
Traffic Engineers’ Epic Fail - jseliger
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/12/15/traffic-engineers-epic-fail
======
maxsilver
Traffic engineers didn't decide to put two different school across from one
another. Perhaps they could have built the elementary school and high school
on the same side of the street? Like say, in the giant empty field right there
next to the school (pictured in the article).

Traffic engineers didn't decide to put the school on a busy arterial State-
Designated Highway. Syracuse Utah has just 6 main arterial roads, and over 50+
small slow neighborhood streets. 90% of the roads in this town are _already_
slow side streets safe for children (the exact ones StrongTowns advocates
for), why did they build the schools _exclusively_ on the 5% of roads
designated to handle actual traffic needs?

\--

Ironically, we have a safer way to build streets like this. It's called a
freeway, and it's great because it keeps nearly 100% grade-separation between
people driving and people walking, while still handling massive transit
requirements at high speeds. But we can't have those in cities, because
StrongTowns hates them. They are too safe, promote affordable housing too
much, and let people get to too many places too quickly.

StrongTowns gets the luxury of claiming every street should be impossible to
drive on, and can prattle on about how cheap it is to destroy a street (it
costs nothing!). Because StrongTowns does not do any actual engineering or
design, they are simply a political campaign against cars.

Real traffic engineers have to actually handle transportation needs of real
citizens everyday. Real traffic engineers don't get the luxury of just wishing
away peoples lives, or jobs, or homes. So while I'm sure this will be an
unpopular opinion, I don't see anything wrong with traffic engineers work
here.

I see a school system that decided building two schools on opposite sides of a
"State Highway 108" was a great idea, and is now suffering terrible
consequences because of it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_State_Route_108](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_State_Route_108)

~~~
revelation
You haven't even established the timeline here. In any case, it doesn't
matter, _someone_ decided to put a crosswalk across a four-lane 40 mph road.
There is no world where this is acceptable design backed by evidence.

And in any case, if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus
"impossible to drive on, war on cars" I'm sure where an engineers opinion will
fall. But traffic engineers aren't all that.

~~~
maxsilver
> if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive
> on, war on cars"

It never was. The suggestion is "don't put kids in the few areas of the city
specifically marked as dangerous".

It's like building a school inside of a river, watching kids drown, and
suggesting the _water_ is at fault and should get out of the way. Or building
a school on an airport runway and complaining the noise scares the children
and suggesting the _airplanes_ are at fault and should land elsewhere.

~~~
revelation
We mark areas as "dangerous" and thats it? A kid is dead, but really, its
noones fault?

I'm afraid your thinking on this is roughly 60 years behind. Of course
vehicular deaths are not "natural".

~~~
learc83
>A kid is dead, but really, its noones fault?

You don't don't seem to be reading what the OP is writing. They are clearly
laying the blame at the feet of the people who decided to build 2 schools on
opposite sides of a dangerous street. Where are you getting "it's no ones
fault"

~~~
revelation
Nobody cares there are schools there. It has no bearing on the safety of
street design. There are sidewalks, the infamous crosswalk over 40 mph lanes:
clearly it's a residential area.

To blame the school placement (likely decided by the very same governmental
body doing the street design) is the epitome of the problem here: "what are
the pedestrians doing on my street".

~~~
learc83
You just completely ignored my post . You don't seem to be reading what people
are writing.

------
gregatragenet3
A side note but something that this article relates to. Here in Pacific Beach
California, the traffic engineers have created a perfect storm of pedestrian
danger. See, they've installed these lighted flashing crosswalk signs
activated by a button on a pole. Awesome idea, as a pedestrian I can hit a
button and think that drivers are alerted to my crossing.. as a driver I no
longer have to search the shadows on sidewalks for pedestrians because of the
lights. Now as a pedestrian and a driver I'm conditioned to depend on the
lights.. but now that they've been in place for months the lights are failing
and public works doesn't replace them regularly. We now depend on the lights
to keep peds safe, and their unreliability is an accedent waiting to happen.

~~~
eru
London is the opposite: red lights are merely advisory for pedestrians. People
just cross the streets. That has trained drivers to be very attentive.

Add in that usual London traffic moves at about bicycle speed, and the central
part of town is a very human friendly place.

~~~
d4rti
It's pretty great, and the bike lanes just keep getting better.

~~~
eru
Yes. It's gotten so good that I feel the main impediment to cycling has become
air quality rather than cars.

~~~
jessaustin
Those factors seem to be related, don't they? b^)

~~~
eru
At most tangentially.

I am glad they added a new "t-charge" (similar to the older congestion charge)
to specifically target cars with worse emissions recently.

------
jessaustin
Sometimes car drivers have to slow down. Maybe on a big, straight street.
Maybe on a state highway. Maybe on the main street in town. Even in those
situations, if there is a crosswalk in regular use for most of the day,
they've got to slow down. If they don't, the street must be changed until they
do. That is the most important task a traffic engineer in small-town Utah has.
It shouldn't take 15 crashes in 5 years to prompt that action. It shouldn't
take an additional fatal crash with a child victim to prompt it.

Anyone who doesn't understand any part of this should never drive on public
roads.

~~~
justinph
You can put all the speed limit signs you want on that street, but it doesn't
change the fact that the road is too wide and straight and people will go the
speed they feel comfortable at, regardless of the signs.

That street needs to be narrowed, have parked cars on the side, have speed
tables, a boulevard, dynamic feedback signs, or other traffic calming
measures. Physical objects and changes to the environment are what cause
drivers to slow down in urban environments, not flimsy metal signs.

There have been numerous studies and research projects on this. Here's one by
the Federal Highway Administration showing the effects of various traffic
calming techniques in situations just like this one:
[https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/08067/](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/08067/)

~~~
jessaustin
You're preaching to the choir. All of that stuff is what I meant when I said
"If they don't [slow down], the street must be changed until they do." I
assumed there were already signs in place.

------
ebcode
Compelling article, but marred by the click-baity title. It would be more
respectful of the bereaved to reserve "Epic Fail" for things less tragic than
the loss of a child. "Tragic Failure" might be more appropriate.

~~~
spraak
Yeah, "Epic Fail" in my mind is most associated with humor from meme culture.

------
adrianmonk
It seems like it couldn't hurt (even if cars drove 20 mph) for the crosswalk
to be about 10 times more visible as well. There's a small sign, but people
don't always notice those, nor do they often think to look for them on a
stretch of road not near an intersection.

And in fact, based on Google Street View imagery, it appears they are in the
process of doing exactly that:

[https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0919153,-112.0647278,3a,75y,...](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0919153,-112.0647278,3a,75y,20.28h,88.49t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snEiLYiNnALhLbENgKyO3rg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

My city has some crosswalks with big, obvious flashing lights similar to this,
and they really catch your attention more. Some of them have button that
immediately turns the flashing lights on so you don't really have to wait for
lights to cycle like you do at a normal intersection, which probably makes
them more effective.

~~~
stevenwoo
The four lane street (San Antonio south of El Camino) near where I live used
to just have painted crosswalks but after two pedestrians were killed in a
short span of time they added the flashing lights in the crosswalk to the ones
close to El Camino and Foothill, no one has been killed crossing the street in
the ten years since even though traffic anecdotally seems to have gone up a
lot (knock on wood).

------
mjevans
How about actual civil engineering and commute design?

DO NOT have public schools and other such facilities RIGHT NEXT to the high
speed corridors.

Those belong in the middle of residential areas.

Design it for the safety of the pedestrians too. Some nice unclimbable walls
that clearly show no other path across than the crosswalk (with as another
reply stated, should be BRIGHT and VISIBLE).

Yes, there should be safety space between the road and that wall; but it
should deny reward for skipping the crosswalk.

------
glogla
"Traffic Engineers’ Epic Fail"

"Let's Turn this Dangerous, Expensive Road Back into a Safe Neighborhood
Street"

"Dying to Widen Highways - Oregon’s DOT seems to be more concerned with making
cars go faster than saving lives."

The site seems to have a rather ... specific focus.

~~~
ebiester
It’s a blog about city planning that is espousing a contrarian view. It isn’t
limited to cars, but it does take a strong point that designing cities around
cars has significant consequences.

~~~
justinph
Strong Towns has far from a contrarian view.

Perhaps to civil & traffic engineers, but to urban planners, it is well known
the detrimental effects streets can have on cities.

------
Zak
> _The street separating these two schools in Syracuse was designed for speed,
> which means it was designed to kill._

This is hyperbole. The street is designed to efficiently move car traffic. The
design error here is in creating a situation where a large number of children
will walk across it. The author's goal appears to be to design streets so that
they make getting hit by a car less deadly, which strikes me as perverse.

It's certainly possible to make the street better for walking across by making
it worse at efficiently moving car traffic, but it's also possible to replace
the crosswalk with a pedestrian overpass and eliminate the conflict entirely.

~~~
Empact
Any street that doesn't seriously consider the safety of people needing to
cross it is functionally a wall or a hazard, whatever the uses surrounding it.
If you create a conflict and _don 't try to make it less deadly_, how do you
describe that?

Pedestrian overpasses require those who cross to physically _climb over_
traffic. Better than a wall, but let's acknowledge the cost of that. They're
also enormous and expensive, whether you design them terribly or well.[1]

The calming proposals include: narrower lanes, a raised median, and a traffic
light to explicitly priortize and protect pedestrians when crossing. What
about those makes them an imposition?

[1] [https://candysdirt.com/2016/04/28/fugly-pedestrian-bridge-
ha...](https://candysdirt.com/2016/04/28/fugly-pedestrian-bridge-harry-hines-
walnut-hill-cost-us-4-6-million/)
[http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/place/article/Footbridge-an-
eleg...](http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/place/article/Footbridge-an-elegant-new-
icon-in-East-Bay-3171157.php)

~~~
Zak
Requiring people to climb over traffic doesn't seem like an unreasonable
imposition in most cases. That sort of physical activity is even a health
benefit for most people. I'm sure there are exceptions.

All of the calming proposals create an imposition. The whole point of traffic
calming is to impede the flow of traffic so as to reduce its speed. Without
effective alternatives, reducing the speed of this road reduces its capacity
to get people from one part of town to another, and it appears that state road
108 is, in fact a major road. It provides access to a number of businesses
including a Walmart supercenter, churches, four public schools and city hall.

The obvious alternative to driving is a public bus service, which also uses
the road. It stops near the two schools hourly most times of day.

So to make the interaction of the road and the schools safer, the city could
redesign the road and make traffic worse, more substantially redesign the
whole transportation infrastructure, or add a pedestrian overpass. The latter
is not an insignificant project, but it usually costs less than the examples
you linked.

------
bmsleight_
My condolences to the family. I hope this can learn to valuable learning from
this loss of life.

Really interested in what data analysis is done in the states regarding (KSI -
Killed and Serious Injured). In the UK we hold good data and can related
designs and design improvement to the KSI.

I strongly agree with the article, we should aim for zero-killed. The balance
can be vehicle congestion vs. space vs. cost vs. time. Because our modelling
is very good we can tell the impact of a new school and the behaviour of the
pedestrians. I could talk about the hierarchy of roads, but Traffic Engineers
need to start influencing the politicians that make some of the decisions. How
? - By clear data and model that show with this design you will have this
KSIs.

------
dleslie
Every time I travel to the USA on business I am aghast by how poorly the
cities are designed for use by human beings, and how evident it is that the
free mobility of automobiles is the primary consideration of urban design.

Just look at those pictures. How can anyone live in that area and not think
that they live in an environment and society that is openly hostile to
pedestrians (school children)?

~~~
closeparen
In this kind of place, humans receive cars two years before they receive
personhood (16 to drive vs. 18 to be the sole signer on a bank account).
Thinking of drivers and people in general as separate categories is
nonsensical. If a place isn't easy to drive to and park at, then it _isn 't_
designed for the human beings who live in American suburbia.

Mainstream American culture holds that it is apartment buildings and street
life which are the true menaces to children. From the Street View, this place
would be considered ideal to raise a family, because there's plenty of room
for huge houses and huge yards/open nature areas between them.

That children can't transport themselves beyond the closed-world snow-globe of
your immediate subdivision is considered a feature, as it limits the trouble
they can get into. The most they should be doing without your accompaniment
(in this mindset) is playing with other neighborhood kids in parks or in each
other's houses.

~~~
dionidium
Your first sentence here is most interesting to me. This is an aspect of car
culture that's sometimes overlooked, but what it does is infantilize
adolescents and provide an arbitrary blocker to normal human behavior (e.g.
shopping, visiting cafes alone, etc) until the child is old enough to drive to
those places. A kid in Manhattan is _in_ society and has access to everything
his parents do. A kid in the suburbs is _outside_ society, in some very
meaningful sense. His access to the broader culture is mediated through
television, perhaps, but he's not actually _there_. He visits society when his
parents feel like driving him there. [0]

Who is surprised, then, that the car represents freedom to so many of these
kids? Where I grew up, a car was needed for _everything_ , which meant that I
had almost no access to the normal world at age 15 and almost unlimited access
on my 16th birthday.

Like a fish who doesn't know what water is, most Americans don't even realize
that car culture is all around them. And an appreciation for the status quo is
baked in _very early._ The car is simply how you get places. How could it be
any other way?

[0] I think this is actually really important. A twelve-year-old should be
able to pick up some groceries, mail a letter, grab a bite to eat at a lunch
counter, and so on, but these basic acts of socialization are completely alien
to suburban kids.

~~~
danjayh
As somebody who has bad knees, 11 acres, horses, a goat, a dog, and some cats,
I really do love car culture. It might be unpopular to say it, but I
personally think big wide streets with lots of parking that make point-to-
point personal transport possible are simply awesome. I lived downtown in my
area for a while - yes, I could walk to a lot of places and I didn't drive my
car as much, but I also absolutely _hated_ it. My next move was to skip right
past the suburbs and into the fringe of farmland, and I now commute ~17
minutes and ~16 miles to work every day (80% 80mph freeway), and I love it. I
get to have my tractor _and_ my software engineering job. God Bless 'Murica
:-D.

~~~
dionidium
I think your situation is great! The problem arises when you have a million or
so people who all want that same experience in the same small area. It just
doesn't work very well.

------
dingo_bat
This is bullshit. A street designer has one job, to make the street good for
driving. It is pedestrians responsibility to look and cross safely. It is
driver's responsibility to not hit people who may have strayed onto the
street. It is the car's responsibility to detect a human and apply the brakes
automatically. It seems only the street designer did his job properly.

~~~
sitharus
I’d love to agree with you, but unfortunately as humans we are not infallible.
We cannot rely on people to look in every direction and see every hazard
constantly. The driver may have been distracted, for example by sun strike,
and the pedestrian may have not seen the car due to its colour.

Roads need to be designed for their purpose, and their purpose also includes
allowing pedestrians to cross safely even if the pedestrian and the driver
suffer from a momentary distraction.

------
bsder
Um, what isn't being pointed out is that there is a freakin' WalMart
Supercenter _right around the corner_. That road is a thoroughfare--this isn't
the "middle of nowhere" like the picture makes it look.

I have lots of questions: Why isn't there a pedestrian bridge? Why are the
schools on opposite sides of the road when there is obviously land on the same
side? Why is there a major thoroughfare in front of a school?

I know the answer: nobody is willing to sign off with _money_ until the outcry
is large enough. It seems like the traffic engineers know that there is a
problem (15 accidents in the last 5 years and a traffic light plan already in
flight), but you can tell from the article that all their solutions are
_cheap_.

That tells me everything I need to know.

~~~
zten
Here's my guesses...

> Why isn't there a pedestrian bridge?

Signals that you don't really care about people walking or people with
disabilities and want them to drive.

Ok, that was flippant, I realize, but the only time I've seen anyone use
prefer overpasses and such is the Vegas strip and that's because it is
outright hostile to walk next to or across.

> Why is there a major thoroughfare in front of a school?

Everybody is driven to school. Look at the land use around the school.

~~~
philsnow
There are tons of pedestrian bridges in Hong Kong, for instance [0]. This is
over a complicated intersection with a large street that has a lot of bus
traffic, so it makes more sense for people to go up and over to cross the
street rather than for there to be ground-level crossings with confusing
traffic patterns. Hong Kong is very pedestrian friendly.

[0]
[http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/45505811.jpg](http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/45505811.jpg)

~~~
ACow_Adonis
Just for further illustration, from my own childhood in a less dense, car
obsessed town/city:

[https://www.google.com/maps/@-35.2516734,149.0794549,3a,60y,...](https://www.google.com/maps/@-35.2516734,149.0794549,3a,60y,291.49h,100.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sG9qOa-
UzdIq9I7tGG3u63A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en)

[https://www.google.com/maps/@-35.4122069,149.1282473,3a,75y,...](https://www.google.com/maps/@-35.4122069,149.1282473,3a,75y,101.8h,89.15t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1so2pZf3ZrIQUWgQ2qqHoS7A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en)

------
GalacticDomin8r
Why is the math wrong if this is a "traffic engineer"?

> A quick physics lesson: The force of impact from a car increases
> quadratically with speed. This means that doubling the speed quadruples the
> force of the impact.

That is absolutely not what quadratically means.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
It's not? I'm not a mathematician, but Wikipedia says "In mathematics, a
function or sequence is said to exhibit quadratic growth when its values are
proportional to the square of the function argument or sequence position."

~~~
GalacticDomin8r
That's my point. The wiki definition you have cited is correct, but it doesn't
compute with the article.

~~~
DannyBee
I'll save everyone else the trouble.

The original data is from
[https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...](https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011PedestrianRiskVsSpeed.pdf)

If you look, on page 9, you can see the plots of impact speed vs risk of
death. They are clearly non-linear, and they you can also read that they tried
various fitting methods for missing data (and quadratic best fit things).

I'm just guessing that you are confused because it does not appear the
constant for the x^2 term is >1.

~~~
scotty79
Quadratic relationship is between the speed and force of impact.

If you want to accelerate pedestrian to certain speed you have to pump kinetic
energy into him. You do that by applying a force over some distance (distance
is how much pedestrian will squish during impact before it starts moving with
the car) so to acellerate to double speed, you need to pump in quadruple
energy, you need to quadruple the force since squishing distance is the same
(until you reach speeds that pulverize pedestrian bones).

