Hacker News Reader

Comment by Davidzheng | Hacker News Reader

Are you weighing the deaths by use of the road. Otherwise it's not representative of danger level right

GP is describing traffic calming road design. Where planners make roads purposefully feel less safe in certain neighborhoods because that statistically makes them safer per mile driven. A common example here in SF is to add unnecessary bends to an otherwise straight alley. This stops people from speeding right through a residential area because it's straight and empty.

An example you may have seen in more rural areas is a straight road with an unnecessary curve before a stop sign or before entering a town. This forces you to slow down in a way that a speed limit doesn't.

https://globaldesigningcities.org/publication/global-street-...

It's also separating things out. We need larger, faster roads to get from city to city - that's kind of inevitable. But the way you design those is to completely separate out bikes and pedestrians from them, and also limit access to them. Think of something like an interstate freeway.

Slow, local streets are relatively safe because of the slow speeds and the priority on building places that cater to people and businesses rather than moving automobiles as quickly as possible.

The 'in between' things, "stroads" are what tend to be the worst of both worlds. They do often include some token bike/pedestrian infrastructure that is not very safe, and they include lots of places where other cars exit/enter the road and turn lanes and just a lot of potential for bad interactions in unexpected ways.

The Strong Towns folks do a pretty good job of outlining this, and in terms of fixing it, I've seen some interesting stuff related to street design in the Netherlands.

The trouble is why the "stroads" came to be to begin with.

Motorists will generally prefer whatever route gets them to their destination faster, but shops want to be where the traffic is, because they want motorists to stop and patronize them. So the shops want to set up right next to the high volume traffic path. But then pedestrians patronizing the same shops will be adjacent to that high speed high volume vehicle traffic.

In theory there are designs that can address this, i.e. you interleave roads so that each block is bounded by a high speed road for vehicle traffic on one side and a low speed road for pedestrians and cyclists on the other, keeping them separate but still allowing businesses to be accessible to both. But now you run into politics: The motorists may now have to walk up to a city block to get where they're going and the anti-car people are going to object to there being high speed roads and parking lots in the city whatsoever. Meanwhile making the change requires a budget allocation to do the work, so in the absence of consensus the status quo prevails.

But that's a complete failure of the people doing traffic management: Other countries manage to make car accessible shops by minimizing the number of ingress and egress points in the road that is supposed to be fast, and moving the stores to a side street that has all those points, but is slower, narrower, and possibly usable by a pedestrian.

The sin of the stroad is to give us a 6 lane road that is ultimately risky and slow-ish due to those ingress points, instead of separating the fast traffic and the slow one. Most of the time we'd not even need a larger right of way: Just treating major roads as places where every intersection is a serious hazard to minimize.

> Other countries manage to make car accessible shops by minimizing the number of ingress and egress points in the road that is supposed to be fast, and moving the stores to a side street that has all those points, but is slower, narrower, and possibly usable by a pedestrian.

The main issue here is really that other countries allow mixed-use zoning, causing a higher proportion of patrons to be pedestrians instead of the majority of the population living isolated in the suburbs and arriving by car. But you can't fix that by changing the roads, first you have to change the zoning -- and then wait several years for its effects to be realized.

And in the meantime the shops will want to be on the high traffic road because that's how most of their customers arrive.

> shops want to be where the traffic is, because they want motorists to stop and patronize them.

Citation needed? Motorists (as opposed to pedestrians) rarely stop at a shop because they passed in front of it (except on very long routes). Reason being, it is pretty hard to register what shops you're passing when driving

I don't think having a lot of motor traffic in front of it helps a shop

Impulse stops are rare (except gas) but people often develop habit of coffee along the way, and they will look for a place not out of their way.

It's not just coffee. If you're coming home from work and want to pick up dinner or grab something at a convenience store, are you going to stop at the place on the road you're already taking or do you want to add more time sitting in rush hour traffic to go somewhere else?

But adding a detour is easy in a car (even during rush hour - congestion is mainly on big axes). Restaurant doesn't need to be right where the traffic is.

Congestion is mainly anywhere near the big axes, which is exactly the problem. Even if the place is "only" three blocks away, that's three stinking red lights in each direction. Meanwhile you may not have any strong preference between two similar burger joints, so if one is directly on the main road and the other isn't, where are you stopping?

Stroads make sense where there is little pedestrian (including bicycles, scooters, etc.) traffic.

Stroads never make sense, even with zero pedestrian traffic. They have way too many ingress and egress points, so they are wide, attempting to be fast, yet ultimately a significant crash risk, because there's a way in, or out, or something, ever quarter mile at the most. Tiny strip mall with 4 stores! A funeral parlor! A bank! a subdivision hidden somewhere? Sometimes, even straight out houses. All at 90 degree angles, where some traffic is doing 40, and there's no traffic lights in most of said interscetions.

Even banning pedestrians, we'd be far better off with fewer ingress points to fast roads that now need fewer lanes, and then the few intersections/roundabouts give access to side roads that are rated far, far slower, and have access to those store parking lots. The traffic that is going far is then detached from the one that is going close, the road gets faster, and the street is safer from fender benders. The diminished places where people stop fast and go will also lower stress on the physical road itself, leading to less places needing repairs very often, as the typical stroad turning lane does.

I'd argue that most American local streets are unsafe anyway: I've seen Spanish highways with fewer lanes than suburbian streets with no commercial. But the distances to connect 500 bedrooms, placed in 1/3rd of an acre lots, are so large that ultimately roads are overbuilt to fit anything. Suburban streets with traffic under 1 car a minute in the daytime, with 3 or 4 lanes, set to a 30mph max, where you'd do 60 except for the fact that it's full of driveways coming in and out. Why do we even allow a lone house connect to a road like that via a driveway, where the neighbor will go into the street in reverse? It's madness, and is all over the midwest. So we don't even have to get into the stroads.

Let's just barricade up the streets. No traffic = no traffic accidents. This is what's been happening in Chicago with all the island, speed humps, etc. Reducing traffic to a safe crawl.

The problem with those devices is that they slow down traffic even when there are no pedestrians around and the streets could be used to reduce congestion on the roads.

I wonder what effect slowing traffic down to a crawl has on overall emissions. I'm guessing not good. I bet speeders are overall more efficient than crawlers.

> Let's just barricade up the streets. No traffic = no traffic accidents.

That’s what my home city did – Ljubljana. Over the past few decades the downtown area has become an almost square mile sized pedestrian zone. It has been wonderful. The area is completely revitalized, shops are booming, tourism is booming, entertainment industry is booming, everything is booming.

All because they kicked out the cars.

Here’s a video and a photo from my recent trip back. It made me realize how dead San Francisco feels in comparison even with 3x the population because everything is just roads with nowhere for people to hang.

https://x.com/Swizec/status/1803873334066843733 https://x.com/Swizec/status/1803896813679972570

For the last point, EVs.

For everything else, have you ever thought about the effects of higher speed traffic on residents? I'm guessing you haven't cause "screw those people".

Roads are a classic NIMBY thing. Essential infrastructure, but a nuisance to those nearby.

I grew up in a neighborhood that had no outlets. Very, very safe place to play as a kid. We’d be in the street all day long, riding, walking, playing.

I returned recently, and the atmosphere is completely different, because now the streets have been extended. Through traffic completely changed the dynamics.

In London, despite assertions from individuals similar to yours, impact has been almost universally positive from Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

To me the comment spoke to our criminal lack of intelligent road design. It’s well known through multiple studies that road design impacts how fast people drive far more than posted speed limit signs. If we actually cared about road safety, we would design roads to be more safe and not just design a road that is comfortable to drive 60mph on and put up a 25mph speed limit. When you want slower speeds you need to make lanes more narrow. Add obstacles along the side of the road so it doesn’t feel so open. Add medians as areas where pedestrians have a refuge when daring to cross a place designed for vehicles. Add chicanes and bollards to force speed compliance in especially dangerous areas. There seems to be almost none of this happening in most places in the US that I have visited.

We also could largely solve this problem with technological enforcement but people really hate that. If we made both the financial penalties for speeding and the probability of being caught sufficiently high, we could practically eliminate it overnight.

1) build a society that requires a car to get around

2) exclusively sell cars with ludicrous acceleration and top speed

3) set legal speed limit at 1/6th the top speed of most vehicles

4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed.

I’m strongly anti-car - I think we fucked up a whole lot designing society the way we did, but at this point, actual strict enforcement of speed limits with financial penalties is just robbery. If you want fewer people to die in car accidents, build a world that doesn’t obligate everyone to drive, or build a world where the vehicles for sale aren’t all SUVs with 0-60 times that would embarrass a Ferrari from 40 years ago, but don’t just start fining people when they use the vehicle you made them buy to do the thing it was made to do.

> 3) set legal speed limit at 1/6th the top speed of most vehicles

> 4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed.

Most consumer cars are going to have a hard time at 120mph, if their tires are even rated for it.

So then you're claiming that most speed limits are 20mph.

Which they're not.

And then, I'm not sure? Should it be legal to drive suburban streets at triple digit speeds?

I am not sure what you're trying to get at, beyond "we should be able to use our cars to the limit of their capability, even if it exceeds our own as a driver".

Please be realistic about what interventions are available given the current US system. Redesign our entire road system? Sounds great, but how are we going do it?

Think about the policy changes and thousands or more of political wranglings across every populous jurisdiction in the United States.

Even if we get it done over the next 20 to 120 years, what are we going do in the meanwhile?

Like a lot of things, start with reviewing what works elsewhere, start some pilots, and what works do bigger and bigger rollouts.

Like, use data. If marketers and TikTok can trick us so easily using these techniques we can do the same in socio-technical settings too.

Like most things, “architectural” systems solutions will work better than point behavioural interventions, but it’s always going to be a mix.

Bike safety in The Netherlands was a multigenerational effort ranging from creating standards around roads intersections, bike paths and pavements and slowly remediating old ones while building new ones.

That’s only a tiny part of a society-wide effort to improve quality- and length-of-life measures, but like the US Interstate highway system, has had measurable results in terms of economic and social outcomes.

Some actions taken today will have individual results tomorrow. Some in 30 years. Better get started, right?

If something is illegal and enforced, people won't do it.

We’ve tried that with Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and speed limits. Even where speed limits are enforced, people speed.

Singapore style drug enforcement seems to work. It's just a question of political will. Same applies to speeding etc of course.

TIL there are no drugs in Singapore.

Vastly, vastly less.

The reason this isn't solved is because traffic deaths are considered to be a "cost of doing business". Most pedestrian traffic in the US is in cities and due to the way funding formulas and political representation works in the US, suburban and rural areas have more political power than urban areas which care more about traffic throughput than pedestrian safety, so the issue never gets fixed. The only places in the US making headway have large urbanized areas and even they are struggling.

Rural areas don’t have much political power either. A lot of rural America is actually unincorporated which means they don’t have a municipal level government, and instead are ruled by the county[^†].

In my experience the outsized political power is across gegraphic areas and instead is divided between classes, with the rich having almost all political power. A rich neighborhood in San Francisco hold much more political power than an improvised suburb in Fresno.

Instead the reason I believe for pedestrian traffic being considered the "cost of doing business" among the political classes, is the good old hatred of the poor. Pedastrian casualties are extremely rare among the rich, as the rich usually drive almost everywhere, and if they walk, they do so in an area which they have lobbied to make safe for pedestrians. The rich don’t care if the poor die.

†: As an immigrant, this feels like a major democratic oversight, one of many USA should fix if it wants to consider it self a democracy by 21st century standards.

Other states may be different, but at least in California there’s a pretty straightforward path to incorporation if a community desires it. The large number of unincorporated areas are because the residents don’t think the tradeoffs are worth it.

Counties are also generally all too happy to delegate decision making to communities which will take it on even if they don’t incorporate.

It still feels like a democratic oversight. The most favorable interpretation is a failure of policy.

It is simply not acceptable to leave any part of your population without municipality level representation. Delegating this to a community council is not democratic and is extremely ripe for misuse. If a community wishes to remain unincorporated you have to look at why that is, and offer accommodations or change the incorporation strategy accordingly.

For example both Skyway and White Center (unincorporated King County, WA) voters have refuse to be incorporated with Renton and Burien respectively, but it was the Seattle city council (not voters) that rejected incorporating White Center, and voters have never been asked if they want their own independence. At the same time Vashon hasn’t even been asked.

If America was serious about democracy they would establish a policy in which every populated area outside of reservations will have local level representation in like 30 years (ideally they should have started that policy 30 years ago). And if there is no agreement on how a single community (say White Center) hasn’t incorporated by that time, have a plurality wins—or better yet, ranked choice—vote on e.g. 3 options, Seattle, Burien, or independent.

Skyway and White Center aren’t rural. They want to be unincorporated to pay less taxes and follow less rules. I agree that suburban unincorporated shouldn’t be allowed. I would add that small, below 50-100k, suburban cities shouldn’t be allowed. But that isn’t for smaller subdivisions but larger ones,

But that has nothing to do with rural areas. My brother lives in Iowa near medium town. Everything else is small towns, less than 1000. Should those incorporate and spend money on city services? What about the farmers who are spread out? What municipality do they belong to? The county is the best option.

Let me understand this. Are you suggesting adding yet another inefficient layer of government in sparsely populated areas?

BTW, in at least some states there are intermediate subdivisions of government, e.g. townships and districts, which take care of the roads even in rural areas.

You are responding to my footnote, but ok.

Yes. This is what most—all?—other democracies do. More realistically though, municipality level governments include surrounding rural areas. In areas with small towns and large areas of rural farmlands, the farmers and town residents have equal representation, but the farmers obviously have a bigger political influence (hopefully the municipality governments have enough representatives though that the townfolks have at least a couple of representatives).

In reality unincorporated America also includes heavily urbanized areas (more often than not poorer than the surrounding areas). Here in Seattle this includes Skyway and White Center. But even if aside from those it is pretty unacceptable that all local planning for the community of e.g. Fairwood, or even Hobart don’t have any say in their municipality level organization, instead relying on the same county council as Seattle for their local affairs (a council with only 9 representatives for a total of 2.2 million constituents).

Indeed, just because a problem could theoretically be addressed (I think solved is a reach) by technology, doesn't mean it's a sensible choice.

Much like how putting a sign that says "pull" on a door that's designed to be pushed is analogous to what most places in NA do, which is to threaten people who use the road in the way it's designed.

In my one trip to China so far, this is exactly what I observed!

It's the same in Australia. Speeding is quite uncommon and you'll be very quickly caught out.

> We also could largely solve this problem with technological enforcement but people really hate that.

The challenge in giving powerful entities direct control over our actions is they:

directly control our actions,

ceaselessly seek to control other actions,

will be as unaccountable as they can be,

will not ever allow control to flow in the other direction.

This type of whining about slippery slope hypotheticals is ubiquitous in these discussions, but it's not very compelling up against the current reality of 40,000 unimaginably violent early deaths every single year in the US alone

Idk. Technological enforcement seems like it really should be the last resort here. Why should we not focus on stopping the construction of stroads and building safer streets and roads first and foremost before we reach for a tech solution that will undoubtedly come with privacy and abuse related tradeoffs while also likely being less effective.

Think probabilities here. Given human nature, what are the most probable solutions?

I’ve seen a number of cities find the authority or political will to increase the number of automated speed cameras. This suggests (while not a complete complete solution) a real step in the right direction

Given the entire urban planning political environment has shifted towards gradual but substantial infrastructure changes, at this point the main barrier to change is just making it happen. And to achieve that all you need to do is push for new road standards and guidance at a city, county, or state level.

Once that's done the changes can roll out whenever there's maintenance or road widening going on. This is for example what Florida is doing to push for a comprehensive passenger rail system and it's what other countries have done to make their roads and streets safer and more efficient as well. So it'd stand to reason the same principle would work at state and local levels in the US for this as well.

The only real argument against it I could see is that it'll take too long but 30-50 years really is nothing for widespread infrastructure improvements.

> it's not very compelling up against the current reality of 40,000 unimaginably violent early deaths every single year in the US alone

I disagree. The economy depends on the rivers of money that flow through the roads. Roads dispense communication, goods, labor, et al, over the vast area that is the USA. 40k deaths, distributed across the US, is a good deal.

On the other hand, I had great expectations for companies that wanted to provide a solution that's safer for a profit (robocars). A handful of people died during the development, and it's rejected outright by large portions of the population. So here we are.

Not only is this accounting callous, it seems to presuppose that there is societal benefit in reckless, antisocial driving behavior. I don't believe that this is true. Imagine a world in which median vehicle speeds remained the same and traffic fatalities went to zero. I'd take that 10 times out of 10 compared to the status quo.

Of course I was being mildly hyperbolic when saying we could solve speeding with technological enforcement, but I genuinely believe it could make a massive difference and lead to a significant quality of life improvement for most people. For those with the need for speed, build more tracks. But we should stop normalizing reckless behavior on our shared roadways. There should be an expectation of safety and we should maximize traffic flux while minimizing traffic injuries and fatalities.

> Not only is this accounting callous, it seems to presuppose that there is societal benefit in reckless, antisocial driving behavior

You cannot eliminate risk, stop people from taking risks or stop people from dying. You say callous and I say practical. We all make tradeoffs every day, which has elevated society from subsistence existence. eg Every person doing physical labor, every doctor pushing diseases to be more resilient.

Before we tackle the hard problem outlined above, let's solve the easy problem of pedestrians (bikers, scooters, skateboarders, etc.) traveling on highways and crossing traffic in undesignated places. I can't tell you how many times I've had pedestrians impatiently run across the roadway in front of my car.

I'm not sure one problem is easier to fix than the other. They both seem to come from people acting irresponsibly to arrive earlier at their destination, probably combined with an infrastructure to nudge towards that behaviour.

Changing behaviour with a penalty isn't terribly effective unless enforced in such a way that it is incredibly privacy-invasive, more effective is changing the layout of the streets. But I wouldn't be sure that that is easier to fix on the pedestrian side than on the vehicle side.

Let me get this straight, do you want to put the burden on pedestrians?

I guess it could also involve building proper crossings.

this is such a hilariously bad take that I have no hope that anything will ever change

Mere sacrifices for The Greater Good. The Greater Good!

Will you step up when it’s your turn?

We all do, every day.

Still tiny compared to heart disease!

Most of those are avoidable plus the rate of long term disabilities is about 10x the death rate (so 400 000) and of minor injuries is 10x that (so 4 million) plus... we can do both. There is plenty of money for safer road infra, DRIVERS JUST DON'T WANT IT because killing a stranger matters less than 5 fewer minutes spent commuting per day.

The same situation is true of heart disease, albeit the risk is generally killing themselves vs a random stranger.

People just run out of shits to give at some point, and do what is easy.

Agreed, especially when the opposition is formed out of several major industries in the country (car manufacturers, adjacent companies, road developers, big box stores, etc.).

I'm not sure it rises to 'opposition' per-se. For instance, I don't think anyone is sitting there cackling about how they're killing anyone due to them being obese fat asses, and figuring out how to make it worse.

It's really macro-economic and social inertia. Those sedentary folks have also convinced themselves they LIKE IT, and there is room (and real economic incentives) in the US trending in those directions. Like low property prices in the 'burbs, cheap gas (by global and economic standards), etc.

What are you trying to say?

He's saying that if a stretch of highway has traffic volume of 10 million trips taken on it in a year and an average of 2 deaths per year, that is still much safer than a neighborhood street which sees 10,000 trips per year and averages 1 death per year.

(numbers made up to emphasize a point, a neighborhood street with 1 death per year is pretty obviously unsafe)

That’s not the correct comparison anyway.

They likely say that more people use fast roads, so it's expected to have more accidents. The safest road is one never used.

> The safest road is one never used.

The safest road is one without motor vehicles. Pedestrians and bicycles cause a tiny number of injuries even when traffic is high.

Cyclist hitting a pedestrian at 20mph is more dangerous than 2 cars hitting each other.

Are there suddenly no pedestrians and cyclists on the roads with the cars? A cyclist hitting a pedestrian at 30km/h (fucking fast for a normal cyclist btw) is a rounding error both in terms of how much it happens and how deadly it is compared to a car hitting a pedestrian at 30km/h

Reply on news.ycombinator.com