Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety
citylab.com
citylab.com
Here's a far more engaging critique of car-first design by James Kunstler: http://youtu.be/Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
- Empty streets feel less safe
- Stores get less foot traffic
- Cars are more likely to speed when there's no one walking about
The cost of that is immense. Why not just make the surface (ground level) street more accessible to pedestrians, and keep the businesses where they would prefer to be?
Aren't there large parts of Chicago already like that?
Chicago is also somewhat of an exceptional city in this regard in that it was to an extent demolished and rebuilt twice, and the city was further built up from water level to accommodate underground plumbing and (IIRC) to reduce the swampiness of the land.
You're not going to put them at every crosswalk
The university I went to is not like the one I see in Madison or Chicago. The entire campus was self contained and did not have non-university buildings there. So not much car traffic through the actual campus (as there were few roads, although the walkways were wide enough for maintenance vehicles to get around).
We have a '+15' system in downtown Calgary such that most of the core office towers are connected on the second floor. Parts of the first two floors of most buildings are open to the public, and tend to be commercial space.
Reading the Wikipedia page, it seems some people have been wondering if they're making the streets less vibrant, but quite frankly even if they were, the enclosed walkways would still be worth it for winter. It can get brutally cold on the Canadian prairies.
My walk to work was about 3.5km, half of it inside. Winter? What winter! I laugh at your winter!
In contrast, I live in Edinburgh. The all-time high temperature was around 30 celsius, but it only drops below freezing at night during a couple of months. The city predates the automobile; as a result, unless you move out to the suburbs, it's entirely walkable. And guess what? The Council is currently holding a consultation on a blanket reduction in the vehicle speed limit to 20mph except on designated high-volume routes.
That town also had a problem downtown of people that would cross the street without looking, and glaring at people driving cars. Pretty much the people posting in this thread lol.
Get rid of the highways downtown if your goal is better cities. Don't just make the lanes look less safe to slow people slightly.
But we should get rid of highways downtown. We should make all streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists (which will in turn make them safer for motorists).
From my experience, few cities have four lane highways running through them - and if they do, they are grade-separated from pedestrians. In cities where the four lane highways are at grade with sidewalks along them, this is a different case. Those roads are hopeless and should be subject to complete removal.
Yet they continue to charge for something they want people to use, if they want to change behavior tax the people in the city and the businesses downtown for it. If they are truly economic benefits they will prove it
In Sydney, IPART (Independant Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal) recently reported that revenue from Sydney's public transport captures about 30% of the cost associated with running it.
The determined that it doesn't make sense to make PT free (fully subsidised by tax) because public transport is doesn't provide significantly enough value for all tax payers. http://www.ipart.nsw.gov.au/Home/Industries/Transport/Review...
The argument for eliminating fares is that the revenue more or less covers the cost of administration.
Also, for future, distinguish between capital and operating expenses.
That's also ignoring the different ways people would use public transport (and non-public transport) if it were free.
Granted as delays reduce people my decide to simply take more trips, but a combination of a car congestion tax, free public transit, and walk-able / bike-able city's are far more efficient say trying to stack highways.
The more people using PT, the greater the operating and capital expenses are
That does not, of course, mean you're not entitled to your opinions about the relative economic and social values of the things you're required to subsidize.
Threads like this always end up full of people who are absolutely convinced that there is only one truth, one valid perspective, one "right" thing to do. The irony inherent in that point of view goes completely unnoticed.
That's impossible. We could stop charging per use and just charge through general income taxation or maybe special taxation like car registrations or maybe sales tax. All those methods might work, but there's no way to "stop charging".
I could do without the bragging about rubbing elbows with White House staffers and setting public policy through executive orders.... and a little more discussing the elephant in the room -- namely that most cars on the road will be mostly driving themselves, much sooner than you think.
It is "appropriate" because the only way to ram this down our throats would be at the federal level... If small city A decides to ruin their roads from the perspective of people who matter, that being the vast majority who are drivers, people will simply move to city B and property values will compensate.
>> I'd argue for expanding the lanes to 15ft rather than narrowing them.
I can't even comprehend people like you. Encouraging biking and public transport is a good thing, environmentally and socially.
That right there is the vicious cycle that has brought us to the mess we're in today. The answer is not to keep feeding the monster of urban sprawl with bigger and faster roads to encourage even longer hellish commutes by car. The answer is to encourage mixed developments where a majority of people live close to the business centers and have short commutes (so a mix of public transit/biking/walking is practical for most people).
I can't envision a day where I personally would be capable of lugging my day's supplies on a bike 20+ miles (each way!), nor where it's practical to take public transit. Nor do I want to only be limited to working in areas my local public transit serves.
This ideal you have just isn't realistic for an awful lot of people. Especially those not living in the large metropolitan areas.
The solution isn't "just ride public transportation".
The solution is less polluting vehicles, ie. hybrid/electric cars. More efficient roadways (ie. "smart roads"), etc.
the idea that 200 pound bags of flesh need to be ferried around by tonnes of steel, massive swathes of land devoted to letting them rest nearby while we remain in the destination, and the entire landscape designed to let them roam around is insanity.
edit: also, the majority of people don't own cars.
That sounds pretty awesome. Driving a personal vehicle that takes up space, pollutes, and has the most capacity for causing harm should not be the default option like people treat it as.
Of course that equates to Mission Accomplished, from the point of view of the people you're responding to.
Wider lanes won't make it less congested.
This article repeats some conclusions from various research efforts of unknown (to me) quality, most of which carry caveats, and none of which were titled "Effects of Lane Width on Pedestrian Safety: A Quantitative View". These weak (not pejorative, just opposed to strong) statements are then used as the base assumptions atop which a logical argument is constructed - an argument that is incomplete. The relationship between speed and mortality is only attacked from the perspective of what happens once a collision has taken place, for instance, but there will likely also be a relationship between speed and the level of caution exercised by pedestrians, but no evidence about this is presented.
This is a question in need of comprehensive study; the tidbits presented here are neither strong nor complete enough to say anything absolute, much less accuse anyone of having blood on their hands.
Personally, I think such a study would validate much of what the author feels. But it is only my gut that says that, I'd need a study to "know". As such this comment is not meant as a criticism of the author or the thoughts in the article, but more as a sort-of defensive reminder of what the scientific method means.
I've seen this pattern in a number of "unintuitive and seemingly clever" traffic engineering tricks proposed in recent years. For example, it has been shown that removing all traffic signs can in fact improve safety -- again by slowing everyone down.
Another similar point (mentioned in the article) is that expanding freeways doesn't reduce congestion, because the new lanes are filled quickly. The argument is, apparently, that we therefore should not bother expanding freeways. The argument ignores the fact that the expanded freeway is serving many more people, creating immense value even if the speed of traffic hasn't improved.
(For the trolls: I personally take the train rather than drive whenever possible.)
Of course it is good for the economy that people can commute effectively. But by building more lanes we are choosing spread out cities dominated by highways where no one wants to live and instead drive to work from the suburbs.
And there are alternatives. We can choose more densely populated cities where the streets are dominated by pedestrians and people commute shorter distances mostly by public transport. Much better for the environment, and most importantly, better for people.
And we are making that choice whenever we chose between using the land for new roads or using the land for new pedestrian buildings and railways.
Comparing my apartment in Boston to mine in SF is like day and night. Here, I feel like I have my own place. It is a tad bit like a hotel room, but I don't hear much neighbor noise compared to the racket in Russian Hill.
Having a continual uneasiness due to random loud noises or having your own life impacted (listening to TV at a whisper, for example) is not human-friendly.
I think apartments get a bad rap because they are built with paper thin walls. It is more expensive to build with bigger spaces and proper noise control, but it has made a giant difference in my standard of living.
Please don't put out blanket claims like this and pretend they're obviously true, and then use them as justification for your particular view of how society should structure its geography. Some people hate densely populated areas. It would be utterly detrimental to my mental health to live in one. So if I have the choice to not live in an urban area, I'm going to take it.
I have a 45 minute commute each way every day to work. Long commutes suck. Living in the city sucks way more.
If moving from 30mph roads to 20mph roads reduced average traffic speed, then this would be a valid argument.
However, for most urban streets during the daytime the average speed is set not by the roads themselves but by the traffic capacity of the intersections along the road. It doesn't really matter how fast you can drive along a road if it only means that you get to the back of the queue for the next set of traffic lights a little earlier!
I commute-by-bike on a road with bike lanes in Somerville and Cambridge. At rush hour, no matter what the speed limit, the fastest way from point A to point B is a bicycle (unless A and B are stops on the red line), almost never exceeding 20mph. The reason cars are slow is that they take up too much space and have to wait in line, again and again and again.
No, that's simply not true. What actually happens is that media outlets write whatever the hell they feel like will sell, rather than what was in the scientific report. This is far more accurate than your description: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174
My point is that it's important to through out the telephone game that reports science, rather than the science itself. One shouldn't trust somebody else's summary of a scientific article, it's important to go look for oneself. Since this is a tech website, Peter Norvig should be a familiar name, and he has an excellent example of that here:
The information you want is available at http://nacto.org/docs/usdg/lane_widths_on_safety_and_capacit... and in exactly the format that you want. Indeed, this is the source material for the article that you are angry about, as was cited in the text.
The author wrote the article for people who want to read "shitty and annoying writing". There's enough of that writing in the world to know that those readers are in the majority. Those people also need convincing, don't they?
I'm not from USA, and on the last time I visited it, I noticed how recklessly people drive on the highways, most of them were on the phone, eating, or doing something else(there was even a lady fixing her hair with her right hand, talking on the cellphone with her left hand and holding the steering wheel with her elbow, that freaked me out).
If those people behave the same driving on a street, I can see that being the cause of the majority of accidents, since the reaction time for events will be smaller, since most occurrences happen within a few meters of the car.
Finally, I know that this is not the focus of the article, but the USA cities need to focus more on the people that either cannot or will not(like me) drive. LA, LV and Miami, for instance, were pretty hellish until I finally gave in and rented a car, with poor public transportation and pedestrian access.
It makes me wonder if its related to the age of the area. Newer areas seem to have more sidewalks.
In contrast, every European and Australian city I've lived in has catered for pedestrians and cyclists to the extent that it's at least possible to walk or bike anywhere you need to go (even if it would take hours in these huge Aussie cities).
I still wonder at it. How do Americans feel about living in such a shitty environment?
"America" however is not one environment and is INCREDIBLY diverse. There are places such as you've described in the US as well. Not everywhere has such prejudice against public transit too. However I believe as a whole the US is (or at least was) moving in general to a society that revolves around the automobile.
I'll tell you the absolute worst part of not being in an automobile is for me (as a woman) - the form of street harassment where assholes either beep at you or yell comments at you out the window going by. This has been a huge issue for me in every American city I ever lived in. Somehow people think this is appropriate behavior. It makes me not want to walk in a walkable area.
I did find it weird that there were these patches of the city where just nothing was built. British cities are incredibly compact - if it's not built on or being built on then it's a manicured public park, usually fenced. But Aussie cities have odd areas that are just empty, too... must be the relative age of the cities that causes this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego#mediaviewer/File:San_...
There are parts of it which are rather other than "beautiful".
that's true (everywhere).
> A place that caters to slow walkers and cyclists sounds worse to me.
and you're no exception.
Perceived because...
A place that caters to slow walkers and cyclists, if minimally well designed, actually improves car traffic throughput. Yes, that may sound counterintuitive. Go look at Copenhagen. You'd never be able to squeeze so many people through so little transportation infrastructure if they were all traveling by car.
Walking around at break to the street vendors was pretty cool, even if digestively perhaps risky :-)
LV, LA, and Miami are particularly appalling examples of US cities which have terrible pedestrian access.
That said, I've never seen as many people talking on their phone while driving as I saw last month in Reykjavik.
Let's see a cite to that data, because it seems ridiculous. Obviously if you make a road less congested people may start preferring it to other, more congested roads, but that just means the reduction in congestion is distributed rather than concentrated, and how is that a bad thing?
The entire premise of this article is questionable. The theory is that people will drive more carefully when the roads are more dangerous. From this the argument is that we should make the roads more dangerous in order to make them safer. This is obviously completely counterintuitive so they point to some evidence that it could be true (which itself seems to imply that its veracity lies near the statistical margin of error). The real problem is that it's a false dichotomy. Making the roads more dangerous is not the only way to make people drive more carefully. And alternative ways of encouraging people to drive more carefully are obviously preferable to a method that, at a given speed and level of care, is more dangerous according to the laws of physics.
More than that, this “make the roads dangerous to make them safe” is completely backwards when we're on the verge of commercially available self-driving cars. A self-driving car is obviously not bound by human psychology, so for all of those vehicles, making the roads more dangerous will only make the roads more dangerous.
(You can also see something similar with internet bandwidth. Same principle, I think.)
There's a Wikipedia article about the theory that narrower, signage-free roads are safer on aggregate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space
(I don't know/care if these are useful to you - simply a brain dump, as you asked)
http://i.imgur.com/DKRsGZ4.png
It was on an episode of Top Gear. It's typically empty, and in the above image you have government officials going to work.
Article provides very little useful information. Again, it's obvious that if you expand one road in a congested city then it will get full of cars again, because it takes the overflow from all of the other congested roads. And if you reduce congestion in general then people might choose to drive more often.
But this does not persist as a 1:1 relationship. China has proved as much by building a bunch of empty highways and cities, as is also demonstrated by urban highways carrying more traffic than rural highways with the same number of lanes. The "problem" is that if you have a lot of congested highways then you need to add a lot of lanes before you'll hit saturation, but that hardly proves that it can't be done. The observed 1:1 relationship in some locations is easily explained as a result of widespread insufficient infrastructure investment, resulting in roads with insufficient capacity even after the expansion.
He was drawing an analogy to the 'swing-top' bin - how you always try to fit more in and never empty it. "What would be the state of affairs a week from now if I gave you all a brand new swing-top bin to put next to your current one?"
So you buy another server. Now you have 2000 users, but once again it is starting to run slowly.
You decide to stop there. Clearly, more servers wont help. You'd just get more and more users.
You're assuming that having more roads makes it more efficient, but that's not necessarily true. If having less urban roads convinces more people to use mass transit, for example, it might be more efficient.
So I open another stall next to it but the lines don't seem to get much shorter even though I'm making twice as much coffee.
Notice that nowhere in there was a requirement that said infrastructure pays for itself. More often than not, and especially in small towns, it doesn't.
But don't believe me, take it from a civil engineer and urban planner who has done a lot of real research into this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn7aJ_Ti-co
Your analogy is broken because building more servers doesn't "get more users". You have to service a fixed number of users in the most efficient manner possible. Providing a car lane for each of them is not efficient.
You buy a second server. Now, your server still is overloaded between 08:00 and 9:00 but fewer people use it between 07:00 and 08:00 and 09:00 and 10:00.
There are plenty of people avoiding the main traffic times for whom the annoyance of congestion is just a tiny bit larger than the annoyance of leaving home an hour earlier. Take away a bit of congestion and they move their schedule.
How to Live Dangerously by Warwick Cairns is a great book on the topic as well.
I'm not disputing the idea that people might respond to perceived safety by taking more risks or vice versa. It's almost a corollary to the efficient market hypothesis. However, that doesn't tell you anything about whether they will overcompensate or undercompensate in any given context.
And what I'm really objecting to is the idea that we should make people "feel" less safe by doing things that actually make them less safe if not for people [over]compensating for them. Because that's a very dangerous game if you're wrong and it's completely ignoring the possibility of solving the problem in other ways, which should on balance be more effective because you aren't running the wrong way with the ball.
The general idea is that congestion dissuades some amount of commuters from using the road at congested times. When additional road capacity is added, those people will shift their commute time, or commute mode, or commute route to re-congest the road. (Time, mode or route is the "Triple Convergence" or latent/induced demand.) But in certain contexts like LA or London it's not possible to build enough road capacity to eliminate congestion. So building additional road capacity has the effect of (a) not reducing congestion and (b) reducing usage of public transportation. And (b) causes additional problems for the efficiency that public transportation.
The counter-intuitiveness is why it's a paradox. And the context probably matters for when this theory applies. But supposedly it happens to lots of developed cities. The original study on London was looking at when ~80% of commutes happened by transit. But LA is trying to improve its transit infrastructure because partly because this problem.
After reading the article I have to point out, from the "Restrictions on validity" section, that it "only applies to regions in which the vast majority of peak-hour commuting is done on rapid transit systems with separate rights of way".
So for most cities outside of NYC, this paradox supposedly does not apply (even though I feel it has some bearing).
Regardless, the general principle behind the paradox is induced demand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) - which, regardless of the share of transit users, will always apply to highway projects.
In other words, I believe that to the extent new lane capacity is filled as soon as the construction workers pick up their cones, it is because economically and/or socially useful things are happening. Otherwise, why would any of us drive anywhere at all?
Instead, because the city is optimized for cycling and public transport, I live in a culture where taking even public transport is frowned upon if the bicycle commute is < 30 mins (and even an hour, perhaps).
I think this argument applies to many things. In the city where I live, Amsterdam, there's (almost) always a supermarket at walking distance (or a 5-10 min. bike ride). In fact, this is true for the whole country, as far as I know. 'Hypermarkets' like wal-mart or Carrefoure never really took off. The reason for this is partly culture, but largely it's because of regulation that protects smaller shops.
Most people consider it a very good thing that we can walk to the supermarket and that we are, in effect, 'forced' to have a healthy lifestyle and culture.
Anyways, I just wanted to share how the fact that streets will fill up and hypermarkets will most likely be successful doesn't mean that this is a good thing, or that it's in our best interest.
Third, economic arguments are a little dicey for driving because driving is filled with externalized costs, subsidies, overoptimistic assumptions, and dependent utility. Driving creates noise and pollution (and it appears that the pollution is more deadly than crashes) but drivers don't pay that cost. There's personal crash risk, but people tend to assume that they are careful drivers and hence less likely to crash than the norm. The cost of the roads themselves is currently subsidized from the general fund; it's not a huge external cost, but it's a cost. Driving also creates (perceived) danger to people biking and walking; that tends to encourage them to also drive for their own (perceived) safety, even when they otherwise would not, and the congestion costs of driving also delay bus transit, making it less useful (it's already slower because of all the stops; traffic jams make it slower yet).
A quick glance at Wikipedia found this reference: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00166218 which appears to be a decent summary.
Moreover, road safety is not fixed but rather dependent on the speed at which drivers drive on the road. Thus, if a roadway design causes drivers to drive slower on road B as opposed to road A, road B may be safer even if it would be less safe than road A if people drove the same speeds on both roadways. There is nothing particularly counter intuitive about this type of theory at all.
Also perceived danger to oneself doesn't take into account the risk one poses to others. This issue of externalities is what makes these 12 foot lanes so dangerous. As noted in the article, if drivers are driving slower, they are far less likely to kill or seriously injure pedestrians. And since F = (.5)mv^2 this is exactly what we'd hypothesize. Pedestrians are a non-issue on the rural highways that the 12 foot lane and other state road design measures are based on. But in the middle of a dense city, higher speeds, even if they aren't any less safe for the drivers, are far less safe for pedestrians and cyclists, not to mention far more unpleasant to be around. It is this concept, more than anything else, that traffic engineers are so often obtuse to.
And driver-less cars will have to be able to navigate the existing 10-foot lane roads anyways to be commercially viable, so I don't see how that is an issue.
Without the expectation that people will compensate for it, making the lanes narrower does make it actually more dangerous. There will be less space between each vehicle and less space between the vehicle and pedestrians on the side of the road, which reduces the amount of space available to avoid an obstruction, the amount of reaction time available to avoid a collision, etc.
> Also perceived danger to oneself doesn't take into account the risk one poses to others.
That is a counterargument to your position. If drivers aren't bearing the full risk then an increase in risk should cause them to undercompensate, not overcompensate.
> And driver-less cars will have to be able to navigate the existing 10-foot lane roads anyways to be commercially viable, so I don't see how that is an issue.
It is possible to be less safe without being negligent and that difference is still measured in human lives.
I think you're being downvoted in part because the linked article refutes your viewpoint. There's even a pullquote saying "States and counties believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong." Followed up in the text by "Or, to be more accurate, they are wrong, and thousands of Americans are dead."
And "The lane widths in the analyses conducted were generally either not statistically significant or indicated that narrower lanes were associated with lower rather than higher crash frequencies."
> This research investigated the relationship between lane width and safety for roadway segments and intersection approaches on urban and suburban arterials. The research found no general indication that the use of lanes narrower than 3.6 m (12 ft) on urban and suburban arterials increases crash frequencies. This finding suggests that geometric design policies should provide substantial flexibility for use of lane widths narrower than 3.6 m (12 ft). The inconsistent results suggested increased crash frequencies with narrower lanes in three specific design situations. Narrower lanes should be used cautiously in these three situations unless local experience indicates otherwise.
It it turn builds on, for example, results by Hauer, et al, Strathman et al. which appear.
You then raised another objection, which is, I believe, that a 10' lane causes people to use alternate routes because of decreased capacity on those lanes, so there are simply fewer people on the 10' lane roads to cause accidents.
This may well be. It's a subtle network effect that is hard to analyze, and not covered in this article. (The article does comment that capacity is unchanged, but I think its literature citations are weak. It quotes Petritsch who in turn quotes a summary of an unpublished literature search.)
However, your objection is not what was refutated. AnthonyMouse proposes that narrowing lanes lead to a higher accident rate since it "reduces the amount of space available to avoid an obstruction, the amount of reaction time available to avoid a collision, etc." While true for country roads, those above papers show that the same correlation can not be identified on city roads.
Now, what I know is only from this article, and it may be that the author cherry-picked the few papers which show that the 'reaction time' hypothesis is unsupported by the evidence. But "refute" means "to deny the accuracy or truth of", and certainly the article refuted that hypothesis.
And this is the problem. "Not statistically significant" means that the effect is very small. This is what you would expect if narrower lanes make driving more dangerous but then drivers compensate by being more careful; they approximately cancel each other out. The author is making much hay out of the possibility that drivers might be not only compensating but overcompensating for the reduction in safety, theoretically causing a (small) net increase in safety.
The fallacy of this is that intentional danger is not the only possible way to increase driver vigilance. As one example, we could promote self-driving cars. That allows us to capture a much larger safety increase because the increase doesn't have to be weighed down by the counterbalancing cost of having narrower lanes and less room to maneuver.
You use the phrase "intentional danger". The flip side is that "illusory safety." A 12' lane may feel safer even though it actually isn't. But it feels like you stress the "intentional danger" part when the label is irrelevant - the questions are the number and severity of crashes, of human injury, of overall traffic capacity, etc. How one labels the emotional aspect of the driver's internal state isn't relevant to the outcomes.
Also, as secabeen pointed out, driver vigilance isn't the only concern. To add another one 12' of road surface is simply more expensive to repair, clean, and replace than 10' of surface.
Regarding self-driving cars - sure, but how does that change anything in the next 10-20 years of road design? The underlying factors won't change unless a large percentage of vehicles are self-driving. You might as well argue that enforcing a 10mph speed limit would be safer as well, as another example of a solution which, even though correct should it occur, won't affect anyone's planning now.
How many lives are saved by fire trucks, police, etc... being able to get to/from emergencies more quickly? I feel like experimental data will be much more useful than models to measure the impact of 10' to 12' lanes.
I can't find the original story but here are some papers:
"The findings show that the density and age of a residential area or jurisdiction explain some of the variation in average EMS response times between urban and suburban or exurban locations. Holding other things constant, those who live in more sparsely settled and newer developments tend to have longer wait times for EMS."
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25469783?uid=3738776&u...
http://www.cues.fau.edu/cnu/docs/Ex-Urban_Sprawl_as_a_Factor...
Strange to use Florida as an example, with an 8-lane local road! Suburban Florida is empty and flat very spread out and every road is basically a highway. People need to go fast because everything is far away. Not like urban environments where most time is spent stopped at corners, not moving.
The cases where narrow street widths work better are places where there is more stop and go traffic like downtown areas where majority of the residences are crowded with store-front development. There instead of insisting on narrow lanes, you should insist on complete street designs that appropriately designs for all kinds of traffic.
New urbanist movements seem to be behind this kind of lunacy of trying to create traffic conditions more difficult for cars. In New York, this trend has been set of by the Bloomberg administration and is labeled/marketed as traffic calming. It is really traffic impeding and is the center piece design of urban environments. I admit there are various benefits to it, but the underlying motivations are to be anti-gas guzzling vehicles.
"Traffic calming" is a euphemism for telling drivers to go fuck themselves. If traffic increases to meet capacity, traffic calming is trying to reverse that. By punishing drivers, and making it incredibly shitty to drive, traffic is reduced.
It's a feature, not a bug.
Instead, it strikes me as both a tool for non-drivers that are "driver hating", as well as those local NIMBYs/etc that don't want those "crazy speeders" through the town ("think of the children").
Next time that folks discuss putting traffic calming bumps in your community, ask whether you want the emergency vehicles to be slowed down when you or your loved ones are waiting for an ambulance. Consider the extra pollution created by all the slowing down and speeding up.
I have spoken to folks familiar with Cambridge, MA government structures, where they have told me that it has been actively refused to re-time/synchronize stop lights to have a green wave because they want the traffic slowed down. New York City has real green waves (e.g. going up 1st ave). So next time you are driving down Massachusetts Ave in the evening and you hit random red lights for no reason, know that someone has explicitly decided to do this to you.
Narrow lanes surely do decrease average driving speed, it's damn uncomfortable to drive fast in traffic, and staying in the lane requires more concentration. I do miss wide Russian lanes sometimes, but the narrow ones are undeniably safer.
As a cyclist, the bike lanes don't really make me feel safer. There is a good margin of space between the bike lane and the car lane, but the bike lanes are really only in effect for half of any given block. The second half of the block, the line between the car/bike lanes is dotted, and cars can legally enter the bike lane, to make right turns. And then of course, anyone parallel parking on the street has to cross the bike lane to do so.
Making the lanes narrower did not make pedestrian crossings any safer, as the road is actually the same width, and you still have to travel the same distance to cross the street. What did make it safer for pedestrians, the installation of flashing yellow warning lights at certain crosswalks, that pedestrians can turn on before crossing the street. Motorists see them and stop for people crossing, and that is a new and welcome effect.
The bike lanes would have been much MUCH better implemented one block south of the main drag on a residential street that runs parallel. Much safer for cyclists. Healthier too, not having to breath as much vehicle exhaust. And probably a more optimal allocation of resources for the citizens. As much as everyone wants to be PC and become friendly advocates of human-powered transport, it really doesn't make sense in this part of town, to increase trip times and emissions for thousands of motorists daily, so the 50 people who choose to ride their bike can have a marginally safer lane to ride in. In Downtown L.A., it is completely different. Downtown, the bike lanes make sense because hundreds if not thousands of people use them. You always see a bike in the bike lane over there. But outside of the heart of the city, many people commute to work and carpool their kids to school and ballet and such. They're not going to ride bikes 5 hours a day to make that kind of commute.
Oh, and where the traffic engineers failed to account for, and accommodate heavy traffic on a couple of heavily-traveled segments of the road, motorists now drive their cars illegally in the bike lanes during periods of congestion.
IMO the project is mostly a failure. The safer pedestrian crossings are a great improvement. But the bike lanes such as they are, and the narrower lanes, just a waste of money. Putting the bike lanes on a side street would have been really great, a win-win for both cyclists and motorists.
Radar signs that basically just say "shame on you" are worthless. Traffic enforcement cameras ("speed cameras") that actually hand out fines would have an actual impact. Those speeders would change their ways if they had to pay a fine every time they drove over the limit. Preferably the fine would be scaled based on the driver's income.
Person A makes $10 * 40 hours / week -> $400 / week -> $100 ticket == 25% of weekly gross income
Person B make $100 * 40 hours / week -> $4000 / week -> $100 ticket == 2.5% of weekly gross income
Who is being hit harder? Who will be more deterred from future speeding?
Furthermore, the "robot overlords" won't care if someone is "rich|poor|black|white|smart|dumb". Can you say the same for a police officer?
Suppose the penalty for murder is 50% of your remaining life. Should we put a 20 year old away until he's 50 (assuming 80 years expected lifespan), but only lock a 60 year old up for 10 years?
My point is: changing from an absolute value to a relative one introduces complexities in the system. Philosophically, the law needs to treat everyone the same, which to me, means the penalties are the same for everyone regardless of sex, race, income, height, weight, or any other characteristic. This is encoded in the Constitution. I do not see how two different people, convicted of the same crime in the same contexts, should have different punishments. (Yes, I know it happens, but I think that's a bug, not a feature, and wish it would be cleaned up.)
Anecdotally, where I live, the truly extreme speeding (50 mph in a 35) seems to have decreased. Also, most of the jockeying for position, weaving in and out of the lanes, has stopped, due to the reduction of 3 car lanes to 2 narrower car lanes plus bike lane. As a result, I'm quite in favor of this experiment.
And also the overall health benefits are better, when you consider that more people will ride without helmet rules.
Only Australia has this requirement.
I remember when the speed limit was raised from 55 to 65. Politicians paraded all kinds of studies from engineers, PhD's and mothers crying on TV. The claim was that blood would run down our streets and highways. The effects of making this change, the "experts" and politicians said, would be cataclysmic.
What happened in reality?
Nothing of the sort. Actually, some of the opposite. Accident and fatality rates went down.
So I call hogwash. Maybe this guy has some sort of bias, financial or political interest in this idea. Maybe it is about hiring a million new union workers across the nation to repaint all of our streets and buy votes for the democratic party in 2016. Maybe it is about giving a few huge corporations juicy contracts to try to buy financial support and votes for republicans.
I don't know. My life is about science and data. So, yes, I do value honest studies with solid data and conclusions. I also know that you can't take a sentence or two our of a study and quote it completely out of context to support your case. When put into context the reality of the study could be very different and the conclusions could be really flawed.
Ask almost anyone who drove pre-65mph how they feel about the change to 65. I would be surprised if anyone said it got worst. It's a lot more relaxed. You don't have to be constantly focused on the darn speedometer or become a human highway patrol detector.
In fact, I think the speed limit ought to be raised to 80mph. People are not suicidal. They'll drive at whatever speed is safe and comfortable for them. On average, today, that seems to be somewhere around 75 to 80mph, except when CHP gets on the road and everything slows down causing traffic backups, etc.
If we are really that concerned that blood will run down streets it is a relatively simple technological matter to legislate that no automobile sold in the US can go faster than, say, 70mph. An automatic speed limiting system could also be put into place to limit speeds everywhere in real time. A low power emitter in every traffic signal in the nation could tell cars what the max speed limit might be and the software in the car keeps you from exceeding it. Done deal.
If the issue is so serious let's just do that. I'd rather have cops devote their time to chasing bad guys than hiding behind a fence to give dumb traffic tickets to all the mommies taking their kids to school during the first week of class (happens almost every year here).
If you value science and data, you can tell from a mile what an enormously stupid idea it is to have multi-ton cars roaming cities at even 20mph. Physics tells us it's deadly, everything tells us people are incompetent and unfit to drive, and the statistics bear out the very, very high expected costs.
I'd argue it can only be ignorance that would make you look at the tremendous body of evidence, both theorethically and statistically, and conclude
> People are not suicidal. They'll drive at whatever speed is safe and comfortable for them.
Indeed the relative comparisons are at the heart of the problem. They come so natural to humans. Everybody drives daily, how dangerous can it be? This very poster attests to the fact that he feels perfectly safe in a multi-ton steel vehicle moving at 65 mph, propelled forward by repeated explosions (well, that part is a bit hyperbole).
So while society tells you it's perfectly safe and why don't you think about those terrorists thousands of miles away, just looking at the absolute numbers for traffic related mortality tells us that the problem is very freaking huge.
Certainly not. We keep track of statistics by vehicle-mile for a reason.
In addition to lowering mortality/car-distance, one can reduce traffic mortality/population in two significant ways: shifting traffic from car to safer means of transport, and lowering total car-distance. This holds true both on individual and society level.
I'm going to deliberately provocate now by comparing to a very sensitive number. Just hoping it will wake up at least someone.
Improve road infrastructure safety to Dutch standards? Prevent over four 9/11's per year (12850 deaths).
Improve transportation culture to Dutch standards? Prevent up to eight 9/11's per year (24007 deaths).
data sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11...
It's talking about the effect of wide lanes on urban and suburban streets. You're talking about what happens on open highway. Completely different animals. He acknowledges as much, and that wider highway lanes are safer.
I'm not a kid any more. I am not easily impressed. I've seen too much of this over the years. Particularly around elections.
Living in Los Angeles I see people crossing the street ALL THE TIME without even looking for traffic. I mean, they just continue walking off the sidewalk as if cars did not even exist. Having traveled to many parts of the world and all corners of the US this has always been rather perplexing to me. It is somewhat unique to California, I think. To see people with such low apparent common sense is jaw dropping. Anywhere else in the world they'd be flattened in a microsecond. In Amsterdam you'd have 15 bikes pile on top of you. Unbelievable.
My point is that there are a ton of factors behind how people get hurt or die on and around roads. Someone else was far more eloquent than I care to be right now about how studies can be total garbage. He or she was far more gentle and politically correct than I am interested in being any more. Crap in Crap Out. Bias in Bias Out. That's what a lot of these studies are.
One can scaffold a bunch of bad conclusions and paragraphs from a bunch of crap studies and build a seemingly solid foundation for the conclusion that if we had less men wearing ties the mortality rate while riding bikes in Manhattan would go down. In other words, more crap out.
We have far more important things to worry about than to devote billions of dollars to repainting all of our streets. Take that money and use it to lift people out of poverty. Maybe we can do a study that shows how not spending money in bullshit projects supported by a maze of bullshit studies and, instead, using that money to truly support the education and growth of the economically disadvantaged might reduce mortality rates when the clueless cross the streets in Los Angeles?
Sorry for the tone. I find that as I get older I am far less tolerant of bullshit the might have tantalized me when I was a twenty-something. It's amazing what a few decades of perspective can reveal to you about people, politics, business and society. Not grumpy, just a realist. I think.
That said, I'm not sure how the chicken/egg situation worked out but I'm appalled by how pedestrians walk across the street. They just go without looking up from their phones.
The crosswalk by my work has added giant signs and flashing lights and you still see people blow thru at 40+ (speed limit is 25). I'm not sure if I'd be alive if I didn't look both ways before crossing. On the other hand, judging by how mad people are when they stop and you don't cross because someone else isn't stopping, it might not have been much of a gain.
You should certainly look both ways at a cross-walk anyway, again because multi-ton vehicle; but, they should also follow those signs that say "stop here for crosswalk"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2724439/
http://narc.org/uploads/File/Transportation/Library/NCHRP_Sp...
http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa1304/reso...
that suggest that raising speed limits increases the rate of road fatalities, at least on highways that are not designed with the features of the Interstate Highway System highways. But perhaps you have found other studies whose methodology you would like to explain here that reach a different conclusion.
Please.
So I called the guy for doing exactly what the author of the 12 foot vs. 10 foot lane author is probably doing: Using bullshit or irrelevant papers to try to support a nonsense conclusion. And you cargo cult kids down vote me. Well done.
Think.
http://www.motorists.org/speed-limits/55-mph-study.pdf (references inside the PDF to the source data)
How about it folks? You are not going to take back all those down votes and nonsense counterpoint posts, are you? You are not going to apologize and say, "Sorry, you were right", are you?
Of course you are not. You probably won't even take the time to read the PDF this person posted. No, it's much easier to hate those with opposing views and smash them down as hard as you can than to make an effort to understand and learn something.
Some of the most valuable learning I have done has been through researching topics out of my own interest, sometimes spurred by and idea or a couple of words I came across somewhere. You learn very little by being spoon fed. I am not here to spoon feed anyone.
If someone wants to refute what I said, take the time to go ascertain whether or not my point is valid. Googling is pretty easy. Until you (plural you) have done that, don't spew off a bunch of irrelevant nonsense that makes you (plural) look like a fool.
The punch line here is very simple: If you ready my original comment, there's NOTHING whatsoever on there that is false. Yet it was attacked mercilessly and down-voted to hell and back. And so was nearly every single comment I had to make after that to defend myself and my position.
Shooting the messenger is a sport around here.
And then someone really smart came along and he/she decided to take a few moments to actually and see if I was full of shit or not. And a link was posted. And, guess what, it corroborated absolutely everything I said about the transition from 55 to 65.
Yet nobody apologizes and the barrage of down-votes and attacks continues because, well, the kids just don't want to be wrong. Well, fuck you all. Grow up and go learn something.
HN sucks at this.
It is ruled by what I perceive to be a petulant mob of post-adolescents who just got free from Mommy and Daddy and now have to be right all the time in the face of reality. And don't get me started about the manure-filled ideas they soaked-up in college and took to be true without any thought, consideration or validation with reality at all.
Important? Not really. HN is mostly a waste of time as a participant exactly because of this mob of post-diaper members who make discussing anything just about impossible. The sport is to find holes in your comments and savagely attack them with comments, down votes or both. It's a true mob of bully's.
I've been pretty busy lately and have mostly ignored HN for probably months (don't really have a clue how long). I've picked up reading an article here and there from a quick browse of the first page but no discussions of any substance in a while. Frankly, not sure why I got into this thread. I'm on vacation, that must be why. And I actually regret it. I hate dealing with ignorant, entitled, petulant 20-somethings. And that's what HN is full of.
I'll phase myself back into read-only mode. I'll let the morons own the castle.
Of course this comment will be met with the usual dosage of savage come-backs and down votes. Have fun kids, whatever floats your boat.
You don't have to be suicidal to be distractable, tired, or overconfident.
Edit: I also like how in the paragraph after you state your love of 'science and data', you promote vague, theoretical, self-reported anecdotal evidence (that isn't even part of a scientific study) as a basis for your argument.
If you are so interested in proving me wrong about the shift from 55 to 65 not having resulted in blood running down the streets (which is exactly what was predicted back then) go do the research yourself.
I don't think I need a research paper to know that AT WORST it made no difference at all. I was not in diapers when this happened. I had already been driving for a while. So, I went through the transition as and adult. Was exposed to all the "the sky is falling" crap and come out of the other side, years later, realizing these people were all full of it.
Had the transition been horrific the media would still be counting the dead every day just like they did for the Iraq war.
Don't believe me? Fine. Go figure it out. I don't need to waste my time on something I already know to be true.
vs
I don't think I need a research paper to know that AT WORST it made no difference at all.
Then your life is not about science and data. If it was, you'd know that counterintutive findings happen all the time in science. For example, the Big Bang theory was famously named for the 'ridiculous example' presented by people trying to discredit that theory. Finding counterintuitive results are a major part of why we do scientific studies in the first place.
Had the transition been horrific the media would still be counting the dead every day
Shall I start counting the logical fallacies you're throwing out (as a 'lives science' guy, no less)? Why does something have to be carnage, sorry, 'blood running down the streets', to be 'worse'? This is how sensantionalist tabloid journalists talk, not reasoned scientists.
(or at least you think you are)
Ironically, I've had a partial scientific test done which indicates that yes, I am smart, regardless of whether or not I personally think so. Being smart is nice, but it's not everything. I was on track for 140ish - not a genius, but above average. But, given that you 'value science and data', you should probably be made aware of me having done a partial WAIS-R by a properly trained professional. It's not perfect, but it was independently run and it's better than self-reported anecdotal hypothetical 'data'.
I don't need to waste my time on something I already know to be true.
I'm wasn't trying to convince you one way or the other; I was just trying to remind you that danger isn't just from people being intentionally suicidal in the traffic control world.
I'm also calling you on your amazing lack of good scientific process, given you call yourself a 'science and data' person, and that you're trying to convince others. Throwing out a strong, opposing opinion ridiculing the initial point, then countering criticism with "I have nothing to prove!" is just poor form in general, let alone in science.
I didn't come up with "blood running down the streets" politicians were actually saying such things back then to try to justify their position against raising the speed limit from 55 to 65. I don't know the true motivation behind them making such claims. My best guess is that the Federal Government exerted pressure by means of threatening to remove funding or some such thing. Pure conjecture on my part at this point.
My point is that plenty of people are mercilessly voting my comments down yet nobody is taking the time to learn a little history and research what I am saying. I don't need to because I was there and remember the idiocy of the entire thing. For about a year or so media outlets tried their best to push the "speed kills" and "65 is bad" agenda but reality somehow chose to defy them. Blood did not run dow the highway as politicians predicted. Not even close. And so after about a year or so they all stopped talking about it because everyone realized what the politicians were pushing was nonsense. We actually had less accidents with the increase in speed limit.
Anyhow, as i said elsewhere, HN is a cargo cult club. If i had come here fully aligned with the crowd and proclaimed how 10 foot wide lanes would save lives I'd collect a bunch of little votes and make all of you happy. Instead an asshole who dares to not be in line with y'all and for that I am personna non gratta. And that's sad. This isn't a place where opposing points of view are welcome at all.
I get it. I haven't been reading HN for probably a year. Now I remmber why I stopped.
It's OK, it's just funny. You still have a few years of reality before you actually get out of the cave and stop seeing the world through shadows on the walls, some of which were painted by your professors in college.
Tolerance is something most people love to talk about just to sound "right" and fit in. In practice intolerance and prejudice are far more common with people who preach it --and behave otherwise-- than in those who do not but rather choose to simply practice it.
Just the way it is.
On HN you can't have a viewpoint significantly opposite that of the underlying HN culture. You just can't.
On the attack aspect. Look, HN is characterized by some really dumb back and forth discussions full of senseless nit-picking. I call these "programmer arguments" because it is often impossible to argue with some programmers because they are really good about arguing endlessly about utterly irrelevant minutiae. Like the comments in this thread that got into the idea that there's an argument to be made about drivers being more careful when they see bikers not wearing helmets. And the nonsense back and forth continues.
So yeah, I have grown quite intolerant to nonsense over the last five years or so. I've been really busy and have not read HN in a while. I just came back and see a bunch of the same thing and this intolerant cargo cult.
HN is at it's best when the discussions are contained to technology, startups, software or hardware development and related topics. There's a lot of expertise and value here when it comes to these topics.
The minute HN discussions deviate from that world it all derails. I have this vision -right or wrong- of a bunch of real-life ignorant 22 year olds brainwashed by their college professors desperately trying to play adult with their comments here. I'd be funny if it wasn't so stupid. They have little life experience yet have categorical opinions about everything and are incredibly intolerant of anything outside this cargo cult mentality.
Progress isn't made by those who swim with the current. You have to be willing to swim hard against it if you want to change the world, or at least your little corner of it. Going against the flow is not easy, as evidenced here. It would be called bullying in the real world. Or at least bigoted intolerant behavior.
Here's the good part: Despite what is said or done here, reality is as it is. And this they will eventually learn the hard way on the street, not here. I remember having a conversation about taxation with a 22 year old engineer who worked for me at one of my companies 15 years ago. He had swallowed-up the liberal coolaid whole. Nothing I could say could convince him he was wrong. Ten years later he called me up one day to thank me for what he learned from me (mostly in terms of engineering). He also mentioned he now understood the issues I used to point out regarding taxation. Why? Because he launched his own business and got the experience of now having to hold that cat by the tail.
HN is broken. Keep it to science, tech and startups and all is well. Everything else derails into nonsense kiddie bickering almost instantly.
That, and weirdly aggressive tone, is why you're being downvoted.
Just asking but do you honestly not know that?
I am not refusing to post anything. I plant a seed. I know the answer. Anyone can google it just as well as I might be able to. Why does everything have to be spoon fed?
So someone finally was interested enough to research my claims and post a link. Here it is:
http://www.motorists.org/speed-limits/55-mph-study.pdf
The article starts with this:
"In 1995 the Republican Congress repealed the 55-mile-per-hour federal speed limit law. At the time, the highway safety lobby and consumer advocacy groups made apocalyptic pre- dictions about 6,400 increased deaths and a million additional injuries if posted speed limits were raised. Ralph Nader even said that “history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life.”
"...a million additional injuries..."
All bullshit as 20 years of history has proven.
So why the tone? Because this HN trait infuriates me.
Someone posts a factually accurate viewpoint that goes against the "HN culture" and they are mercilessly attacked here. It's bullying at it's best. The difference is that while most people just crumble and leave, I don't. And I am not shy about calling bullshit when I see it.
As to my choice to be short and to the point and even use colorful language. Well, I'd much rather listen to a man who presents facts with straight, even sometimes abrasive, speech out of the need to make an impression than waste any time listening to well-crafted, intellectually brilliant sounding, well articulated, refined, non-colorful, non-offensive language that is full of lies and manipulations...you know, like politicians or those on HN who take the time to write great sounding posts with lot's of links and research that, when you get right down to it, are hardly worth a handful of manure.
So there, someone, not me, was smart and inquisitive enough to ask: I wonder if this guy might have a point? And he or she posted a link to a pretty good PDF.
It echos exactly what I said: politicians, misinformed activists and even government agencies painted apocalyptic i ages of what would happen if the speed limit was raised. It was all nonsense. The exact opposite happened. And that is likely the case with this dumb 12 foot vs. 10 foot lane issue.
Of course, none of the HN down-vote kiddies are going to read this and say "Wow, this guy was right!", apologize and learn something.
No, instead they'll find some other justification for their hatred-driven down vote assault and move on to he next guy who dares to stand up for a truth that happens to go counter tho what makes HN kiddies feel good about themselves.
People, grow up.
Yet you can somehow concluded that "if I'm not hearing about it (on the news no less!) it doesn't exist?"
Perhaps all of Texas, Arizona or NM.
Not here.
I hope some smart Alec SF supe does not get any ideas, reading this.
The bulb-outs at the intersections [1], the rules-dont-apply-to-us cyclists [2], the abundance of parklets and dedicated Muni lanes are already making driving in SF a hugely cumbersome affair. If it isn't already, with its 20%+ grade roads [3].
From my experience living in SF, drivers here are not the most skilled as it is. This will only worsen things.
If Mr. Wiener catches wind of this, I'm certain he will call for miniature lanes, like when he called for miniature firetrucks, when firefighters expressed concern over the width of streets. [4]
[1] http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/07/03/bulb-outs-noe-valleys-g...
[2] http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Bicyclist-sentenced-for-...
[3] http://www.datapointed.net/2009/11/the-steeps-of-san-francis...
[4] http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/05/09/monday-speak-out-on-sff...