
The Benefits of Slower Traffic, Measured in Money and Lives - DarkContinent
http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/10/the-benefits-of-slower-traffic-measured-in-money-and-lives/408472/
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Steltek
I think the article's argument is framed terribly bad. It's not about
"increasing traffic jams". It's about bringing back a vital and necessary
balance in our infrastructure, city planning, and our cultural approach.

You can not solve automobile traffic and long travel times by adding ever
bigger roads/overpasses/tunnels without facing exponentially increasing
maintenance costs, expensive land requirements, and massive works projects. On
top of that, the surrounding property value and economic generation plummets
as roads expand and become congested.

Everything points to an urgent call to scale back our automobile oriented
country: for our health, humans lives, economy, foreign policy, and
environment.

~~~
sandworm101
Funny, I thought the article was about safety, about not killing people,
rather than any sort of car-bike urban balance.

>>One way to improve safety on this type of urban street is through a road
diet. [...] with any leftover space going to curb parking and perhaps bike
lanes.

It would seem that making thing better for bikes is a lower priority in the OP
than pedestrian safety, even lower than on-street parking for cars. Given that
the author draws the bike lanes between parked and moving cars, bicycle safety
is clearly not the goal. They are out to protect pedestrians from all things
faster than a walking pace. I wouldn't read in any car v. bike politics.

~~~
Steltek
Unsurprisingly, I usually bike to work and take a keen interest on bike safety
improvements. I hate the "protected bike lane" phenomenon with a passion. My
most common incidents with cars start with not being seen by the driver. A
"protected" bike lane destroys whatever little visibility I have to begin with
and worse, the increased turning radius means that what was once a mild
sideswipe will become a T-bone.

As a protected bike lane is usually also a wider than normal bike lane, ~8' vs
~4', I posit that you see a huge perceived and actual safety increase by just
taking the existing normal bike lane and widening it.

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dre85
I don't see how increasing traffic jams is ever a viable long term solution.
Why not consider things like pedestrian overpasses for large 4 lane streets. I
guess in north America there's no point of even mentioning the possibility of
having a reasonable public transportation system...

~~~
maxsilver
> I guess in north America there's no point of even mentioning the possibility
> of having a reasonable public transportation system...

This is the main problem. If there was fast/rapid public transit available
(read: not just crappy bus lines), much of the car traffic would be reduced,
and you could safely remove traffic lanes and slow traffic down without
increasing congestion or trip times.

But that would involve spending money on a public service. Which is an
impossibility in the US. So instead, we get "urbanists" rushing to eliminate
traffic capacity because that has no cost.

But in truth, all these "road diets" actually do is increase congestion,
increase drive time, and _displace_ (not eliminate) the traffic accidents the
author is concerned about.

~~~
skybrian
You're assuming zero sum rather than supply and demand. When supply is
decreased, fewer car trips happen in the first place because some marginal
trips are combined or cancelled. This less likely to happen for commuting but
can easily happen for shopping and entertainment where there are lots of
choices.

~~~
Silhouette
This is a point that seems to be overlooked surprisingly often in transport
debates: people generally travel _for a reason_. There are as many reasons to
run a safe, efficient transport infrastructure as there are reasons for people
to make a journey. Every time we make a change to the infrastructure that
deters someone from making a journey, there is almost certainly a
consequential loss to someone's business and/or someone's quality of life. We
could obviously make the roads much safer and more environmentally friendly
overnight by just banning all motor traffic, but the effects on our society
wouldn't be pretty.

~~~
jschwartzi
It's selfish to ask us to overlook the needs of the people who make their
homes in a place for the benefit of some few who choose to pass through.
People adapt. If a person decides that a trip is too expensive, they will find
another trip that meets their needs. If a business loses some customers from
outside it's neighborhood, then perhaps there will be an offset from within.

~~~
Silhouette
_It 's selfish to ask us to overlook the needs of the people who make their
homes in a place for the benefit of some few who choose to pass through._

That may be true, but it's _also_ selfish for people who inevitably travel
themselves as part of their own lives to expect everyone else to behave
differently. The degree of NIMBY thinking in the setting of public travel
policy is one of the biggest problems we have with making progress.

I saw some interesting but all too predictable research not long ago. It was
about people who campaign for heavy restrictions on driving in their own
(often expensive, desirable, close to local amenities) area, such as lower
speed limits, traffic calming measures, extra crossings, or even closing roads
to motor traffic entirely. A remarkably high proportion of those same people,
when covertly observed, drove their own (often expensive, powerful,
inefficient, dangerous) vehicles in _exactly_ the kinds of ways they cite as
objectionable in their own back yard, as little as a half-mile down the road
going through someone else's residential area, or past someone else's kid's
school, or on the way to some other local shopping centre.

So, there is certainly a lot we can and should do to improve road safety, but
like administering first aid, it should be based on evidence and real need,
not who is crying the loudest or making the most emotional appeal for help.

Unfortunately a lot of the time these kinds of travel infrastructure decisions
are made at a very local level, in response to very local pressure from
relatively small numbers of very vocal campaigners. Local politicians with the
authority to make the decisions are, in practice, more accountable to a few
hundred people living within a mile of their home than they are to national
governments and their evidence-based policy frameworks and even well-funded
research organisations. Consequently, the number of people effectively
influencing policy on their own doorstep may be far less than the number of
people actually using that travel infrastructure every day, but the latter
don't get a vote and so the systemic bias frequently results in effects akin
to a tragedy of the commons. Maybe it's different where you are, but in the UK
this happens very often and very obviously, and it's a real problem.

 _People adapt. If a person decides that a trip is too expensive, they will
find another trip that meets their needs._

Or they'll stay at home and let their kids watch TV and play on their Xbox.

 _If a business loses some customers from outside it 's neighborhood, then
perhaps there will be an offset from within._

If this really happened very much then it wouldn't be local businesses who are
usually the first and most vocal critics of travel-hostile changes in local
policy.

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sandworm101
Traffic and vehicle speed are two different things. Slowing cars can be done
without slowing traffic. Traffic is limited by the carrying capacity of the
road. More, but slower and smaller, lanes can handle the same amount of
traffic while still slowing cars. Simply halving the number of lanes (4 to 2)
without replacing the carrying capacity, only offloads through traffic to
other areas. It would be better to replace the one fast+big road with multiple
slower and smaller roads.

And the bike lanes in the OP are awful. Those bikes don't want to share
pavement with moving cars. Put that lane on the other side of the parking
lane, preferably with a line of grass/trees shielding it from moving traffic.
That keeps everyone happy.

(Those painted green lanes are also a horror for motorcycles in the rain. They
must turn, lean and accelerate all at once on that wet paint when entering
such a road.)

~~~
Silhouette
You're right that the cycle lanes shown are awful in almost every way. They're
too narrow, in the dooring zone for the parked cars, barely separated from the
main traffic lane, and so on.

I just wanted to add that putting dedicated cycle paths along the outer edge
of main roads with hard segregation also brings challenges of its own. In
particular, if the cyclists then have to give way at every side street their
path crosses, this is horrendously inefficient for cycling and will cause most
experienced cyclists to simply use the main road instead in a residential
setting.

From what I've seen so far, the Dutch seem to have some of the most promising
ideas about designing genuine multi-modal transport routes, with proper
attention paid to motor traffic, cycles and pedestrians both at junctions and
on longer, faster, less interrupted routes. I wish more people were paying
attention to their ideas, because they've figured out much better solutions to
a lot of common scenarios than most of us have.

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nextweek2
Not to put down the hard work these people do, but I really think slowing
traffic is backwards thinking. Its the same advice that tells us to turn off
electrical appliances to save the environment.

That kind of thinking is really about scaling back technological advances. To
save something. Really technology should be employed to solve the problem.

Automated cars will solve the problem being reported here. New energy research
will solve the power problem. Why do we need to take civilization back 50
years to get a benefit?

~~~
everyone
Why do you think everyone driving cars and using a lot of electricity is
progressive?

I think it would make more sense to use metrics like happiness, health,
education standard etc. of the population and whatever policies increase those
should be deemed progressive.

The prevalence of cars for example, I would argue is a regression for society.
They emit greenhouse gases, fill our air with toxins and carcinogens,
encourage many diseases through lack of exercise, are the number one cause of
violent death, and their popularity has changed the urban fabric into an
environment that is not fit for humans and for human societies to grow.

~~~
everyone
Perhaps you simply think that all the changes that have happened since 1965
are progress. Well, in that time the wealth gap between the rich and the poor
has increased, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, contamination
of soil, over-irrigation, flogging the land, overfishing etc. have all
increased and many other non-renewable resources have been consumed or
otherwise destroyed.

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anon4
A bike lane _between_ traffic and parking lane? Are those people insane?

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hugh4
Another day, another article filled with twenty something single professionals
who don't own cars because they live in a 600 square foot apartment in a dense
downtown core for $4000 a month saying "Why can't everybody be more like me?"

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Or "Why can't everyone else pay for their own lifestyle choices instead of
getting subsidized by me?"

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everyone
Similarly to the US's problems with gun violence. Other industrialised nations
have implemented a solution to the problem of over-reliance on cars. Look at
Denmark. They faced similar issues in the 70's and have since methodically
scaled back car infrastructure in favour of rail, cycling, walking, made
possible by suitable city planning.

[http://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport](http://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport)

