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TooMuchAbstraction posted:It is one lane each way, no shoulder. I found it on Google Maps:  No one is driving 40 MPH on that street. That is just a random street in a purely residential area of a small town Here's another one: 
DTurtle fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 12:31
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| # ? May 17, 2024 01:37 |
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The goal is to make it undesirable for anyone to drive on the street, unless their destination is an address on that street. Everyone else can use larger throughfare roads.
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Apr 12, 2024 13:21
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Ahh, I see, thank you for the detailed explanation. That said, nielsm posted:The goal is to make it undesirable for anyone to drive on the street, unless their destination is an address on that street. Everyone else can use larger throughfare roads. one of the big issues around here is that the roads are super haphazard. There's a small number of stroads and 1 freeway, but everything else is a vast tangle of residential roads. I assume that central planning has basically shrugged and said "it'd cost billions to make a system that makes sense, so we aren't going to". Which in turn leads to people doing 40MPH on residential roads because they're the most direct route by far to their destination. If you slowed traffic down to 20MPH using traffic calming measures, you'd still have people using those roads, "undesirable" though they might be. Honestly, I'd rather they prioritized adding more shoulders/sidewalks, because nothing's walkable outside of your immediate residential neighborhood, and bicycling anywhere would be terrifying.
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Apr 12, 2024 13:33
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Ahh, I see, thank you for the detailed explanation. However, that requires you to think about what speeds you want people to drive. Is the priority getting people from A to B as quickly as possible? Or is the emphasis on making the street safe for cars, bicycles, children playing on it? There are tons of different ways to achieve that goal. Some of them very easy and simple to implement, others requiring a lot more investment. The thing is that you need to recognize that some improvement, without being a perfect solution, is still better than the status quo. Perfect is the enemy pf good enough. Hell, Germany is still a very car centric society, it is quite far away from really being a good example - but still better than most of the US. You don’t need Dutch street design as a first step. Strong Towns is an American/Canadian NGO focussing on implementing those kinds of things. You might want to look into them if you are really interested in actively changing stuff in your town. DTurtle fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 18:48
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I feel like speedbumps are basically never added as the result of a good decision, and often they're added more for spite than anything else.
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Apr 12, 2024 21:58
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SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like speedbumps are basically never added as the result of a good decision, and often they're added more for spite than anything else.
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Apr 12, 2024 22:08
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Haifisch posted:It doesn't have to be spite, it just has to be something as simple as "slowing down traffic the effective way takes a lot of time and money, and nobody wants to invest in that"(with a side of "have fun convincing most Americans that making a road smaller can make it better for everyone") and then you end up with speed bumps as the charade of doing something. IMO speed bumps fall in to the same category as stop signs where they're very rarely the best answer and in an ideal world should almost never exist. Every time they're used a traffic engineer should have to explain in detail why they can't be something better. I can't find it right now because searching podcasts is hard but Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire fame has a good rant he's gone on a few times about how a one-way road near him (LA area) had bad problems with speeding and wrong-way for years, then they redid the markings to both narrow and center the lane while clearly indicating the direction of travel and it more or less solved both for the cost of paint. No actual changes to the road, no new hardware, no technology, just paint used in a way that aligns drivers' perception of the road with the road's intent. It's certainly not a universal solution but there are a lot of cases where it feels like that sort of thing would be a lot more effective, yet all that ever seems to be able to get done is installing speed bumps and posting meaningless lower limits.
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May 7, 2024 20:53
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The downside of speed bumps are also their upside - they make roads less fun and efficient to drive on. There's certainly better alternatives, from easy stuff like chicanes or road narrowing to more significant changes like gating off roads halfway through so cars can't use neighborhoods as a shortcut, but they attract a lot of opposition. Much like speed limits and cameras, speed bumps are the sort of low-impact control device that people are willing to tolerate. One of the universal truisms of policymaking is that people only want change if they think they'll be unaffected. People like the idea of a clean environment - so long as they don't have to do anything and their gas prices stay the same. People like cycleways - as long as they aren't on any of the roads they drive on. People want safe streets - so long as their commute time is unaffected. While obviously this makes it very difficult to get anything done, it's also a guide for how to craft policy so that it will be accepted by the majority of people. Speed bumps, cameras, and speed limits get tolerated because people tend to envision themselves as being admirable and law-abiding drivers who would never be affected by them. Kaal fucked around with this message at 21:16 on May 7, 2024 |
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May 7, 2024 21:07
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In the Netherlands we have speed bumps everywhere, but of course they have to be used in combination with other measures to be effective. You can't just dump them into a wide stroad. For slowing down traffic, you mainly rely on other mechanisms such as narrowing the road, adding curves and putting things close to the edge of the road, and then speed bumps are placed at points where drivers have to pay extra attention, e.g. before a crosswalk, entering a residential area, turning on/off a side road or a tabled four-way intersection. Sometimes they are used in combination with a narrowing of the road, in areas where there are no intersections and such but traffic still needs to be slowed. An example of that: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3g7TK5W2QznGy6ES9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/e647MBTs67BpY32W8 Typical example on an arterial urban road - on the speedbump there is a crosswalk and cycling intersection and it's before a traffic light for a crossing with a bus lane. https://maps.app.goo.gl/h1d2jvFACQDbijMz8 One outside an urban area to indicate an intersection - of course these are more flat since speeds can be high here. https://maps.app.goo.gl/4do8jVtuU3kkja447 Regular and fairly nasty speedbumps in a residential area, strategically placed before intersections. Of course this road is not for through traffic, there are parallel arterial roads on both sides where through traffic is supposed to drive and these bumps also discourage taking shortcuts. https://maps.app.goo.gl/vCuWUAZ5aRMWRv4q8 When going from a minor to a major residential road, you normally cross these tables at the sidewalk level to slow you down and make you pay attention to traffic with priority. https://maps.app.goo.gl/F5SYNpKtzastCSUc9 These are strategically placed at a train station where many people cross the road. They are very interesting because although they look nasty, they are fake and sink into the ground as you drive over them. So, out of towners slow down a lot for them but regulars just speed over them. Not sure why this choice was made, perhaps because a lot of buses pass here for which such bumps would be nasty if real. Entropist fucked around with this message at 12:19 on May 10, 2024 |
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May 7, 2024 23:48
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Entropist posted:In the Netherlands we have speed bumps everywhere, but of course they have to be used in combination with other measures to be effective. You can't just dump them into a wide stroad. For slowing down traffic, you mainly rely on other mechanisms such as narrowing the road, adding curves and putting things close to the edge of the road, and then speed bumps are placed at points where drivers have to pay extra attention, e.g. before a crosswalk, entering a residential area, turning on/off a side road or a tabled four-way intersection. Sometimes they are used in combination with a narrowing of the road, in areas where there are no intersections and such but traffic still needs to be slowed. My complaint is 100% about their use on roads that are intended for through traffic. The kind of speed bumps that can be hit at any kind of normal road speed are the kind of speed bumps that are effectively optional to anyone who has even a few inches of ground clearance and almost invisible to anyone driving a modern truck with a lot of suspension travel. The people who do slow down voluntarily probably weren't the ones driving dangerously. Every single vehicle makes more noise going through, everyone who slows down and accelerates back up makes even more noise plus some pollution, so the negative effects are greater on those living nearby and those obeying the posted limit or safely driving with the natural flow of traffic rather than the people actually driving dangerously. Often going faster is actually smoother in the same way as it can be over railroad tracks, so to a certain subset of drivers it provides exactly the opposite of the intended motivation. --- My city has these temporary speed tables they install outside of plow season in target areas and so far my experience with those has been more of the same. Last year they put a set along a road just entering the city where the PSL changes from the standard rural two-lane 45-55 MPH to 25-35 MPH when you cross the city line but nothing about the road really changes so most people just keep going the same speed, especially because most of the traffic is coming from or going to the interstate interchange just outside of the city limits. I drive along this route regularly and even in my little hot hatch with barely any sidewall or suspension travel it was more comfortable to just hit them at normal speed than to slow down. I can't imagine anyone with a modern passenger truck/SUV even felt them *unless* they slowed down. They just announced this year's locations the other day and a pair are going in just around the block from my house so I'll get to see how they are in a more appropriate environment soon. The stretch they're going on is purely suburban residential, has a high school at one end, a blind downhill turn towards an elementary school at the other, and is already narrowed by street parking plus a (very half-assed but still present) bike lane so it is a proper low speed road without much else to try. It'll be interesting to see what happens there.
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May 8, 2024 21:10
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I guess the thing is that few roads function entirely for through traffic. A separated highway would, but as you add residential and industrial driveways you get more of a property access function, even if its mostly still through traffic. Start adding side roads, you introduce more conflicts and slow out down even more. Start adding commercial areas and you've suddenly made it a destination in of itself, with pedestrians needing to get across the road. Of course this major thoroughfare might meet another major thoroughfare that runs perpendicular, at that point you've got a LOT of cross traffic to manage conflicts on safely. I guess the point is that the road that you see as just being a major thoroughfare may be less of a 100% thoroughfare in the eyes of other users of the road (and, if they've attempted to calm it, also in the eyes of the controlling authority as well, who should (in an ideal world) have a better idea of the big picture than any individual who passes through the road)
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May 8, 2024 21:52
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Lobsterpillar posted:I guess the thing is that few roads function entirely for through traffic. A separated highway would, but as you add residential and industrial driveways you get more of a property access function, even if its mostly still through traffic. Do you want stroads? Because that's how you get stroads.
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May 9, 2024 07:01
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pun pundit posted:Do you want stroads? Because that's how you get stroads. Just to be clear, I didn't intend adding development over what was previously a separated highway. I should have said that on another road, with residential driveways and other sorts of activity, and as that activity intensifies, you are increasingly no longer solely for thoroughfare and shouldn't treat the road with the philosophy of " speed and motor vehicle movement efficiency at any cost".
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May 9, 2024 23:03
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Entropist posted:In the Netherlands Great examples, but you've got a duplicated link.
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May 10, 2024 03:13
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Discendo Vox posted:Great examples, but you've got a duplicated link. Oops, fixed.
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May 10, 2024 12:19
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I guess traffic engineering is not very concerned with road resurfacing normally, perhaps. But I found this pretty interesting: repave a lane without closing it, while traffic is rerouted on top of the work crew. https://youtu.be/ymyIEGRw4-U?feature=shared
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May 10, 2024 20:14
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Lol at the guys not wearing helmets while driving machines with their heads at support beam level. Yes dude that bandana is clearly osha approved head protection.
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May 11, 2024 02:04
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:I guess traffic engineering is not very concerned with road resurfacing normally, perhaps. But I found this pretty interesting: repave a lane without closing it, while traffic is rerouted on top of the work crew. That's a Dahir Insaat level construction technique. Honestly? Would be great for concrete roads, which are a pain in the rear end to repave when it comes time to entirely replace the surface course.
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May 11, 2024 09:01
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| # ? May 17, 2024 01:37 |
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They built it because our highways usually only have two, sometimes three lanes in each direction and once you close highway lanes, traffic clogs every town in the region for hours. So traffic engineers have been looking for various ways to do road maintenance without lane closures over the past 15 years or so and the bridge is the latest idea. People still have to slow down significantly so you still get congestion, but not as much as by closing the lanes entirely. Before that it was "do most work during the night but the lanes have to be open by 7am again" which is very expensive and doesn't work everywhere, and "build new lane, close one for maintenance" for which there's generally not enough room, it's also expensive and largely unpopular. Also I saw only one dude without a helmet, I imagine it gets very hot down there 
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May 11, 2024 11:31
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