Traffic engineers build roads relying on outdated research, faulty data
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
The bright shining hope: Most Americans do not want these big cars. Legislation is making small vehicles less competitive, when it should be the other way.
AKA - we have good, cheap(ish) electric trucks now. Legislation doesn't need to worry about farmers who can't afford electric anymore.
We are trully living in the future. :) I heard that cars are getting smarter but you are the first i have the pleasure to chat with.
Joking asside, i don’t know if I have ever seen a more succint example of how people identify with their cars.
Right now the NCAP has pedestrian avoidance but nothing on impact. It would be fairly trivial to test the impact of hitting a crash dummy at 30mph.
However the US regulator is already floating a proposal to include similar pedestrian testing in its requirements.
I think the emission standards are dumb, but this narrative around customer choice is really getting distorted in weird ways. The bottom line is that people in the US want to drive pickups. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad reasons, but they go out of their way to do this. And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Yes, a newspaper can always post a photo of a lifted 2024 RAM 3500 next to a 1975 Chevy C10 pickup to get some internet outrage points, but if you post an apples-to-apples comparison, the changes aren't really all that dramatic.
That’s more a function of crew cabs and using a pickup as a family vehicle. The bed has to shorten as the cab lengthens, else the truck gets unmanageablely long.
A lot of people like bigger vehicles. For ages, big cars drove poorly, absolutely guzzled gas, and lacked features. Over the past 20 years, auto makers basically solved all of these issues.
A lot of big vehicles drive much better for what most people do - straight driving on highway. Fuel economy is “good enough”. Large trucks and SUVs have great feature sets. On top of all of that, large vehicles seat more, hold more, and generally still fit in most parking spaces and garages.
People just want big cars
It comes down to: "I want to drive big, loud, smelly, dangerous car free of any consequences for fraction of the cost". We don't tolerate such desires in other areas but cars somehow get free pass still.
It's really not that black and white. There's a line between the government deciding the optimal allocation of all resources and you retaining some degree of personal freedom. Techies in the SF Bay Area are very quick to draw that line in a way that affects other people's lifestyles, but doesn't affect their own. Guess what - pickup drivers in Texas have critical opinions about your consumer choices too.
If you think the math for cars is uniquely bad, I think that's a reasonable position, although I suspect it's pretty myopic. The externalities of cheap consumer goods from China, or of a clothes dryer or an AC unit, are pretty terrible too.
The math aside, there is a huge risk to this sort of hyper-rational accounting. It's probably not cost-effective for the society to medically prolong the lives of people over the age of 50. There are many squishy, hard-to-parametrize overriding considerations for policy decisions, and if we accept it for our lifestyles, we should probably at least try to understand what they are for other lifestyles too.
Do you also have a problem with commercial trucks or just the people that chose personal trucks because they don't agree with your ideology?
They still guzzle insane amounts of gas and generally drive poorly. That hasn't changed in decades. They may handle better than they did in the past, but they still handle poorly. Similarly they may get better gas milage, but not by much, and not in comparison to other vehicles.
Which could also reasonably be called a pretty big car.
Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs. And those SuperCrews start at $43,000 which means more like $50,000 for a realistic spec.
Regular Cab/6.5-Foot Bed: Length – 209.1 inches / Wheelbase – 122.8 inches
Regular Cab/8.0-Foot Bed: Length – 227.7 inches / Wheelbase – 141.5 inches
SuperCab/6.5-Foot Bed: Length – 231.7 inches / Wheelbase – 145.4 inches
SuperCab/8.0-Foot Bed: Length – 250.3 inches / Wheelbase – 164.1 inches
SuperCrew/5.5-Foot Bed: Length – 231.7 inches / Wheelbase – 145.4 inches
SuperCrew/6.5-Foot Bed: Length – 243.5 inches / Wheelbase – 157.2 inches
Nope, as you can see above bed may be shrinking, cab growing and growing.
These start at about $44,000. I was responding to the parent's claim that you can have a normal sedan or a pickup for "$15,000", so consumers choose the larger car sort of by default.
In reality, they pay a lot more for pickups because they want pickups, not because of some lopsided pricing incentives.
For non-Americans: While literally writing truck bed lengths being 8 inches (8") and 5.5 inches (5.5"), the text means 8 feet (8', 2.44m) and 5.5 feet (5.5', 1.68m). Americans don't always remember which of the " and ' is which, so they use these interchangeably (and according to the movie This is Spinal Tap, so do the English).
Yeah…
* https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/honda-civic-2021-se...
The F-150 is +1216mm (48") longer, +228mm wider, +546mm taller than a Civic.
> It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
What is the front-end height of all of these vehicles?
> Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head. I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221201222...
Based on what? Anecdotal I know, but my biggest frustration is I can't convince friends and family they should buy a small car instead of an SUV because they always say "I might need to move a couch/dresser/friends/etc one day". I'm convinced they would come out way ahead buying a small car and renting a truck the once or twice a year they need it but again, I've yet to convince anyone that's the case
So I'd rather spend a few thousand more for a midsize or large car/suv than a mini or compact car. It has nothing to do with neighbors, or signaling. Larger cars are usually just better.
This article is clearly on the money.
You get the utility of a truck and van with the MPG of a car, I see why they took over the world. If it weren't for pickup trucks being a cultural icon they would probably have replaced the "workman" vehicle too.
At some point i had a Fit and a slightly larger Suzuki SX4. I got to carry 30 folding chairs in the Fit once. I could maybe have fit 20 of them in the Suzuki.
It's a real shame they don't make the Fit anymore here in the US. Instead we get that shitty crossover HRC in it's place that doesn't have nearly the storage space in it, because it has to look like it's higher off the ground to satisfy buyers.
Just a preposterously useful car without being conspicuous at all.
The SUV protectionism of import tariffs, safety exclusions, and pollution carve-outs must end because they're killing us on the roads, killing our health through more pollution, and killing the planet.
Makes a pretty convincing case.
How much does it cost to execute this whole plan? You end up taking a large percentage just to run the program with little to show for. It does make for great political campaigns.
That's patently false.
Americans by and large want SUVs at a minimum the size of CRV or RAV4, or else a pickup. At any rate with hybrid vehicles getting 40mpg is very attainable. I have a three row SUV that gets this. And I bought it because I really wanted a much more comfortable vehicle I could fit more humans and stuff in.
Other comments addressed this, but it’s also absolutely bananas to claim trucks are as cheap as small cars in the US. Even the F-150 quoted in the comments which is already more than 10k more than the car is quoted as the base model that basically doesn’t exist outside of work fleets. You’d be lucky to find a truck with 100k miles for 15k.
The conclusions are what the person paying for the study wants them to be.
If a local municipality is anti-car, they will run a study justifying adding bike lanes everywhere, even though once they are built you never see bicycles in them, and they create more difficulty for cars by narrowing or taking away lanes.
Or they'll install "traffic calming" speed bumps, chicanes, or curb-extension bottlenecks on neighborhood roads when (almost) nobody in the neighborhood wanted them.
On the other hand, if they are pro-development, their studies will show that a new or widened road will lead to more business development, more jobs, more tax revenue.
/s
Where? Outside of cities with very high density I don't see this being true. For medium density and less, what I've seen is that bike lanes remain empty. Bike counters basically show them to be failures, since the utilization barely increases over time or even lags population growth, while the car lanes remain fully utilized.
If cyclists aren't using them, they're not doing it to spite you. They're doing it because there's no network and 500m of bike lane doesn't take them somewhere useful or because they're badly designed and dangerous or very unpleasant due to heavy car traffic, pollution, etc.
"Urbanists" greatly exaggerate the number of cyclists. And on top of being in the vast minority, cyclists don't ride many miles per day, they are limited by the biology. So, naturally, even if every motorist had the vehicle confiscated and replaced by a bicycle, you would not see nearly as much traffic of cyclists. And in reality the vast majority of the tiny minority of cyclists also own a car and use it for most trips, only riding for exercise/fun.
You might not want traffic calming, but everyone else who has to deal with your driving does.
On city streets, tailgating is common, jacked up pick-ups are drenching the interior of your car with their headlights after dark, making all your mirrors a blinding image. Can we please put our phones down for safety's sake? Sometimes I ride a motorcycle, so I'm hyper aware and see all kinds of just plain terrible driving practices. Most of it is simply a lack of patience behind the wheel. On the turnpike, when that car passes doing twenty over, do we really think they think about the possible consequences?
So the bollards do seems to work. Install bollards!
Throw in some strategically placed bollards or chicanes to change the geometry of the road and people will be forced to slow down.
http://www.thinkstreetsmart.org/uploads/1/2/7/4/127450599/ed...
As for traffic calming, curb extensions, etc.: the city only started adding those modifications after pedestrian fatalities started going up and people started demanding them because they got tired of hearing about deaths all of the time.
None of this is because the city is pro/anti-development since most of the projects could be construed either way. In a lot of cases it was simply to see which measures were effective because we often lack the data to know what will be effective.
You know why the idiot traffic engineers made the streets so wide in the area where these oversized cars killed two people? “The average commute on the road would be extended by 1 minute.”
Where do you get this idea? NIMBY works every bit as well on new or expanded roads, and it gets used constantly. Hell, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars just trying to decide if we can build a new bridge, and that doesn't even involve actual planning. It's amazing we get any infrastructure projects done now given that every single person can stall them indefinitely.
Probably the one thing they wouldn't really be bothered by is expanding that cul-de-sac, as long as it will still be a dead end and not a new connection that traffic might choose to use to transit across the neighborhood.
US cities were not destroyed, and this is just misinformation, or hyperbole at best. In fact virtually all cities benefited from car infrastructure, since it brings people and things to the city, lets people efficiently get around, and so on. It helps the economic value of a city and also improves quality of life. If this wasn't true, there would have been a response with a broad political base. But there hasn't been. At best, a tiny minority of residents gets upset about roads and organizes into activist groups that make such claims. But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
Of course non of those cul-de-sacs pay their own taxes, they are all subsidized by the often poorer people who live in denser neighborhoods.
Your argument doesn't work because people are terrible at making good choices as individuals. Public enjoys smoking too, especially when pushed by advertising. Yet we somehow managed to push back on it a bit and people are now die less frequently from lung cancer and you can now breath in many cases you couldn't before.
Driving is like smoking only much worse.
That is a weird comparison. Smoking has no objective upsides, unless you count pleasure or the stimulant effect of nicotine. Driving, on the other hand, has a huge utilitarian aspect that is impossible to ignore. There are many things you cannot accomplish using public transit, and many of the counter arguments are transparently made by young healthy individuals with a lot of stamina, plenty of spare time, and no children. And probably no house. That may seem like utopia to some folks but it completely ignores reality, so the argument is dead on arrival.
I am not saying cars don't have utility but the problem is that you can buy a more dangerous, more polluting, bigger one and not pay the costs you incur on others. It's like smokers blowing the smoke into other people faces and then disposing of the cigarette butt on the street without paying anything.
Just make drivers pay the costs they incur on others and then let people choose. Right now it's a giant subsidy for driving at every step.
The damage US policies did to US cities is worse then what allied bombers ever did to Europe.
> In fact virtually all cities benefited from car infrastructure, since it brings people and things to the city
First of all, car infrastructure is literally the single most inefficient way to get people to a city.
In order to do it you need to basically destroy half of the city and give gigantic amount of space to roads and parking. To the point where in the US, much of the things people used to go to the city for is just gone.
And the few people that do get to the city, is LITERALLY the expense of the people who actually live there. But fuck them I guess. All the people who were Red Lined, unable to invest and impoverished, and then when their houses lost value, getting paid nothing and torn down.
And those places now had a horrible highway threw the city, making the land on both sides be worth even less.
But at least the subburban white people can still drive to the office tower.
> It helps the economic value of a city
US cities were much more valuable before the drive to build highways. And in Europe, cities that didn't build massive highways tend to be much more valuable. And many of the worst example of urban decay are those cities with the most complete highway programs.
Your assertion simply not backup by any data, there is tons of research on this. Gigantic amount of property value was lost. Countless beautiful old building that could still produce economic value to this day (and for the next 100 years) were ripped down to build parking lots.
And the worst part is, despite the dilapidated state of the cities, the cities were still producing more taxes, subsidizing the suburbs.
Literally destroying cities, pulling all the wealth out of it, to subsidize the subburban infrastructure.
> If this wasn't true, there would have been a response with a broad political base.
Please do yourself a favor and actually read up on the history of how these things happened.
> At best, a tiny minority of residents gets upset about roads and organizes into activist groups that make such claims. But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
People back then didn't all understand the long term effect of these policies. And hidden subsidizes were used to hide the actual cost.
You act like the US in the 50/60 was some perfectly democratic society where if its impossible to even imagine that one group of people would support policy to exploit another group of people that was much less able to fight back politically. Must be nice to live in a imaginary world all the time.
If you didn't get it in school, if it doesn't fit the narrative it didn't exist.
> But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
People for the most part don't enjoy it. 'Road rage' is literally an incredibly common thing. People are sad by the terrible state of roads. The Netherlands and other European countries consistently outrank the US in driver satisfaction index. And that is only looking at drivers.
And many people have had people die, many people had accidents, many people had cars drive into their homes. Many people have lung issues. The list goes on an on and on.
The reality is people don't have another option, and most people today in the US have never even thought about or considered any other kind of system.
You can't say 'see after we invested countless billions in System A and gave it every advantage over decades and decades and abused System B for just as long', people use System A more. That's prove that system A is better.
Its an idiotic line of argument and its truly sad to see that even on HN people make those kind of basic mistakes.
In the Netherlands people actually have options, trains, trams, bikes, cars. And turns out, yes some people like driving. And driver satisfaction is much higher there then it is in the US. But many people clearly use bikes and trains. And just FYI, the investment that was put into bike infrastructure in the last 40 years is a absolute drop in the bucket compared to 100+ years of road investment.
If you actually gave all the modes the same amount of city space, and the same amount of investment, and actually prioritized by both energy efficiency and and people threwput, things would be far more tilted then it even is in the Netherlands.
I guess that depends a bit on how far back still includes 'now'. Portland is the nearest big(ish) city to me, and they absolutely killed road expansion about 40 years ago; that is when most of the freeways and major arterials in the area were being built out. There have been a few small extensions built since, a bit of widening now and then, but they are the exception and they take many years to get buy-in.
I thought you were going to say they spend all their effort on studies to appease every special interest group instead of actually fixing things.
It sounds like the problem we have here is that each individual incident is analyzed and catalogued as an incident, so we never get to 'enemy action'. The most urgent issue to resolve is whose insurance is going to pay for it, which requires assigning blame, and in each case it's usually clear where the blame lies. This is all the system working entirely as expected and we can't really skip this step.
What ought to happen next is that the incidents get compiled, trends turn up, and we change our designs according to those trends.
The article is pretty light on details about the extent to which this isn't happening among traffic engineers. Requiring smaller vehicles or banning touchscreens has to come from Congress, so it's outside the control of any city's engineers. Anecdotally, the engineers in my own city seem pretty determined to consider the possibility that any given accident had a bad design as the root cause, and regularly fix and improve intersections and road markings according to what is happening. They're not perfect, but I don't get the sense that they're resting easy on the assurance that it's all user error either.
Also, smartphones being used while driving are a massive hazard that people aren't really talking about. The number of people that I, or my passenger, has seen texting while driving is really shocking. I'd wager it's a bigger problem than drunk driving ever was.
This was a huge problem in a car I rented recently. There was so much light coming off the dash I could hardly see the road, and there was no obvious way to dim it (all my older cars have a dedicated knob or wheel to control the dashboard brightness).
This is another issue that plagues a lot of modern cars. Lack of physical buttons and moving a bunch of functionality into the touchscreen which increases distractions and causes the driver to get flustered.
I 10000% support this and I think a good 5% of what makes Elon a bad person was him going on twitter and saying that HUDs are stupid and that teslas will never get one.
It links to https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl... for that 7500 pedestrians in 2022 figure.
Yet on that very same page there is a table of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths going back to 1975, which shows that 1977-1981 all had more pedestrian deaths (7732, 7795, 8096, 8070, and 7837) than 2022 (7522). Several of those years are within the last 45 years.
For bicyclists 2022 is indeed the biggest year just edging out 1977 (1084 vs 1003).
This might be forgiven as just being a little sloppy. If he'd just have said "past 40 years" instead of "past 45 years" then it would have been accurate.
But wait...the US population was 338 million in 2022, and around 220 million in 1979. We really should look at rates.
2020 pedestrian deaths per 100k population were 2.22. They were above that every year from 1975-1991. Same for bicyclists--every year from 1975-1991 was higher than 2020.
For pedestrians the rates peaked in 1979 at 3.76 then declined fairly linearly to 1.33 in 2009, then rose again fairly linearly to 1.95 in 2020, then jumped a bit to 2.22 for 2021 and 2022. Same pattern for bicyclists.
Here's a graph of the rates by year [1]. The bicyclist rates are per 1m instead of per 100k to make them easier to read.
Edit: Mmm.. Possibly correlates more with smartphone usage..
I omitted pickups and vans/minivans because the pickup share hasn't varied much and vans/minivans have a small share and including them made the graph too hard to read. Here are the shares in table form so you can mentally add them back if you wish.
Minivans Sedans
& Truck Car &
Pickups Vans SUVs SUVs Wagons
1975 13% 4% 2% 0% 81%
1980 13% 2% 2% 0% 83%
1985 13% 6% 4% 0% 78%
1990 13% 9% 4% 2% 72%
1995 15% 11% 7% 2% 65%
2000 15% 7% 17% 4% 57%
2005 13% 7% 19% 4% 57%
2010 11% 4% 22% 9% 54%
2015 11% 4% 28% 9% 48%
2020 15% 2% 37% 11% 35%
2023 17% 2% 46% 11% 24%
[2] https://www.theautopian.com/heres-the-exact-year-suv-sales-o...
[3] Yes, I first tried ChatGPT. It was able to turn the chart into a table, but it too only did every 5th year, and some of its numbers were quite a bit off.
I'm honestly done with trying to convince politicians, car-brains, "traffic engineers", transportation departments that they way we have been scaling our infrastructure is a tremendous waste of resources. Every talking point they have presented has a mountain evidence against it, yet they continue churning away at "wE mUsT bUiLd mOrE hIgHwAyS!!1 [at the expense of the federal/state/local budgets, environment, and communities near these projects]".
I was not very impressed. The confounding factors for the traffic light to circle projects were always far too large, and it always had to be coupled with the fact that it was usually poorest intersections that get rebuilt. I no longer have a high opinion of traffic safety research as a field.
Regarding this article's claims in particular, traffic fatalities went up a certain amount after 2020, and I doubt that road design changes were a primary driver. (Policing trends are one possible candidate.)
Regardless, in the last six months or so, my Tesla's autodrive went from "expensive joke" to "safer driver than me". IMO, leveraging existing technology could cut traffic deaths to a small fraction of what they are now over 3-5 years, were we to pursue aggressive conversion of the existing vehicle fleet.
Traffic circles really need a critical mass of drivers that know how to use them academically before they get installed all over town.
I remember when driving in SoCal, there was a massive traffic circle that I could see people maintaining fairly high speeds through and could see major accidents happening. But everything I see locally would be low speed collisions.
This is why proper driver's licensing & training is so important - in my city & country (Wellington, New Zealand) roundabouts (as well call them) are so common that in some tight intersections they are nothing more than a circle painted on the ground. Everyone knows how to use them, and they end up being very effective.
The huge hoods/bonnets on SUVs and trucks need to be regulated to make future cars smaller. I'm not an expert (I'll pontificate anyway) but could external airbags help at all?
One issue with our neighbourhood is that SUVs use our road to skip past 2 junctions that get congested during school drop-off/pickup. The moms sometimes look ridiculously tiny in their urban tanks, but they speed through a residential road to shave off a minute from their school run. People in cars appear to act more selfishly than people outside of cars (has there been any research on that?) and I think roads should be designed with that in mind.
If you could not get a five star safety rating because your car mangles somebody when hitting them at 30mph the tune would change pretty quickly. See all the things tested in Euro NCAP in section 2.2. https://www.euroncap.com/media/80156/euro-ncap-aeb-lss-vru-t...
[1] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/designers-must-make-vehicle...
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-proposes-new-cras...
The test protocol is here:
https://www.euroncap.com/en/for-engineers/protocols/vulnerab...
I used to be very excited about Euro-NCAP but when I actually researched it, I became fairly critical. It only measures AEB, and leg impact and head impact against the car, with very little consideration put into how the general profile of the car affects the collision kinematics. Whether the car pushes pedestrians onto the ground or throws them up in the air, it doesn't matter -- only the initial contact between the car and pedestrian is measured. (And while representing the pedestrian by a disembodied leg and a disembodied head).
It's had a good influence in some ways, most importantly by testing head impact at various points on the hood, which has forced automakers to reduce stiffness and add more space for deflection between the hood and the engine block. I think in other ways, it's helped accelerate a trend towards brick-shaped vehicle fronts, because they perform better on the leg impact tests. I personally believe this will result in fewer leg injuries but more deaths.
If they change the standards and a truck doesn’t get a five star rating, the manufacturer will just not mention the safety rating in their marketing materials, and astroturf online forums with opinions undermining the value of the safety rating (‘they changed it specifically to mark down trucks’; ‘it doesn’t test the safety conditions that really matter anyway’; etc… heck you already see people raise these talking points about NCAP) so customers can rationalize themselves into ignoring that the truck they want to buy only scored 3.5 stars.
When people use these standards for local roads it’s because it’s the same mindset as “no one ever got fired for picking IBM.”
Political will alone goes a long way, engineers are capable of self educating quite well.
A simple example is the town in Indiana that has lots of roundabouts. They are operating under the same standards but is much better in lots of way.
Engineers can do a lot by themselves and with local political cover they can do much more. If the state DoT is onboard, there is a lot of freedom.
There are school busses--need to penalize people driving children to school as long as there are busses. The 'school run' needlessly increases traffic and danger and causes expensive decisions in school design.
If anything we need to bring walking to school back to historic levels. In 1969, 48% of children did so, but in 2009 that had declined to 13%. http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...
Here in Philadelphia, advocacy groups spent years fighting to have a wide, lethal stroad that runs through the middle of the city put on a road diet. Residents were polled, and something like 70% of people in the surrounding neighborhoods were in favor of it. The city spent millions in planning and engineering, and then right before paving was about to start, a local councilmember blocked it and canceled the whole project on the half of the road that runs through their neighborhood. So half of the road was narrowed to two lanes and has no speeding, no fatalities, and generally sane driver behavior. The other half is a reckless free-for-all that’s exhausting to drive on and terrifying for pedestrians and cyclists.
Millions in taxpayer dollars and the political will of a majority of citizens were wasted because our system allows one NIMBY to stop everything. A year later, there has already been a cyclist fatality on the road.
Narrowing a road makes it worse for its' primary purpose.
You would definitely not just narrow a footpath on a busy high street without considering the impact.
The worst thing is, this isn’t always true. A good two lane street can have similar or better average speed than a bad four lane stroad.
Cars are the least efficient form of transportation if you REALLY care about throughput.
For a 3.5m / 12' lane, you can move 6-8x more people via bicycle, and 7-10x more pedestrians, per hour, than via private motorized vehicles ("cars"):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_per_hour_per_direct...
Can you provide a more specific argument or evidence? To me, it seems obvious that two lanes has less capacity than four lanes. Therefore, a two lane road will have worse traffic, all other things held equal.
It also doesn't matter that the other two lanes might be repurposed for something else like bike lanes. In my experience, when bike lane projects are forced onto a city by activists, without authentic support from the general public, it ends up just creating a lot of underutilized infrastructure. In many west coast cities it is common to see clogged up car lanes next to permanently empty bike lanes. So even if in theory you could pack those bike lanes with more people (although moving at low speeds), it's never true in practice. The real throughput only gets worse.
the problem with how the US does bike planning is that the payoff doesn't happen unless you have a bike network; biking is so unsafe on regular roads that a partial journey on bike lanes doesn't cut it. so often bike lanes get poor usage than they would otherwise get due to lack of connectivity.
While it's true that two lanes have less capacity than four, it's also measuring the wrong value - throughput is what you want to optimize for. This means you have to take a bunch of additional factors into account, for example:
- How many lanes do the connections to other roads have? Any time you're reducing the number of lanes, you're creating potential bottlenecks. If you have one lane, then widen up to four, and narrow back to one, you'll most likely have worse throughput than if you'd just kept one lane.
- How much space do you have for switching lanes? The more lanes, the more time people need to get into the correct one for their destination. You need to telegraph exits etc. much earlier.
- Do surrounding roads have space for the additional induced traffic? Time and time again, extra lanes have made traffic problems worse instead of better.
There are of course also disadvantages, e.g. the impact of any single lane being blocked. It's a complex and fascinating topic, especially considering the similarity to other networks (e.g. computer, biological).
Average speed isn't the goal. Bandwidth is.
And, in case you're thinking about talking about "induced demand", that's fallacy.
The demand is/was there. More bandwidth means that more people try to satisfy it.
That's kind of the problem with urban planning in many cities in the USA -- the "primary purpose" of roads is assumed to be to serve cars, rather than to serve people.
>You would definitely not just narrow a footpath on a busy high street without considering the impact.
Happens all the time in my city for construction projects - an entire sidewalk will be shut down for years for construction, forcing pedestrians to the other side of the street (which means 2 extra waits for stop lights). Often the closed sidewalk is used for nothing at all except to hold a construction fence.. a more pedestrian friendly solution would require a covered walkway.
I get it, we like public transport. It's just daft to go all in the other direction and pretend that cars aren't useful or don't count or something, though.
But I've seen a lot of fighting in my city anytime any transit or biking project reduces road space dedicated to cars, even if just removing on-street parking.
>People are in cars.
All too often, a "person" is in a car, which is a pretty poor use of space.
<https://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/16-places-around-the-world...>
But there's a lot of potential ways to use space other than cars. The problem is, in seeking to accommodate cars at the expense of all else, we've made all other forms of transport -- like walking through a cute downtown on a spring day -- less practicable and common. In turn we drive more, spread businesses out for more parking, and created a never-ending feedback loop for more driving infrastructure.
In turn, the infrastructure has grown to a point that we can't really afford it from tax revenues, and where the mixed use of a thoroughfare for accessing businesses and going long distances does well at neither.
Unfortunately, getting us out of this loop is going to make things less convenient for some people for awhile before we can get to something better. There's no avoiding that, but continuing to make the same decision and hope it gets to a better outcome would be nuts.
Useful for what? More useful than what? Less useful than what?
How many people does private car transportation move? How much can a car lane move per hour? How about a bicycle lane? Bus lane? [0] What do private cars interfere with? Goods transportation / delivery perhaps? People's health (through pollution and/or lack of active mobility)?
It's not that cars cannot be useful, but are they more or less useful than other options? What does leaning towards cars inhibit?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_per_hour_per_direct...
Serving cars is serving people. Who do you think is driving the cars or being driven in them?
As an aside, I am surprised that this exceedingly shallow point is still being made in 2024. Let's be honest - it never made sense, and was only ever brought up as an empty slogan to dishonestly dismiss those who depend on and benefit from cars (which is most of the public in most cities).
So is better transit, and biking, and even shutting off entire streets to cars and making them into pedestrian-only districts - and those can often serve more people than when it was just a road for cars.
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, you can serve more people in the same land space by other forms of transportation:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_per_hour_per_direct...
If you have a budget of $x, do you want to move more or fewer people? Because private auto transportation ("cars") moves the lowest volume.
Further, cars interfere with things that may not have alternatives, like trucks that make deliveries. There tend to all sorts of options for individuals (and the average occupancy of a car is like 1.0) to move hither and thither and yon, but if you want to deliver a refrigerator or a sofa, that's a lot harder to do on public transit—though not unheard of:
* https://www.blogto.com/city/2022/01/couch-toronto-subway/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/5erltx/apparently_...
The primary function is already in place. Adding a railing/guardrail should have absolutely no negative impact on the primary or secondary functions.
Which people do object to:
> In a twist that could only happen in the world of cycling politics, a city councillor in the New Zealand town of New Plymouth is making headlines for an eyebrow-raising reason — he’s worried about his beloved sports car. Murray Chong, owner of a Chevrolet Corvette just 160mm off the ground, has raised concerns that a proposed $14 million protected cycle lane might wreak havoc on his precious ride.
> Chong’s main gripe? The 100mm-high concrete separation barriers, meant to keep cyclists safe, apparently pose a dire threat to the underbelly of his sleek sports car. In an extraordinary meeting, despite Chong’s objections, the council voted in favor of the cycle lane plan, sending shockwaves through the world of low-riding vehicle enthusiasts.
* https://momentummag.com/a-new-zealand-councillor-objected-to...
"Won't someone please think of the safety of the cars!" /clutches-pearls
Because of political culture and human nature; everything is driven by FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) so you can basically spin anything to scare people or to line your own pockets, living standards be damned.
1. "why should I care about pedestrians? they should get a car!" 2. "there's no way I'm driving without 4 lanes... that's gonna be slow!" (it isn't)
There are so many I can't even say I have a good candidate for it :(
Could be Girard as well.
In my opinion, this isn't a great point, but a naive one. Literally anything can be argued for or against on the grounds of safety, and the fact that a safety-based argument exists isn't grounds to remove it from public debate. Also, blindly putting safety above all other concerns is just "safetyism", rather than a balanced argument. In the case of the railing, apart from a minor expense, there isn't impact to others. In the case of anti-car road diets, an attempt to create more safety will cause most users of that road to lose lots of time (to reduced speed limits, increased traffic). To most people, a few road fatalities a year simply does not matter in the grand scheme of things - it's a minor cost compared to the huge time savings of fast and convenient driving infrastructure.
> Here in Philadelphia, advocacy groups spent years fighting to have a wide, lethal stroad that runs through the middle of the city put on a road diet. Residents were polled, and something like 70% of people in the surrounding neighborhoods were in favor of it.
Mind linking to the poll? I find it hard to believe since the reality is that most people favor roads that are wide and have high speed limits, so they can get around quickly. A small but loud minority tends to argue, often successfully, for road diets. But most people aren't in favor of a war on cars because they get a lot of use from cars.
Additionally, what you're claiming about the poll being ignored is the opposite of what I've seen in west coast cities. Here, anti-car activists get into the transportation department positions and then try to implement their ideological plan regardless of polls or studies. Usually, they run dishonest polls that provide justification to whatever view they already have - for example, an online poll that only activist groups are aware of, which lets them get whatever numbers they want. If a poll disagrees, they don't talk about it or act against it anyways (example: https://crosscut.com/2018/04/seattle-city-hall-listen-consti...).
Especially if they get to kill poor people in bad neighborhoods on their way from suburbs to CBDs.
Expecting a 15MPH ~250lb bike with none of those features to interface safely with 55MPH 5,000+lb traffic is moronic. You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.
I think it's worth talking about taxation here. Roads are generally in the top 3 costs for most municipalities along with police and firefighting.
Even when you add together tolls, gas tax, vehicle excise taxes, it doesn't cover the costs of road maintenance, and needs to be supplemented by sales tax, building property tax, etc.
If bike infrastructure reduces the number of cars, SUVs, and pickups that are on the road just to carry one person around, the reduction on road wear means it's a total cost savings.
(For what it's worth, I think the same argument applies also to buses.)
I've crashed on a bicycle, more than once. I've crashed even on a motorcycle (on a racetrack). The damage that is caused to myself, to my machine, and the surrounds, is tiny compared to the damage that is caused by an automobile with (at least) an order of magnitude more mass: a friend of mine had a car go through the front of his house, and the physical carnage was impressive (no person was injured thankfully).
And every time licensing has been looked at for cyclists, it has found to be a dumb idea:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj47qJ-UUno
> You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.
Cars cause much more damage to roads than bicyclists, and they should pay proportionally:
* https://www.investopedia.com/gas-taxes-and-what-you-need-to-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
And bicyclists already pay for local roads through local property taxes:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjv8WQu92c0
The problem is that roads are now practically monopolized for private vehicle use to the exclusion of everyone else, and the costs are not fully paid for by drivers. Higher density areas subsidize lower density ones, and road infrastructure is a big part of that:
yes, a parallel infrastructure would be welcomed by current cyclists and by many of those who now abstain from cycling because of persecution and threat of death on the roads.
If everyone can agree that a parallel infrastructure is needed, the funding question is trivial. The overall costs could even be negative due to the reduced need to subsidize car usage (also health benefits of cycling, etc.). If it makes you happy, we can let little kids slap a sticker on their bike to take of the "licensing".
They are and we do? You know those signs when you get on a highway that say things like pedestrians/bicycles/horses/etc prohibited? That's what those are for.
If you're proposing that the rest of the roads' speed limits be lowered to what's achievable by the average cyclist, then why not just advocate for that directly? Personally I don't appreciate the oversigning trend, generally preferring to drive at a decent clip as conditions permit most of the time, but also being content to follow the rare bicycle at that vehicle's speed until an opportunity to pass with a wide berth and clear oncoming visibility.
The real problem here is drivers who expect to be able to continue driving at whatever speed they want regardless of who else is using the road. Apart from when I was cycling myself, I used to experience this pretty harshly while shoveling snow. Half the drivers would treat me as a human being and slow and go mostly into the other lane. The other half would continue their speed right at me, ostensibly thinking it was acceptable to create close call danger for fun and spray me with shit from their tires (ie not just assault but outright battery). Similar situation with a dinky ride on lawnmower. It's funny how the ratio changed when I started doing the snow/grass along the road with a compact farm tractor - apparently the prospect of assholes' cars being significantly damaged effects their ability to see!
As far as taxes, municipal real estate taxes more than pay for the meager wear bicycles cause to the road. And as a general proponent of freedom I certainly wouldn't want to implement multiple new draconian papers please mandates just to assign taxes a few percent more accurately.
Not safely interfacing on existing roads — that’s 100% true. And cyclists would love parallel infrastructure. Problem is, in the US, it’s seen as anti-car (and therefore anti-american), and so is much less common than it should be. But in the Netherlands, this is how they make biking one of the primary transport modes.
Because, as every engineer knows, everything is a tradeoff and good intentions can lead to bad outcomes.
I can't comment on your specific case, but obviously any measure that wants to improve safety needs to be evaluated based on whether it is actually effective, whether it is cost effective and whether there are negative consequences.
The only car that's safe for pedestrians is the one that isn't moving, which is why pedestrian impact isn't a factor in safety.
Funnily enough, my first major bike accident as a kid involved me running into a parked pickup truck and ended up with a tooth going through my lip. Definitely my fault and not the truck's for just sitting there. But I thought it humorous that there are indeed people injured by non-moving vehicles.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jq98/man-fined-for-enginee...
https://indyweek.com/news/wake/state-engineer-files-complain...
Missing from all of this is, well, data. He squarely blames large vehicles, SUV's. Now, I have no horse in this race, I prefer small vehicles for practical every-day driving. For moving family, dogs, camping trips, etc., a minivan is great.
Yet, at a very basic level, some of what he is saying makes no sense to me. Take this introductory statement:
"As a country, we hit the threshold of 1 million cumulative deaths in 1953, 2 million in 1975 and 3 million in 1998. While the past several years of data have not yet been released, I estimate that the U.S. topped 4 million total road deaths sometime in the spring of 2024."
So, 4 million by 2024. Fully half of that by 1975. Care to guess how many SUV's existed in 1975? Also, I am going to guess average speeds where likely lower.
He is blaming SUV's and claiming that making them 10 cm lower would have a dramatic impact on results. OK, well, if the data up until 1975 is any indication, this is nonsense.
How about distractions, drunk driving and, yes, pedestrians and cyclists. Accidents are not always attributable to one side or a single variable. The world is a complex multivariate problem. This guy is trying to sell books by hating on everything and only blaming one or two variables: SUV's bad, wide roads, bad.
And then there's are the circumstances of each accident. He gives the example of an SUV losing control, jumping a curb and killing a father and his kid. Well, not every accident is like that. And, no, life isn't going to be perfectly safe. You are not going to go down to zero accidents and zero fatalities, no matter how hard you might try.
Which brings me to the last point: He offers not data whatsoever on how things would improve if his world view were to be adopted. If we ripped-up and modified every road and shrunk every vehicle by 10 cm.
You see, it is easy to be critical of anything when you don't have to be accountable for any of it. Happens all the time with "experts". As an example, the financial world is full of economists who just "know" all there is to know about finance...yet none of them are billionaires and few (none?) run successful businesses at scale.
Yes, of course, road safety is important. I just think that the solutions include far more variables than what this guy trying to sell a book seems to be focusing on in this article. In a few decades, self-driving cars might solve this problem nicely. Don't know.
However, when studying a complex, multivariate problem, if you find one or two variables that can easily affect the outcome (lower hood heights), it does seem sensible to optimize it, while obviously keeping in mind that you can optimize for other things.
This, to me, on first inspection, is pretty strong evidence indicating that the 10 cm prediction is very close to nonsense.
The prediction is no different from saying TSLA will go to $1000 because of some randomly-picked variable that will never be tested. Sounds fantastic and cam make me look very intelligent, yet, I would not have any accountability at all in making such a prediction.
Now, if I wanted to sell a book about how to make a billion dollars trading Tesla, I would write a bunch of blog posts explaining how this could happen and feature a nice picture of myself holding the book along with an Amazon link. Which is what this article is about.
If I take your comment at face value it seems you are arguing that we should ban all cars not just the very heavy ones?
There is certainly an argument to be made that we are all outcomes of the system in which we operate. That is to say, we all victims of circumstance. Does that, however, mean bicycles should swerve between cars like motorcycles in CA ( and lately -- illegally -- in IL ) or go against the traffic diagonally?
Both examples are admittedly anecdotal, but very recent and both from recent trip downtown.
At the end of the day, it is the user error. Having a tank to drive just happens to be re-assurance that whatever happens, the other user will bear the brunt of their bad decision.. which is supposed to be deterrent. But, apparently, it is not.
I honestly do not know what it is about bikes, but not completely unlike BMWs and Teslas, they seem to attract oddly aggressive drivers.
But if it's a Chicago intersection and you just said I'm on a bike all 12 lanes have to yield to me and you zoom diagonal in front of cars... the Darwin Awards are never short of applicants.
E-bikes and scooters and stuff have made this 1,000 times worse. The number of drunk kids who think they can go max speed down a hill through intersections and cars will just magically make way for them... Terrifying.
The horror at this from the cyclist community is why anti-cyclist sentiment is so strong.
And pedestrian infrastructure is just horrible designed for wheeled vehicles in the first place. As people with kid strollers and wheel chairs find out quickly.
The actual solution, that pretty much every other first world country in the world has recognized is to start to build proper safe infrastructure for bikes (and the US overwhelmingly has plenty of space for that). Or to lower car traffic speed such that sharing can be done safely.
If the US had huge sidewalks everywhere and fantastic design for access of wheeled vehicle, your suggestion might make sense, in the actual world, it doesn't, it just makes the world worse for people that walk and those that cycle.
This is literally already all figured out and backed up with plenty of research but somehow people have to come up with their own 'solutions'.
So many people jog in the streets exactly for this reason. Sidewalks are often poorly maintained and falling apart. I'm not sure how anyone handicapped is supposed to get around.
In a previous life, during heavy winter storms, I would commonly walk in the streets because they were maintained while the sidewalks were covered in ice. The city once changed its plowing algorithm due to angry drivers but for sidewalk maintenance they act almost powerless.
Years ago I visited Amsterdam and the pedestrian experience was incredible. It was like walking around a theme park. Ever since that experience I can't unsee the hell we've created in the states with our cars-first mentality.
That makes no sense at all, something tells me you hate cyclists and will continue to hate cyclists wherever they are.
My favorite unsubstantiated theory about anti cyclist sentiment is that exposes the radically car centric nature of US society and people don't like noticing that.
You think mixing 2 kph pedestrian traffic with 20 kph bicycle traffic is a good idea?
(Sidewalks are probably called that for a reason.)
Lane splitting is for air cooled engines stuck in traffic, where they literally need to move or shut down. (It is technically illegal to park the vehicle with engine shut off in case you can't restart). It has absolutely never been legal for anyone to shoot through gaps in traffic because of erectile dysfunction compensation. It is only in the absolute emergency that you need to walk your bike around to keep it from melting.
In general I do agree. Campaigns to "see motorcycles" just end up with 80yo biker gangs thinking it's okay yo blast their engines in residential. Campaigns to "share the road" lead to bicyclists who will absolutely charge an SUV just to get on the news. I'm all for road safety but it absolutely requires bike clubs of all types to stop being twits.
California passed AB 51 in 2016 which codified lane splitting under California law. There is no mention of "air cooling". There are guidelines that say you should not go more than 10 mph faster than traffic and not faster than 50 mph total.
Maybe in the United States of America. There are a great many developed countries where lane splitting by motorcycles and bicycles is not only legal, but even expected and encouraged.
Lane splitting has never been illegal in CA, but is apparently illegal in all other US states. (Having been in CA for about 10 years, I've gotten used to it, but think it's still crazy. Definitely have seen it on highways in the midwest before that, too)
This link was informative: https://www.kqed.org/news/11680481/10-things-you-need-to-kno...
Basically, not illegal; the 2016 law passed just said, "CA Highway Patrol can make guidelines", which was in response to a previous attempt by the CHP to give those guidelines. Helpfully the article includes those guidelines, too.
Splitting and filtering are legal in other US states:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_splitting#Legal_status_in...
However, I agree that lane splitting gets more and more dangerous as traffic starts flowing faster.
The state of of California would disagree with you:
* https://www.chp.ca.gov/programs-services/programs/california...
As would several others:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_splitting#Legal_status_in...
In my anecdotal experience driving all over the country, aggressive bike riding tends to pair with poor bicycling infrastructure.
Where infrastructure is designed for bikes and following the rules is safe and makes sense, then compliance also goes up. This is much of the point that the article was making.
The evidence is obviously anecdotal because and comment on it because its exceptional, while people not properly stopping at stop signs or going to fast is literally no even worth commenting about.
> I honestly do not know what it is about bikes, but not completely unlike BMWs and Teslas, they seem to attract oddly aggressive drivers.
You seem to indicate that you understand what a systematic issue is but then completely throw it out with this comment.
The reason only 'aggressive drivers' ride bikes (if this is even remotely true, more likely its just those you notice) is because most normal people rationally decide that these places are to dangerous to ride the bike in.
> .. which is supposed to be deterrent. But, apparently, it is not.
Given how few people bike in the US, it clearly is.