The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
A GST On The Design Of Our Roads
AngelHedgie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So there was a discussion in the police brutality thread about how our roads are designed that I thought was interesting:
This is ultimately a design problem in my opinion, because we shouldn't be relying on empathy to keep people safe (as it too often fails.) Systems like the Barcelonan "superblock" acknowledge that different types of traffic flow should not be mixed, with high speed transit limited to the edges, slower intrablock traffic then handled inside (and many streets being restricted to pedestrian traffic only.) Running a state highway through a town is a failure of design, asking a road to serve multiple masters.
I'm sorry, just because your town of 200 fuckwits decided to build both bars, the church and the local park directly along side the state highway for some stupid fucking reason doesn't mean the speed limit needs to drop from 55 to 25 for those 1000 feet.
I mean it should probably drop to 35 or 40 first, then 25. But otherwise...yeah it kinda probably does mean that. To you that’s just a state highway that connects actual places you actually give a shit about. To them it’s their home.
The street I just mentioned is the main street leading to the beach. To most other people, they probably see no reason it should be a 30 and not a 40. Because to them, it’s the road that connects their neighborhood to the place they actually want to go. But to us, it’s our home.
The idea that those fuckwits aren’t worth slowing down for is toxic. We need to accept that sometimes our travel time isn’t set strictly by geography, but that people may live along the roads we drive. And that we shouldn’t be deciding which human beings are worth slowing down for. The difference between 55 and 25 over 1,000 feet is like...well, for 60 and 30 it’s about 6 seconds. It’s 1/5 of a mile, a mile is one minute at 60mph, and double that at 30mph, so it’s 1/5 or 12 seconds versus 6 seconds. 6 seconds.
Even if the town is a full mile, it would be thirty seconds.
People are allowed to live along the roads you use. And they should be able to do so safely. Yes it sucks losing 30 seconds on your trip because the highway runs through their town and they wanted to build things for the town near that highway. But try to see things from their perspective.
I lived in Montana and drove through a lot of one-stoplight or even no-stopsign towns between the places I cared about. I can name several where the limit drops from 55 or even 75 down to 30 or even 25 without so much as a stop sign otherwise. But people live there. They cross that road on foot, they turn on that road in cars, and they should be able to do so safely.
I’m not picking on your personally though. Most people, myself included, tend to lose a ton of empathy when we get behind the wheel of a car. Everything is an obstacle to us.
This is ultimately a design problem in my opinion, because we shouldn't be relying on empathy to keep people safe (as it too often fails.) Systems like the Barcelonan "superblock" acknowledge that different types of traffic flow should not be mixed, with high speed transit limited to the edges, slower intrablock traffic then handled inside (and many streets being restricted to pedestrian traffic only.) Running a state highway through a town is a failure of design, asking a road to serve multiple masters.
XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
+9
Posts
Passive design is inherently more safe than active enforcement. Even automated. Making it so that travelling at speed is literally more challenging due to shifting it to a boulevard style road with traffic calming devices (chicanes being the most likely) will result in less death than hoping people behave well and ticketing hose who don't.
But yes, cars make people go crazy. Road rage is a thing. The idea of building something and not having off-street parking causes people to turn up to a community meeting like nothing else. Concerns about traffic are right behind 'community character' among NIMBYs. It just does something to people and rationality goes out the windscreen.
I'll transfer my road rage to my robot chauffer or something
This kind of ignores the basic issue that businesses want to be where the traffic is.
There’s a town in my area that had the highway route going right through their central business thoroughfare. Bars, restaurants, chintzy little tourist gift shops, you name it. All dealing with constant thru traffic.
18-wheelers having to negotiate 3 separate 90° turns in less than a mile of city streets was not a good time for anyone.
Eventually someone went “hey do you guys notice how the railway just keeps going straight when the road jogs into town? Why don’t we build a bypass for the thru traffic and get the semis off the city streets?”
It took them decades to actually think this up and get it done but now it’s great.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
No, they want to be where the customers are. Through traffic doesn't spend money, but it does make it harder for the people who stop and need to cross the road without dying to spend money.
This thread isn't talking about interstates.
Cars don't generally travel at the speed limit, or at least, people driving cars don't always feel comfortable driving at (note! not safe driving at!) the speed limit. They instead feel comfortable driving at the Operating speed, this is determined by the geometry of the road, curves, straightness, quality of surface, impression of speed (e.g. easier to travel fast if there are no landmarks), trees, lane markers, central dividers, speed bumps, traffic calming, etc etc. These all contribute to what speed average drivers feel comfortable driving at. If the speed limit is higher than this speed, then great! you'll find that people generally slow down a bit and all is well. If you have a dead straight road in the middle of no-where that happens to go through a town with no change in design, then of course people are going to speed.
I emphasise with people who live in these towns, but they have a choice between becoming a speed trap, and making the road safer for themselves and people passing through.
Ok cool. Who is going to fund rebuilding the highway on the edge of town or relocating all of the buildings currently on the highway? Oh, no one? Well, that might be a problem.
You're absolutely right except this isn't about interstates and is instead about highways and as such: See above.
This is like a very slightly more manageable version of the argument that keeps popping up about the current layout of cities in the US. It turns out "So just fix it!" falls apart once the funding becomes involved.
Except in this case instead of actual reasons for investing insane amounts of funding because it's going to fight climate change (which frankly I think is a legit goal but that's if we plan in the 50-100 year timeline which we absolutely don't) it's because asking people driving on a highway, not an interstate, but a highway to slow down for a couple of minutes is just a bridge too far for some reason and quite frankly that line of reasoning is flat out asinine.
I gave it a googling, and the results there are definitely not what it means in this context.
And it's very much about design. Trying to frame this as "drivers just don't wanna slow down" completely misses the actual dynamics at play. You aren't going to solve anything if you are trying to view this as a personal responsibility issue. People will drive on the road according to how it's designed and what it's use-case is. If the reason people are on your road is to get from A to C and the road is easily navigable at high speeds, they are going to want to drive at high speeds right through B so long as you make the road go through B.
"Goddamned Separate Thread". Originally from a mod heartfelt reaction to political threads going into tangents and growing 20 pages.
Goddamn separate thread. It's interesting and inspired by but not relevant to the police thread.
Does anyone know the town in question? I'm struggling to find it in the other thread.
There is one place I know of here where an 80km/h road (50 mph) runs through someones property. Like there's the house they live in to the left, and to the right there's like a fairly big tool shed or something, and the road goes right through the yard and the property has some fences around it. Super obvious the road just blasts through one family's yard. Now the house is visibly 1800's so obviously that used to be a horse and carriage road and then a small car road and now a major thoroughfare and the owners refused a buyout. I expect that this happens, but less extreme, all the time and you end up with things like a fast highway passing through a town fairly often.
Regardless of how it developed - of course the speed limit should be adjusted according to the situation at hand. The kids being run over by fast cars didn't build the town in the wrong place.
The issue is that adjusting the speed limit is not necessarily going to change driver behaviour.
So unless you break the limit you're not getting photographed (it's just used for the plates and to confirm driver identity). Your car might get caught in a photo of another persons car if you were next to it or something. You'd have to be incredibly principled for this to be a concern.
I'm all for redesigning those places so that the highway passes around town but it's gonna be time consuming and costly to do so even if the will had existed. So until then it makes sense to me to place speed cameras there, from what I can tell people tend to respect those in order to not get hefty fines.
My hours was built in 1880. In the 1970s, the roads on both sides at the ends of my short street were converted into 3-lane, one-way, 35mph roads. Being 3-lane, one-way, they have a real motorway feel to them and cars drive much faster. And even though there are cross striped crosswalks, cars don't stop at all for pedestrians. These roads were intended to make driving through the city core from one side to the other as fast as possible.
The part that gets me is when proponents of these roads blame the houses for having been built so close to a fast road. Dudes and dudettes, these houses had been there for a century before those roads went up. Some still have ornamental posts to tie up your horse by the curb!
That road is dead-straight for 4 miles, then curves slightly then is dead straight for another 6 miles with no road markings whatsoever. In the middle of a town with no crossing and no divider! It's insane to me that the planning reached this stage.
A possible comparison in the UK might be Ockley - Stane St (an old roman road) runs right through the middle, it's a 3 lane single carriageway. The local council wanted to slow the speed down from 40mph to 30mph. As part this there were road markings and audible road markings (dragons teeth make a noise when you drive over them iirc).
Obviously the speed changes and distances involved are lower, but there is plenty that could be done to cheaply to lower the speed drivers will actually drive at along this stretch.
Again, if a bypass is not possible or sensible then convert it to a boulevard. Encore's describes a perfect use case for that, actually. Especially since I'm sure those 3 lanes have wide AASHTO highway lanes rather than narrower NACTO lanes.
What's the cutting edge thinking on speed bumps?
Personal preference is for raised crosswalks along with chicanes at intersections to narrow the street at the point where pedestrian conflicts would likely arise.
It also improves sightlines by making it impossible for someone to park in the no parking zone approaching an intersection rather than just hoping they don't. To my mind, anywhere that cars are not supposed to be should be cut off with a curb and plantings/ expanded sidewalk.
You can also use a mid-block chicane and swap the side of the street the parking lane is on instead of using a raised roadbed (speed humps, speed bumps, speed tables) for traffic calming. Since it makes the street less of a straight line.
If there's a parking lane on both sides, and your neighbors would bomb your house for suggesting they stop having free surface parking, swap out parallel parking for angled parking on one side of the street changing which is which halfway to have the equivalent geometry and retain the parking spots. But you're still going to want a cement chicane (preferably with a sturdy looking tree) to mark where the driving lane shifts over. Because parked cars aren't always parked, and then it's just paint telling people to slow down. Which doesn't work.
There are a lot of Complete Streets guides and NACTO standards have been adopted by a lot of States or localities for street design that isn't intended to be high speed connectors. Both those images are from NACTO.
There are designs that work for emergency vehicles, and they are effective, but snowploughs can be a big issue. Other approaches are making the roads have serpentine curves, or putting in a choke (example here). It all depends on the situation.
Admittedly this is a multi-way boulevard rather than a one-way, but you get the idea and can fiddle with the dimensions for specifics. Central travel lane(s) for through traffic at speed. Local lane and parking lane for people who are going to stop mid-block and park to buy something. (Preferably with the parking lane on a sloped pavement acting as an extended sidewalk when not occupied by a car rather than curbed. Parking meters and bollards protecting the minimum width for the sidewalk.) Planted median(s) clearly and physically separating the two and acting as stopping areas for pedestrians trying to cross the boulevard at intersections who might struggle to make it in one go.
I saw a lot of these in Lisbon, they seemed effective.
When it comes to emergency vehicles you're talking about adding five seconds to response time. I wouldn't sweat it
Come Overwatch with meeeee
If the road is going through an established commercial district, like the century old buildings Encore refers to, then there is no way to expand it due to constrained geometry from the building facades. Aside from literally tearing them all down, at which point you can just do whatever. In that instance a bypass would likely be preferred if you can't safely fit through traffic in the pedestrian oriented environment. As for cost... dead pedestrians also cost money. Both in burial fees and forgone tax revenue.
Loss of parking is really a question of geometry, again. How much space is there and how do you prioritize it? Because odds are a lot of those individual lanes are probably closer to 15' widths rather than 10'-12' widths and converting that alone gives you two 5' wide planted medians while retaining 3 travel lanes, the parking lanes, and potentially having a couple feet for wider sidewalks. You can probably make the local Lanes 9' wide instead of 10'-12' too, which gives even more play for a bike lane or broader sidewalks. If the initial conditions are narrower then it may require moving on street parking to a neighboring side street or rear lot rather than the main ROW, but depending on block length that doesn't actually have much impact on distance from parked car to business for the folks who aren't just passing through.
Any more contemporary developments likely have off-street parking so you just need a mid-block curb cut to access the lot and can have out-lot buildings or make the strip mall place parking in the rear to maintain the street wall and pedestrian environment while maintaining parking and increasing overall commercial square footage (and tax revenue). Again, it's hard to say without specifics, but odds are the undifferentiated street space has a lot of wasted pavement that could be utilized to make it safer for pedestrians without impacting travel time.
40% of buildings are owner occupied, 60% rentals, if that helps paint a picture. Very diverse neighborhood. Students, families with children, subsidized rentals, retirees, and “supervised housing” (I’m sure there’s a more correct term) for people with disabilities all mixed in. We like it a lot.
(164 goes over 175 it isn't an intersection)
One of these allows you to use the state highway at 55, the other needs you to slow down to 35(hint its the one with 4 buildings in it). I had to crop the images, but just picture endless fields of corn around both of them. Another town in that area has multiple city parks literally along side the highway. But unlike in cities where there is no where to move shit to, there is nothing but space. It's literally a choice of bad design. If the concern is safety, maybe don't build the park 20 feet off the highway. Or zone the city off to one side, rather than have the entire town glued to either side of the highway like its the Vegas Strip.
And it's always rural areas with loads of spaces- No one goes "Downtown Austin is such a speed trap". It's not a geometry problem of trying to squeeze hundreds of buildings into any particular envelope. The envelope is effectively infinite. Most these towns should basically be rotated 90 degrees and boom problem solved. The worst of this shit was a state highway it was either in Iowa or northern Missouri I had to drive once, where at every town it basically kinked east or west. So you be driving north, cruising along, then you have to make a 90 degree turn, drive through town at 25, make another 90 degree turn and continue on your way north, and then repeat the maneuver in the next town. They took what would have been a functional grapes on vine type arraignment and went "what if we route the vine through all the grapes?"
It's a racket, and the towns enjoy the benefit of all that ticket money, more than they give two shits about safety, because even a basic amount of zoning would solve the safety problem. And the town may be their homes, but the highway is the state's road. The state being able to say "No the speed limit is 55" is the only thing that can break the perverse incentive structure of poor zoning being a massive revenue source.