Putting up a railing has no cost other than financial.
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.
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.
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 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.
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