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Hasn't there been a huge furore over the gas tax being used to fund the Evergreen Line? I get the impression it's been like that every stage of building rapid transit in Greater Vancouver, forcing designers to cut corners for short term gains over long term headaches, so I guess it's not surprising that this would go the same way. Anyway, what do you guys think of the proposed Burrard/Cornwall intersection overhaul? To me as a lay person it looks like a good balance between maintaining motor vehicle throughput and turning what is currently a batshit insane intersection for anyone not in a car into something more rational. The plans are here. Warning: slightly large PDF.
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Jun 1, 2013 06:54
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And cycling infrastructure actually increases local business. Unfortunately it makes for a good right-wing wedge issue. The amounts of money spent make good targets, being closer to what the average person can relate to (tens of thousands to millions rather than tens to hundreds of millions). In Vancouver, getting people riled up over a $1.2 million separated bike lane on a downtown back street was a key part of the right-wing party's electoral strategy in the mayoral/city council elections two years ago. And it worked -- even my very left-leaning baby boomer landlady upstairs got drawn into the "wasting are tax money on bicycles" nonsense. The saddest thing is that London, which you can probably think of as New York's European sister-city, also has a bike share and is investing heavily in cycling infrastructure ... under a right-wing (Conservative Party) mayor. People even call the things "Boris bikes" after him. But hey, in New York, it's all part of the totalitarian left-wing mayor's plot to ruin New York, and we need an "enterprising new mayor" to "preserve are traffic patterns". Ahem, but back to the traffic engineer: NIMBYism by rich people and right-wing car-first identity politics seem to be pretty powerful forces in local planning. Cichlidae, do you see a lot of this? How do you handle it?
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Jun 4, 2013 17:37
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Meat Mitts posted:My biggest complaint t about cyclists is I'm never certain how to define them. Are they considered another vehicle that have to obey the rules of the road or are they considered a pedestrian? Some cyclists act like vehicles, using hand signals to turn or getting in line for the left turn arrow. Others ride on the sidewalk or on the shoulder and behave like pedestrians, waiting for cross walk signals, etc. And then there's the type of cyclist that I hate that behaves like a vehicle and a pedestrian, switching whenever it helps them get through an intersection quicker. It's pretty much universal that cyclists are considered to be vehicles, with all the same rights and responsibilities as drivers, and also pretty much universal that they are banned from riding in most pedestrian areas (sidewalks, crosswalks). There are usually some additional laws outlining signals to use (which are also pretty much universally required, if not always universal in form), requirements for having lights after dark, etc. For example, here's the relevant section from the BC Motor Vehicle Act. I don't think I've heard of very many places that are exceptions to this, and cannot think of any off the top of my head. Interestingly, for a number of reasons, cyclists acting like pedestrians (riding very far to the side/on the sidewalk / in crosswalks) actually put themselves at a lot more risk than those riding as vehicles. That said, best cycling practices do sometimes advocate grey-area manoeuvres, like making a left turn "perimeter style" as an alternative to crossing multiple lanes of traffic to get to the turning lane (see "making a left turn" in this cycling guide for a diagram.) In that guide they urge you to dismount in the crosswalk (as required by law), but in practice cyclists required to dismount to get somewhere just don't. Anyway, there's some debate in the cycling advocacy/safety community about how stringently to follow "vehicular cycling". For instance, there really isn't much safer infrastructure than totally separated bike lanes, which don't require vehicular cycling at all. And to bring this all back to roundabouts, this is how the Dutch do them: separated pedestrian and cycle tracks in a second circle around the motorway circle, and pedestrians/cyclists have right of way. As that video shows, it works pretty well over there. I'm not sure the proportion of dangerous / self entitled drivers in North America would support it, though.
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Jun 6, 2013 06:02
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nielsm posted:
Interestingly, in an earlier version of that manual, the "perimeter method" was called the "Copenhagen method". I guess this is why. Volmarias posted:If I (poorly) recall, these are the hand gestures to use if your vehicle lights are broken. I can't imagine why given how few people with perfectly functional lights can't signal anyway I think the right-turn-with-bent-left-arm signal is a Canadian oddity, not generally used in other places. I used to use it while riding here, but in the past year or two have switched to just using my straight arm in the direction I'm turning, since it's a lot less ambiguous. A lot of motorists still don't seem to understand what it means, though -- for example when I'm making a right turn and there's someone waiting to pull out of the side street I'm turning into, no amount of signalling will reassure them that it's safe to pull out until I've actually gone past. Mine GO BOOM posted:I prefer to think of bicyclist as being the same as a motorcycle at stop signs. If there is no traffic, slow down to almost a walking pace, then continue through. Don't need to touch the ground with your feet, but you should reach at least <5mph speeds by the time you pass through the stop sign. In Idaho, this is law (for cyclists). It's also a very popular idea among bicycle advocates. Cichlidae posted:PROWAG wants us to put ped signals at every multi-lane entrance and exit. I can't imagine how tough that's going to make the design. I understand that accessibility is a must, but this is going to discourage designers from making roundabouts where they could save lots of lives. I don't really know how it would be best to handle pedestrian safety in the USA. As I posted above, in the Netherlands, they do this by giving pedestrians (and cyclists) priority over cars. But in the Netherlands, motorists are aware of this, and act appropriately. They approach the traffic circle at a safe speed and keep a lookout at the crossings. While I reckon 50-75% of North American drivers could handle this, it only takes a few crazies to turn things very, very dangerous. One other thing about the Netherlands in terms of cyclist safety: if a motorist hits a cyclist, it's treated the same as if they hit a pedestrian, in that the motorist is presumed to be at fault unless they can provide compelling evidence otherwise. This is in contrast to most parts of North America, where the blame is apportioned equally by default. In the Netherlands, it almost certainly contributes to motorists being more careful. Also, in terms of saving lives, I don't know how it is in the States, but I'm sure I saw some recent figures from BC saying that pedestrian and cyclist deaths from car accidents are starting to exceed car occupant deaths. While I believe the literature has generally shown that traffic circles save motorist lives, it's also shown that they tend to increase pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. So I have a feeling the net safety benefit of traffic circles may not be all that much, or even a detriment, especially in high pedestrian (and cyclist) traffic areas.
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Jun 6, 2013 17:28
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about cycling in Denmark
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On the topic of traffic circles and bicycles/transit, what do you think of the traffic planning in Milton Keynes? It's a city that was built from the ground up in the 60s, so the designers and engineers had free reign. They decided to build a 1km x 1km (~0.63 mile) grid of major roads and structure the city around these. In the original design, these were meant to be 30 mph roads lined with mixed commercial and residential zonings, to be the core of the community, and with traffic lighted intersections. However, in the final design, the engineers decided to turn them into 70mph dual carriage freeways with traffic circles at every intersection. The result was a city made up of tiny islands of suburbia with few amenities, very poor pedestrian and bicycle access, and a generally lovely transit system (due to there being few places where buses can safely stop). Most of the amenities have ended up in the city centre, which looks like a gigantic strip mall, complete with massive, largely empty parking lots. Mode share is about 70-80% private vehicles, way above the national average, and more in line with a city in the south-eastern United States than south-east England. There's a separated network of bike lanes, but these are incredibly poorly designed, and their safety record plus low cycle use are often used as a strawman to argue against any kind of separated cycling infrastructure in the UK at all. Of course, car traffic moves very freely. Article in Traffic Engineering + Control making the strawman argument against separated bike lanes A blog post providing good counter-arguments, with photographs of the terrible, terrible design of the separated bikeways An article in the Journal of Urban Design by one of the original designers, explaining what went wrong.
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Jun 11, 2013 18:02
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Kakairo posted:The pedestrian/cyclist/public transit situation can't be improved without major infrastructure changes. I can't help thinking that they almost got it right, but needed a few tweaks--larger commercial zones spread out, aligning the Redway closer to the actual grid--it could have been successful. I think the main and biggest mistake they made was in turning the grid into a freeway system, rather than the network of urban high streets it was intended to be. At least, that's what the article I posted in that last link argues -- and the author was one of the original design team. I've found a PDF since then: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/4642/1/4642.pdf Michael Edwards posted:For all these reasons I submit that Milton Keynes is not the place it might have been. The view from the road—the experience of getting around—is in fact what you see when speeding along expressways, lined with fine planting, with occasional slip-roads off to named, but invisible, neighbourhoods, workplaces and services. Buses follow circuitous routes and are thinly patronised. Most local shopping centres struggle to maintain viability, tucked away and dependent on their designed ‘catchment areas’. Pedestrian routes are often segregated from the roads and the typical resident may have quite a long walk to the bus, often through woodland which can be dripping and rather scary. Travel is overwhelmingly by car (especially for men) with buses tending to carry women and children. The segregated cycle paths work well, however, and redeem the situation for many people, especially older children and young adults. His suggestions for fixing things are to set the speed limit to 30mph, replace traffic circles with traffic lights, and rip up the forests lining the grid, to be replaced with high density commerce. This would bring it back in line with how the original plan was intended to be. Fat chance of any of that happening, though.
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Jun 11, 2013 23:30
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Hedera Helix posted:Le Corbusier was a very sick person. It's mystifying as to why he was so influential at the time. I'm busy reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities (which thoroughly excoriates Le Corbusier and the consequences of his planning, especially on socialised housing in the US). The most ironic thing is that Le Corbusier was apparently a syndicalist, and a lot of the Modernist designers had communist leanings (e.g. Niemeyer who built Brasilia to Le Corbusier's principles), yet their designs have only made things worse for the poor, and better for the rich. Install Gentoo posted:Current Paris is itself some random officials' "knock down everything we can and build something modern*" planned design. I get the impression that "modern" urban planners see Haussmann's design principles as a kind of antidote to the worst aspects of the Modernists. It's interesting that one of the strawman arguments that seems to be raised against Jane Jacobs is the claim that she was advocating against urban planning enitrely. So far I have yet to see this in her book. She just advocates the right kinds of urban planning: taking an approach that works with the emergent processes of city growth, rather than against them. Planning itself is not bad, just planning that caters to automobiles at the expense of all other modes of transportation.
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Jun 12, 2013 07:21
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Install Gentoo posted:It has been done before, and was really rather useful: Couple those with high-capacity cargo bikes and you might actually have a solution. (I know one of the guys who started that company. They can carry about 500lbs on the back of one of those things. They have an electric assist, but they still use the pedals, and they are a whole heck of a lot quieter and safer than big trucks.) Koesj posted:Get off your high horse. I don't know where you live, might be a hellhole, but there's a place for cars in a healthy modal mix. Get off your high horse. This is total woolgathering -- nobody seriously believes that cars are going to be eliminated from the modal mix, but that isn't stopping you getting incredibly defensive. smackfu posted:I thought that congestion pricing was the modern version of "car-free" cities. It seems pretty effective in Europe, especially if they throttle it way down so that there's not much car traffic at all. Have you seen the traffic in daytime central London lately?
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Jun 13, 2013 03:43
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NihilismNow posted:To be fair at 500lbs you should not be comparing them to a big truck but a small car. I'm sure there is a niche for those and i see comparable vehicles on the road here. But it takes 10 of those to replace 1 medium delivery van in capacity. I am pretty sure that ammount of trips and labour involved in making those trips is not economical at all and would actually increase congestion in a busy city center. What I wonder about (rather than freight trams or underground freightways), is whether you couldn't just use old fashioned freight rail to a warehouse, so your final delivery vehicles only have a short (1-5km) trip to make. But yes, there is the issue of capacity. Apparently one of the aspects of the City of Vancouver's long-term transportation plan is more big trucks. Koesj posted:Sorry, didn't mean to get defensive! No worries.  Mandalay posted:Is traffic bad? I imagine that there is more than one input into prices than "demand". I still think an increase in gas prices or electronic tolling is THE FUTURE because (driving) freedom isn't free. When my wife and I visited last year, she insisted that we take a cab from Liverpool Street Station to our hotel near Earl's Court, rather than the Underground. The journey was about 7 miles, and took an hour. This was at 2 in the afternoon, so hardly peak time. For gently caress's sake, we've both lived in London before, and should have known better, but neither of us had taken a cab during the daytime before, and in the evening traffic flows smoothly enough that they work pretty well. For what it's worth I was sceptical of the cab idea before we even got in. Most of that traffic was delivery vans and cabs. I'm sure the congestion charge has helped somewhat, but London daytime traffic remains a mess.
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Jun 13, 2013 18:00
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Incidentally, urban planning academic John Pucher is giving a talk about urban planning for increasing walking and cycling, tomorrow (Friday) evening in Vancouver at 7pm. It'll be webcast if anyone's interested in tuning in. http://www.sfu.ca/continuing-studies/events/2013/06/how-to-increase-cycling-and-walking.html
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Jun 14, 2013 07:37
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I think I recall seeing similar stats nationwide for the UK -- decreasing overall injuries from car accidents, but stable (or only slowly decreasing) fatalities. They suggested that the decrease in injuries might be due to cars being built with more safety features, but that the lack of a decrease in fatalities (or increase in the chance of a car accident being fatal, if you will) might be due to cars being bigger and hence more momentum being involved.
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Jun 20, 2013 23:09
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OK, here's a serious traffic planning question. I present the Stanley Park Causeway: 1.8km of 3-lane road with switchable lane direction connecting the Lion's Gate Bridge to downtown Vancouver. It serves its purpose fairly well for motorists as the major arterial connection between West Vancouver and downtown. However, it is also a major route for cycle commuters. In fact, it is the only route through Stanley Park (a forest under conservation) that is lit, so cycle commuters don't have much choice during winter. The cycling infrastructure, however, consists of a narrow sidewalk shared with pedestrians, with a one-foot drop to the motorway. The road is on a slope, so this works reasonably well on the uphill side, where cyclists don't go much faster than walkers. On the downhill, it creates an extremely dangerous situation, with cyclists picking up speed, but running the risk of falling into traffic if they lose control of their bike. This happened a month ago, and the cyclist in question fell in front of a bus and was killed instantly. Needless to say, the fatality has had cycling advocacy organisations, as well as the City of Vancouver, and the Provincial Ministry of Transportation (who are actually responsible for the stretch of road) looking for solutions. Nothing concrete has been suggested yet. The question I have is, what would you do to make this road safer for cyclists (and pedestrians)? Would a railing be enough? Maybe separated paths for cyclists and pedestrians (but could these be put in place without cutting down trees)? This is not an entirely moot question. I am involved with one of these cycling organisations, and so far our position is just that "something" needs to be done. It would be good to nail that down to some viable proposals we can start lobbying for.
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Jun 24, 2013 07:09
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Koesj posted:Build a new bridge next to the existing one, preferably combined transit/cycling/ped. Yes, the bridge is also an issue, albeit something of a lesser one. The focus right now is on the road going through Stanley Park to the bridge, however. I'm told the bridge may become transit/ped/cyclist only at some point between now and 2040, although I'll believe that when I see it. Jethro posted:This would be good if not for the fact that neither bikes nor pedestrians care very much about rules. Road users in general don't care much about the rules; good traffic design should try to provide as few opportunities for them to do stupid/illegal things and kill themselves/others as possible. The real issue I could see with having one side bikes only and the other peds only is that a pedestrian caught on the bike side has nowhere legitimate to go after they get buzzed by a bike halfway along the path and realise they're on the wrong side (and vice versa). Volmarias posted:A series of shuttles that run back and forth across the stretch of road, ferrying cyclists from one end to the other. Safe and efficient. If cyclists are concerned about their environmental impact of their activity they can give the driver like $2 for the gas or something. I'm pretty sure that the majority of cyclists, if given the choice between a shuttle (that would probably only run every half- or quarter-hour at best), and taking their chances on the lovely infrastructure, would choose the lovely infrastructure. For reference, there is one bike shuttle in the region, and although it works, it's really quite a headache (where if the infrastructure in question had been a bridge rather than a tunnel, it would have worked a lot better.) Wait - you were being ironic, weren't you?
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Jun 24, 2013 19:43
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Cichlidae posted:The best thing to do would be to widen the sidewalk on one side of the road and make it bike-only. You might be able to grab another half meter out of the grass on either side, and a meter or more by narrowing the travel lanes. That'd give you at least some room for a proper fence or half-section concrete barrier. On the bridge, the road's a good deal narrower, so you might require bicyclists to dismount. None of them will, but at least you're covered, legally. If you've got some cash, you could build a parallel bridge or strap on an extra couple meters to the side, if the structure can take it. I'm not sure I like that idea, for the reason that pedestrians probably wouldn't respect it (and have nowhere to go once they've started walking along the bike-only side). What I'm leaning towards is expanding the downhill side, adding a bike-only lane there (yeah pedestrians would wander into it but at least they would have a painted pedestrian lane to dodge into), and railings on both sides. The bridge is a bit less of an issue (at least there's a barrier there, even if it wouldn't really stop a cyclist from falling over it). Forcing cyclists to dismount to cross 1.5km of bridge is simply not an option. The cycling advocacy organisations wouldn't stand for it, and cyclists simply wouldn't respect it. I'm also not so sure about legal coverage -- the City was sued a few years ago by a cyclist who fell into traffic on a bridge due to bad infrastructure. They settled out of court (and fixed the bridge by removing a lane of traffic and creating separated cyclist and pedestrian lanes on both sides). It wasn't a case of someone "successfully suing", but I think it shows that you can't just put up signage / make roads that you know won't actually work, and then expect to be protected legally when people get hurt. Anyway, thanks for weighing in. E: minor copyedit Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Jun 25, 2013 |
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Jun 25, 2013 18:19
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Hedera Helix posted:A long-proposed project to replace the I-5 bridge between Portland and Vancouver, Washington was officially canceled today. It faced ferocious opposition from Washington Republicans due to its accompanying light-rail extension.  When Googling for news on this, the first article I found had this image of the senator leading the effort to get the plans scrapped:  That does not look to me like the face of a sane person. The worst part is that it sounds like they're going to have to redo $170 million in planning just to satisfy what I'm sure is nothing more than naked populist haymaking. But hey, identity politics apparently works, at least in the short-term.
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Jul 2, 2013 06:01
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Kakairo posted:I was out on my bike today (second time on my first bike in 15 years...whew), when I passed an electronic speed sign like this: I rode past one on a biggish ride in Vancouver, and it was clocking speeds for the riders that looked about right, too (20-30km/h on roughly flat terrain). PS: Come to YLLS. We have bike threads.
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Jul 5, 2013 04:10
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Kakairo posted:Thanks for the answers. Good to know my easy riding is at a good pace. Come to the Bike Commuting megathread, it's more friendly to folks on lovely department bikes, even if 50% or more of the posters are hardcore spandex-clad road warriors. /derail
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Jul 6, 2013 00:03
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Yay! Cycling infrastructure upgrades are being turned into a wedge issue in my city again. OK, to be fair, the engineers' proposal to remove a 14,000 car/day arterial (that should never have been an arterial, given how narrow it is) was probably a little too much for the car driving psyche, but it still makes me sad. Not least of all because I've heard that the traffic engineer who worked on the designs has been getting harassed on his home phone number, and has even been spat on.
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Jul 11, 2013 19:24
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Baronjutter posted:I was assuming you lived in some little right wing suburban american city... then I clicked the link. Although isn't Point Grey a famously elitist rich conservative district? Hah -- the way some people in the local political spectrum carry on, sometimes I wonder. And Point Grey .. Point Grey is pretty elitist, but has one of the highest bicycle commute mode shares in Canada (at around 12% of trips to work). Point Grey / Kits are about 50% or more ex-hippies who got rich, so there are some pretty progressive people there, but also some pretty conservative types. The anti-bike lane campaign is suspiciously well funded. They have lawn signs, and have been flyering the neighbourhood like crazy (with pamphlets containing erroneous information). I'm hoping they won't have too much of an influence, especially with the 2,600 supporting signatures, plus cycling and pedestrian advocacy organisations being in support (and actual legitimate residents associations seeming to be on the fence). The City Council meeting to vote on the proposals promises to be a complete poo poo show, however. When the representative from my organisation registered to speak, she was something like number 52, and everyone gets five minutes. The attacks on the engineer made me sad, though.
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Jul 12, 2013 07:08
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misguided rage posted:As less than three mentioned, 4th avenue a couple blocks down is a much larger road and is where that traffic is meant to be going. Pretty sure those smaller side streets have traffic calming measures in place already, traffic spilling over into them shouldn't be an issue. Point Grey Road was not intended to carry that much traffic and right now it's absolutely terrible to travel along it by any means; even if you never had a single bike on that road it would still be awful with the way it's set up now. Gah -- I've been travelling, so haven't been checking this thread. For reference, all of the planning documents for the project are online here. In terms of traffic re-routing, they have done some analysis, which can be found in this document. To summarise what they said, the traffic would be re-routed to neighbouring arterials, which would bring their traffic flow to levels similar to arterials elsewhere in the city. Interestingly, they made a decision not to try to traffic calm Cornwall Avenue itself (at least until we have real rapid transit in the area), as this would divert too much traffic. That's a little sad, as Cornwall is where the majority of the accidents are happening (and is likely what Baronjutter mainly experienced). Anyway, the improvements to the Burrard Street offramp, coupled with setting up York Avenue as a bike route, should ease that significantly. Cichlidae posted:Bike boulevards are great and all, but putting a cul-de-sac in the middle of a through street is going to severely increase your response times from emergency providers. The typical solution in these kinds of situations (in Vancouver) seems to be to install short plastic bollards that would stop the average driver but could easily pass under a fire truck. For example: this. Although infrastructure more similar to what they're proposing on Point Grey seems not to have that provision (e.g. this), that second example is on a less busy street, and in a less dense area, so I guess it makes sense to completely close it to emergency vehicles. I suspect that along Point Grey they would go with the plastic bollard solution. grover posted:Would it not be better to turn 1st or 2nd ave into one-way only with a bike lane than to divert all the point grey road traffic onto them? Seems like it's the bikes causing all the problems; remove the bikes, remove the problem. No, it would not. Both 1st and 2nd are discontinuous between Balsam and Alma. There is an existing bike route along 3rd, but to get to this from the seaside area around Cornwall requires going up a steep hill along Trafalgar. There really is no other option than Point Grey. sincx posted:Well, democracies do lead to the tyranny of the majority, and there's a lot more drivers than cyclists. We'll see, though. Vancouver is known for being the North American city that refused to build a freeway through its downtown core back in the 1960s when the car was king in urban planning. I think a lot of people realise that expansion of car mode share is not the future. ================= As an aside, and to update everyone on this particular issue, the council meeting to decide on this is in progress. It started last Tuesday, with more than 200 speakers registered, each allocated 5 minutes. They'll be reconvening for the fourth time tomorrow, although I think they're getting close to the 200 mark, so that may be the last. I haven't followed too much of it (the 40 or so hours of meeting can all be viewed online at that link  ), but reports seem to suggest that it's a mix of people speaking for and against.
Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Jul 29, 2013 |
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Jul 29, 2013 01:30
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Socket Ryanist posted:it looks like los angeles to me? I think, for those of us from outside the United States, we're not used to seeing poo poo like that outside of sci fi dystopias? Anyway, on the topic of the LA Freeway system, some crazy urban planner in Boston has rendered it as a London Underground style subway map:  http://www.stonebrowndesign.com/los-angeles-freeways.html And on the topic of the Vancouver bike lane I was talking about earlier, it passed in City Council last night. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth, then everyone getting back to their lives and completely forgetting about it by this time next year (when the slightly more conservative party running for Council will doubtless try unsuccessfully to resurrect the issue, like they did the last major cycling infrastructure upgrade.)
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Jul 31, 2013 04:01
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what's so terrible about it?
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heythisguyhere posted:Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange best interchange. Named after the judge who squashed the lawsuit(s). Ahahaha it really is straight out of Judge Dredd. Cichlidae posted:It drives me batty when politicians revisit a good idea and smack it down. "Here's ten grand to design your project, and... now throw it in the trash because we decided not to fund it." Oh, we're good. The infrastructure is scheduled to be built before the next Council election. 
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Aug 1, 2013 04:07
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As far as I know, pretty much all the studies (except those coming from the Netherlands) show a decrease in car accidents (or an increase in accidents but decrease in severity), but an increase in cyclist and pedestrian injuries. The reason the ones in the Netherlands work is because they design them with dedicated lanes for pedestrians and cyclists outside of the circle, with the peds and cyclists having priority. eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEXD0guLQY0 Also, that kind of retrofitted, "just add a round traffic island to a four-way intersection" style of traffic circle in question in Corvallis is very common in Vancouver. In fact, they got built as "traffic calming" measures along bike routes, but a recent study showed that they were the most dangerous type of intersection to cyclists by a very wide margin, topping even uncontrolled intersections. http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2013/02/13/injuryprev-2012-040561.full They recently removed one at 10th and Pine because it was one of the highest cyclist-accident locations in the city: http://goo.gl/maps/s9w17 I mean, traffic circles, when designed well, can improve traffic flow and reduce injuries. But if you don't have the space and/or political will to do them right, they can be a major obstacle to liveability in your city/town.
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Aug 2, 2013 21:17
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As far as I can tell the South is basically hosed by bad urban design resulting from the mid-20th century car mania, and continues to be hosed by the modern political climate down there. I don't think any amount of traffic engineering is going to fix that, and blaming the engineers for trying to make the best of a bad situation is pretty mean.
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Aug 4, 2013 08:41
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John Dough posted:Green pavement for cycling lanes? What barbarism is this? Some countries use red, some countries use blue (this sounds like it should be a poem), and some use green. Vancouver apparently can't decide yet so we get a mixture of green and red. Hedera Helix posted:Aw, there's nothing in there about bike boxes. Well, not explicitly, but I'm pretty sure they mean to imply it under the general cycling infrastructure section?
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Aug 22, 2013 07:17
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So does the FHWA policy mean that Portland, Oregon has to go and repaint all of its blue bike lanes green?Baronjutter posted:And here's a follow-up of a town rejecting traffic engineering orthodoxy and seeing real improvements. I'm a big fan of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street In fact, I honestly think that in cities and towns neighbourhoods should be designed with ultra-slow (7-10km/hr) streets that are safe for kids to play in for residential access, feeding into faster but still significantly calmed (30km/h) collectors, feeding into full-speed (50km/h) arterials, which can if necessary feed into faster roads for longer trips, but these should be rare.
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Aug 22, 2013 19:01
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:Would you be looking at something like this, then? Yeah Swedish urban design is often classic Garden City, and only really works because the society has such a low gini coefficient, baked-in egalitarianism, and the tax base to build and maintain infrastructure. Unfortunately they never had a failure on the scale of the 50s and 60s era housing projects to convince them of the unworkability of high-density housing standing alone in a park in the middle of nowhere. For that matter, a lot of the newer Swedish development (at least what I saw in and around Gothenburg) is looking more and more like suburban, car-dependent America (albeit with lots of buses). It's quite depressing, really. The part in that video about excluding traffic from the city centre was a bit sad, too. When we arrived in Gothenburg by train, we found ourselves (as pedestrians) having to cross this: http://goo.gl/maps/RG4Vh That's about 100m from the central railway station. FISHMANPET posted:When it comes down to it, it's pretty much impossible to design an area where you can easily walk, bike, take transit, etc, yet still let everybody drive as much as they want and own as many cars as they want. While true, it is certainly possible to design an area where people can easily walk, bike, take transit, and own a single car for occasional use. The issue comes with values: when people consider it a fundamental right to be able to drive as much as they want and own as many cars as they want, no matter the consequences for society, the consequences for society are pretty dire.
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Aug 23, 2013 17:43
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less than three posted:They're green here in Vancouver as well. Except for the red bike box at Main and Union, but they need to redo that one anyway,
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Aug 24, 2013 06:33
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grover posted:Milton Keynes was a horrible failure of an attempt to recreate an American-style urban area. It's definitely not representative of American urban planning. Urban and suburban. At least part of the horrible failure aspect of Milton Keynes was the fairly accurate reproduction of the American freeway-bounded cul-de-sac neighbourhood.
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Aug 26, 2013 07:06
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Why would it be based on GPS and not the car's built-in speedometer? I mean I'm sure the speedo on a car is not 100% accurate, but it's probably accurate enough and pretty reliable. But yes, average speed cameras make a lot of sense. They tend to generate a lot of opposition, though, because how dare you make us obey the law?  vv Yeah I didn't think of that. You could still have a "dumb" limit to the freeway maximum, though. vv Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Sep 4, 2013 |
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Sep 4, 2013 20:28
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grover posted:Or we could, you know, post reasonable speed limits, thus obviating the need to treat ordinary lawful citizens like criminals. Because speeding is a victimless crime? PittTheElder posted:Cichlidae has already been over the fact that speed limits aren't arbitrary, and have to be set considering the needs of vehicles and drivers other than a young guy in a fast car. For the residential roads, I think Cichlidae has vacillated between being frustrated by having the limit decreased where people have complained and acknowledging that you need a lower limit where there are lots of pedestrians and cyclists around. nm posted:No, most freeway and highway speed limits are set by statute on a statewide basis, not based on a speed survey. Most freeways were designed for higher speeds than the posted limit. That said, speed differential is a huge factor in accident rates. Even if the road were designed for people to hypothetically go faster, unless everyone (including HGVs) are going at that speed, you create unsafe conditions. There are also social reasons for keeping the limit lower than the maximum design speed that a high performance vehicle could go, like noise, air pollution and fuel economy.
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Sep 6, 2013 07:46
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FISHMANPET posted:The problem is that speed limits are often far lower than design speeds. Not just on freeways, but on local streets too. If you give a car a 12 foot wide lane on a residential street of course they're going to speed, you built the road so they would! I think people slowing down on narrower streets is more psychological than anything else (but yeah there are studies correlating street width with actual speed people drive at). And yeah, 12 foot wide lanes in residential areas is one of the gigantic fuckups of mid-century traffic engineering that is going to be with North America for some time to come. Of course, one of the ways Vancouver has been trying to correct for this is curb bulges (narrowing the lane at intersections). These help to slow motorists down and make it easier for pedestrians to cross. The City's other crazy-but-not-so-crazy idea was to take really wide streets and cut them in half, using the surplus half for housing. From an urban planning perspective it's fantastic -- it promotes densification and removes the problem of over-wide streets. From a private property owner perspective, though, who the gently caress wants a bunch of houses built between their house and the street? So yeah, that didn't fly. Maybe if they could offer big cash incentives (or just give the new land to the people with houses there already on the condition that they build on it).
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Sep 6, 2013 17:21
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Baronjutter posted:Was just in Seattle on the weekend, holy poo poo that city loves highways. It's like vancouver if vancouver was utterly destroyed by criss-crossing highways in every direction. One of the ways a friend of mine (and long-time Vancouver resident) described the push-back against freeways in the 70s was "people didn't want the city to end up like Seattle".
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Sep 6, 2013 20:22
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Cichlidae posted:You could always ticket people going under the minimum, too. That's every bit as illegal. My main issue is that, if enforcement is stepped up, fines should be reduced. Giving someone a $70 ticket every time they go 1mph over the limit isn't going to be well received. One dollar per (mph over the limit)^2 per mile traveled is much more equitable. Cichlidae posted:So long as they're all going the design speed, and not the arbitrarily low posted speed, it's not a problem. Just remember that higher speeds reduce delay cost and increase capacity, though there are diminishing returns. Anyway, as an aside, somebody in DnD has started a thread on urban sprawl in the USA, which may be of interest to the denizens of this thread.
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Sep 9, 2013 04:28
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To add to the bike/bus/special infrastructure colour chat of a few pages back, I'm currently visiting London, and the bike lanes here come in red, green and blue, depending on the neighbourhood. I've only bus lanes in red so far, though. The blue bike lanes are for the "cycle superhighways", and the colour was quite obviously chosen to match the branding of the corporate sponsor, Barclays Bank  .
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Sep 23, 2013 09:58
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NihilismNow posted:so why not stay in the left lane and dedicate spare brain cycles to whatsapp. Because texting while driving is like drunk-driving levels of dangerous, and also illegal in most US states (and other countries)?
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Oct 18, 2013 22:29
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Kaal posted:It sounds like a perfect opportunity for exchanging the street parking with the bike lane, and then separating the lanes. That way cars can access their parking spots, and establish a protected zone for bicyclists. Here's a picture of New York's approach to the same issue of converting a three-lane speedway to a slower two-lane with bicycling facilities: They just finished the first one of these in Vancouver, on Union Street between Main and Gore. It's really rather nice, although some drivers haven't quite adapted to it becoming a one-way yet (I saw at least one driving in the bike lane on the side of the road without parking). It was much needed, though. That section of road saw 3,000+ cyclists per day, and about as many motorists. Apparently rush hour was a complete shitshow. I'll see if I can take a photo when I pass through there today or tomorrow.
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Oct 18, 2013 22:52
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Kaal posted:One of the cool things about this style of bike facility is that it actually increases the throughput of the road. It slows down vehicular speeds, but it is more than made up for with increased bicycle traffic and reduced vehicular congestion. Yeah, it's removed one traffic lane (and made the road one way), but keeps it in the direction that most people go (to the viaduct onramp on the other side of Main Street). They did some pretty good stuff in this project overall: if you note the intersection of Union and Main on the map below, that's a weird 5-way with the onramp, and was one of the highest cycling accident locations in the city. They've now closed off Union to car traffic on the west side of Main, with a bike-passable traffic island in the middle of the intersection to reinforce that. They've also changed the light phasing to a 3 phase cycle that allows left turning traffic from Main to the viaduct to pass at the same time as cycle traffic from Union to Union. E: If anyone's interested, the planning and background documents are all online here. The main plan PDF (10MB or so) is here. The block of Union Street in question (also note the nasty intersection at Main):  Union Street before:  Union Street now, with bike lanes behind the parking:   As I said, though, a lot of motorists are still getting confused by the change to one way, and end up driving in that overly wide bike lane on the south side of the road. E: Apparently, according to the plan, that's meant to be a shared lane. I guess the few cars I've seen on it weren't going that fast, and can afford to wait behind a cyclist for one block, especially given the 30 km/h speed limit. This all raises another interesting question for Cichlidae: viaducts. That map shows the beginning of the Dunsmuir and Georgia viaducts into downtown. Here's the Google map link: http://goo.gl/maps/uqUBZ As far as I can tell, they're somewhat redundant, since Pacific and Expo Boulevards directly underneath them actually have more capacity. Historically, I'm told they were built as the first step in driving freeways through the downtown core, a project which was killed by popular protests in the 60s and 70s. Right now, the City is looking into removing them over the next decade, citing extremely high maintenance costs, the eyesore factor (that part of downtown feels like something out of Judge Dredd to have to walk through), and the fact that they are occupying several blocks of what is now prime downtown real estate. What are your feelings on this? Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Oct 19, 2013 |
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Oct 19, 2013 22:29
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smackfu posted:CT already has the 3rd highest gas taxes, behind CA and NY, and just raised them another 3.6 cents in August. The government here is just notorious for spending them on non-transportation uses, especially when gas prices spike and there's "extra" money vs. what was projected. And even when it's transportation, there's a lot of under-maintained commuter trains in CT that can always use a lot of funding. The 3rd highest gas taxes in the country with gas taxes about a fifth of what they are on average in other OECD countries are still not very high. That said, low gas taxes seems to be almost sacred in US politics, and woe betide any who try to raise them. Cichlidae posted:That third option is probably what's going to happen, and honestly, I think it's the worst of the three. At least the other two save lives. Help me folks, what do I do? Eh, one of your issues is that the benefit is a future externality (unless the entire $8 million is borne by the state government), while the cost is immediate and direct. That all said, if the crappy decision gets made (which if it is a case of immediate cost vs externalities is a near-certainty given modern US politics), and you feel really strongly about it (and brave), you could try going to the press anonymously. You have some pretty choice sound bites there (e.g. the value of life in Connecticut). Or you could use those choice sound bites on the politicians above you who will be making the decisions.
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Oct 23, 2013 19:54
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Cichlidae posted:It is an externality - that $8M is borne by society at large. If nobody pays for it, everyone suffers. We have no problem spending tens of billions to wiretap the world in the hopes of eventually saving a few lives that would've been killed by terrorists, but we could save hundreds of thousands of lives every few years for the same amount of money. The whole thing is really sickening... thewaronterror.txt There's a seriously weird thing that goes on in people's minds where they don't feel particularly afraid of dying in a car accident but do feel very afraid of dying in a terrorist bombing, even though the probability of the former is at least 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than the latter. Cichlidae posted:There's no point in going to politicians. Honestly, I'm thinking I might change fields. I tried contacting the media before about ethics, and they didn't even get back to me. I'll at least transfer out of Traffic and into Highways or Project Concepts. This ship is sinking, and it's time to get out. This probably won't make you feel better, but about 6 months ago somebody posted a poll in DnD which asked US citizens to decide which (non-military) government service they absolutely would not cut funding to. The options were social security, medicare/medicaid, education, and infrastructure. Guess which came out the lowest? By contrast, when I visited Sweden in the summer, they had a shitload of road infrastructure, and it was all immaculately kept, with fresh asphalt and nary a pothole to be seen. You live and work in a country where bridges sometimes have to actually fall down before money is allocated to maintaining them.
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Oct 29, 2013 23:22
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