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A GST On The Design Of Our Roads
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Population ~25k. Those are two State Route highways bisecting it after splitting into two one-ways to provide 3 travel lanes in each direction. One of which is literally on Main Street. Here is the intersection where IL-13 and IL-51 meet:
Notice the gantry with interstate level MUTCD signage just a little bit past the Thai restaurant? That is fucked up. No amount of signage is going to get drivers to not treat this as the highway it is clearly designed as. Not can you expand the streetscape without tearing down that row of 2-flats and old church. Not much further down is the hospital. Which, again, constrains just adding another lane or widening the sidewalk outward.
Now, the E-W route is actually pretty well setup for a bypass along the Northern edge of town, and you could have Main Street be converted back to a Main Street. Sign it a Business Loop and folks who want to grab some Thai food can get there in no time while everyone passing on to Murphysborough will just go around and not kill anybody. The N-S route, however, doesn't really have that luxury without creating a full on ring road. Which is unreasonable, considering traffic volumes.
However, it's still running through the downtown of a college town with ~25k people living there, and a bit of night life where you could have drunk college kids wandering into traffic. That lane setup? Telling people to mind their manners and drive at 30mph just won't happen, and it didn't happen when I attended. People went 45-50mph easy. The only thing slowing them down were red lights. It needs to be converted to a boulevard style inorder to create (there's nothing to preserve) a pedestrian environment while maintaining throughput of a major connector for Southern Illinois. Just yelling at people and putting up speed cams won't do anything for public safety, but road diets and plantings to force people to slow down for the stretch of city street between farm field roads would. It would also make the area a nicer place to live and spend time in for residents. Which helps businesses a lot more than keeping it a stroad highway but signing it 30mph.
Here is a maps view. I've circled the future roundabouts.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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The issue with speed bumps and emergency vehicles isn't so much that they have to slow down; it's that if they don't, the speed bumps cause damage to the vehicles and injury to the people inside. (I'm assuming you're actually talking about speed humps, not speed bumps. The latter, it turns out, encourage speeding because vehicle shocks easily handle the bump at speed. The former are wider and dangerous to cross at speed, which is what makes them effective.)
I tell you though, waiting at stop lights to cross to get to the Dairy Queen or the Burger King (with its own gas station) was a daily thing there and seeing as how it’s right on TWO major highways, the rescue squad and fire departments see a lot of action, sadly. I know, I volunteered for the rescue squad while I went to high school... so did a number if my friends and their family members. We spent a number of nights doing Roleplaying Games, dice rolling into the night, staying up all night for when calls would come in.
That town I think barely has enough money to pay their ‘police force’, if that. The county gets the taxes around there and the small town gets whatever is shared to it. There’sa reason why you need to slow down while going through there and why they take it seriously when you don’t - I was one of those reasons... and I also put time in to help those in my community. In a town where they can’t even pay for firefighters or EMTs, you better believe they can’t afford this fancy road bullshit you’re talking about. It’s all well and good to talk about what people should and could do regarding roads so people don’t have to slow down, but kids have no choice where they live, no control over how taxes get spent or how roads get built or how they need to get home after school. They rely upon people actually following the speed limits, especially when town planners decide to not make more crosswalks.
Anyhow, at least from the perspective of someone who actually lived there, just because it’s a straight road and it’s a Major high way, it doesn’t matter what you think the speed limits should be, they are what they are and there’s other ways to get where you’re going if you don’t like it. It isn't a speed trap and really the only reason there are so many tickets given out is because people don’t fucking listen. With as many crashes as occur on those roads it really should be slower... meant Of you have not seen what happens when a semi plows into a car at 70 or above, or gone to school With someone that fell asleep at the wheel for a moment and drove right under one of those semis, or have to deal with a friend that had to talk to said parents of said kid because he was the one to arrive at the crash site. Like someone said earlier, it’s people’s lives, actual people live there, people like me and like others here really. Lots of poor people that really can’t even move out but also likely enjoy the relative quiet out there.
I had a point to this, but generally I just wanted to put a bit of a face to the location there started this and, though I haven’t lived there in 15 years, maybe Answer some questions or provide some insight, if needed, on how things are there.
The overall idea is fairly simple. While it is possible to drive almost anywhere, it is made tedious, time consuming and expensive to park. More of the road is given to slower traffic. Sidewalks are growing larger, and my own city now has streets where it is made explicit that the bicycles set the pace, and do not have to give way to cars.
Now one caveat is that Dutch cities are not that large, which allows this slow traffic model.
That same channel also has some quite negative things to say about North American suburb and inner city design and zoning, and the problem is that the there is now 70 years of very car centric design to reverse. The Netherlands sort of halted it in the mid 70s, and really turned in the 90s.
A big part of the Dutch implementation, as I understand it, is to a much as possible take the decisions of pedestrians and drivers out of the equation.
You assume people will behave poorly, and design around that.
Austin has taken a half assed swing at implementing the same with their Vision Zero plan, attempting to redesign streets and sidewalk for zero pedestrian fatalities. However, significant part of the Austin plan is an attempt to change pedestrian and driver behavior through things like signage and signals, rather than changing traffic patterns and road design. Mostly missing the point.
It seems a little optimistic in it's stated goal, as in my view is pretty much any attempt to improve road safety that is centered around changing people's behavior through only road markings, signs and enforcement.
If it's a State jurisdiction road, the State is the one responsible for design, construction, and maintenance costs. Converting to a boulevard style would not be on the local taxpayers, except inasmuch as they also pay State taxes like everyone else.
It is also the responsibility of the town's municipal government for how it approved zoning and land use around those highways to concentrate businesses there rather than being orthogonal to them and accessible to the major roadways without being oriented around them. Which they likely still have not changed. Same with putting the middle school where they did. There is plenty of land next door to the high school or other apparently open lots that are much more oriented around the residential areas rather than being on the outskirts of town along a major State road. Those are bad decisions that make the town more car oriented, and more prone to collisions and deaths than if they had made other decisions. Which they should do.
*Edit*
Looking at census data, the town population doubled from 1990-2010. So all of those mistakes are relatively new decisions rather than borne from a slow accretion of inertia over the course of a century.
If the majority of what the road is actually for is just driving through to get somewhere else, you need to understand that as a major purpose of the road itself and how it will be used and how that will influence people's reactions to changes you make.
Instead you adjust the road itself. Narrower and curved roads make people slow. A raised intersection will force people down to about 20kph, which you can tune by how steep you make it. Same with a roundabout, those throttle and are excellent in a certain traffic range. Roundabouts are also quite good at incorporating foot and bicycle traffic.
All these "nuisances" also make people stay on main roads better. Removing shortcuts means less traffic near houses.
Once you get good enough at it, many traffic lights can also disappear. Or for instance, turn them off at night (actually they blink the orange light, so people don't report them as broken...). Below certain treshholds traffic will selfregulate.
It also looks nicer, especially combined with increasing regulation on commercial signs / billboards.
Yes to speed humps and I've had to drive said emergency vehicles under emergency conditions, they're not a major consideration
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Once I was in Washington DC and walking to a game store from the nearest metro station. Crossing these gigantic roads at lights that took forever, it felt like I was walking alongside a motorway except there were shops and regular intersections all over the place. It was unpleasant.
Erm. How so? My experience as a pedestrian trying to cross a busy roundabout is that it's impossible because traffic never stops. The only viable option is to walk a block to the nearest traffic light.
edit: old draft
The big ones around here have signal buttons that when pressed light up the pedestrian signs right next to the cross walks and the drivers stop while pedestrians/cyclists cross.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
This is just further expansion of the "superblock" system they pioneered.
Good. Speed itself kills.
One of the comments thrown around about the maintenance of a road I have heard since high school was it costs a million a mile. I did not believe it then even less so now.
I will make fun of the questionable fact recently the city had a vote to "borrow" money from the property tax with the intent to pay it back in 2025 to repave one of the main streets on this side of town
They did last year. But they are back repaving a intersection on that road causing a long line of cars over 3 blocks long often blocking and hanging out in other intersections along that road
But back to maintenance the roads around my neighborhood and the area in general are falling apart there are huge chunks or large cracks {some of the cracks if not filled with plants or grass would trap a car with ease}
With little effort to do any maintenance. The bike path where it is paved and not cement slabs has the same problem but last month they came along and made a series of cuts along the cracks doing nothing more
Jesus christ. I'm glad they found it in time to shut the bridge down, at least. (Memories of I-35 here)
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That call is up on Twitter and there are exactly zero spaces between any of his words
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I have a friend who's a civil engineer, and his timeline was:
1-2 months to do as thorough an inspection with drones as they can, then doing a whole lot of math multiple times to determine whether or not it's safe to put crews on it
If so, another two months or so to inspect every bolt, rivet, and spar to determine the exact state of the bridge, if not ????
3ish months to write a fix plan and have it approved
??? To bid out the contract
Probably 1-2 years in construction time
Absolute bare minimum 18 months if there's no other damage and the feds throw money at it and they only have to repair the single busted truss
I-35W was replaced in 14 months from the collapse. The question is basically if this will get the same expedited treatment. Looking at a map it's less of an essential route, Memphis is basically all on the one side of the river rather, than being split down the middle like the twin cities, but there is only really one other crossing and shifting traffic to I-55 will be annoying to a lot of people on the boulevard that will get all that diverted traffic.
Their highway setup is both kind of great and horrible in equal measure.
35W was a total loss though, so it was just
1) Clear old bridge stuff
2) Build new bridge
And of course you can do the planning/bidding while the cleanup is going on.
I think that the bridge didn't collapse actually makes it more complicated to resolve the issue.
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Westbound though it forces all the trucks to take the south loop, which, not ideal
The truss is sheared through completely. I can't imagine it's the only issue, either. It's a total loss, it just isn't sinking into the river currently.
It seems like the decision tree is:
If you have a main highway going through a town:
1. Zone residential and commercial properties on feeder roads and keep the main road clear for traffic.
If you can’t do that for political or historical reasons then:
2. Build bypass roads and alternative traffic patterns
If you can’t do that for funding or space reasons then
3. Implement road control measures like boulevard design, lane narrowing, raised intersections, etc to discourage drivers from speeding
If you don’t have the funding or political will for whatever reason to do that then:
4. Slap on a speed limit sign and call it a day, collect speeding fines.
It seems like the ultimate point is “towns with highways running through have speeding problems but neither local or state authorities want to spend money or really give a shit”. In which case yeah you’re going to continue to have problems.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/parking-drives-housing-prices/618910/
Gets better from there
The article mentions Buffalo and Minneapolis have already removed minimum parking requirements and Cali (!) might be on the verge of doing it statewide- I would love to see this in Columbus, as open-air lots have ruined our urban core...I’ve been talking about this with people for years and couldn’t articulate (until now) why we designed our city this way...
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Slate had a related piece talking about the reluctance of planners to remove parking minimums. Short version - they know that minimums are gooseshit, which makes them a bargaining chip for getting concessions from builders.
Even cities with okay public transportation have shitty public transportation to residential areas in most of the country. There's a lot of perverse incentive to concede half of the available physical space in a city to cars. I know there are island communities in places that have a ban on full size vehicles including most compact cars, I sometimes wonder what living in a place like that would feel like.
The problems are multifaceted and intersectional, especially with the most extremely local politics possible. Wanting to have a say and control over what other people build is a thing that cuts across political identity and philosophy. Because it's in my backyard. Creating by-right zoning should be a uniformly celebrated idea.
You can put the requirements you want in the code, so it's not like it's a free for all build anything anywhere. It let's developers construct new buildings more quickly and with easier planning logistics, it can have various affordability requirements tacked on as a universal so that you don't even have to rely on filtering for affordable housing, it removes the chance for graft in order to get variances and expedited discretionary review, it removes the need for local reps to respond to NIMBYs because they have a right to build so long as it meets the requirements, &c. It solves a lot of problems that are the stated concerns of most groups. But everybody hates it.