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Yeah but yelling about how wrong it is makes about as much sense as arguing with the weather, it's a fact that it's going to happen so we need to design our poo poo accordingly
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Jun 4, 2019 07:20
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Cugel the Clever posted:Anyway, that brought me to this thread. I'd be curious where urban planners and urban planning aficionados fall on this in 2019. If the OP from 2009 is anything to go by, the answer might still be gently caress those slowpoke grandmas. The OP hasn't posted in three years, but appears to have some cognitive dissonance going on in which they recognize the significant harms of American car dependency and suburbia, yet prioritizes fast-flowing automobile traffic over all else. At least in my layman's understanding of current attitudes in the field, it's increasingly the consensus that doing this creates a feedback loop: prioritizing car traffic makes getting around on foot or bike more dangerous, resulting in fewer cyclists and pedestrians and more drivers on the road, further locking in place our extremely low density land use and putting parking lots everywhere. i think you're misunderstanding "fast flowing" as optimizing for speed, throughput is an ideal metric to optimize but that's not achieved by making fast number go up. you want to reduce the number of times people have to hit their brakes. fast flowing is not everyone going as fast as they can, it is everyone traveling at a costant, reasonable speed appropriate for the role the roadway plays in the overall transportation network also i don't want to speak for the OP but i think you have a specific misunderstanding here quote:appears to have some cognitive dissonance going on in which they recognize the significant harms of American car dependency and suburbia, yet prioritizes fast-flowing automobile traffic over all else. At least in my layman's understanding of current attitudes in the field where the bolded section is about urban planning in general and land use/transportation interactions, where the italic section is about civil engineering and roadway design, which is a subset of that planning. OP is a traffic engineer, not an urban planner, and thus would have a focus specifically on how roads are designed and not why roads are where they are or connect different parts of the city together. from the traffic engineer's standpoint, it doesn't matter why the road is there, a road has been requested and it is then the engineer's job to design that roadway e: i looked up the actual text of the bill and it's pretty vague and unenforceable, seems like standard dumb state politics at work where some backwoods state legislator ends up passing "common sense" regulation that actually does nothing but at least everyone can agree a Problem has been Solved, Somehow Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 20:56
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Javid posted:Yeah but yelling about how wrong it is makes about as much sense as arguing with the weather, it's a fact that it's going to happen so we need to design our poo poo accordingly I completely agree with you. I just find it weird when people think "oh but I'm one of the good ones, and the speed limit is probably set low because of olds, so it is an unambiguous good to drive faster" and then broadcast it publicly.
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Jun 4, 2019 21:34
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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If >15% of cars are speeding, the limit is in fact objectively wrong, though.
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Jun 4, 2019 21:49
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Javid posted:If >15% of cars are speeding, the limit is in fact objectively wrong, though. Exactly. This is the thing way too many people can't seem to get through their heads. If you have a road where a significant percentage of traffic is exceeding the speed limit, the speed limit is wrong for the road. If there is a legitimate reason to reduce speeds in the area the correct response is to modify the road and its surroundings with various traffic calming measures. If not, the speed limit should be raised. Either way, the two need to be brought together. If the speed limit is too low for the road then most drivers will not respect it and those that do will function as obstructions.
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Jun 4, 2019 22:26
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You guys keep saying that as if drivers are rational entities who will drive safely. IDK what it's like in europe but that is decidedly not the loving case in the us.
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Jun 4, 2019 23:57
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To be honest, I don't really buy the argument that the speed limit should be set at the speed drivers will drive at naturally. I mean it's a good idea to design roads so people will drive at the appropriate speed, but if enforcement was fast and reliable, drivers would slow down anyway. That's why motorists rebel at speed traps and red light cameras: they dent the culture of impunity around reckless driving. The problem I can't see a way around is that if enforcement isn't fast and reliable, you wind up in a position where driving 70 in a 65 is only illegal for black people.
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Jun 5, 2019 00:19
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Javid posted:If >15% of cars are speeding, the limit is in fact objectively wrong, though. there's no way the number can be objectively wrong because it is a measure derived from observed conditions on that roadway or similar roadways. it's like saying the average height of 5'10" or whatever is objectively wrong because people who are 6'4" exist. whether or not there is some deviance from that benchmark doesn't matter considering what the number was set at when it was last observed http://www.mikeontraffic.com/85th-percentile-speed-explained/ the point of this limit is not to inconvenience people who would like to drive faster, it is to generally try to get everyone moving at the same speed along the roadway Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Jun 5, 2019 |
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Jun 5, 2019 01:52
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Peanut President posted:You guys keep saying that as if drivers are rational entities who will drive safely. IDK what it's like in europe but that is decidedly not the loving case in the us.  (we absolutely do have sub-par driver's ed, but we aren't uniquely stupid or inept) If you don't want people driving over 25, don't build wide open, unpainted side streets with 12-14 foot lanes. If you build a drag strip, people are going to drive fast on it. You can't erase generations and decades of speed limits being set ridiculously slow by changing signs any more than you can stop middle school kids from running in the hall; you have to acknowledge that the whole system is hosed from top to bottom and address that, not just driver behavior.
GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Jun 5, 2019 |
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Jun 5, 2019 01:58
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GWBBQ posted:Americans are exceptional because of some principle that absolutely isn't fallacious i was saying my experience is with bad drivers in the US because I'm an american you loving idiot
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Jun 5, 2019 03:08
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nrook posted:To be honest, I don't really buy the argument that the speed limit should be set at the speed drivers will drive at naturally. I mean it's a good idea to design roads so people will drive at the appropriate speed, but if enforcement was fast and reliable, drivers would slow down anyway. That's why motorists rebel at speed traps and red light cameras: they dent the culture of impunity around reckless driving. Motorists don't rebel at them because they're reliable enforcement, they rebel at the use of the police as a municipal revenue generation system that prioritizes tickets over safety or reasonable discretion. This is the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" of arguments. And don't worry, the police will still find a way to pull you over for doing 55 in a 54.
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Jun 5, 2019 05:24
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wolrah posted:Exactly. This is the thing way too many people can't seem to get through their heads. If you have a road where a significant percentage of traffic is exceeding the speed limit, the speed limit is wrong for the road. Yup. Design the road for the design speed. It's really that simple.
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Jun 5, 2019 05:49
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nrook posted:To be honest, I don't really buy the argument that the speed limit should be set at the speed drivers will drive at naturally. I mean it's a good idea to design roads so people will drive at the appropriate speed, but if enforcement was fast and reliable, drivers would slow down anyway. That's why motorists rebel at speed traps and red light cameras: they dent the culture of impunity around reckless driving. Yeah this is the drat problem, especially on highways. There's two fixes required:
My locality does the latter, just need the former.
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Jun 5, 2019 06:30
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Eskaton posted:Yup. Traffic natually goes slower in dense urban areas because - surprise - driving on small roads with lots of intersections and street parking makes people want to go slower. But have fun convincing people to make their roads feel less fun to drive on, even if they crow about wanting people to drive slower. People can barely be convinced that more on-street parking and fewer parking lots is good for downtowns, even though it has a demonstrably beneficial effect on local business income. nrook posted:That's why motorists rebel at speed traps and red light cameras: they dent the culture of impunity around reckless driving. If you want people to respect traffic enforcement measures, step one is convincing them that it's genuinely aiming for safety and not  . Even just changing the type of infractions cops tend to enforce would help a lot - it's not a coincidence that the easy money of speeding tickets is more common than enforcing other traffic laws(such as only using the left lane to pass, or making sure people have their drat lights on in the evening/rain, or making people use their turn signals when they turn or change lanes, or catching people staring at their phone while driving, or...). It'd be an uphill battle to make that happen, though - a lot of small towns and suburbs rely on that ticket money since it's more palatable than raising taxes.
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Jun 5, 2019 08:12
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Haifisch posted:Red light cameras are pure revenue grabs usually run by private companies with no accountability. Speed traps are set up to meet ticket quotas and harvest money for towns. Neither is truly about safety. I feel like a lot of these statements depend on where you're from.
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Jun 5, 2019 13:53
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i just remind myself that everyone thinks they are a good driver, and it is the other people who are the problem. aka "why are all these people generating traffic and getting in my way"
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Jun 5, 2019 16:34
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Peanut President posted:You guys keep saying that as if drivers are rational entities who will drive safely. IDK what it's like in europe but that is decidedly not the loving case in the us. pun pundit posted:I feel like a lot of these statements depend on where you're from. In theory red light cameras are a great idea, obviously no one is going to defend running red lights. The problem is that so far I have not heard of a single implementation that didn't have some corrupt poo poo going on with it. Obviously there's a lot of confirmation bias in play there because you typically won't hear about it otherwise, but it's incredible how regularly these programs are investigated and discovered to have been messing with the light timings to encourage violations and/or funneling money to questionable places. It's not like it would be hard at all to have a red light camera program that no one reasonable could argue against, with long yellows and maybe a short all-red phase where violations during that time would trigger a warning letter but no actual fine if you didn't have a history of violations. Unfortunately the entire industry seems to be built on trying to rack up as many charges as possible. As far as speed traps, we just have to go back to the core of this discussion. If there's a place where cops love to set up shop, it's probably a place where the 85th percentile rule is being violated significantly. Fix the road or fix the limit, don't put bullshit enforcement there just to make money.
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Jun 5, 2019 18:10
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wolrah posted:Do you think that the people who study traffic and develop guidelines like the MUTCD aren't aware of this? Many European countries manage to have red light cameras without turning them into a racket. At some point the problem isn't 'trying to enforce traffic law', it's that you live in a corrupt country. The EU is also making automatic speed limit enforcement mandatory on new cars from 2022. This stuff is actually solvable, it's just that car-centric governance has become so entrenched that 'reducing driver frustration' over 2 minute delays trumps literally saving actual people's lives. Jonnty fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jun 5, 2019 |
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Jun 5, 2019 18:25
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wolrah posted:Do you think that the people who study traffic and develop guidelines like the MUTCD aren't aware of this? Yeah, kinda.
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Jun 5, 2019 18:55
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Peanut President posted:Yeah, kinda. Write a peer-reviewed paper Be the hero we need
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Jun 5, 2019 20:14
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According to the DOT, 37,133 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2017. In light of this, it is difficult to fully sympathize with the plight of someone ticketed for driving at the 80th percentile speed.
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Jun 5, 2019 20:32
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This page: "Ask me about my layman's opinions on traffic policy"
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Jun 5, 2019 20:32
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pun pundit posted:I feel like a lot of these statements depend on where you're from. Yeah seriously. Even in Canada (pretty damned similar to the US, traffic wise) there being a red-light-camera racket of some kind doesn't ring true at all. Jonnty posted:At some point the problem isn't 'trying to enforce traffic law', it's that you live in a corrupt country.
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Jun 6, 2019 00:07
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nrook posted:According to the DOT, 37,133 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2017. Are you making the argument that it’s immoral to drive the design speed? How about the median speed, 50th percentile? By definition half of us do. Are half of us murderers in wait? Is it immoral to drive above the posted speed, if that equates to the 10th percentile? 9 out of 10 drivers are flying by me, am I doing the wrong thing doing 27 in a 25? What about if it’s posted at the 50th percentile? Do we have to continually creep posted speed limits lower as traffic slows further and further to avoid roadside judgment from Trooper Dredd? These are all stupid facile appeals to emotion. If you had a good answer you could do research, write a paper, and change the world.
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Jun 6, 2019 00:21
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One would think that examples such as the un-speed limit sections for German autobahn, the very very high speed limits on motorways in some parts of the US, and the many older town centers where cars simply cannot move fast, they present examples that having a posted speed limit is in no way necessity for safety with proper designs. Yes, if you do somehow do 100 km/h down a village market street the police can charge you with violating a limit, but that is not what stops the average motorist from doing it. Conversely if your car can handle 150 km/h on the no limit autobahn sections, its not so much hurting anyone if you are otherwise being attentive and driving a well built car.
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Jun 6, 2019 02:02
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I'd challenge the premise that "drivers will always drive the fastest the road will allow" and argue it's reflective of cultural norms rather than any universal truth. You can't choose your height, but your speed and driving style is 100% within your control. By handwaving away speeding or running red lights, we normalize that behavior and perpetuate it into the future. Compare it to four dozen people standing in a long queue for something they all want—even with relative anonymity and opportunity to cheat the system, the vast majority will adhere to the established rule and even self-enforce against violators (in my part of the US, at least  ). Of course, we should still design those roads on which we intend drivers to go slower specifically for those speeds to further encourage this and to reduce costs. luxury handset posted:where the bolded section is about urban planning in general and land use/transportation interactions, where the italic section is about civil engineering and roadway design, which is a subset of that planning. OP is a traffic engineer, not an urban planner, and thus would have a focus specifically on how roads are designed and not why roads are where they are or connect different parts of the city together. from the traffic engineer's standpoint, it doesn't matter why the road is there, a road has been requested and it is then the engineer's job to design that roadway Jonnty posted:Many European countries manage to have red light cameras without turning them into a racket. At some point the problem isn't 'trying to enforce traffic law', it's that you live in a corrupt country. A tangential complaint since automation has been brought up: it's 2019 and cars are apparently still not required to automatically activate headlights when the car is moving and the wipers are on? WTF.
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Jun 6, 2019 03:40
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Cugel the Clever posted:I'm definitely ignorant of the specifics of of what sort of tasks a traffic engineer typically takes on. An understatement. This poo poo is well studied and well documented: people will tend to drive faster or slower depending on the design and conditions of the road. You can design around these proven facts, or you can build a six lane arterial that gets barely any traffic, sign it 35 mph, and wonder why everyone's going 70 on it. Feel free to continue arguing with actual traffic engineers though, you're definitely going to convince them everything they've learned is wrong if you keep at it
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Jun 6, 2019 04:02
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Cugel the Clever posted:I'm definitely ignorant of the specifics of of what sort of tasks a traffic engineer typically takes on. Are pedestrian and bike traffic not typically the domain of American traffic engineers? I just dug into that and am shocked that, while this and most aspects of road design are one of very few areas my home state of SC gets right, most states don't require headlights in rain. https://drivinglaws.aaa.com/tag/headlight-use/ Also, around here pedestrians and bicycles are the preserve of the gun lobby not the government.
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Jun 6, 2019 05:29
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Cugel the Clever posted:I'm definitely ignorant of the specifics of of what sort of tasks a traffic engineer typically takes on. Are pedestrian and bike traffic not typically the domain of American traffic engineers? car dependence and overbuilding of suburbs is a structural issue which flows downward as a result of fragmentary land use control and perverse incentives from all superceding levels of government, from the way mortgages are secured to the way that school funding is apportioned. much of american society, law, economic behavior, etc. goes to service this expectation that suburbs are the preferable place to live. the average traffic engineer is given a map, with a marked right of way, and told to design a road that can handle X vehicles per hour it's a bit like blaming an aircraft technician for flaws in the airframe. the guy doing the grunt work is only the final link in the chain which reaches back to decisions made in some government agency decades ago
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Jun 6, 2019 14:11
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Javid posted:Feel free to continue arguing with actual traffic engineers though, you're definitely going to convince them everything they've learned is wrong if you keep at it Do we still have any ITT though? The OP is long gone, who else here is an actual traffic engineer?
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Jun 6, 2019 22:17
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:Do we still have any ITT though? The OP is long gone, who else here is an actual traffic engineer? I'm a transportation/highway engineer which this thread blurs the line in discussions to include. I design roads and trails, and coordinate the work of all the civil disciplines, including traffic. Traffic as a discipline is classically: 1. Analysis/traffic operations 2. Signals/lighting 3. Signing/Pavement Marking
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Jun 6, 2019 22:36
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Devor posted:I'm a transportation/highway engineer which this thread blurs the line in discussions to include. I design roads and trails, and coordinate the work of all the civil disciplines, including traffic. Cool! How does your job work as a transportation/highway engineer? Like, say a new road is being built, do you get handed a map with some lines added, or are you in the process even earlier?
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Jun 7, 2019 19:43
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Devor posted:Are you making the argument that it’s immoral to drive the design speed? This is a bit bizarre. Design and percentile speeds are a traffic engineering concept and are considered on aggregate when thinking about things like the safety of car occupants and whether there are any external circumstances which mean traffic may need to be artificially slowed. The speed you, personally go at is a matter of judgement and - yes - morals and takes into account not only the design of the road but the prevailing conditions. If you get them mixed up you end up doing mad things like declaring that it's totally OK to do 60 past a school just cos the road happens to be pretty straight and wide.
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Jun 10, 2019 00:44
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:Cool! I work for a consulting firm, and we work for local and state governments, doing everything from helping create Master Plan documents that say "a road should connect X and Y in the future" to planning work that says "when you build a road between X and Y, it should go roughly along here, and it'll cost $X Million dollars, and have X environmental impacts" to the actual design of everything down to exact elevations of sidewalk ramps. But most jobs we pick up after the Master Planning has been done, and start with a conceptual design then step through the stages to final design. Jonnty posted:This is a bit bizarre. Design and percentile speeds are a traffic engineering concept and are considered on aggregate when thinking about things like the safety of car occupants and whether there are any external circumstances which mean traffic may need to be artificially slowed. The speed you, personally go at is a matter of judgement and - yes - morals and takes into account not only the design of the road but the prevailing conditions. If you get them mixed up you end up doing mad things like declaring that it's totally OK to do 60 past a school just cos the road happens to be pretty straight and wide. I was pointing out that there is not a moral imperative not to exceed the speed limit, because the speed limit is an artificial construction that when done 100% rigorously, will still have 15% of users driving above it, by design. And as-implemented, speed limits will generally have a LOT more than 15% of users driving above it, and on the vast majority of roadways that's not really a problem. If we waved our magic wands and created a world where all people drove 0-3 mph below the speed limit, I wouldn't sign a 4-lane collector/minor arterial road for 35 mph, I would sign it for 45 mph and be happy when everyone is doing 42-45, instead of shrugging at the mix of 35 mph - 50 mph I would get under our current regime signed for 35 mph. I never said that it's a good thing to drive 60 mph through a school zone - but operating a vehicle moderately above the posted speed of the roadway is not inherently wrong or immoral. It's a judgment thing, as you said. But I would be cool with exploring some crazy new theoretical policy "Absolute Speed Limit" where we have that upper speed limit where punishments actually kick in. But it would take a lot of political will to implement.
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Jun 10, 2019 01:55
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Signing a road 25 that should be 55 is 1000000x more dangerous than one person happening to be driving 45 through it, is the point.
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Jun 10, 2019 02:37
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This hit the news last week and is relevant to the current topic https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/06/speed-limits-too-high-on-nearly-all-kiwi-roads-nzta.html The headline is a bit sensationalist, but essentially what it's saying is that most of the roads around the country have higher speed limits than the most recent guidelines would recommend (for example, the recent guidelines suggest 40kph for most local residential roads, and the vast majority are currently 50. Also a winding mountain road might be more appropriately 60 or 80, and most are 100.
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Jun 10, 2019 08:25
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Lobsterpillar posted:This hit the news last week and is relevant to the current topic If someone created a tool where you plug in 10 factors about a roadway, and it spit out a recommended posted speed, I would expect it to spit out lower posted speeds than currently exist because we're moving in that direction generally, although like that article said, it's implemented in targeted roadways and not blanket changes. The cynical part of me wonders if that "tool" was created so that when they're doing a safety improvement and lower the speed limit they have something to point at that isn't just the NZTA Project Manager. "Crikey I wish we could leave the speed limit at 100 kph, but this tool says that we should have a lower speed limit because *squints at list* there's trees along this roadway. Strewth!"* *I have no idea if NZ shares slang with Australia, bear with me
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Jun 10, 2019 15:01
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Yeah, that's exactly what the tool does. It doesn't remove the need for actually designing a road to be self-reinforcing and the vast majority of changes are left to local authorities to make. The reason it's got into the media is politics, though, this is something that has been in the works for ages.
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Jun 10, 2019 16:04
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While I am generally skeptical of any claims that a significant number of roads have too high of speed limits, I'm more willing to believe it for New Zealand. Matt Farah, who if you don't know is an auto journalist that has built his career on driving fast, said on his podcast after a trip to New Zealand that the speed limits on rural roads were no joke and that even trying to reach the limit wasn't always a great idea depending on what you're driving. You couldn't treat them like American roads where almost every single limit is 10-30 MPH lower than it should be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImqSBmacyOI If a man who has done this says some speed limits are actually worth paying attention to, I take that seriously. That said, the claim in that article that 90% of limits are too high is laughable. Very possibly the rural roads, but it'd be really hard to believe that any highways anywhere on the planet are too fast. Likewise for straight clean city grids.
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Jun 10, 2019 16:39
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I thought the deal with the limits being too high there is that most classes of road have a standard speed limit based on their type there, with minimal verification at the actual road of what's safe - think like how a lot of US states will slap a blanket 45 mph on rural surface roads, sight unseen. And also there's barely any freeways in the country, and hell barely any residents in vast amounts of the place.
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Jun 10, 2019 17:14
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