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Cicero posted:A bunch of states have banned hand-held (i.e. you can still use them for GPS or Pandora) cell phone use while driving though? Not here in Tejas. It seems that everyone thinks that their car will not start if they are not talking to on their freakin cell phone. I cant count how many times that I was almost run over or off the road while I was riding my bike. Its gotten to the point to where I carry a pistol under my jacket just in case.
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Aug 26, 2015 02:35
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Chemmy posted:Being able to read a book in the car means people will accept longer commutes which likely increases sprawl. Boss wants you to work in the car? F no! They give you a gaddam laptop so you can work at home when youre not busting As at the office.
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Aug 26, 2015 02:46
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Cicero posted:I don't understand the point of bad posts like this. Like, obviously it has "picking up people along the way" in common with airport shuttles, but it also has the potential to become vastly more widespread than the narrow use case of airport shuttles, to the point it could be a serious competitor to conventional public transit (and public transit agencies could adopt a similar model to accommodate radical but temporary changes in ridership behavior, like major events). What's the point of intentionally missing the point? Are you just trying to let everyone know that you're really obtuse? When you have a massive user base like Uber, you have a massive ability to do sorts of traveling-salesman trips for people who have some time-insensitivity and don't mind sharing a car. This is exactly the model of airport vans. I initially thought Uber was doing shared-ride airport van service, and I thought it was cool. After I posted, I realized they weren't. But I think they should, hence my edit. Kindly gently caress off about us not fully respecting your Uber advocacy discussion in a tangentially related thread. And post some loving Diverging Diamond Interchanges. 
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Aug 26, 2015 02:47
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Baronjutter posted:I know in large amounts of the US it's normal for cars to not stop at crosswalks even if someone is standing there trying to cross, you often have to wait upwards of a dozen cars until someone finally obeys the law and stops for you. Actually, in my experience, drivers stop even when they have right of way. A small highway cuts through town, so technically they shouldn't stop, but very often they do.
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Aug 26, 2015 04:30
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Baronjutter posted:My main tinfoil hat worry with self driving cars is that BECAUSE they follow the rules perfectly and actually stop everywhere they should (including "jay walkers") drivers, who are a powerful lobby and tend to get what ever they want (at leas historically) will throw a fit and we'll see crosswalks taken away and jay-walking fines/enforcement get even more draconian. That and so many people hand-wave away the problems of sprawl and auto-centric living with "oh don't worry self-driving electric cars are coming". I don't want self-driving cars to usher in a new 1950's where walking is marginalized and criminalized even further. In a perfect world, perfect self-driving cars means that we could make streets narrower. Since nobody is speeding, there's no reason for a residential street with a speed limit of 25 mph to be designed to deal with cars traveling twice as fast.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:16
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ChipNDip posted:In a perfect world, perfect self-driving cars means that we could make streets narrower. Since nobody is speeding, there's no reason for a residential street with a speed limit of 25 mph to be designed to deal with cars traveling twice as fast. Also by the time self-driving cars are 100% of the fleet it will all be flying cars anyways so pedestrian/car interaction won't be an issue.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:20
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Devor posted:When you have a massive user base like Uber, you have a massive ability to do sorts of traveling-salesman trips for people who have some time-insensitivity and don't mind sharing a car. This is exactly the model of airport vans. I initially thought Uber was doing shared-ride airport van service, and I thought it was cool. https://www.google.com/maps/@44.8619686,-93.2229066,1108a,20y,90h/data=!3m1!1e3
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Aug 26, 2015 19:24
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This whole discussion is frustrating and baffling to me until I get to comments like theseCicero posted:edit: also I don't think "jaywalkers just randomly walking into the street without looking whenever they want" will be a big problem Eskaton posted:Actually, in my experience, drivers stop even when they have right of way. A small highway cuts through town, so technically they shouldn't stop, but very often they do. Here's an Average Daily Traffic map of downtown Stamford.  Here's the area on Google Maps https://goo.gl/maps/v9bSs Here's the intersection near the university on street view. https://goo.gl/maps/Fo3mO A couple of points here -Foot traffic across Washington Blvd is constant throuhgout the day. You have to press the walk button to get a walk signal, and you'll get it when the left turn phase is over. Almost nobody bothers to wait, so you end up with pedestrians blocking people trying to turn left, who then block traffic going straight for at least 30 seconds into the all green cycle. -The fence you see to the right was built because people would walk across the street from the garage instead of going to a crosswalk and several people a year were seriously injured in accidents (a few pedestrians a year are still hit in the crosswalk.) -Pedestrians are not the only problem. People run red lights all the time, make right turns on red illegally (they've recently started installing No Turn On Red signs with strobe lights and white strobe bars across the red light bulbs,) and I've lost count of how many times I've seen people make left turns from the far right lane. Until recently, city buses would not stop for pedestrians with a walk signal. Head down Washington Boulevard and you'll see there's a barrier built down the middle with fenceposts and chains https://goo.gl/maps/jxbJ6 This was built in the past 10 years or so after several fatal accidents involving jaywalking pedestrians and a bunch of non-fatal accidents. The city has recently started putting up signs warning of fines for jaywalking because people run across anyway. So yeah, I have no idea what you're are talking about with pedestrians being considerate. Baronjutter posted:If it got to the point where peoples commute times went up enough I'm sure we'd here arguments about eliminating some crosswalks or putting them on a timer because "why should a couple pedestrians hold up hundreds of commuters??
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Aug 26, 2015 20:32
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ChipNDip posted:In a perfect world, perfect self-driving cars means that we could make streets narrower. Since nobody is speeding, there's no reason for a residential street with a speed limit of 25 mph to be designed to deal with cars traveling twice as fast. Uh, typical residential roads are wide so that you can park on the sides, not to go fast.
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Aug 26, 2015 20:33
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Nintendo Kid posted:Uh, typical residential roads are wide so that you can park on the sides, not to go fast. Then why are they still built that wide in areas where overnight street parking is banned, and/or when all the houses have 2-3 car garages and big driveways as well? It's because engineers adopted the idea of "forgiving highways" to give a margin of safety for bad drivers with wide lanes, big shoulders etc. This works fine on a limited access road, but it's a disaster on an urban street. When you design the road to be idiot-proof, people stop paying attention and start driving like idiots.
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Aug 26, 2015 20:45
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GWBBQ posted:This whole discussion is frustrating and baffling to me until I get to comments like these I'd say the pedestrians are probably just fine, it's the fact that you've got an six-lane thru-highway snaking its way through a metropolitan downtown, splitting a university and a larger commercial/institutional in half, that is the problem. It's too late to change it, but Highway 137 looks like it was supposed to have been connecting up with Highway 106, which would have evened out the interstate traffic rather than loading it all onto one street. It looks like residential development forced the planners to change their minds though, since that area just got turned into cul-de-sacs. Also, Washington Blvd seems built entirely with thru-traffic in mind, without a thought to enabling alternative modes of transportation. I mean if you're a pedestrian it looks like you need to travel the length of three football fields in order to get from one signalized crossing to another. Of course people don't want to do that. They need to put in more pedestrian crossings, and add signals to the ones that exist along that boulevard. Kaal fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Aug 26, 2015 |
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Aug 26, 2015 21:00
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ChipNDip posted:Then why are they still built that wide in areas where overnight street parking is banned, Because people park there during the day quote:and/or when all the houses have 2-3 car garages and big driveways as well? Because people have parties, and rich people want nice big streets quote:It's because engineers adopted the idea of "forgiving highways" to give a margin of safety for bad drivers with wide lanes, big shoulders etc. This works fine on a limited access road, but it's a disaster on an urban street. When you design the road to be idiot-proof, people stop paying attention and start driving like idiots. Not sure what example you're raging against, but standards are acknowledging narrower lanes in appropriate areas. But you're never going to see 20 feet of pavement for a 2-lane road in a medium density single family house suburban development because that's not what the developer can sell.
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Aug 26, 2015 21:15
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Enough about self-driving cars. Here's a continuous flow intersection that got built a few years ago: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.2747724,-111.7132404,411m/data=!3m1!1e3 Before it was built, people swore up and down that it was going to be the biggest mess with constant car wrecks and terrible gridlock. The only wrecks I've ever seen are small fender benders in the turn lanes from people not braking. I also typically get through the intersection much more quickly than I did under the old decision, which was a traditional intersection. But man, when you look at it from above, it does look like a mess.
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Aug 26, 2015 22:25
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ChipNDip posted:Then why are they still built that wide in areas where overnight street parking is banned, and/or when all the houses have 2-3 car garages and big driveways as well? Because the overnight street parking is rarely actually banned for everyone. It also usually wasn't banned when the road was built. Having a big garage or driveway doesn't mean you won't have people over, or won't have say 4 teenagers at home each with their own cars plus the parents' cars. Let alone the fact that TONS of people use their garage as an extra room/workshop/storage and thus it might as well be a 0 car garage. No, it's not. It's really all about parking being available. Heck I can just look at the development where I grew up, it's almost 4 lanes across but not striped at all, and most of the week there'll be enough cars parked on the side of the roads that the road is effectively 2 lanes. The only time you see the streets bare is when a major winter storm's coming in and the township will fine you if your car(s) are still parked on the roadside when the plows come through. Most of the people don't bother to park in the garage, and they'll only put two cars on the driveways in normal times because otherwise you gotta shuffle cars around to get some of them out.
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Aug 26, 2015 22:38
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It's pretty easy to have narrow roads and on-street parking. Just have every 10th parking spot or what ever be a flower bed or planter or something that narrows the lane, and/or put little islands at crosswalks.
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Aug 26, 2015 22:40
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Baronjutter posted:It's pretty easy to have narrow roads and on-street parking. Just have every 10th parking spot or what ever be a flower bed or planter or something that narrows the lane, and/or put little islands at crosswalks. But this is absolutely pointless. The parked cars are themselves a narrowing of the road. There's no point to putting a lovely planter in there.
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Aug 26, 2015 22:51
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No it's not. The cars aren't reliably placed anywhere in particular, and they somehow manage to be less effective at reducing lane width and perceived speed while still hiding children and pets that can move onto the road unpredictably. Planter beds and the like are basic traffic calming and demonstrably useful. The new residential trend in NZ for the last 5 years or so is toward relatively straight, narrow roads with parking bays and it's a bloody good approach compared to the traditional dead worm style subdivision.
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Aug 26, 2015 23:51
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Jaguars! posted:No it's not. The cars aren't reliably placed anywhere in particular, and they somehow manage to be less effective at reducing lane width and perceived speed while still hiding children and pets that can move onto the road unpredictably. Planter beds and the like are basic traffic calming and demonstrably useful. The fact that cars aren't placed anywhere in particular at any given time is why it's effective enough at getting people to slow down who are going to be slowed down to begin with. Frankly its usually only one guy in the neighborhood who's going to speed really fast going through there anyway, so having the cops sit out there to pull him over one day is good way to get that dick to slow down in the future.
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Aug 26, 2015 23:58
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I don't think any of that is even remotely true. Roads lined with cars are just part of the scenery unless the lanes are made uncomfortably narrow, People speed on any wide residential road that leads through or to another part of the development, and the cops don't target individual speeders unless they get whole communities up in arms. (hint: this never happens.)
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Aug 27, 2015 00:21
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Jaguars! posted:I don't think any of that is even remotely true. Roads lined with cars are just part of the scenery unless the lanes are made uncomfortably narrow, People speed on any wide residential road that leads through or to another part of the development, and the cops don't target individual speeders unless they get whole communities up in arms. (hint: this never happens.) In your average American subdivision, the road is 3 or 4 physical lanes wide, but with no striping and cars parked on the side frequently enough that it'll be either effectively one or two lanes wide throughout. Also suburban cops don't exactly have pressing duties so you can just call them out to wait through the morning or evening if there's actually someone who really is speeding on a regular basis. Of course, often enough the people that call out the cops get owned because when the cop clocks the supposed speeder going through the subdivision, they were actually doing like 26 in 25 at most, because the idea of people speeding "all the time" tends to be bogus.
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Aug 27, 2015 00:31
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Parking bays are great and a lot more efficient than planting a cop on every street to look for speeders.
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Aug 27, 2015 00:41
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Kaal posted:Parking bays are great and a lot more efficient than planting a cop on every street to look for speeders. Cops aren't doing anything else in a normal town, and the speeders usually don't actually exist in the first place. Hell in my hometown they just rolled out their solar-powered radar detector speed trailers on random streets throughout the town on a rotating basis as a deterrent. Putting parking bays on a typical residential street in the suburbs is pointless.
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Aug 27, 2015 00:46
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Kaal posted:Parking bays are great and a lot more efficient than planting a cop on every street to look for speeders. Cops definitely have better things to do, even in small towns. Many cops prefer the night shift because the day shift is full of calls. Ask in one of the cop threads if you doubt. And funding a program of speed detectors hardly indicates that the speeders you mention don't exist. (I tend to agree with you that speeders are not necessarily the menace to society that they are sometimes made out to be.) Retrofitting parking bays over seal usually has a worse cost-benefit over doing nothing, but in any new development, they're great, for a slight reduction in parking capacity (which is usually covered by bylaws requiring offstreet parking), they calm traffic, cost the developer less and allow more greenery to create a more pleasant environment.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:04
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Jaguars! posted:And funding a program of speed detectors hardly indicates that the speeders you mention don't exist. (I tend to agree with you that speeders are not necessarily the menace to society that they are sometimes made out to be.) They got them from some grant in the 90s, they were originally intended to be posted around construction sites to remind people to slow down, but since they aren't needed for that purpose most of the time they instead just tow them between developments. They look like this model, only the sign on top has the ability to change the designated speed numbers:  When I was a kid, we'd look for one of them on a nearby street so we could see who could run or ride their bike the fastest, they'd turn on the indicator at 8 mph detected so it worked pretty well.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:20
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GWBBQ posted:
To be fair, here in the tri-state, pedestrians are really aggressive. The same sort of thing happens over here in Bridgeport all the time. But when I've been in Europe or in other cities in the US (e.g. Seattle) the pedestrians follow the signals very closely. At least in my experience.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:58
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Nintendo Kid posted:Cops aren't doing anything else in a normal town Then fire them and save taxpayers some money. quote:Putting parking bays on a typical residential street in the suburbs is pointless. Except saving your municipality massive amounts of money in unnecessary law enforcement as well as increasing public safety and improving the quality of the local neighborhood environment. This conversation is dumb. Parking bays are great, and in the real world they're typically compared against speed bumps not loltastic ideas like putting a speed trap on every corner.
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Aug 27, 2015 02:33
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Kaal posted:Then fire them and save taxpayers some money. Taxpayers are the ones demanding big police departments for sleepy towns. The fact is that speeders in the residential streets are a very rare thing to begin with, so parking bays aren't accomplishing anything, for the made up problem. If someone is truly speeding on the other hand, calling out the cops to stake out the neighborhood for a day is more effective to get him to stop doing it.. You don't seem to be thinking enough to understand that the cops don't actually need to be out there every day, there's only a few dozen-few hundred people who'll ever be using that street on frequent basis and maybe one or two guys who actually speed. They're easy to nail and then they stop being a problem. Maybe eveentually they think they can risk it again so Mrs. Thwaitwhistle can call Officer Bob out to the street again, big deal. You also don't seem to get that just having the parking bays isn't going to stop someone who's really speeding, they're not doing it because of some inherent compulsion in the unadorned road - else most of the people who use the street would be doing it, after all.
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Aug 27, 2015 02:41
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Devor posted:
Okay. The construction company building this DDI posted a visualization of the final conditions. It isn't a good simulation because some of the cars make illegal movements but I don't think that was there goal. Overall it looks really nice. The guide signs are missing some colors, the Right Only should be filled in with yellow and the TOLL boxes need to be Hulk pants purple but oh well. Does anyone recognize the software used to render this? It looks like an upgraded version of VISSIM but I am not sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF-IU-1lDzU Nintendo Kid posted:But this is absolutely pointless. The parked cars are themselves a narrowing of the road. There's no point to putting a lovely planter in there. Planters or bulb outs are pretty cool in front of fire hydrants, next to intersections where parked cars can block sight lines, and other places where people shouldn't park.
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Aug 27, 2015 03:38
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It must be a local term, but what the hell is a parking bay? I've never heard of one.
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Aug 27, 2015 13:16
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I live in NYC and they're doing some crazy loud work on my street, do y'all know if there's like a central database for MTA projects at all? Some sort of public-interest announcement function with even some spare details on what exactly they're doing? Is this something that cities do for more mundane transit projects? I'm mainly just curious. They've painted two two-foot wide channels down the street basically trisecting it and are in the process of cutting them out of the pavement with those big ol' fuckoff water cooled concrete saws. I'm guessing it's infrastructure (like water, steam or gas pipe) maintenance but yeah. lovely fire escape picture: you can see the two channels painted out at the bottom 
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Aug 27, 2015 15:17
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https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/stop-transportation-victim-blaming-and-design-our-roads-for-the-results-we-want/ Good article on victim blaming in the world of transport and how ultimately it comes down to bad car and speed-centric engineering.
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Aug 27, 2015 15:53
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Baronjutter posted:https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/stop-transportation-victim-blaming-and-design-our-roads-for-the-results-we-want/ That makes valid points about traffic calming and building the infrastructure itself to enforce the speeds you want to see, but the author throws away a lot of their credibility by acting like the mother in their example case was 100% without fault. They get up on a high horse about victim blaming without acknowledging that sometimes it really is partially the victim's fault. Quoting the linked article about that example case: quote:"The officers determined that A.J. was killed because his mother walked with him into the roadway under unsafe conditions," the filing said. "Another driver could have just as easily been the one that hit A.J. In fact, there is evidence that another driver did almost hit the group after the collision." Sounds to me like the police agree that what she did was dumb as hell and though in this case the driver may have been impaired a non-impaired driver would have been just as likely to hit them. To take the stupid cars vs. pedestrians war bullshit out of the equation, think of it as if this woman was in her car at a two-way stop wanting to continue straight across. The guy who hit her is on the main road with full right-of-way. She pulls out in front of him and gets partially past, but she didn't go fast enough and he hits her rear passenger door, killing her kid in the back seat. It's pretty much the same scenario as described in the news article, just the victim family is in a car now. Who's at fault? Her of course. Why should it be any different if she's on foot? The only difference that would make sense with pedestrians is if there were other adults involved, who would be her responsibility in the car but could be considered to be responsible for their own safety while on foot.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:08
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Kaal posted:I'd say the pedestrians are probably just fine, it's the fact that you've got an six-lane thru-highway snaking its way through a metropolitan downtown, splitting a university and a larger commercial/institutional in half, that is the problem. It's too late to change it, but Highway 137 looks like it was supposed to have been connecting up with Highway 106, which would have evened out the interstate traffic rather than loading it all onto one street. It looks like residential development forced the planners to change their minds though, since that area just got turned into cul-de-sacs. Also, Washington Blvd seems built entirely with thru-traffic in mind, without a thought to enabling alternative modes of transportation. I mean if you're a pedestrian it looks like you need to travel the length of three football fields in order to get from one signalized crossing to another. Of course people don't want to do that. They need to put in more pedestrian crossings, and add signals to the ones that exist along that boulevard. It also doesn't help that it's been 15-20 years since city-wide signal coordination was done. Nintendo Kid posted:You also don't seem to get that just having the parking bays isn't going to stop someone who's really speeding, they're not doing it because of some inherent compulsion in the unadorned road - else most of the people who use the street would be doing it, after all.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:09
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Baronjutter posted:https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/stop-transportation-victim-blaming-and-design-our-roads-for-the-results-we-want/ http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/27908/hey-look-that-flawed-texas-am-traffic-study-is-back-and-grabbing-the-usual-headlines/
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Aug 27, 2015 17:21
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Jaguars! posted:Many cops prefer the night shift because the day shift is full of calls. Cops don't prefer nights because days are full of calls; they prefer nights because days are full of report calls. All day people are discovering things that happened the night before, like burglarized businesses, vandalized cars, etc. and an officer can get tied up for a long time on just a single report call. Night shift has far fewer of these reports and a higher percentage of in-progress/just-occurred criminal calls, hence why we used to call it "crime-watch". You get plenty of action during the day, but enough reports to choke a mule, and no one wants to be the guy stuck at an apartment building taking nine vandalism reports about broken car windows while the rest of the shift is chasing a bank robbery suspect.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:34
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GWBBQ posted:
But most people don't, in fact barely anyone does. Especially, again, when there's cars parked along most of the road so it isn't very wide for any significant stretch.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:40
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Nintendo Kid posted:But most people don't, in fact barely anyone does. Especially, again, when there's cars parked along most of the road so it isn't very wide for any significant stretch. Fishmech, could you please go and read some of the literature on the relationship between road width and speed, as well as the literature on curb bulb-outs before you continue? I'm not going to do this for you, but my recollection is that the anecdotes you've been repeating ad nauseam do not match with the published research.
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Aug 27, 2015 18:27
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Fishmech, could you please go and read some of the literature on the relationship between road width and speed, as well as the literature on curb bulb-outs before you continue? I'm not going to do this for you, but my recollection is that the anecdotes you've been repeating ad nauseam do not match with the published research. The assertion that there's an epidemic of people speeding on suburb neighborhood roads is absolutely baseless.
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Aug 27, 2015 18:48
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Maybe pizza delivery folks are over-represented in the sampling.
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Aug 27, 2015 19:05
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kefkafloyd posted:It must be a local term, but what the hell is a parking bay? I've never heard of one. This is an example of a parking bay.
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Aug 27, 2015 20:47
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