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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue it's wide suburban streets that encourage high speed driving. The road I live on is not wide enough for two cars to pass each other if there are also cars parked on each side, and driving even 20mph feels way too fast. But when I go visit family members in the suburbs, the streets are wide enough for two lanes of parked cars, plus 3 lanes of driving cars. Driving under 50mph feels like you might as well get out and walk.

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This is called "traffic calming", the notion that you have to design the streets so it's impossible for drivers to go at unsafe speeds, rather than making wide straight roads and plonking down a "pls no speederino" sign.

Leave wide straight roads for segregated highways and build streets for people, not just cars.

> This is called "traffic calming"

That sounds like the PR branding for a positive externality of developers making streets narrower because they can and it allows them to maximize the space they get to charge for when they sell.

I live in one such neighborhood, and enough people park on the street that even without two cars needing to pass each other it feels unsafe even at slow speed, because if you're taking a turn you can't see oncoming traffic, and if some kid ran out from behind a car there would be no room to maneuver to avoid them without hitting something else, even at a slow speed.

If it wasn't about money they would just put speed bumps in, like they do in lots of places.

It's not PR branding, cities actually spend time and energy and money actually making streets "worse" for cars. A common technique, for instance, is to alternate the side that cars are parked on. This creates a sinuous road where you're constantly doing little turns, instead of a straight-away.

This isn't just because of the width of the roads, because these didn't exist 30 years ago (in the states at least; they were starting to become common in the UK 30 years ago), but the houses haven't suddenly merged closer together.

I see in another reply you say these underperform. Citation? Fatalities are still lower in cities.

The fact that it feels unsafe is what makes it safer. You're prompted to slow down and pay attention to what's in front of you.

You might slow down but that’s offset by the roads being it’s inherently unsafe. Real world statistics frequently show such designs underperform compared to the expected payoffs and sometimes reduce safety.

I'm interested in these statistics, can you suggest a source?

Speed bumps make it harder for fire apparatuses to respond to calls. Traffic calming is preferred because the expectation is for opposite ROW traffic to yield to the fire apparatus.

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