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On a happier note, the City of Vancouver recently completed work on a major road crossing on my bike route, and did a really great job: One of the biggest conflicts on these kinds of intersections are between cyclists waiting on the right to go straight and motorists wanting to turn right (and only needing to wait for one lane of traffic to do so). By only allowing motorists to turn right, and creating a dedicated lane for cyclists going straight (with a push button on a central pole, rather than on the right), this conflict is eliminated. I'm really pleased with how they did this, and I really hope they adopt this design elsewhere.
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Oct 29, 2013 23:30
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MrYenko posted:Not being a cyclist myself, I've never understood why the law puts them in traffic with motor vehicles. I just don't see how the accident between a bicycle and a pedestrian could be in any way as bad as between a bicycle and a car. This actually comes down to something of an ideological schism within the cycling advocacy community. John Pucher argues that, particularly in North America, this is due to the influence of John Forester's vehicular cycling movement on traffic planning over the past 3-4 decades. Forester posited that "cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles". This is not bad advice where infrastructure is limited, and a cyclist's best bet is to be as visible and predictable as possible, for example taking the lane to prevent motorists from crowding them off the road, or going through intersections the same way cars do so as to be in the places a motorist would normally look for other vehicles. However, as Pucher argues, this has gotten twisted around into an argument that, because cyclists are best off acting like cars, they don't need any special infrastructure at all, and that this is how a lot of North American traffic planning has gone until fairly recently. Pucher is much more in favour of the (continental) European system of separated cycle tracks, although he isn't especially opposed to the North American compromise of Bike Boulevards -- roads with quite low speed limits and traffic calming where cyclists ride with low levels of slow-moving motor traffic. But, as Baronjutter pointed out, ped-cyclist accidents can be pretty dangerous, and cycling on sidewalks is especially dangerous for the cyclist because of vehicle interactions when crossing side streets/driveways. One other interesting data point, though: multi-user paths (ie shared cyclist/pedestrian infrastructure) are really bad. In a very recent study (of emergency room visitors) conducted in Vancouver and Toronto, the only type of infrastructure more likely to send cyclists to the ER turned out to be major roads with parked cars on the side. The same study showed that cyclists all think they're super-safe, too. By contrast, in the Netherlands/Denmark, cycling and pedestrian tracks are always separated. http://cyclingincities.spph.ubc.ca/injuries/the-bice-study/
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Nov 4, 2013 22:36
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Kaal posted:That street is probably part of a designated municipal bike route, which means that it's a secondary road intended to act as a magnet for cyclists in order to deconflict alternate routes. And so it's common to divert vehicular thru-traffic toward main streets in order to make the bike routes safer for cyclists. Eugene, OR has a bunch of intersections that are just like that. Local residents can still drive to and from their homes via alternate routes, but it cuts down on folks who are trying to save time on a commute. It's exactly that. Here's the Google maps link: http://goo.gl/maps/DRznT Two blocks east is Cambie Street, a multi-lane arterial. Two blocks west is Oak Street, also a multi-lane arterial. Given the proximity of better roads for cars, there is no reason not to have it blocked off. Also, north and south along Heather are a bunch of features you don't want motorists zooming past, including a hospital, old age home and two parks. Entropist posted:Is that really a source of conflict? Cyclists are flexible, when you see that a car has their right turning signal on, you can go wait on the left side instead to avoid getting in the way. That's how people do it in the Netherlands anyway. In that Google maps street view you can see the problem: the crossing button for cyclists is placed on the right hand side of the intersection (note that in the new intersection design it is on the left). This forces cyclists to pull over to the right while going straight, and motorists to pull up on their left while turning right. Pretty much all the intersections where a bike route crosses a major road in Vancouver are like this. Fortunately they are steadily shifting to buttons on the left. Amused to Death posted:We want them to treat each other as equals and share the road while, to quote some posts up, also assuming they're in a constant blood feud with each other. You know, I find that the "blood feud"/"war on cars" thing tends to only come up when some populist politician wants to use cycling as a wedge issue (see for example Rob Ford in Toronto, or the NPA and their tame columnists in Vancouver). There were some pretty good articles written about this two years ago: http://thetyee.ca/Life/2011/06/15/WarOnCars/ http://daily.sightline.org/2011/01/03/war-on-cars-a-history/ Eric de Place posted:There’s something almost laughably overheated about the “war on cars” rhetoric. It’s almost as if the purveyors of the phrase have either lost their cool entirely, or else they’re trying desperately to avoid a level-headed discussion of transportation policy.
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Nov 5, 2013 02:33
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Install Windows posted:That old design seems like the unhappy child of those early 20th century drawings of ridiculously multilevel cities and normal roads. You know, those illustrations from like the Popular Mechanics of 1948 or so where there's cities of 100 story skyscrapers and every 10 floors you have roads for a different kind of traffic and the top tier is just landing strips and taxiways into the buildings for compact airplanes. Yep -- classic Garden City. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:Meanwhile in Europe, http://green.autoblog.com/2013/10/29/bicycles-outsold-cars-all-over-europe-last-year/ You know, I was visiting London a few months ago, and, with my newfound sense of cycling and road infrastructure, was pretty appalled at the overall setup. But it occurs to me that the main issue is that you have a city which did most of its growing into a metropolis back in the days of horse carriages (and to a greater degree than cities pretty much anywhere, due to the whole height of the British Empire thing). And, unlike say Paris or Berlin, there was never any major urban replanning/reconstruction. So you have a whole lot of roads that are barely wide enough for two cars to squeeze by going the opposite direction, but in addition they allow people to park, and try to fit in cycling infrastructure. Cyclists seemed to just ride in the door zone as a matter of course. I mean stuff like this: http://goo.gl/maps/x6eek They've tried to put it some bike boxes, and a weird kind bike lane in one spot, and there were really a lot of cyclists using this street, but there also absolutely isn't room for a car to pass a bicycle safely, nor is there room on such a narrow street to create that. Money-wise, Boris has kinda pledged a billion pounds over the next decade -- £100 million a year can go quite a long way in terms of building cycling infrastructure. Plus those blue painted bike lanes are actually sponsored (the blue is for loving Barclay's corporate branding). But here is a question for the traffic engineers: how do you build safe cycling infrastructure in London (given incredibly narrow roads through suburbs built 150+ years ago)?
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Nov 10, 2013 07:20
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Install Windows posted:Despite the fact that urban freeways are usually terrible things, London could have actually benefited from having the ringways and their radials built, if for no other reason then to have a lot of traffic shifted onto them from the surface road network. Instead it's all just a mess, with the apparent intent that this would magically cause people to stop using cars so much. That obviously didn't work. Why do you say that? The private vehicle mode share in London is at 34%, down from 46% in 1993. The absolute number of private vehicle trips has also been decreasing slightly (slowed somewhat by the city having grown by a million people or so over that time). See this TfL report, specifically tables 2.2 and 2.3 on pages 24 and 26. I'm not denying that it's a mess, but it is measurably less of a mess than it was 20 years ago. Entropist posted:My first thought was that this doesn't look narrow at all! I guess you just have to be used to it. If cars are parked at the traffic light, you don't need much space to squeeze past them and get into the bike box. And in normal traffic, they can use a bit of the other lane to get around you. Here's a spot a short distance away from there, which better illustrates the problem. The way people were using this road was that cyclists were riding within touching distance of the parked cars (ie right in the way of a flung open car door), while motorists were passing them in both directions without actually overtaking into the other lane. Here's an example of a cyclist riding right in the door zone: http://goo.gl/maps/FV2Vg I mean, if I biked that road, there's no question that I would take the lane, but I would be willing to bet that motorists would get pissy at me for it. This could also be a mode share thing. There are studies showing that as mode share increases, bicycle accident rate decreases, with the generally accepted explanation being that motorists get used to sharing the road with bicycles and stop doing stupid and dangerous poo poo around them.
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Nov 11, 2013 22:30
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Install Windows posted:There's a little something you might have heard of that they actually did since then, which was the congestion charge zone actively keeping people out of parts of the conglomeration. Plus the stopping of real road improvements was a good 20 years before 93! The congestion charge was only introduced in 2003. Also, although I haven't found mode share data going back to the 70s, why are you assuming the trend wasn't the same? I'm not sure what you're trying to get at, though. Are you arguing against the idea of induced demand?
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Nov 11, 2013 23:37
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Eh, helmetchat. I found this article describing a local journalist interviewing international cycle planning experts at a conference in Vancouver. He keeps trying to push them on helmets, and they keep pointing out that helmet laws are bad for cycling and a waste of energy which cycling advocates could be putting into more important issues like building safe infrastructure. Other than the two points that adult helmet laws are actively and measurably harmful to cycling safety, but that you as an individual may want to wear one depending on how you ride and where, helmetchat is invariably a huge waste of energy.
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Nov 20, 2013 23:40
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RadioPassive posted:Flashing green is specifically advised against in the MUTCD: The ones in Vancouver are similar -- they're used at intersections of side streets with major roads, where the side street has no traffic light, only a stop sign (and pedestrian/cyclist buttons). During the green phase on the main street, the lights flash green to indicate that motorists should approach with care, and yield to traffic in the intersection if there is any. Motorists at side streets should only enter the intersection when it appears safe, but if they're in already, they have right of way. Of course, basically nobody knows this, and tons of people go screaming through the flashing greens at speed, then get all upset when they hit somebody on a green light and the courts find them at fault: http://bc-injury-law.com/blog/tag/flashing-green-lights
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Feb 25, 2014 23:21
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Varance posted:Ever since I got into transit, I've had to teach myself how to nudge instead of push. Baby steps, because anything else is too scary for Joe Average or too uncomfortable for Joe Politician. Transit, man. In Vancouver we have the busiest bus corridor in North America, but the amount of opposition that's come up to building an LRT or underground alternative is so depressing. http://www.translink.ca/en/Plans-and-Projects/Rapid-Transit-Projects/UBC-Line-Rapid-Transit-Study.aspx And by busiest I mean that during rush hour there are articulated buses packed to capacity running as fast as they can load, and that's still not enough.
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Apr 14, 2014 18:56
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Cichlidae posted:
Would a width mapping like Tufte's beloved Napoleonic Russian Campaign map work? If your problem is occlusion, you could try mapping it to a graph with edges for each road section, and then fiddling with different graph layouts. Cytoscape is free and would let you do that.
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Apr 18, 2014 00:40
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Cichlidae posted:Yeah, occlusion is the issue. What do you mean by mapping it to a graph? I need to keep the ramps in a recognizable arrangements so I won't have to label anything, because that's just going to be NUTS. I mean a graph in the mathematical sense. Cytoscape lets you map whatever data you want to nodes and edges, then colour/size/style them according to that data. It also has graph layout algorithms that try to show the structure of things, but that would probably make the system unrecognisable. It might be necessary, though (a schematic rather than cartographically accurate representation).
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Apr 22, 2014 04:24
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Cichlidae posted:Ah yeah, I guess I could've done it in ArcGIS or TransCAD, too, if I wanted something set up that way. But my boss said, "don't spend more than a couple hours on it," and so Photoshop it was. Yeah a schematic would probably work better for making design decisions, but simple is definitely better for convincing policy makers or the public. That map definitely looks like it'll do the job. You guys have per-lane data on this stuff? How do you gather that?
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Apr 22, 2014 22:35
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Varance posted:Hell, Tampa was looking into ways of tolling local roads before this even came up. Tolls, Tolls Everywhere. Given the political impossibility of raising gas taxes in the USA, I'm not sure how else you'd do it. I like that the fund is due to run out just in time for the elections. I wonder if congress will turn this into a replay of the default crisis in miniature.
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May 1, 2014 16:56
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:No, you mean "figuratively". I'm seeing images of jet-propelled, low-radar-profile flying toilet seats. On the topic of the highway fund: on the one hand, the government shutdown seems to have largely backfired on the Republicans, so I don't see this going any better for them. On the other hand, they seem crazy enough to want to play chicken. Also, there was a poll posted in DnD some months ago, asking Americans what government service they would be least willing to cut. Infrastructure came out last - it was competing against healthcare, education, defense and social security, though. But I read that and thought, "Yep, expect even more potholes and falling bridges."
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May 14, 2014 17:23
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Haifisch posted:Around here a lot of people won't stop for pedestrians, but the pedestrians also jaywalk all over the place and weave between (stopped) cars. We're in that weird zone where people walk enough to get pedestrians but not enough for anyone to know what to do when another human wants to cross the road. Bigger cities have enough of both kinds of traffic that each one just goes in a wave, smaller towns can just have people cross when there's not a car coming. Well, here's the history of how this came to be. Don't mind the inflammatory headline -- the article is pretty good. Varance posted:My perspective is kinda flawed, given that Florida is famous for dead pedestrians. Our four big MSAs take the 4 top spots for "likely to get killed trying to cross the road." If you try to cross the road in Florida, even at a crosswalk with a florescent green/yellow vest with reflective striping on, you will get run over. Yeah, at one point when I was looking up safe cycling advice, I came on a Florida website, that advised people not to walk their bikes in a crosswalk, as it reduces your ability to leap out of the way of cars.  . It seemed kinda weird to me, but I guess now it makes sense.
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May 22, 2014 17:31
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ConfusedUs posted:I wish this was done in a more academical manner, with sources and footnotes. Oh definitely, although that article does stick to a combination of easily verifiable facts and hyperlinks in place of references. But, since you asked, here's an equivalent, academic article for Britain: http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/2012/114/113.short The journal is Radical History Review, though.  Here's a gentler article, focusing more on flow than safety: http://geography.uwo.ca/speakerseries/poster/Nixon.Article.for.Discussion.pdf
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May 22, 2014 23:27
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Cichlidae posted:As for the parking spaces, I don't think it's possible to get rid of on-street parking, no matter who owns it, without risking a lawsuit. Best case scenario, they'll settle with you. Worst, they'll torpedo your project. In Vancouver, they are in the process of converting a narrow road that had turned into an arterial route into neighbourhood street and a bikeway by blocking off parts of the road. In the process, they are losing some on-street parking. There were a bunch of threatened lawsuits (not actually to do with the parking, so much as with changes in traffic flow, IIRC), but nothing came of them. Do you know of any cases where a lawsuit over lost street parking has been successful? Cichlidae posted:Now for another discussion topic (as if we needed more): I was wondering today how traffic engineering contributes to gentrification and if our streetscape projects are really helping people, or just driving them deeper into poverty. This probably isn't something I should lose sleep over, but I like to be ethical, y'know? There's a vaguely related thread in DnD. In terms of poverty, some of the voices in that thread with a more direct perspective would be Mugrim (works with non-profits directly helping the poor) and DR ZIMBARDO (union organiser). At least, they have a better perspective than the goony "self-driving cars will fix everything" response of a lot of the other posters. But a lot of the issues are well beyond the control of traffic engineers themselves: car subsidisation, fuel subsidisation, zoning decisions creating sprawl, disincentivising (or outright banning) of public transit / walking / cycling, etc. Fifty to ninety years ago, however, when the science fiction dream of mega-highways was all the rage, I do believe traffic engineers did a lot to screw things up for the poor. More recently, there are still issues. You should read the articles I linked in my earlier post. Here's one quote, at least giving some people's perspective: Pedestrian advocate posted:Knowing the issues it's impossible not to be an advocate. It's not something to be ashamed of - to be an advocate for pedestrians. I'm called an advocate but that's because my ideas haven't been accepted yet. We don't call traffic engineers advocates for automobiles. We call them experts in moving automobiles when in fact they are advocates as much as I'm an advocate. I think it's an irrelevant distinction and one that is used to question the expertise of people who take a common sense and human-based approach to planning From the UK article: UK article posted:[Ernest] Marples even intensified the reorganization of public space by not only cooperating more closely with the governmental Transport and Road Research Laboratory but also by establishing within the ministry a special Traffic
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May 28, 2014 18:24
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MrYenko posted:Lights are supposed to be coordinated? I'm pretty sure Miami just installs the light, and the guy with the hard hat WAGs the timing when he's setting it up, and no one ever touches the thing after that. Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_wave Only works in one direction, though, so I assume they set it up for rush hour and change direction between morning and evening.
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Jun 7, 2014 07:03
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Well, on the topic of tolling, transit and infrastructure funding, there's an interesting and ongoing showdown between local and provincial government in British Columbia. In the provincial elections last year, the BC Liberals' leader, Christy Clark, made an election promise to hold a referendum on any new funding streams for public transit. It was pretty clear from the context that it was a "no new taxes, no how" kind of promise, and at the same time the BC Liberals have been starving Translink (the government-held corporation running the Province's public transit). Meanwhile, the mayors of the municipalities making up Metro Vancouver are making GBS threads themselves as the metro keeps growing and tons of transit-centric new development is happening while the province (under the BC Liberals) has been effectively cutting transit funding. Anyway, since the referendum proposal was stupid and poorly thought out to begin with, our provincial Minister of Transportation shirked off the responsibility of coming up with a plan for people to vote on to the mayors (despite transit being a provincial, not municipal, responsibility). Yesterday, the mayors published that plan, and it's already full of compromises and far from adequate, but under the threat of a public referendum on a new tax (like that would ever pass anywhere in North America in today's political climate), that's what you get. http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Metro+Vancouver+mayors+look+tolls+carbon+fund+billion+transit/9932710/story.html http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/rejects+Metro+Vancouver+mayors+plan+carbon+help+fund+billion+transit+boost/9932710/story.html The proposed revenue source is "mobility pricing", which I believe will take the form of tolls (mainly on bridges), but could be levied in other ways? In fact, they're talking about cutting gas taxes at the same time, to sweeten the deal to the public. They also wanted to take some money out of carbon taxes (a provincial income-based tax), but the province said no. Anyway, I think tolls can be less gently caress-the-poors when they're used to fund cheaper means of transportation, like public transit, cycling and walking infrastructure. They also seem to be a viable means of achieving transportation demand management?
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Jun 13, 2014 17:45
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PittTheElder posted:Baron is also Canadian though, so the MUTCD probably doesn't need to be zealously followed. Of course I can't speak for the railway he's building. Yeah he'd be looking for the TAC guidelines. Unfortunately, unlike the American guidelines, you have to pay (through your nose) for a copy of those. http://tac-atc.ca/en/bookstore-and-resources/bookstore E: The BC supplement is free, though: http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/publications/eng_publications/geomet/TAC/TAC.htm#chapters Here's the chapter you want for maximum local authenticity: http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/publications/eng_publications/geomet/TAC/TAC_2007_Supplement/Ch1100-2007.pdf Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 01:52
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Cichlidae posted:Version two: Definitely better, but I would have gone with bars rather than size of car icon to represent the volume. Length is easier to parse visually than area. You could even make the bars out of cars or something cute, just make sure the lengths are accurate. Also, if you're going to be doing many more of these, I highly recommend reading some books by Edward Tufte.
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Jul 9, 2014 04:02
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Cichlidae posted:My money's on lazy-rear end traffic calming. Or they planned to add a third leg and never did, which is a common situation in subdivisions and commercial parks. We've got one like that in Berlin, CT: http://binged.it/1r960CH Yeah it looks like there's a major road just to the north that it was meant to intersect with. But it could also be lazy traffic calming. It's annoying if it is, though, as there are so many better ways of doing that.
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Jul 26, 2014 07:42
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Communist Zombie posted:No the number is fine, he just made them more than half again as large as 'necessary', especially the bike lane. Oh? In the Netherlands, bike lanes must be a minimum of 1.8m wide. In most parts of the UK (though not apparently London based on what I saw there), it's 1.5m. That looks like a two-way bike lane, so 3m - 4m is about right. http://www.camcycle.org.uk/resources/cyclelanewidths/ http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/state-of-the-art-bikeway-design-or-is-it/ Properly designed bike lanes should allow cyclists to pass each other while remaining in the lane. E: Dutch Engineer posted:It really doesn't matter a lot that there are only 2 car lanes. Suppose a car or truck accidentally swerves on the bike lane? The bridge deck has to be able to resist the loads of that truck, or else it collapses on the train tracks, along with the truck. That's why you have concrete separators for bike lanes.  Well, in an ideal world.Dutch Engineer posted:And the moment your city decides they want to use the ped and bike lanes as car lanes instead, you're already prepared for it. Yes, that will happen. Does this happen in this day and age? I thought most cities were shifting towards more bike infrastructure, not less. Well, I heard of it happening in a very big, major route bridge in Vancouver, where they dedicated one lane to cyclists for about two weeks after opening the bridge, then just turned it over to cars (leaving cyclists to have to ride on a narrow sidewalk with nothing but a low handrail separating them from a 50m drop), but that was 15 years ago, and on a huge arterial, not a little 25m span. Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 18:37
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Entropist posted:They could for example add car lanes to the bridge, and build a separate lightweight bike and ped bridge next to it if they want to increase capacity. Out of curiosity, how do the costs weigh up between adding bike lanes to an existing multi-lane bridge (by widening it), versus constructing a new, dedicated bicycle/ped bridge? Say a bridge like this or this.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:23
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Baronjutter posted:Because the connecting cycle track is on that side of the road. The rest of the road is like that. Sidewalk, lane lane, buffer, 2-way cycle track, sidewalk. They did two-way cycle tracks in downtown Vancouver (example). While it's nice to have the separated facility, having it two way on one side of the street seriously complicated the intersection design, and makes it a bit tricky to get on and off the cycle track in a lot of places. Plus the lanes are actually really narrow for two-way cycle traffic (some of which can be going quite fast). Two-way bike lanes are a hacky solution for when there isn't enough space. drunkill posted:This is more urban planning than road engineering but the plan has a couple of neat road cross sections in the proposed designs.  2m bike lanes? Set on the outside of parking with a buffer rather than right in the door zone?  Baronjutter posted:A lot of those streets seem a bit wide, but I guess you need to be wide if you're including all that stuff. The actual roadway is really narrow -- about 1/4 the width of the "street" or less. For comparison, Berlin.
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Jul 29, 2014 18:35
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Boldor posted:
It's physically impossible for renewables to produce enough electricity to even keep up with current consumption, let alone power cars on top of that. Nuclear is much-beloved by many goons (and internet nerds generally) as a "sustainable" option, although the technologies for newer (safer/cheaper/cleaner) reactors are unproven, and it's entirely unclear that either the political will or the resources exist to actually replace the current fossil fuel infrastructure before it runs out and/or destroys the climate. From the US EIA currently: EIA posted:What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source? Right now, and barring a political and technological miracle in the future, electrical cars are just another (and less efficient) way of burning fossil fuels. I mean sure, in a fantasy world where electricity is both fully sustainably generated and provides twice the current KWH, the rest of your theorycrafting might hold. But in practical terms, the kind of future where everyone has a self-driving, fully sustainable car is utopian thinking on the scale of the super-skyscrapers and 50-lane expressways imagined in the 1920s.
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Aug 7, 2014 18:52
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God dammit. I actually just came here to post about actual traffic engineering stuff. Here goes: Physically separated bike lanes are, generally speaking, a good thing, and pretty standard in Denmark and the Netherlands. They are starting to appear in North America, but rather being raised up on a curb like in Europe, they tend to just be a chunk of roadway separated by a concrete barrier. One consequence is that drivers sometimes end up going down them: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-driver-in-separated-bike-lane-almost-right-hooks-cyclist-1.2729054 I guess one solution would be to put a bollard at the end of each block, physically blocking cars out. But is there some reason why, in North America, they don't just raise the bike lane up on a curb?
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Aug 7, 2014 18:58
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PittTheElder posted:Are they truly less efficient though? Just by concentrating your carbon emissions in one place, it becomes much more feasible to scrub it and reduce the carbon content before it hits the atmosphere. Now I have no idea if US plants actually bother to do it, but doing it on a few thousand power plants is much easier than doing it on a few million consumer vehicles. I was thinking more in terms of EROEI due to losses from the battery (vs gasoline which can be stored more efficiently. However, now that I'm looking, I'm having a hard time getting solid numbers for comparison. You would also have to factor in coal power transportation, generation, and transmission EROEI vs gasoline extraction, refinement and transportation EROEI. It is possible that electric cars use less energy than gasoline powered ones.  For sure, though, electric cars would make carbon scrubbing easier. I don't think they're doing it widely in the US as yet, but Obama has been making rumblings about mandating it for new coal plants. Of course, carbon sequestration makes the electricity generation EROEI even worse, and the feasibility of widespread adoption of electric cars even lower.
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Aug 8, 2014 07:44
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You'd think they'd be happy. Carbon sequestration means burning more coal per kWh, which means more coal needing to be freighted around.
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Aug 8, 2014 16:25
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Cichlidae posted:With a normal four-way intersection, it is a lot safer the way they've striped it. Having an "unofficial" second lane is a huge hazard to an opposing car turning left. In this case, since the cross street is one-way, it's not quite as dangerous. There aren't as many conflict points and there aren't opposing left turns that could conceal a through vehicle. Yeah, the very pervasive tendency in BC (maybe all of Canada?) to create intersections with 2-3 "unofficial" lanes has never seemed especially safe to me. It gets much, much worse when you include cyclists, and an (incorrect but pervasive) expectation that cyclists should always be to the far right, even when going straight or turning left. Four way stops become eight-way, and intersections end up with more possibilities for conflict than not.
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Sep 3, 2014 08:05
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Kaal posted:Well, cycle lanes ought to be on the far right because it reduces conflicts and is safer, but that is often not the case in Canada and America. If you have a complete system of separated bike lanes, absolutely. But yeah, this is not the case almost anywhere in Canada and America. Also, that system works not by reducing conflicts, but by making them more visible and then relying on the fact that, in the Netherlands, motorists get into deep poo poo if they hit a cyclist. This is also not the case in Canada and America. When cyclists are sharing the road with motorists, the only safe and legal way for cyclists to proceed through an intersection is in the correct lane for the direction they are travelling, and not in "inferred" or "unofficial" lanes.
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Sep 3, 2014 20:55
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Carbon dioxide posted:In the Netherlands in some places you can see this sign: Yeah, here's a local example: https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.2622141,-123.065868,3a,75.5y,66.4h,63.58t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s9tuLPmLYqnLqGBpeJtIP8g!2e0 Of course, Vancouver has largely switched to green paint now (and I suspect that one may have been repainted, but haven't gone by there in a while). It also may not help that much: Rime posted:If anyone was inconvenience by the traffic jam at Broadway & Victoria this afternoon around 5:30, sorry, really wish that car hadn't hit me while doing 50kmh.  Oh god it could have been this part of the intersection, which is even worse. Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 23:13
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Consist posted:There's actually quite a few people in LA who bike, even if the percentage of people biking to work is really low, that's really a function of the sheer mass of people commuting in the area. Yeah, Vancouver's bike share, if it ever gets past the problems of compulsory helmet laws and the provider they were going to use going bankrupt, will only be available downtown and along the Broadway corridor - the densest parts of town. I'm pretty sure this is how most cities do it.
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Oct 10, 2014 20:22
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Baronjutter posted:Woah I've never seen a road like that, is it made out of concrete tiles or something? Or is it just a pattern for better grip? Dunno about the the first part (concrete tiles I guess), but later on it turns into concrete slabs. There are a ton of roads in the western parts of Vancouver built like that: https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.2589913,-123.1896962,3a,51.1y,85.08h,64.21t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sAlHtDtvAowg98TpHCIfzjg!2e0 https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.2628846,-123.2080467,3a,79.5y,261.88h,73.17t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s1_asa-m0t3kXf8XR3hq9RQ!2e0 I guess the plus is that they never get potholes, but the minus is that they develop giant ruts between the slabs that swallow bicycle tires. Over time, they're steadily tarring over them: https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.2628846,-123.2080467,3a,79.5y,261.88h,73.17t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s1_asa-m0t3kXf8XR3hq9RQ!2e0 Which doesn't always work so well: https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.2381663,-123.1463512,3a,75y,110.31h,56.25t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1soMIdijgWDGqR7ckJsH3-mw!2e0
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Oct 22, 2014 17:10
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smackfu posted:A lot of those countries have tax rates of over 100% on fuel. At that point, it's more of a penalty fee than a tax. Is it, though? Going from the last page of discussion, it sounds like that's just the level of tax you need to offset road maintenance, never mind trying to account for environmental or human health costs. Even going from this thread in general, how many times do you hear the American engineers saying "Well, there's the right way to do this, and then there's the way it's being done because we don't have the funds" versus the Dutch engineers?
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Oct 29, 2014 16:57
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Javid posted:The trend of blaming drivers for hitting things that shouldn't be in the roadway to begin with is ridiculous. Honestly, the trend of blaming pedestrians for being hit by cars is long-running, ridiculous and lovely, and something which badly needs to be reversed in North America. http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/murder-machines/ Baronjutter posted:If you're driving in a way that you "didn't notice in time" the pedestrian then you're driving too fast, not paying due attention, or your road was designed by an incompetent.
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Nov 7, 2014 18:30
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Kakairo posted:Yeah, I always figured that pelican crossings were more sensible, since they use standard traffic lights. Absolutely. Also, take a look around the particular crossing featured in the article (in Orpington High Street). The road has been narrowed to two lanes, and near the crossing the parking is gone as well, so pedestrians only have to cross a very short space. This is the case up and down the high street -- narrowed street, widened sidewalk (pavement, as they'd say over there). This is the right way to design the main road through a local commercial district. (Better still is to close it to traffic altogether).
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Nov 9, 2014 00:15
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I think they're actually somewhat mistaken. Although usage fees (vehicle licenses and fuel surcharges) do go towards road maintenance, this only covers about 1/3 of the cost, with the rest made up from property and income taxes. http://www.teamestrogen.com/content/cycling_myth2 In other words it's functionally the same as in Sweden, just that the fuel taxes are too low to actually compensate for road usage.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:05
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Devor posted:https://maps.google.com/maps?q=16th...,357.65,,0,3.45 Kakairo posted:Yeah, I always figured that pelican crossings were more sensible, since they use standard traffic lights. I also just got sent this article about "stroads", which hits on exactly what's wrong with that Washington street, that it is an unholy hybrid between a street and a road. I'm not sure what the solution is, though, since the DC Metro doesn't have very much room for real roads.
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Nov 10, 2014 20:46
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Varance posted:Renderings of the new I-4 in Orlando, FL: That is an awful lot of fancy landscaping that nobody will ever walk through.
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Nov 13, 2014 07:37
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