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Jasper Tin Neck posted:There is a fairly easy and cheap solution to streetcars (or buses) stuck in traffic jams, though. It just requires going against such widely held misconceptions about how traffic works, that Class B right of way is a non-starter in US cities. I've seen this kind of setup in a few places in US cities. Typically it's reserved for the most high-traffic streets, but it does exist. I expect it's unpopular because it squeezes cars into fewer lanes in areas where there's already not enough space for the drivers that want to be there, and people don't want to change their driving patterns. US uptake of mass transit is greatly hampered by its culture, in particular: - The people who need mass transit are typically poorer, and poor people are routinely discriminated against, so mass transit doesn't get the support it needs - Personal vehicles are status symbols for many (and the bigger, the better) - People stuck in heavy traffic will bitch about how there's too many cars on the road, and then also bitch about the bus they're stuck behind, with absolutely zero self-awareness. Hell, I've done this myself. In general I feel like the utility of cars is judged not based on the reality on the ground, but on a hypothetical reality where there's 20-lane freeways running everywhere with copious cheap parking surrounding every destination.
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May 25, 2021 15:14
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One problem with the "use X to finance Y" tricks is that it can easily just result in a compensatorial reduction in Y's budget from other sources. For example, a common thing in the US is for state lottery incomes to be used to fund schools, presumably because that makes the lottery seem less "evil" or reduces the moral hazard somehow, I don't know. But the school budget comes from a myriad sources, including the state general fund. So if the lottery produces $100 million for the schools, say, then the state can just reduce the general fund's contribution to school budgets by $100 million, and have that money to spend on whatever they want. They might as well just have the lottery money go straight into the general fund directly. In other words, just because something's being used to fund a worthwhile thing doesn't mean that the money available to that worthwhile thing actually goes up.
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Sep 24, 2022 23:08
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Peanut President posted:Also why does a transit company need to charge fares in the first place? It's a government agency. The Road Dept doesn't charge fares outside of the rare toll road. Vehicle registration includes fees based on the weight and mileage of the vehicle, to offset the impact that vehicle makes on the roads it's driven on.
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Sep 28, 2022 16:39
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"efficiency" here means maximizing throughput of road vehicles, I assume?
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Sep 30, 2022 21:32
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Why twenty-four minutes? (This is in the city of South San Francisco, which is not the same as the southern part of the city of San Francisco)
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Dec 2, 2022 01:26
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There's an area near where I live that drives me batty during high traffic times. It looks like this: Both intersections are four-way stops, which means that the overpass is routinely backed up from one intersection to the other. And there's three lanes of traffic feeding into that one backed-up lane. As a consequence, you are pretty much forced to go into the intersection before there's space for you in the backed-up lane; if you wait, some other rear end in a top hat will shove their way in even though it's not their turn yet. And that means that people going in other directions through this intersection can't get through, because there's cars sitting in the middle of it, not moving. Is this even solvable without a massive restructuring of the area?
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Mar 9, 2023 18:06
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Yeah, there's a gas station/service center combo on one corner (abutting a shopping center), and a beloved* fifty-year-old pastry shop on another. I can't imagine the county is in a big hurry to tear up buildings in order to improve traffic flow.Devor posted:Traffic signals This is the easy answer, but I'm not convinced it'd actually work. I mean, I get the theory: line up the lights so that cars can flow freely across the overpass. But is there actually a configuration of light timings that would achieve that? The whole "three lanes feeding into one lane" thing, plus the need to handle the not-insignificant traffic that isn't going across the overpass, makes it sound to me like moving to a lights system would require very long wait times. Honestly, if there was some way to just force drivers to wait for their turn instead of seizing the first instance where they can shove their way in without someone else stopping them, the intersections would be fine. Slow, but fine. Maybe the answer is to station a traffic cop there during rush hour  * I don't really get why they're so popular, but I can't deny they are 
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Mar 9, 2023 18:47
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What's the reason to use a spiral curve? I guess I can see some utility in easing into the curve instead of having to suddenly apply a certain amount of steering, but is there anything beyond that?
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Mar 12, 2023 01:50
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I'm taking this to read as "left turns are forbidden"; is that the intended reading? The ramifications of that change on the nearby streets sure would be entertaining!
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Mar 13, 2023 03:41
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Ahh, gotcha, thanks for the clarification!
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Mar 13, 2023 04:22
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It's probably a good thing to have a counter balance to all the people who are stuck at the beginning of that comic, though. At least they're being unrealistic in a good direction.
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Sep 23, 2023 17:53
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I feel like this is the best place for me to ask this: why is this loop 2 roads instead of 1? 
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Jan 10, 2024 01:15
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Ahh, I hadn't noticed that Northwood Road continues to the south! I thought the loop just had two roads dedicated solely to it. But if one road continues outside of the loop, then I can definitely see the argument for not wanting that road to double back on itself. Also, an interesting catch on the resurfacing.
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Jan 30, 2024 05:21
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I'd noticed that there was a portion of "yard" that didn't belong to any of the lots, and wondered why that was. Leaving a spot for a road to go through makes a lot of sense! It's not going to happen anytime soon though, because the lots in that direction are all giant mcmansion types.
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Feb 9, 2024 19:17
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Carbon dioxide posted:Yes, this is important. That means allowing 35 km/h on bicycle paths means you're allowing a 20 km/h speed difference, maybe more in some cases. Which is quite dangerous, and would scare away casual cyclists, kids going to school, people going about their business, in favour of race cyclists. I'm reminded of discussion around a change in the rules for escalators in some subway system somewhere (maybe New York City). Basically the rules changed from "stand on the right, walk on the left" to "just stand". People in a hurry were pissed off, of course, but it turned out that "just stand" increases the carrying capacity of the escalator (because people can pack in more densely), which improves overall throughput. In other words, optimizing for the people who want to go fastest can reduce the utility of your system.
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Mar 20, 2024 22:28
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There's a residential road near where I live, with a 25MPH speed limit, that has a speedbump on it. I can well believe that people used to bomb down the road in excess of 35MPH, so I don't question the need for the speedbump. However, in order to traverse the speedbump without scraping the hell out of your car and the road (which lots of people have done, judging from the road's surface), you have to slow down to like 10MPH. I would naively expect that the speedbump would be sized to bring people down to 25MPH, instead. I'm curious what the guidelines / rules of thumb are that guide sizing of speedbumps, to see if there's maybe a more interesting explanation here than just "someone hosed up".
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Apr 11, 2024 19:43
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Oh right, suspensions exist, I keep forgetting about that.  I thought that reaction to a speedbump was purely a matter of your ground clearance.Thanks for the insights, y'all! DTurtle posted:I’m so, so happy that speed bumps arent a thing here in Germany. If a certain spot needs slowing down, then you narrow the road or build a chicane. Much more effective and mostly independent of the type of car. It can probably even be cheaper, easier, faster, and nicer if you for example do the narrowing with large concrete planters. For the record, this is a suburban street, 1 lane each direction, no shoulder (going directly onto either peoples' yards or forest, depending). I can't imagine that a speedbump would be more expensive than any of the options you described, especially in the case that you need to retrofit the road to slow down traffic, instead of designing it in from the get go. Which isn't to defend the roads around here, to be clear, they're dumb as poo poo. drat near everything is a residential road with lots of hidden driveways and terrible visibility (curves, hills, trees), and people are doing 40MPH on these things because they're the only way to get anywhere. If we were to go back to the drawing board and make a concerted effort to make the way people get around here make sense, then things would look vastly different.
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Apr 12, 2024 01:45
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DTurtle posted:Well, do you really need a two lane street? Is it two lanes + space for on street parking? Narrowing it down to a single lane + on street parking switching from one side to the other every 50 or so yards could help. It is one lane each way, no shoulder. I found it on Google Maps:  There's some scope for making it narrower without pushing vehicles over the centerline, I guess. I think with the way local traffic behaves, though, you'd end up with people giving your obstructions a wide berth in favor of going over the centerline at high speed. Which would usually work fine, as it's a low-traffic road...buuuuut if there is a car coming the other way...
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Apr 12, 2024 11:53
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Ahh, I see, thank you for the detailed explanation. That said, nielsm posted:The goal is to make it undesirable for anyone to drive on the street, unless their destination is an address on that street. Everyone else can use larger throughfare roads. one of the big issues around here is that the roads are super haphazard. There's a small number of stroads and 1 freeway, but everything else is a vast tangle of residential roads. I assume that central planning has basically shrugged and said "it'd cost billions to make a system that makes sense, so we aren't going to". Which in turn leads to people doing 40MPH on residential roads because they're the most direct route by far to their destination. If you slowed traffic down to 20MPH using traffic calming measures, you'd still have people using those roads, "undesirable" though they might be. Honestly, I'd rather they prioritized adding more shoulders/sidewalks, because nothing's walkable outside of your immediate residential neighborhood, and bicycling anywhere would be terrifying.
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Apr 12, 2024 13:33
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