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I've got a question for the traffic engineers. I just started a summer job at the local city council and have been asked to try find any research at all on the effect on road safety fixed convex traffic mirrors have. This is difficult to search for because cars also have mirrors, and you get a lot of hits from that. Convex doesn't help refine the search very much either. On the other hand there is a lot of positive information that comes from... mirror manufacturers and installers. So, any traffic engineers have much knowledge of the interesting world of putting mirrors on hairpin bends and seeing if people crash/don't crash?
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Dec 4, 2014 06:32
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How obvious are these red light cameras? I'm guessing they'd have to be pretty obvious or signposted to create such a change in driving behaviour.
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Dec 21, 2014 06:59
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That is an odd intersection. The obvious solution (to me) is to put carpark access to Wholefoods on N Edgewood St so the purple people don't go onto Clarendon. Mind you, green traffic and purple will still be clashing but red traffic will get through. Is there parking in the shopping centre to the south? Because people should probably just park there and walk to Wholefoods, the lazy bastards.
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Dec 25, 2014 09:23
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Baronjutter posted:Oh Seattle drivers... I've been doing some work for the local city council as a student engineer helping out the traffic engineers with pedestrian surveys (go to remote places - count how many people cross the road - determine 2 people and a flightless bird in 2 hours means you don't really need a zebra crossing there) and parking turnover, and its amazing in some places the kind of parking maneuvers people do. Especially builders. I saw one builder parked for 45 minutes in the middle of the road just before an intersection, making uphill traffic have to cross onto the wrong side of the road to overtake - and the sight lines are pretty poo poo on that intersection even if you're on the right side of the road. Also, parking limits are really only a guideline when you're so far from the city centre chances are close to zero you'll get a ticket. quote:Also don't park on tram tracks or in the dynamic envelope of a tram! Apparently this is a big problem in Seattle.
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Dec 27, 2014 07:02
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Volmarias posted:Silly traffic planning question I always wondered. How do local governments actually figure out who is going where? I assume that if you have a community where many people are going to X neighboring town and Y neighboring town for work, how do you know what roads to improve? You can put electronic vehicle counters fairly cheaply on roads to measure the traffic going down that road, plus their speed and direction. Stick these on what you expect to be the main roads between two towns and you can figure out how many cars are driving between them. Combine that with census data about where people live and any other data you can think of that is relevant.
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Dec 27, 2014 23:35
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Baronjutter posted:Blindly just listening to "the community" results in every single street being closed off and/or covered in speed humps. There were some totally normal residential streets in my old neighborhood that were between two roads. Yes, sometimes people that didn't live on the street would drive down them to get between the roads, which had no proper main-route style connection between them but the vast number of smaller street between let traffic filter through. Well a couple of the street complained hard enough and the city made them dead-ends. These streets were by a hospital though, so they had to install these super expensive gate things so ambulances could get through. Yay listening to the community! Everyone is happy right? A local street near me has had traffic calming put in, including two speed bumps. This happened about5 years ago, and I found out recently there were several fatality crashes down that street. The moral of the story is, if "the community" wants speed bumps get a couple of people killed in a high speed car crash. I also met a lady while doing a pedestrian survey (numbers crossing, I didn't want to ask them questions) who said she thought we should install speed bumps on a curve of road. This is a curve that is a major arterial (although rural) road that is used regularly by logging trucks, not to mention a lot of construction trucks and other heavy vehicles. The traffic engineers solution for this bend? Cut down some bushes.
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Dec 29, 2014 18:59
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The Deadly Hume posted:Melbourne's not so bad but in Sydney the press is absolutely hostile to the idea of any kind of cycle infrastructure (fortunately Clover Moore keeps persisting) and tends to lump all cyclists in with the lycra warriors. I heard that Australian drivers do hook turns when they want to turn right (they pull over to the left, wait until through traffic goes through, and then turn right).
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Dec 31, 2014 04:46
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mamosodiumku posted:So you come across an all way stop with five intersections. Who goes first? You wait for the local transport authority to signalise it.
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Jan 3, 2015 21:20
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Just today I went through a fairly nasty 2 lane roundabout that has 5 entrances, and is right on the intersection of some major arterial roads and a new industrial area. It gets a lot of trucks, and a lot of crashes. A panelbeaters shop has set up right next to the intersection, apparently it generates a decent amount of work for them.
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Jan 14, 2015 07:09
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NFX posted:I apologize that there's no English translation, but I came across this interesting article about a planned experiment by the Danish Transport Authority. As a background, some of the highways around Copenhagen have been upgraded with electronic speed signs. These are used to regulate the traffic during rush hour, warn about delays, and warn about emergency traffic coming from behind. Ideally they'd have collected that data before they put the new signs up, but you can't always get what you want.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:22
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Speaking of travel times, does anyone know how google estimates real time traffic delay on google maps? Do they model it, or rely on first hand reports, or historical/empirical data, or real time satellite images to estimate traffic density, or something completely different?
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Jan 25, 2015 10:02
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What sort of things can be done to prevent people using a car park as a thoroughfare, which won't also inconvenience the legitimate users of the car park?
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Jan 31, 2015 07:59
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Whats the professional etiquette for you guys posting details about what you're currently working on in this thread? Is it okay because they're public works that don't require any sort of confidentiality, and the information is publicly available anyway?
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Feb 4, 2015 19:11
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I did think it was interesting that many of the groups of cars were exactly the same colour and model. Probably because they are actually the same car?
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Feb 9, 2015 18:57
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xergm posted:Located the sign in Street View. And on the other end of the vigilante sign scale, you have this. They've tacked a children crossing sign onto the speed limit sign, and modified the 70 to a 40 by use of some electrical tape not very well.
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Feb 14, 2015 07:21
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I would think that if you are going to put a roundabout in, you're going to have to put lane markings in the roundabout. I also think zebra crossings are a terrible idea there. Pedestrians would have to be extra alert because they can't predict when traffic might try to move. Stripy lines on the road doesn't stop people driving their cars into other people. Just in terms of pedestrian safety traffic lights and controlled crossings are a better idea, and I'm guessing the intersection already has them. You could alter the pattern/duration of the lights, or maybe try making changes to the network as a whole, maybe to make the intersection into a 5 or 4 way intersection. EDIT: My mistake, I just read the article and had assumed zebra crossings meant no crossing signals- it seems that isn't always the case. And they've got a big problem balancing safety and traffic flow. I do think that road markings on the intersection to indicate which lane to stay in would be great, whether its a roundabout or not. Lobsterpillar fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Feb 28, 2015 |
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Feb 28, 2015 05:50
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That is a terrible bike lane. I thought the footpath was the bike lane but it goes right up to a grate and a swale and just... suddenly ends. https://www.google.com/maps/@27.44917,-82.636815,3a,75y,52.88h,57.68t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s0q24aMmXQId3QB80CSbwlQ!2e0 It ends right next to a sign saying "Bike Lane" which I would assume refers to the footpath if I hadn't seen some road markings earlier on. I would love to know what was going on with the planning of that. Did they literally build it all the way out there before realising they couldn't move it further?
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Mar 5, 2015 08:52
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Varance posted:In Florida, most sidewalks are built by a developer either when the land is developed, or by the county when a road is improved as a direct result of a nearby development via impact fees. We've got sidewalks that do this all over our suburbs, simply because the area isn't built out yet. Ah I thought it looked really narrow - here in New Zealand the absolute minimum cycle lane width is 1.6m (just over 5 feet), so I don't think I've ever seen cycle lanes that narrow. There might be some build decades ago that are narrower. But then again, we don't require them on every single road.
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Mar 5, 2015 09:22
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Volmarias posted:Give them orange vests and picker sticks, take them to the highway, and tell them that every large piece of trash they collect is worth one point. Then when they collect a whole bag, throw it off an overpass onto a semi, and say "whoops, there goes your grade!" You will teach them a valuable lesson about cheating, and urban planning. Tell them to make up the points, they can do a traffic count for you. Then put out electronic counters exactly where they are counting and throw out their results, because you can't trust those little shits to get an accurate count. But seriously, from reading the whining about students thread, it seems that cheating among students is really prevalent, premed students and engineering students are up there with the biggest cheaters. Many universities also have policies such that its a really tedious process for the teacher to prove cheating and sometimes the result is only a slap on the wrist. quote:It's very cool looking, but I scratch my head at the idea of using the space inside the interchange. What exactly is supposed to go inside? Certainly it isn't a useful residential or commercial space. Maybe you could put in a solar field or a monument - something that doesn't need to be accessed very much - but it seems like a lot of compromises just in order to get a few acres of land that still can't be easily used. A great use for that space could be for stormwater treatment - put in a big rain garden or some engineered wetlands or something and divert your stormwater through it.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:21
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I think the big plus for electric cars is that they shift the pollution from millions of point sources to a few sources (the battery factories). Potentially massive improvements in air quality in cities, and there are several other benefits to electric vehicles. For example, the fact that fossil fuel prices are only ever going to keep going up in the long term.
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Mar 14, 2015 00:23
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GWBBQ posted:I have relatives who claim that the statistics regarding roundabouts are falsified to make them look more appealing and that building them in the US is a conspiracy to bring European socialism to the US. Everything that moves control from local to a larger area is seen as a Marxist plot. Roundabouts have their problems (I heard of a local one the other day that works fine all of the time except 5pm when a huge glut of traffic going in one direction completely clogs it up, and its also one of the ones where you can't actually see the exit from the entry so it gets people being stuck on the roundabout)
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Mar 23, 2015 08:48
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Baronjutter posted:I was just going off photos and local gossip so far but here's a brief article. From the perspective of the road workers, unless they lived/biked in the area they wouldn't know how much it is used by bikes. They probably didn't really give bikes a second thought.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:05
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I was recently in Milan, and we had booked a night at a hotel that was 1km from the airport. One thing we failed to account for is that there is literally NO safe pedestrian access to the airport. You can get there by car (via roads with no footpath or pedestrian crossings), plane, or train, but not on foot. Luckily, the hotel runs a shuttle bus to/from the hotel, and there are taxis everywhere, but still... is this normal for big airports? Also holy poo poo don't hire a car to drive on the Amalfi Coast that road is terrifying italian drivers just don't believe in driving on their side of the road
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Jun 3, 2015 09:08
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Baronjutter posted:It's really heart breaking though when you've got some great project, you've done a million public info sessions, you have great signs telling people everything about it. Then some big council meeting come up, and you've once again got handouts and a big foam core info sheet giving the basics of the project. "Yeah, but what are you going to do about *insert something waaaay outside project scope*?"
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Jul 30, 2015 08:02
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Dusty Baker 2 posted:So the city I work for (Tumwater, WA) recently hired somebody to come do locates for a new fiber optic line they're laying down. Of all the symbols they could have used... Oh dear, why don't they just do a cross and then write an F or something next to it?
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Aug 13, 2015 07:27
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Carbon dioxide posted:
This is so true, while google street view, aerial photos, youtube videos etc. are fine for showing roughly how things are, things can be quite different when you're there in person. Sight lines around a bend, for instance.
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Aug 13, 2015 20:31
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Kaal posted:Those are a lot more "self-driving" than a car where the user needs to stay at the controls, ready to take over at a moment's notice because the software can't deal with anomalies. I mean have you used some of these cars with "self-driving" features? Lane assist is great but I'm not going to start reading a book in the driver's seat. I'm all for driverless cars some day, but frankly it's a bit absurd to be talking about nextgen cruise-control as a transportation revolution. Fundamentally, self-driving features fall into two camps, with the truly autonomous features holding the lion's share of the promise of the technology; the Chauffeur is a lot farther off than the Backseat Driver. When you've got self driving cars it is inevitable that you will have self driving car hackers. Even if you manage to somehow force every car on the road to be self driving, people will get a thrill out of hacking them so they can go around racing and driving dangerously for the thrill of it.
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Aug 22, 2015 04:25
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kefkafloyd posted:It must be a local term, but what the hell is a parking bay? I've never heard of one. This is an example of a parking bay.
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Aug 27, 2015 20:47
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Nintendo Kid posted:If you think that's bad: Wow, that sort of thing can't be great for community identity. Do people actually like those street names or do they just not care?
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Sep 18, 2015 22:58
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Baronjutter posted:I don't think my city has any concrete roads, I've seen some concrete bus stops though. Actually there's a single concrete road in the entire region and it's a narrow rural road that tour buses use to get tourists to Buchart Gardens. There is a single collector road in my city that has a couple of concrete bus stops, but the bus routes no longer go down that road. It must have been put in as a trial or an experiment but the origins of it are seemingly lost in the mists of time.
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Oct 13, 2015 06:39
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Do you get the problem with petrol stations/service centres being built right by busy intersections in the US? Over here most of them seem to be but people always seem to want to right turn into the petrol station just after going through the intersection, and block the exit from the intersection. It is a pet peeve of mine that petrol stations are stupid for being built to encourage that and the city is stupid for letting them and the drivers are stupid for doing it.
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Oct 22, 2015 08:36
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Javid posted:Topical: They MIGHT be able to but in the end road safety usually trumps parking. What I think will probably happen is they will delay the project, costing tens or hundreds of thousands dollars worth of staff time, and it will eventually go through anyway. Possibly with a few concessions. Basically, they're wasting taxpayer money fighting it because they don't want to park slightly further away once a week (or, you know, bike to church)
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Oct 24, 2015 04:44
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Cichlidae posted:My office has started laying out bike plans in Hartford, and the results are really discouraging. I tried showing them how bike infrastructure works in the Netherlands (using Utrecht as an example with its bike paths, signals, and the way bicyclists make a left there) and just got blasted with a bunch of American exceptionalism in return. NZ has recently had to make a big change to its bike boxes design, changing it from 2m to 4m - because (surprise surprise) a truck killed a cyclist because it couldn't see the cyclist in the 2m bike box in front of it. People still drive right up to the edge of the intersection and block the bike boxes so I really don't see the use. Hook turn boxes have appeared on some newer intersections but as a cyclist I'm skeptical about going that far into the intersection. Also, check out this bicycle lane. What happened here is someone decided 'The bigger the cycle lane the better right?'. Its just big enough for a car to fit into it so of course they do.
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Oct 27, 2015 08:57
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Dominus Vobiscum posted:It is scary how easy it gets to pick out certain land uses and particular types of businesses after you spend It's also pretty scary how certain land uses an lead to flooding and/or overloading of the stormwater network. Roads and paved parking lots are one of the worst for this (since the water just runs right off and can't soak in, it all gets to the stormwater pipes /rivers much quicker during a rainstorm and you get a massive peak)
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Oct 29, 2015 06:06
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Baronjutter posted:Unfortunately telling people to slow down never works. Doesn't matter if it's over the radio or a big official sign by the side of the road. Unless there's brutal enforcement people will drive what they think is a safe speed for the street, which depending on the design can be deceptively too fast or too slow. A badly designed street feels safe to drive fast on but actually isn't, a well designed street feels unsafe to speed on but is actually safe. You don't slow people down with speed limits, you slow them down with design. Narrow the lanes, install trees and other obstructions that both protect pedestrians and slow cars down, add little curves and medians cars have to maneuver around. Don't add pointless stop signs, and speed bumps are pretty lovely too. Speed bumps, especially the older, short and tall ones, annoy me because it just leads to people slowing to a crawl to cross it and then sitting on their accelerator before breaking heavily just before the next speed bump. The flatter ones at least you only have to slow down a little so you don't get as much acceleration/braking.
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Nov 6, 2015 22:22
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wolrah posted:Sorta half-baked solution, put the racks the bikes are left at on those automated cart type things used in some factories, then have the racks drive themselves around based on demand. Pay high school students minimum wage to ferry bikes from one place to another.
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Nov 17, 2015 19:22
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In my city we've just had a report released which classifies which properties are going to be potentially affected by rising sea levels. The owners of many of these properties are petitioning the local council to redo the report because it'll mean the property value will go down. And the council is listening. Absolute waste of money because when the report is redone its just going to come to the same conclusions.
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Dec 27, 2015 07:35
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Javid posted:This thread and a few others have made me curious enough to dig up and watch recorded city council meetings about projects around here. Oh man I've legitimately heard "Won't somebody think of the children?" also "This pothole in the footpath is a HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION because elderly/disabled people might TRIP OVER AND DIE."
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Dec 31, 2015 07:38
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Cichlidae posted:With a dedicated pedestrian phase, all the signals turn red at the same time, and then the walk signal lights up. Pedestrians (and bicyclists, in this case) can cross any leg they want without having to worry about anything except inattentive motorists turning right on red. Over here I think we call that a Barnes dance? Most of the CBD intersections are getting that treatment. Then again we're lowering the speed limit to 30km/hr (from 50) too and are really trying to discourage cars in the central city.
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Jan 22, 2016 23:13
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osirisisdead posted:Sorry, gently caress off and die, but it's basic loving physics. A 200-300 pound object moving at 10-20 mi/hr versus a 2000-5000 pound object moving at 20-40 mi/hr. It's about the kinetic energy imparted into a system, not some bullshit that you are spouting because it makes you feel better about driving a car aggressively against cyclists. I agree, a car is going to cause more damage than a cyclist but in this situation - but if we're talking about a right turning car at a busy intersection I think 40mi/hr is very optimistic. That is pretty much instant death and dismemberment speeds.
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Jan 23, 2016 05:04
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