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You can lead a motorist to an acceleration lane, but you can't make him accelerate.
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Aug 8, 2018 23:02
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A decent little article on why LOS is bullshit and traffic engineers are really bad about thinking about non-vehicle users. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/13/a-losing-proposition
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Aug 15, 2018 18:28
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:The point of the article is that focusing only on automotive level of service is a narrow view. It assumes that the underlying traffic is immutable and has to be engineered around. But what if the same resources used to expand a road to a particular LOS can be used more efficiently to lower or maintain the current LOS by encouraging off-peak commuting or deliveries, or offering better non-automotive infrastructure? Yeah, it's exactly this. By obsessing over LOS for personal vehicles you create a self-fulfilling prophecy, induced demand. Maybe if the area wasn't a dangerous wasteland for anyone not in a car more people would walk or cycle or take transit and you wouldn't need the extra lanes and high speed limits needed to maintain the LOS that's killing the other options. You get the traffic you build for, and by constantly chasing LOS you will constantly be locked into a totally unsustainable cycle.
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Aug 15, 2018 23:27
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Devor posted:Sir this is a project to reconstruct an Arby’s drive through Where's the loving bike lane and why won't they serve me on foot
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Aug 16, 2018 01:40
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I think of myself as a reasonable person but anyone who designs a 4-way intersection that is missing one of the pedestrian crossings should be sentenced to crossing that intersection as a pedestrian every morning for the rest of their life Same, there's a new intersection that you literally can't cross in one go. They hosed up the light timing so bad that you have to cross halfway to an island then wait for an entire cycle to go by for the chance to complete your crossing. It takes a good 3-4 min in what should be about a 30 second crossing. Meanwhile there's these huge chunks of time, a solid 10 seconds, where everyone has a red and both drivers and pedestrians often get confused and just go since it looks safe. Worst designed intersection I've ever been to. I get things like this existing along some suburban highway crossing, but not in the heart of a city that claims to put pedestrians first. The designers should have to circle this intersection on foot as punishment.
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Aug 17, 2018 21:58
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Yeah, amsterdam is like the worst city for admiring cycling and pedestrian infrastructure in the country. It's great, but it's so so much better generally everywhere else. They've done the best they can trying to jam so many different modes into old tight streets though and it's so much more pleasant than 90% of other cities its size in the world. But you get out to any of the other mid-sized dutch cities and suddenly the sidewalks and bike lanes are much more spacious and pretty much all the conflict is gone. Then you get out into the country and realize even rural and suburban areas can have world class bike infrastructure and life is so nice.
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Aug 17, 2018 22:50
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One of my city's school districts points of prides is that it doesn't have a bus system. The surrounding suburban districts do, but the urban district does not because everyone can got drat walk to school. There's never a school more than a 15min walk away, shorter once the kids are on bikes. Even so, and even with greater density and better safety improvements since I was a kid, more and more parents drive their kids to school due to a hosed up parental culture that's evolved in the last generation that sees parents loading their kids into huge up-armoured SUV's to drive them 800m to school. If the schools aren't close enough and the streets aren't safe enough to allow even elementary aged children to get to school on their own power, your city has absolutely failed to provide infrastructure for all users. That's a big part of modern urban design: accounting for users who aren't physically able adult men. The streets and crossings should be safe enough for an 8 year old to get to school without any worry. Kids are really lovely at crossing busy streets, like some spacial reasoning part of their brains haven't fully developed yet, so there's some special care that needs to be put into the design. Simple things like refuge islands even on simple 2-lane streets help a great deal here as the person crosses each lane at a time, and the islands also act as a traffic calming measure at the crossing. For middle/high school here's the dutch modeshare.  From this article https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/arriving-at-school-by-bicycle/
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Aug 18, 2018 16:38
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https://cal.streetsblog.org/2015/11/18/caltrans-admits-building-roads-induces-congestion-but-admitting-a-problem-is-just-the-first-step/ Caltrans basically officially admits to induced demand being real and building more roads not an actual long term solution. It's hopeful to see government agencies that are usually fully committed to the road building death cult at least admitting the transport infra strategy of the last decades doesn't work.
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Aug 29, 2018 19:26
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Basically all demand is induced to some degree, there's a lot of elasticity when it comes to travel. The problem is that for decades a lot of traffic engineering looked at traffic like water in a flood control system. There are X amount of cars, and the system must be able to handle a peak of Y. They would then engineer a series of highways and roads to handle that traffic, plus future predictions of traffic. When people talk about "induced demand" they are talking about a variety of factors. There's the induced demand from long-term land use policies that are directly tied to highway expansion, but that's more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You expand the highway to handle current congestion plus predicted increases over the next 10 years, and 10 years later you're back at square one with a congested highway because of course that highway made farther and farther suburban land attractive for development. I guess you could call this induced demand, but it's no accident, it's been the dominant pattern of land use and transport planning in north america for decades now. What most people are generally referring to when using the term "induced demand" generally has to do with shorter term elasticity in people's trips, modes, and routes. You can have an area without any growth decide to add a few lanes here and there, add a fly-over to a congested intersection, fiddle with traffic light timing optimization and so on. Initially these improvements might see traffic "fixed", but even without any major growth in the area people will slowly notice traffic get worse over a few years. This is because more people are choosing to drive in the area due to the upgrades, people who would otherwise avoid the area or just choose not to make a certain trip that day are now choosing to because driving has become more convenient. As more and more people do this, driving through the area becomes less and less attractive and an equilibrium is reached. There is again a push to "fix" the traffic in the area, more investments are made, and the cycle continues. But surely there isn't infinite demand for road capacity? Of course there is, but chasing this demand results in a hellscape of pavement and an area with such a terrible road to taxable land ratio that it's financially unsustainable in the long run. And of course it's not just driving that can be an induced demand, all modes follow this pattern. Pointing at something and saying "ah! Induced demand!!" isn't a valid reason to not invest in infrastructure, the point is to understand that all infrastructure will induce demand to some degree, so be smart about what you're investing in. If you make transit more attractive by making is fast and convenient, adding service, making it more safe and comfortable, you will induce demand for more transit. If you make an area more attractive for walking or cycling, you will see induced demand there as well. The key though is to understand this effect and build for the traffic you want rather than letting the tail wag the dog.
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Sep 3, 2018 21:45
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From donoteat
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Sep 23, 2018 22:15
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I think those all break the rule that the non-descript triangle of grass is sacred and can not be touched.
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Sep 24, 2018 23:18
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Checking the area out on street view it really does seem like swapping the church driveway and the road would be the easiest solution.
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Sep 25, 2018 00:12
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This whole area is an ultra-low density wasteland of mansions with Mitt Romney signs in their front lawns, gently caress em.
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Sep 25, 2018 18:41
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I got so fed up about the weird and bad light timing on a terrible intersection with a terrible beg-button I wrote to my city's engineering department. I wonder if anything will come of it.
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Jan 24, 2019 04:03
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Jan 30, 2019 00:27
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There's a whole series of little residential streets that turn into dead-ends at a highway that have zero signage and often nothing but a couple posts or a strip of grass and a pedestrian path separating them from the highway. With a little maneuvering and a break in traffic you could probably get onto the highway from them, and I'm sure it's been done both on purpose and accidentally. This is my favourite though, I've had friends who have used it. I imagine emergency and service vehicles use it from time to time (a police and fire station is around the corner along the highway) but other than the no-entry signs and the fact that you'd have to slow down from highway speeds to suddenly turn off, it's quite an inviting shortcut. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Mar 13, 2019 |
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Mar 13, 2019 22:46
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Jonnty posted:When I went to NZ (from Scotland) all their car hire literature goes on about how their roads might not be like yours because some of their roads are bendy and narrow and it's a bit like, yeah, sounds familiar. And actually, their residential roads seem to be massive just like in the US. Is this purely aimed at US drivers - do you really not have roads where you're unlikely to want to go at the speed limit all (or even some of) the time? I assume it's primarily for Australians.
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Jun 12, 2019 19:32
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Yeah I just had to replace a break light on my fairly new Honda Fit. Was surprised to find no LED's back there.
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Jun 13, 2019 22:02
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I've never seen anything like this before in my life, but we were driving somewhere a bit rural down a 80 marked highway and there were loving crosswalks on it. No light, no strobes, just painted on crosswalks here and there with the lowest-effort signage for it.
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Jul 7, 2019 21:39
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Here's what the crosswalks we were gasping at looked like. There's not even loving street lights. The speeds there, even in perfect conditions, are way too fast for anyone to notice someone trying to stop and actually stop in time. I don't get the use for them, they're not offering any sort of protection, at worst they only offer a false sense of safety. Normally there'd be a little bridge at a crossing like this, or an activated light. We didn't see anyone trying to use them, but we almost hit a bear. The bear was not using the crosswalk.
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Jul 8, 2019 18:22
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Devor posted:The UK is schizophrenic about how they protect pedestrians I guess I missed the 60 signs when I was keeping up with traffic doing about 120... Which again shows how ineffective signs are. You can take a highway that can handle 100+ speeds and toss some 60 signs and unlit crosswalks in but that's not going to change anyone's behavior.
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Jul 8, 2019 20:03
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Seeing little walkable residential streets totally jammed with cars because parents have all decided children can't get to school on their own anymore is always very frustrating. It's not so bad where I live, but I've noticed it here. The school I went to as a kid is in a very old walkable neighbourhood and maybe 5% of kids would be dropped off in a car, everyone would either walk or bike or school. On their own, with a parent, with a sibling or little pack of friends, but car were not really involved in the getting to school modeshare. That same turn of the century school that only had a tiny staff parking lot is now getting a whole drop-off lane because cars were lined up around the block for parents dropping off and picking up their kids. The neighbourhood has also only improved since the 80's. We have more crosswalks, we've had some road diets, we have bike lanes, speed limits have been reduced, yet the modeshare of cars for school trips has exploded. Clearly there's something cultural going on that needs to be addressed.
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Nov 4, 2019 19:48
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Latest Do Not Eat "video" is all on the politics of Traffic Engineering. Dig in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oq0u2i4iHc
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Nov 8, 2019 06:56
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Not Just Bikes does good stuff. There's so much most places could learn from the dutch, but we refuse because thousands of deaths are easier to swallow than admit any of our standards are bad or that we're not exceptional.
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Jan 27, 2020 22:43
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I'll generally go out of my way to use zebra crossings vs signalized ones since the former gives me instant right of way while the latter I have to wait for. Luckily I live somewhere where a pedestrian near a zebra crossing is treated about as seriously as a red light.
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Aug 18, 2020 00:01
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Also make all the streets 40 or even 30 kph zones so drivers are always going slow enough to stop in time for anyone jumping out at a crossing.
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Aug 18, 2020 21:42
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Is there a downside to incrementally closing more roads to cars to encourage other forms of traffic like New York and Oakland have been trying? It seems like a remarkably simple idea to deal with excess vehicular traffic, and a lot cheaper than engineering roads for traffic calming measures. And as a bonus if it results in more traffic on the remaining streets that allow cars, that's just more incentive for people to us alternative transportation. Mostly the very loud petulant meltdowns of car people writing thousands of letters to the editor every day about how their house will burn down because the fire trucks won't be able to reach them in time due to all the bike lanes and crosswalks.
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May 1, 2021 23:28
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mobby_6kl posted:I'm a fan of the tunnel solution like what they did in Düsseldorf: Uhg I hate that road. Just a big ol elevated freeway/stroad right through your city core and ruining your amazing historic train station.
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Nov 17, 2021 22:52
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Carbon dioxide posted:Alright, I'll bite. They all have amazing bike infra with Amsterdam being a very stark "worse than everywhere else"
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Sep 23, 2023 22:05
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multi-use trails really suck. They stem from a very car-brained ideology that anyone not in a car can be lumped together and is probably just out there for recreation. Instead you get cases like in my city where thousands of people just trying to get to work on time are sharing too-narrow "shared" paths that people also go for leisurely walks 4-abreast or take their dogs for a walk on. Both groups can be real dicks, with slow movers being totally unwilling to move an inch to let people pass because last week a guy on a one-wheel passed them too fast, to people on bikes punish-passing random people without warning because last week someone purposefully didn't let them pass. It creates a lot of bad blood between users who should really all be allies in the war on cars. Paths need to be wide enough for bikes to pass each other, and use paint at the minimum to segregate walkers from rollers. The better paths actually have a little strip or grass or a change in paving texture. We've been upgrading our main "bike highway" luckily but it's been slow going. Some sections have smooth asphalt for rolling and concrete with a stamped brick texture for walkers and those areas see almost no conflict. It mostly comes back to cars getting everything and everyone else having to fight each other over the scraps.
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Dec 9, 2023 21:01
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Yeah, the level of pearl clutching directed to just about any form of transport other than cars is so inverse to the level of risk. A single rental scooter knocking down an old lady and breaking her arm will see cities try to outright ban them in a media frenzy about their danger, while totally ignoring the few dozen people killed and hundreds injured by cars in the same city every year. Some too-narrow shared-use path will have some conflict between "aggressive too fast cyclists!" and walkers, and instead of just making the path wider we pit people outside of cars against each other with both sides trying to ban or restrict the other, specially those drat dangerous entitled cyclists. My e-bike is limited to 30kph, but every random SUV driven by a harried mom on her way to pick up her kids while arguing on the phone with her dog's chiropractor over a billing issue isn't limited in any way. When cars constantly crash in a single spot due to 100% unsafe driving and a driving culture where paying attention is optional, authorities will spend millions doing "safety upgrades" to make the road wider and gentler and a softer clear zone. When some shared trail sees minor conflict between users because it's way too narrow, the solution is always to call for strict new laws and enforcement crackdowns. Lets regulate drivers down to the point where they're injuring as many people as cyclists and then we can start worrying about bike speed limits. Until then, our safety dollars and enforcement time needs to be laser focused on the lowest hanging fruit.
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Mar 21, 2024 00:50
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Javid posted:Based on my limited experience on the local (terrible) bike trails, people hooning fast on e-bikes are far, far less of a problem than morons treating the path like a park and obstructing it instead of traveling along it as intended I swear "shared use" trails are a plot by the auto industry to pit anyone outside of a car against each other. But yeah I see so many people walking 4 abreast along with their unleashed dogs on a trail that's basically the region's bike highway for commuters. And if anyone passes them a little too close or dings their bell they get extremely upset and defensive and run to reddit to complain. Paths should be wide enough for everyone, and segregated so there's minimal conflict.
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Mar 21, 2024 02:32
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 00:39 |
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Amsterdam really sucks for bike infra. Way too much of their city center still has vehicle access, which takes up tons of space and the scraps are then given over to everyone else. So you have these very cramped narrow cycle paths and sidewalks. Add in the mass tourism and drunks and its a recipe for a lot of conflict. But outside of Amsterdam, dutch cycling infra is generally super good. They try to always build single-direction lanes to be 2-bikes wide, this is massively important! It lets people ride side by side and carry on a conversation, just like talking to the person next to you in the car. But most importantly it allows different speeds to pass each other, it allows old people on slow little mobility scooter chair things to use the bike lane going like 8kph while someone on a bike passes them at 25kph and there's no stress or conflict. Another massive thing with wider cycle paths is that once you make them as wide as a car lane, it means vehicles can use them. Paris for instance purposefully has been designing a lot of their new bike lanes to be wide enough for ambulances. Bikes can get out of the way of emergency vehicles way better than cars and it's led to huge improvements to emergency response times!
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Mar 22, 2024 00:37
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