another front page article (now page 2) with many posters lamenting that National Electric Code does not require a “You touch it? You have to fully upgrade it!” approach to code compliance as code evolves.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34339608

That’s what happens in a forum over represented by Californian apartment dwellers.

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.

There are also other issues - for example, MUTCD doesn't allow for multiple languages on street signs.

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.

Link for the curious to an article about the New York Chinatown street signs (not much discussion in the thread): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30739996

https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/10/rewriting-our-nations-d...

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."

my dream: urban roads (and parking) underground and multimodal streets above-ground severely road-dieted, with ample trees and micromobility lanes along them all. trees provide shade, reduces the heat island effect, reduces noise pollution (a bit), reduces air pollution (a bit), preserves soil and helps it hold more water, and overall reduces stress for pedestrians. adding mixed-use everywhere, with smaller pedestrian/micromobility alleys for accessibility, means people have somewhere to walk to rather than hopping into their cars for everything.

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.

It's a beautiful dream but we can barely manage upkeep in our existing road network, which is mostly just layers of dirt and asphalt. If we need to maintain tunnel systems I imagine the maintenance goes up by at least an order of magnitude.

The great part is that we don't need fancy underground roads at all because trains and subways exist!

So we can just do all the multi-modal mobility stuff and just skip the car-tunnel part

japan has an extensive network of tunnels and manages them just fine. and it's not a money problem. california, for instance, is the 5th largest economy in the world (~$3.6T), with greater LA ~$1.2T and the bay area ~$1T of that. cars have great utility, and while the economic benefits of roads/streets more than offset their cost in urban areas, a better mix of transportation reduces the amount of roads & streets we need overall (not to mention needing to repair them less often when usage is lower), mitigating the cost issue a bit.

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.

I agree it's not a money problem, but it seldom really is when we're discussing big projects. It's a problem of priority and perception. These might seem like trivial things when you're making grand designs but it matters a great deal when it's time to actually do something in the real world.

How is it not a money problem?

It's not a money problem because we spend vastly more money on much more trivial and wasteful things. If there is anything I have learned, it's that if powerful interests care about a thing it doesn't really matter how much it costs.

It's a beautiful vision, and I mean that. But I must also ask: How much more in taxes should Californians pay for the privilege? Give it a number. Because your average HN reader in California is paying close to 60% of their salary in state and federal taxes.

I don’t know how rich the average HN reader is but, for a bit of perspective: I’m solidly middle class and I only pay about 30% total (and that’s if you include property taxes).

Do you live in California?

Yes (should be obvious from context). This includes federal, state, and local taxes.

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).

I appreciate that taxes are higher in California than many places - but a married couple earning $300k pays much closer to 26% in income tax, and 5% in FICA/SS in California.

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.

Note that in these contexts (comparing with European, Asian cities) tunnels are typically employed to (1) carry mass transit (which requires and in turn supports density), and (2) carry through traffic through dense urban centers without having to take up as much surface space.

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).

The main factor that I feel that people forget is that once you build something, fixing it requires undoing it and that’s extremely expensive. Like if you design an API wrong, release it, then realize to change it requires a massive deprecation effort (if you don’t want total disruption).

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.

Japan has an extensive network of tunnels for trains, not cars. It's a totally different problem, and doesn't require remotely as much space because trains can carry so many more people and are pretty narrow and don't need lots of lanes for passing. Asking for all the major roads in a city to be moved underground is lunacy; you can do a few tunnels here and there (like big cities such as DC and NYC already do), but that's about it. The answer isn't more car-based infrastructure, the answer is to make cars inconvenient and move people into trains, and make ground-level streets better for pedestrians and cyclists.

>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).

japan 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.

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).

>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 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.

the tunnels i went through in japan were all at least 2 lanes in each direction. there were plenty of cars and traffic in the cities i visited so it can't be that inconvenient.

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.

there are places like you describe and they get along just fine without those underground car roads. if you're going to the enormous expense of tunneling you should get your money's worth by building high-capacity transit.

> MUTCD is great if you're in a car on a grade separated highway. But it's staggeringly awful for when you're outside of a car.

>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"

No, I'm not misunderstanding. I talk with traffic engineers on a regular basis on how the MUTCD is a large barrier towards safer streets. Pavement markings, including lane widths, bike lanes, counter flow bike lanes, HAWK signals, transit lanes and crosswalks affect the street design.

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

Your previous comment was mainly referring to traffic speed which is primarily a function of geometric design of the road (width, superelevation, sightlines, etc).

> 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)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6-AI_X1qE

> Wouldn't that lead to more red light running?

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...

I'm 191cm and often can't see the far side signals in a normal seated position in a Civic. If the signal heads were on the near side, I would have to stop like three car lengths away from the intersection to see them from inside the car.

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.

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