I'm seeing a lot of resistance to the idea of narrower city streets on this thread. The advantages of narrower city streets (and hence, crossings) goes far beyond safety. It actually enhances quality of life in a significant way. A wide, four lane highway running across your town basically says humans must come encased inside an automobile. Pedestrians and cyclists become second class citizens. It's a design driven for the convenience of cars and to the detriment of humans.
So many ostensibly "urban" places in the US feel actively hostile to pedestrians. One of the best things about New York is that, more than any other place in the country, pedestrians unequivocally own the city. If you are in a car (or even a bike), you are on borrowed turf and must drive as such. This is as it should be – cities are for people, not cars.
I could do without the bragging about rubbing elbows with White House staffers and setting public policy through executive orders.... and a little more discussing the elephant in the room -- namely that most cars on the road will be mostly driving themselves, much sooner than you think.
"setting public policy through executive orders...."
It is "appropriate" because the only way to ram this down our throats would be at the federal level... If small city A decides to ruin their roads from the perspective of people who matter, that being the vast majority who are drivers, people will simply move to city B and property values will compensate.
I think the article is targeting more arterial streets that have 12-foot lanes (e.g. one-way, two lane streets). Not highways running through cities, which are not "streets".
From my experience, few cities have four lane highways running through them - and if they do, they are grade-separated from pedestrians. In cities where the four lane highways are at grade with sidewalks along them, this is a different case. Those roads are hopeless and should be subject to complete removal.
In my experience (limited mostly to Gainesville) a lot of fairly residential streets in Florida with speed limit ~30mph are ridiculously wide, often 3 or 4 lanes each way.
Actually, the evidence suggests that a narrow four lane road is better than a wide four lane highway when it comes to roadway user safety.
But we should get rid of highways downtown. We should make all streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists (which will in turn make them safer for motorists).
stop charging for mass transit if your goal is to make better cities. We waste billions on transit lines no one will use because authorities build overly expensive systems even when studies say don't. Portland and Seattle for example seem hell bent on finding out who can spend the most per mile, estimates put them over 200m per mile on new lines. The top it off with not only do the streets need repairs but light rail lines need them too.
Yet they continue to charge for something they want people to use, if they want to change behavior tax the people in the city and the businesses downtown for it. If they are truly economic benefits they will prove it
Soundbites like "Stop charging for mass transit" unfairly ignore the complexity of the issue at hand.
In Sydney, IPART (Independant Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal) recently reported that revenue from Sydney's public transport captures about 30% of the cost associated with running it.
The argument against eliminating fares (at least in Sydney) is that the added costs would vastly outweigh any benefits of a small number of people getting free transport.
That's also ignoring the different ways people would use public transport (and non-public transport) if it were free.
That does not necessarily follow. If you offer free mass transit, the people who take advantage of it may not be the same people who would otherwise be clogging up the roads in their personal cars.
It does not need to be a 1:1 relationship for my statement to be true. If every 10 rides reduces 1 car trip it's still reducing congestion. The important thing to remember about congestion is at maximum capacity new trips simply increase wait times so a 30 min trip can add more than 30 minutes of wait time spread among all drivers. And removing a 30 minute trip can save people more than 30 minutes of wait time.
Granted as delays reduce people my decide to simply take more trips, but a combination of a car congestion tax, free public transit, and walk-able / bike-able city's are far more efficient say trying to stack highways.
Just like it doesn't make sense to build expensive, high maintenance highways, largely at public expense to subsidize driving. But that's exactly what's been happening in large parts of the world (led by the US example) for the past 50 years or so..
That's impossible. We could stop charging per use and just charge through general income taxation or maybe special taxation like car registrations or maybe sales tax. All those methods might work, but there's no way to "stop charging".
That doesn't make better cities, it just makes certain areas less safe. I see no reason for my taxes to be used to send bums and thugs around all over town. Does that make me a bad person?
Yep. That's (literally) life in the big city. You are part of others' lives, whether you like it or not. Often that implies subsidizing their activities.
That does not, of course, mean you're not entitled to your opinions about the relative economic and social values of the things you're required to subsidize.
Threads like this always end up full of people who are absolutely convinced that there is only one truth, one valid perspective, one "right" thing to do. The irony inherent in that point of view goes completely unnoticed.
The university I went to invested in skywalks to replace many if almost all cross walks within and on the edges of campus. It does require more energy to go up and down sometimes, but it means everyone is safer and everything still flows.
After you've done that, in combination with sidewalks, you have effectively created a pedestrian-only street above the cars.
The cost of that is immense. Why not just make the surface (ground level) street more accessible to pedestrians, and keep the businesses where they would prefer to be?
Every city I've visited that has an extensive skyway system is also a city that gets severe winter weather. The skyway is not so much about protecting pedestrians from cars, and more about protecting them from the weather.
None of the vaguely famous underground/above-ground roads in Chicago, notably Wacker, Congress, and Michigan Ave, are pedestrian only above ground. It would also be pretty much lying to define those three roads as "large parts". There's probably 10-15 miles of drivable underground road in downtown (maybe less), most of which is used as not much more than service roads for garbage pickup and loading docks for the high rises above these.
Chicago is also somewhat of an exceptional city in this regard in that it was to an extent demolished and rebuilt twice, and the city was further built up from water level to accommodate underground plumbing and (IIRC) to reduce the swampiness of the land.
I don't know where this is so can't really comment on this particular situation.
But the general idea of skyways, while making walking from building to building easier, would also isolate these pedestrians completely from the surrounding environment -- in particular, from other people who live and work in the city but don't have access to universities' buildings. How do you feel it works in your university?
I don't know about his university, but I figured you might be interested in this too.
We have a '+15' system in downtown Calgary such that most of the core office towers are connected on the second floor. Parts of the first two floors of most buildings are open to the public, and tend to be commercial space.
Reading the Wikipedia page, it seems some people have been wondering if they're making the streets less vibrant, but quite frankly even if they were, the enclosed walkways would still be worth it for winter. It can get brutally cold on the Canadian prairies.
Winnipeg has central Canadian weather, going down to -40 celsius wind chill. Brr. Skyways and subway walks are about the only way to go for pedestrian access in a city where the climate for half the year threatens hypothermia within ten minutes of exposure to surface temperatures.
In contrast, I live in Edinburgh. The all-time high temperature was around 30 celsius, but it only drops below freezing at night during a couple of months. The city predates the automobile; as a result, unless you move out to the suburbs, it's entirely walkable. And guess what? The Council is currently holding a consultation on a blanket reduction in the vehicle speed limit to 20mph except on designated high-volume routes.
They are outdoor bridges, so perhaps I used the wrong term. I do not feel like it sucks any life out of the scene, since even some of the bridges have bridges between them to connect over some nice landscaping.
The university I went to is not like the one I see in Madison or Chicago. The entire campus was self contained and did not have non-university buildings there. So not much car traffic through the actual campus (as there were few roads, although the walkways were wide enough for maintenance vehicles to get around).
My alma mater needs those. It's not cars, but the bikers on campus are downright vicious and will run you down if you happen to be in their way when crossing the street.
That town also had a problem downtown of people that would cross the street without looking, and glaring at people driving cars. Pretty much the people posting in this thread lol.
I live in a country where lanes are that narrow. Driving is fucking terrifying. You're just inches away from the traffic in the next lane. Traffic is always congested. For me to get to work, the fastest way is bicycle or scooter, then public transport, then car, then walking. A third of the population doesn't drive it at all. It's simply too dangerous, too frustrating and too slow. I'd argue for expanding the lanes to 15ft rather than narrowing them.
> For me to get to work, the fastest way is bicycle or scooter, then public transport, then car, then walking. A third of the population doesn't drive it at all.
That sounds pretty awesome. Driving a personal vehicle that takes up space, pollutes, and has the most capacity for causing harm should not be the default option like people treat it as.
except when I live 20 miles from work and the public transit system has no regular schedule that will suit my needs, meaning I'd have to arrive at work 1+ hours early, or 1+ hours late, carrying my laptop bag with all my work supplies + my school bag with all my university supplies. (not everyone lives in SF). This simply is not practical, nor is it practical to impose every person should "just ride public transit".
"except when I live 20 miles from work and the public transit system has no regular schedule that will suit my needs"
That right there is the vicious cycle that has brought us to the mess we're in today. The answer is not to keep feeding the monster of urban sprawl with bigger and faster roads to encourage even longer hellish commutes by car. The answer is to encourage mixed developments where a majority of people live close to the business centers and have short commutes (so a mix of public transit/biking/walking is practical for most people).
I don't want my commute distance to limit my employment opportunities.
I can't envision a day where I personally would be capable of lugging my day's supplies on a bike 20+ miles (each way!), nor where it's practical to take public transit. Nor do I want to only be limited to working in areas my local public transit serves.
This ideal you have just isn't realistic for an awful lot of people. Especially those not living in the large metropolitan areas.
the idea that 200 pound bags of flesh need to be ferried around by tonnes of steel, massive swathes of land devoted to letting them rest nearby while we remain in the destination, and the entire landscape designed to let them roam around is insanity.
edit: also, the majority of people don't own cars.
A classic TED talk and some classic J. H. Kunstler. Most interesting is how, despite his spot-on takedown of postwar urban planning, his dire predictions of having to adapt the suburbs to a post-oil world have been completely upended by the shale oil economy of the past decade. The suburbs got a stay of execution thanks to fracking, and the economic pressure to reform our living spaces has been relieved for now.
The article is 3/4's fluff, and 1 paragraph about the author's actual reasoning behind narrowing lanes. Saving 4, or 8 feet of space isn't going to magically make pedestrian crossings super safe.
The standard of the average academic/research paper is low enough that very few stand on their own. This, of course, is the reason why certain media outlets are able to make lots of money with bi-weekly, likely untrue claims that <insert thing here> "causes cancer".
This article repeats some conclusions from various research efforts of unknown (to me) quality, most of which carry caveats, and none of which were titled "Effects of Lane Width on Pedestrian Safety: A Quantitative View". These weak (not pejorative, just opposed to strong) statements are then used as the base assumptions atop which a logical argument is constructed - an argument that is incomplete. The relationship between speed and mortality is only attacked from the perspective of what happens once a collision has taken place, for instance, but there will likely also be a relationship between speed and the level of caution exercised by pedestrians, but no evidence about this is presented.
This is a question in need of comprehensive study; the tidbits presented here are neither strong nor complete enough to say anything absolute, much less accuse anyone of having blood on their hands.
Personally, I think such a study would validate much of what the author feels. But it is only my gut that says that, I'd need a study to "know". As such this comment is not meant as a criticism of the author or the thoughts in the article, but more as a sort-of defensive reminder of what the scientific method means.
Another thing missing: What is the economic cost of slowing everyone down? Clearly if people spend 50% longer commuting because they're driving 20mph instead of 30mph, that has real consequences for both their economic output and quality of life (commute time has a surprisingly large impact on a person's overall happiness!). The author disregards this factor entirely.
I've seen this pattern in a number of "unintuitive and seemingly clever" traffic engineering tricks proposed in recent years. For example, it has been shown that removing all traffic signs can in fact improve safety -- again by slowing everyone down.
Another similar point (mentioned in the article) is that expanding freeways doesn't reduce congestion, because the new lanes are filled quickly. The argument is, apparently, that we therefore should not bother expanding freeways. The argument ignores the fact that the expanded freeway is serving many more people, creating immense value even if the speed of traffic hasn't improved.
(For the trolls: I personally take the train rather than drive whenever possible.)
The problem with the expanded freeways is that they create traffic. People that previously used public transportation now take the car because it's just faster. Then other people take that job on the other side of the city, or buy the house further out in the suburbs because the new lanes makes driving faster (for a while).
Of course it is good for the economy that people can commute effectively. But by building more lanes we are choosing spread out cities dominated by highways where no one wants to live and instead drive to work from the suburbs.
And there are alternatives. We can choose more densely populated cities where the streets are dominated by pedestrians and people commute shorter distances mostly by public transport. Much better for the environment, and most importantly, better for people.
And we are making that choice whenever we chose between using the land for new roads or using the land for new pedestrian buildings and railways.
...so long as you build sufficiently quiet apartment buildings.
Comparing my apartment in Boston to mine in SF is like day and night. Here, I feel like I have my own place. It is a tad bit like a hotel room, but I don't hear much neighbor noise compared to the racket in Russian Hill.
Having a continual uneasiness due to random loud noises or having your own life impacted (listening to TV at a whisper, for example) is not human-friendly.
I think apartments get a bad rap because they are built with paper thin walls. It is more expensive to build with bigger spaces and proper noise control, but it has made a giant difference in my standard of living.
> Much better for the environment, and most importantly, better for people.
Please don't put out blanket claims like this and pretend they're obviously true, and then use them as justification for your particular view of how society should structure its geography. Some people hate densely populated areas. It would be utterly detrimental to my mental health to live in one. So if I have the choice to not live in an urban area, I'm going to take it.
I have a 45 minute commute each way every day to work. Long commutes suck. Living in the city sucks way more.
My friend who lives in the downtown area sent me a picture today. Someone busted out the elevator button to the top floor (where they live of course). In densely packed areas the ill behavior of just a few bad actors affects many more people. Having nice things close is great, though also having more bad thing close would take a toll on my mental health too.
The cities built for pedestrians will undoubtly be better for people than cities built for cars. I didn't mean to claim that living in a city always is better for people than living in the countryside, but I admit that my comment could easily be interpreted that way.
What is the economic cost of slowing everyone down?
If moving from 30mph roads to 20mph roads reduced average traffic speed, then this would be a valid argument.
However, for most urban streets during the daytime the average speed is set not by the roads themselves but by the traffic capacity of the intersections along the road. It doesn't really matter how fast you can drive along a road if it only means that you get to the back of the queue for the next set of traffic lights a little earlier!
As someone else pointed out, reducing peak speeds does not necessarily increase travel time. See this report on the Prospect Park West redesign: http://jonathansoma.com/ppw/
I commute-by-bike on a road with bike lanes in Somerville and Cambridge. At rush hour, no matter what the speed limit, the fastest way from point A to point B is a bicycle (unless A and B are stops on the red line), almost never exceeding 20mph. The reason cars are slow is that they take up too much space and have to wait in line, again and again and again.
Don't forget the extra pollution caused by the "traffic calming" measures. Frequent stops and lower speeds == considerably higher gas usage, higher emissions, increased dependence on oil.
> This, of course, is the reason why certain media outlets are able to make lots of money with bi-weekly, likely untrue claims that <insert thing here> "causes cancer".
No, that's simply not true. What actually happens is that media outlets write whatever the hell they feel like will sell, rather than what was in the scientific report. This is far more accurate than your description: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174
My point is that it's important to through out the telephone game that reports science, rather than the science itself. One shouldn't trust somebody else's summary of a scientific article, it's important to go look for oneself. Since this is a tech website, Peter Norvig should be a familiar name, and he has an excellent example of that here:
This article makes me genuinely angry for burying the explanation for why 12 foot traffic lanes are dangerous beneath many paragraphs of what the author clearly thought must have been clever banter, wasting my time. Note to authors: put the claim and the gist at the top, then defend it with more details. Don't burry the gist of the article with shitty and annoying writing, making the reader scan paragraph after paragraph of bullshit to establish if the article is worth reading in the first place. In this case, it wasn't.
The author wrote the article for people who want to read "shitty and annoying writing". There's enough of that writing in the world to know that those readers are in the majority. Those people also need convincing, don't they?
Ya, and what about the people like me who gave up on that scanning and came here to find the tldr, but instead just found your complaint, and then read this complaint about the complaint!! When will it end?!
I see a huge number of comments on this thread implying that carefulness is related to the road danger. It's the perceived danger that matters. You don't need to make the roads more dangerous, just need to make them look so.
I'm not from USA, and on the last time I visited it, I noticed how recklessly people drive on the highways, most of them were on the phone, eating, or doing something else(there was even a lady fixing her hair with her right hand, talking on the cellphone with her left hand and holding the steering wheel with her elbow, that freaked me out).
If those people behave the same driving on a street, I can see that being the cause of the majority of accidents, since the reaction time for events will be smaller, since most occurrences happen within a few meters of the car.
Finally, I know that this is not the focus of the article, but the USA cities need to focus more on the people that either cannot or will not(like me) drive. LA, LV and Miami, for instance, were pretty hellish until I finally gave in and rented a car, with poor public transportation and pedestrian access.
I'm frequently surprised by the lack of sidewalks everywhere outside of the downtown core of many cities. Perhaps its different in cities I haven't been to, but compared to where I grew up in, it does seem like everywhere else is car-first. Its not just the states or even big cities, I've lived in a small town in Ontario that was similar.
It makes me wonder if its related to the age of the area. Newer areas seem to have more sidewalks.
I visited San Diego (I was living in the UK at the time, and found it impossible to get anywhere. I was routinely told that only poor people caught the bus (and it could be dangerous), and there were no pavements anywhere to walk on. I walked to the nearest burger place for lunch every day, a hellish 1-mile jaunt through rubbish-strewn wasteland getting beeped at every time I tried to cross a road.
In contrast, every European and Australian city I've lived in has catered for pedestrians and cyclists to the extent that it's at least possible to walk or bike anywhere you need to go (even if it would take hours in these huge Aussie cities).
I still wonder at it. How do Americans feel about living in such a shitty environment?
I hate the "only poor people take the bus" vile bullshit prejudice and I've seen it here on Hacker News as well.
"America" however is not one environment and is INCREDIBLY diverse. There are places such as you've described in the US as well. Not everywhere has such prejudice against public transit too. However I believe as a whole the US is (or at least was) moving in general to a society that revolves around the automobile.
I'll tell you the absolute worst part of not being in an automobile is for me (as a woman) - the form of street harassment where assholes either beep at you or yell comments at you out the window going by. This has been a huge issue for me in every American city I ever lived in. Somehow people think this is appropriate behavior. It makes me not want to walk in a walkable area.
That is one thing I have to give to Hyderabad (India). For all its faults, you could safely walk on the side of the streets around the office park during the day, and drivers gave you space instead of doing the ugly American "I'm gonna mow you down for daring to enter my road!" thing.
Walking around at break to the street vendors was pretty cool, even if digestively perhaps risky :-)
Where in San Diego were you? I am wondering if there is a place in that beautiful city that is rubbish strewn. It's got horrible public transport though, agreed.
It was a few years ago, so things may have changed. I was out in the suburbs a bit, staying with a friend (who worked and therefore couldn't give me lifts everywhere). The wasteland looked like it was eventually going to be more suburb, but wasn't actually a building site.
I did find it weird that there were these patches of the city where just nothing was built. British cities are incredibly compact - if it's not built on or being built on then it's a manicured public park, usually fenced. But Aussie cities have odd areas that are just empty, too... must be the relative age of the cities that causes this.
Like most Americans, I have access to a car, so it's not a shitty environment. A place that caters to slow walkers and cyclists sounds worse to me. I think we tend to overrate inconveniences that affect us personally and underrate inconveniences that affect everyone else.
I think we tend to overrate _perceived_ inconveniences that affect us personally and underrate _perceived_ inconveniences that affect everyone else.
Perceived because...
A place that caters to slow walkers and cyclists, if minimally well designed, actually improves car traffic throughput. Yes, that may sound counterintuitive. Go look at Copenhagen. You'd never be able to squeeze so many people through so little transportation infrastructure if they were all traveling by car.
Las Vegas is perhaps the worst city on the planet for the carless. I've had many amusing incidents of attempting to walk places, where not just sidewalks, but roads simply do no go through.
LV, LA, and Miami are particularly appalling examples of US cities which have terrible pedestrian access.
That said, I've never seen as many people talking on their phone while driving as I saw last month in Reykjavik.
> as state DOTs widen highways to reduce congestion, in complete ignorance of all the data proving that new lanes will be clogged by the new drivers that they invite.
Let's see a cite to that data, because it seems ridiculous. Obviously if you make a road less congested people may start preferring it to other, more congested roads, but that just means the reduction in congestion is distributed rather than concentrated, and how is that a bad thing?
The entire premise of this article is questionable. The theory is that people will drive more carefully when the roads are more dangerous. From this the argument is that we should make the roads more dangerous in order to make them safer. This is obviously completely counterintuitive so they point to some evidence that it could be true (which itself seems to imply that its veracity lies near the statistical margin of error). The real problem is that it's a false dichotomy. Making the roads more dangerous is not the only way to make people drive more carefully. And alternative ways of encouraging people to drive more carefully are obviously preferable to a method that, at a given speed and level of care, is more dangerous according to the laws of physics.
More than that, this “make the roads dangerous to make them safe” is completely backwards when we're on the verge of commercially available self-driving cars. A self-driving car is obviously not bound by human psychology, so for all of those vehicles, making the roads more dangerous will only make the roads more dangerous.
The phenomenon of adding lanes not reducing congestion is generally a reference to the "Downs-Thomson Paradox"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox) or "Triple Convergence" related research.
The general idea is that congestion dissuades some amount of commuters from using the road at congested times. When additional road capacity is added, those people will shift their commute time, or commute mode, or commute route to re-congest the road. (Time, mode or route is the "Triple Convergence" or latent/induced demand.) But in certain contexts like LA or London it's not possible to build enough road capacity to eliminate congestion. So building additional road capacity has the effect of (a) not reducing congestion and (b) reducing usage of public transportation. And (b) causes additional problems for the efficiency that public transportation.
The counter-intuitiveness is why it's a paradox. And the context probably matters for when this theory applies. But supposedly it happens to lots of developed cities. The original study on London was looking at when ~80% of commutes happened by transit. But LA is trying to improve its transit infrastructure because partly because this problem.
The Downs-Thomson Paradox makes reasonable sense, but it doesn't prove the claim from the article. It explains how adding road capacity could make traffic congestion worse (if it causes the preexisting level of mass transit availability to become unsustainable), but not why it inevitably must. For example, if mass transit in a particular city is already useless and disused then that can't happen. It also points to a way out of the paradox: Expand road capacity and subsidize mass transit availability at the same time.
That isn't a reality due to the massive cost of either options (basically, pick one). Successful mass transit using the roads (eg bus rapid transit) require taking capacity out of the highways and therefore aren't mutually compatible.
I had not heard of the Downs-Thomson Paradox, thank you very much for sharing it.
After reading the article I have to point out, from the "Restrictions on validity" section, that it "only applies to regions in which the vast majority of peak-hour commuting is done on rapid transit systems with separate rights of way".
So for most cities outside of NYC, this paradox supposedly does not apply (even though I feel it has some bearing).
Regardless, the general principle behind the paradox is induced demand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) - which, regardless of the share of transit users, will always apply to highway projects.
Downs-Thomson contains its own ad-absurdum refutation. If adding capacity makes congestion worse, then why can't we make congestion better by reducing capacity? Clearly this is wrong in the general case.
It does not state that it makes it worse, it states that it does not improve it. i.e. that there is an approximate equilibrium that is reached regardless of road capacity in an environment where there is more potential traffic capacity for congested times than the roads could realistically be made to accommodate.
What such simplistic studies miss, though, is the reason why those drivers are out there in the first place. They are going to and from different places, doing different things at different times. By treating traffic as a variable to be optimized in a vacuum, the academic and professional urban planners tend to miss the forest for the trees.
In other words, I believe that to the extent new lane capacity is filled as soon as the construction workers pick up their cones, it is because economically and/or socially useful things are happening. Otherwise, why would any of us drive anywhere at all?
I think it's a three-part problem. One, it is a flow problem, and by removing congestion at one bottleneck you mostly deliver traffic more efficiently to the next bottleneck. Actually increasing traffic flow is much more expensive than the cost of any single project. Second, over time, you end up with induced demand -- if you actually do get rid of all the congestion, longer commutes will become more practical, and traffic will increase until the marginal-next-commuter is discouraged from adding his car to the scrum.
Third, economic arguments are a little dicey for driving because driving is filled with externalized costs, subsidies, overoptimistic assumptions, and dependent utility. Driving creates noise and pollution (and it appears that the pollution is more deadly than crashes) but drivers don't pay that cost. There's personal crash risk, but people tend to assume that they are careful drivers and hence less likely to crash than the norm. The cost of the roads themselves is currently subsidized from the general fund; it's not a huge external cost, but it's a cost. Driving also creates (perceived) danger to people biking and walking; that tends to encourage them to also drive for their own (perceived) safety, even when they otherwise would not, and the congestion costs of driving also delay bus transit, making it less useful (it's already slower because of all the stops; traffic jams make it slower yet).
One explanation could be that people are lazy and will generally opt for the conveniences a car if the perceived disadvantages are relatively small. I and many people I know probably would consider a car if we lived in a city optimized for that.
Instead, because the city is optimized for cycling and public transport, I live in a culture where taking even public transport is frowned upon if the bicycle commute is < 30 mins (and even an hour, perhaps).
I think this argument applies to many things. In the city where I live, Amsterdam, there's (almost) always a supermarket at walking distance (or a 5-10 min. bike ride). In fact, this is true for the whole country, as far as I know. 'Hypermarkets' like wal-mart or Carrefoure never really took off. The reason for this is partly culture, but largely it's because of regulation that protects smaller shops.
Most people consider it a very good thing that we can walk to the supermarket and that we are, in effect, 'forced' to have a healthy lifestyle and culture.
Anyways, I just wanted to share how the fact that streets will fill up and hypermarkets will most likely be successful doesn't mean that this is a good thing, or that it's in our best interest.
The theory is that people will drive more carefully if they perceive the roadway to be more dangerous. That is not the same as it actually being more dangerous.
Moreover, road safety is not fixed but rather dependent on the speed at which drivers drive on the road. Thus, if a roadway design causes drivers to drive slower on road B as opposed to road A, road B may be safer even if it would be less safe than road A if people drove the same speeds on both roadways. There is nothing particularly counter intuitive about this type of theory at all.
Also perceived danger to oneself doesn't take into account the risk one poses to others. This issue of externalities is what makes these 12 foot lanes so dangerous. As noted in the article, if drivers are driving slower, they are far less likely to kill or seriously injure pedestrians. And since F = (.5)mv^2 this is exactly what we'd hypothesize. Pedestrians are a non-issue on the rural highways that the 12 foot lane and other state road design measures are based on. But in the middle of a dense city, higher speeds, even if they aren't any less safe for the drivers, are far less safe for pedestrians and cyclists, not to mention far more unpleasant to be around. It is this concept, more than anything else, that traffic engineers are so often obtuse to.
And driver-less cars will have to be able to navigate the existing 10-foot lane roads anyways to be commercially viable, so I don't see how that is an issue.
> The theory is that people will drive more carefully if they perceive the roadway to be more dangerous. That is not the same as it actually being more dangerous.
Without the expectation that people will compensate for it, making the lanes narrower does make it actually more dangerous. There will be less space between each vehicle and less space between the vehicle and pedestrians on the side of the road, which reduces the amount of space available to avoid an obstruction, the amount of reaction time available to avoid a collision, etc.
> Also perceived danger to oneself doesn't take into account the risk one poses to others.
That is a counterargument to your position. If drivers aren't bearing the full risk then an increase in risk should cause them to undercompensate, not overcompensate.
> And driver-less cars will have to be able to navigate the existing 10-foot lane roads anyways to be commercially viable, so I don't see how that is an issue.
It is possible to be less safe without being negligent and that difference is still measured in human lives.
> making the lanes narrower does make it actually more dangerous.
I think you're being downvoted in part because the linked article refutes your viewpoint. There's even a pullquote saying "States and counties believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong." Followed up in the text by "Or, to be more accurate, they are wrong, and thousands of Americans are dead."
And "The lane widths in the analyses conducted were generally either not statistically significant or indicated that narrower lanes were associated with lower rather than higher crash frequencies."
That's not a refutation, it's a contradiction. The evidence offered is not sufficient to actually prove the assertions. In particular, those crash frequencies need to be normalized against the reduced capacity in order to be a meaningful comparison. If narrowing the road decreases crashes because fewer people are using the road, you don't have a safer road, just less road, and you may have merely shifted the crashes to alternative routes. On the other hand, if narrowing the lanes makes people drive more carefully without significantly constricting flow, that's a real result that deserves to be stated clearly.
I chose my words carefully. The quote in the article is in turn a quote from http://trb.metapress.com/content/x7854w1160551331/ . The article links to that publication. The abstract of that publication says:
> This research investigated the relationship between lane width and safety for roadway segments and intersection approaches on urban and suburban arterials. The research found no general indication that the use of lanes narrower than 3.6 m (12 ft) on urban and suburban arterials increases crash frequencies. This finding suggests that geometric design policies should provide substantial flexibility for use of lane widths narrower than 3.6 m (12 ft). The inconsistent results suggested increased crash frequencies with narrower lanes in three specific design situations. Narrower lanes should be used cautiously in these three situations unless local experience indicates otherwise.
It it turn builds on, for example, results by Hauer, et al, Strathman et al. which appear.
You then raised another objection, which is, I believe, that a 10' lane causes people to use alternate routes because of decreased capacity on those lanes, so there are simply fewer people on the 10' lane roads to cause accidents.
This may well be. It's a subtle network effect that is hard to analyze, and not covered in this article. (The article does comment that capacity is unchanged, but I think its literature citations are weak. It quotes Petritsch who in turn quotes a summary of an unpublished literature search.)
However, your objection is not what was refutated. AnthonyMouse proposes that narrowing lanes lead to a higher accident rate since it "reduces the amount of space available to avoid an obstruction, the amount of reaction time available to avoid a collision, etc." While true for country roads, those above papers show that the same correlation can not be identified on city roads.
Now, what I know is only from this article, and it may be that the author cherry-picked the few papers which show that the 'reaction time' hypothesis is unsupported by the evidence. But "refute" means "to deny the accuracy or truth of", and certainly the article refuted that hypothesis.
> And "The lane widths in the analyses conducted were generally either not statistically significant or indicated that narrower lanes were associated with lower rather than higher crash frequencies."
And this is the problem. "Not statistically significant" means that the effect is very small. This is what you would expect if narrower lanes make driving more dangerous but then drivers compensate by being more careful; they approximately cancel each other out. The author is making much hay out of the possibility that drivers might be not only compensating but overcompensating for the reduction in safety, theoretically causing a (small) net increase in safety.
The fallacy of this is that intentional danger is not the only possible way to increase driver vigilance. As one example, we could promote self-driving cars. That allows us to capture a much larger safety increase because the increase doesn't have to be weighed down by the counterbalancing cost of having narrower lanes and less room to maneuver.
As a quibble, "not statistically significant" means "cannot tell if there was an effect, either positive or negative, because it's smaller than the noise." The only difference is that one can't use it to argue that it 'theoretically [caused] a (small) net increase in safety'.
You use the phrase "intentional danger". The flip side is that "illusory safety." A 12' lane may feel safer even though it actually isn't. But it feels like you stress the "intentional danger" part when the label is irrelevant - the questions are the number and severity of crashes, of human injury, of overall traffic capacity, etc. How one labels the emotional aspect of the driver's internal state isn't relevant to the outcomes.
Also, as secabeen pointed out, driver vigilance isn't the only concern. To add another one 12' of road surface is simply more expensive to repair, clean, and replace than 10' of surface.
Regarding self-driving cars - sure, but how does that change anything in the next 10-20 years of road design? The underlying factors won't change unless a large percentage of vehicles are self-driving. You might as well argue that enforcing a 10mph speed limit would be safer as well, as another example of a solution which, even though correct should it occur, won't affect anyone's planning now.
Right, but you're missing the author's point. Smaller lanes make the space feel more human-scale and friendly to pedestrians and bikers. Traffic engineers argue that larger lanes are safer. These studies show there is no evidence of that. Given that smaller lanes are more appealing, and have no measurable impact on safety, the trend towards larger lanes should be reversed, and smaller lanes implemented on new roads.
Imagine if you have an IT company with a server. Your server can handle 1000 concurrent users. It is running slowly because a lot of people try to access it.
So you buy another server. Now you have 2000 users, but once again it is starting to run slowly.
You decide to stop there. Clearly, more servers wont help. You'd just get more and more users.
You have 1000 users and a server that can easily do the work 20000 users want it to do each day. Yet, every weekday between 08:00 and 9:00, your server is overloaded.
You buy a second server. Now, your server still is overloaded between 08:00 and 9:00 but fewer people use it between 07:00 and 08:00 and 09:00 and 10:00.
There are plenty of people avoiding the main traffic times for whom the annoyance of congestion is just a tiny bit larger than the annoyance of leaving home an hour earlier. Take away a bit of congestion and they move their schedule.
Cities have relatively fixed populations. The problem is not allowing everyone to drive their own car: that's stupid. The problem is how to persuade more people to catch the bus/train. Building roads doesn't make anyone's life any easier or better because it just persuades people to drive instead of catching public transport. Less roads actually helps because public transport gets better.
Your analogy is broken because building more servers doesn't "get more users". You have to service a fixed number of users in the most efficient manner possible. Providing a car lane for each of them is not efficient.
We all know that roads aren't free. If they weren't worth building in terms of increased economic output, however, then city planners would stop building them.
That seems reasonable on its face. The reality is that state and federal funding hinges on city planners padding budgets and increasing capacity to meet future growth. Meanwhile, cities and towns put themselves in hock to meet the servicing demands of their infrastructure, requiring more state and federal funding, requiring new projects with padded budgets and increased capacity.
Notice that nowhere in there was a requirement that said infrastructure pays for itself. More often than not, and especially in small towns, it doesn't.
You say that as though you think there isn't a significant economic benefit to having a more efficient transportation network. Having higher-capacity roads is beneficial even if they aren't toll roads.
You say that as though you think there isn't a significant economic benefit to having a more efficient transportation network
You're assuming that having more roads makes it more efficient, but that's not necessarily true. If having less urban roads convinces more people to use mass transit, for example, it might be more efficient.
> There was an article about people's tendency to soak up additional road space posted on HN fairly recently
Article provides very little useful information. Again, it's obvious that if you expand one road in a congested city then it will get full of cars again, because it takes the overflow from all of the other congested roads. And if you reduce congestion in general then people might choose to drive more often.
But this does not persist as a 1:1 relationship. China has proved as much by building a bunch of empty highways and cities, as is also demonstrated by urban highways carrying more traffic than rural highways with the same number of lanes. The "problem" is that if you have a lot of congested highways then you need to add a lot of lanes before you'll hit saturation, but that hardly proves that it can't be done. The observed 1:1 relationship in some locations is easily explained as a result of widespread insufficient infrastructure investment, resulting in roads with insufficient capacity even after the expansion.
I had a recording of Ben Elton's standup in the mid-1980s in the UK, and he raised the issue of adding lanes to clogged roads just inviting more traffic, leaving the road just as clogged as before.
He was drawing an analogy to the 'swing-top' bin - how you always try to fit more in and never empty it. "What would be the state of affairs a week from now if I gave you all a brand new swing-top bin to put next to your current one?"
> There's actually a ton of data to support the idea that making activities feel more dangerous makes them safer.
I'm not disputing the idea that people might respond to perceived safety by taking more risks or vice versa. It's almost a corollary to the efficient market hypothesis. However, that doesn't tell you anything about whether they will overcompensate or undercompensate in any given context.
And what I'm really objecting to is the idea that we should make people "feel" less safe by doing things that actually make them less safe if not for people [over]compensating for them. Because that's a very dangerous game if you're wrong and it's completely ignoring the possibility of solving the problem in other ways, which should on balance be more effective because you aren't running the wrong way with the ball.
I had the impression (from talking to traffic engineers) that it was pretty much common knowledge in the field that newly constructed highways only alleviate congestion for a very short time (a year or two), after which it returns to previous levels on both the old and new routes.
How does traffic speed increase with wider lanes, but capacity doesn't?
How many lives are saved by fire trucks, police, etc... being able to get to/from emergencies more quickly? I feel like experimental data will be much more useful than models to measure the impact of 10' to 12' lanes.
I read a story just recently that suggested that suggested that since areas with wider lanes have lower density any speedups of emergency vehicles is lost because they one average have to travel a greater distance.
I can't find the original story but here are some papers:
"The findings show that the density and age of a residential area or jurisdiction explain some of the variation in average EMS response times between urban and suburban or exurban locations. Holding other things constant, those who live in more sparsely settled and newer developments tend to have longer wait times for EMS."
These are city streets. Capacity is probably limited by the rate at which cars go through traffic lights (which is probably largely unchanged by 10 vs 12 feet lanes), not by how fast a motorist can accelerate when driving away from a light.
Actually, more speed also means cars spend less time on the road, so throughput increases still. Bumper to bumper Traffic jams don't mean high throughput. What is most important is smoothness in flow.
The article has 1.2 the amount of words it needs, at least. Apropos.
Strange to use Florida as an example, with an 8-lane local road! Suburban Florida is empty and flat very spread out and every road is basically a highway. People need to go fast because everything is far away. Not like urban environments where most time is spent stopped at corners, not moving.
Agreed. Tampa, Orlando, and the other big cities are like any others. In the middle of the state or the Everglades, though, you can go miles without even a turnoff.
This article completely misses the point of having wider lane path ways. Wider lanes help increase the speeds of vehicles and studies have shown that high speed traffic works far better than slow traffic. Just look up ramp metering where they deliberately keep too much traffic off of highways to maintain speed and maintain safety and maintain efficiency of roads.
The cases where narrow street widths work better are places where there is more stop and go traffic like downtown areas where majority of the residences are crowded with store-front development. There instead of insisting on narrow lanes, you should insist on complete street designs that appropriately designs for all kinds of traffic.
New urbanist movements seem to be behind this kind of lunacy of trying to create traffic conditions more difficult for cars. In New York, this trend has been set of by the Bloomberg administration and is labeled/marketed as traffic calming. It is really traffic impeding and is the center piece design of urban environments. I admit there are various benefits to it, but the underlying motivations are to be anti-gas guzzling vehicles.
You should re-read the article. He specifically states he is no talking about highways, and further specifically states that throughput of traffic remains the same in areas with 10-ft lanes, and gives references to prove that.
Your comment makes me think about this a bit differently. I live in NYC, and end up driving through it once every couple of months. While I'm normally sympathetic to people who hate anything that makes things easier for drivers and worse for pedestrians, if NYC is a model for "traffic calming", it's terrible, because I'm very angry and aggressive after 15 minutes of trying to drive in this place. I don't want to drive often, and I don't want to encourage more driving, but I want driving to be less difficult. Maybe make street parking 2-hour-max everywhere so there's room for cars and trucks to stop so they don't stop in the middle of the road, and they're forced to pay for off-road parking overnight, etc. Or something else, I don't know. That sounds severe, but the situation is already ridiculous.
> if NYC is a model for "traffic calming", it's terrible, because I'm very angry and aggressive after 15 minutes of trying to drive in this place.
"Traffic calming" is a euphemism for telling drivers to go fuck themselves. If traffic increases to meet capacity, traffic calming is trying to reverse that. By punishing drivers, and making it incredibly shitty to drive, traffic is reduced.
I thought "traffic calming" was to reduce speed and increase safety. My point was that, if you reduce speed all the way to zero, safety is not increased, due to frustration. "Traffic is reduced" is not an accurate way to describe the situation.
I'm not a traffic engineer, but if "traffic calming" is to reduce speed and increase safety, then I have very rarely seen it work or be used that way.
Instead, it strikes me as both a tool for non-drivers that are "driver hating", as well as those local NIMBYs/etc that don't want those "crazy speeders" through the town ("think of the children").
Next time that folks discuss putting traffic calming bumps in your community, ask whether you want the emergency vehicles to be slowed down when you or your loved ones are waiting for an ambulance. Consider the extra pollution created by all the slowing down and speeding up.
I have spoken to folks familiar with Cambridge, MA government structures, where they have told me that it has been actively refused to re-time/synchronize stop lights to have a green wave because they want the traffic slowed down. New York City has real green waves (e.g. going up 1st ave). So next time you are driving down Massachusetts Ave in the evening and you hit random red lights for no reason, know that someone has explicitly decided to do this to you.
I green wave that goes 30 MPH, instead of 45, sounds like a good idea if you want traffic flow to be pedestrian friendly, though. Race car drivers have to stop, until they learn to just cruise.
Speaking both pedantically and based on my experience riding a bicycle, when traffic speed is reduced all the way to zero, it is in fact safer, at least for me. I am of course, not counting the risk of drivers stroking out from frustration-induced high blood pressure, but that's what we on bikes call a lifestyle choice.
Even if I agree with most of that, I don't think keeping the road wide and using the outside area a bike lanes will work. People are going to see a wide road and drive fast anyway. I suspect you'd have to actually narrow the road, not just reallocate the concrete. But TD;DR maybe that was covered and I'm wrong.
Anecdotally, in Vancouver we have narrow lanes in the city, with many streets having all kinds of bike lanes along their sides – both shared and separated. It works quite well, especially the separated ones.
Narrow lanes surely do decrease average driving speed, it's damn uncomfortable to drive fast in traffic, and staying in the lane requires more concentration. I do miss wide Russian lanes sometimes, but the narrow ones are undeniably safer.
About 8 or 9 months ago, they reduced the 3-lane thoroughfare through my part of town to 2-lanes with a bike lane, and narrowed the lanes to about 10 feet. People slowed down at first, but now people go just as fast as they used to, typically 5-10MPH over the speed limit, and some 15 MPH over (that's 50MPH). The radar signs installed as part of the project always read 40, 42, 45 and not just for my car.
As a cyclist, the bike lanes don't really make me feel safer. There is a good margin of space between the bike lane and the car lane, but the bike lanes are really only in effect for half of any given block. The second half of the block, the line between the car/bike lanes is dotted, and cars can legally enter the bike lane, to make right turns. And then of course, anyone parallel parking on the street has to cross the bike lane to do so.
Making the lanes narrower did not make pedestrian crossings any safer, as the road is actually the same width, and you still have to travel the same distance to cross the street. What did make it safer for pedestrians, the installation of flashing yellow warning lights at certain crosswalks, that pedestrians can turn on before crossing the street. Motorists see them and stop for people crossing, and that is a new and welcome effect.
The bike lanes would have been much MUCH better implemented one block south of the main drag on a residential street that runs parallel. Much safer for cyclists. Healthier too, not having to breath as much vehicle exhaust. And probably a more optimal allocation of resources for the citizens. As much as everyone wants to be PC and become friendly advocates of human-powered transport, it really doesn't make sense in this part of town, to increase trip times and emissions for thousands of motorists daily, so the 50 people who choose to ride their bike can have a marginally safer lane to ride in. In Downtown L.A., it is completely different. Downtown, the bike lanes make sense because hundreds if not thousands of people use them. You always see a bike in the bike lane over there. But outside of the heart of the city, many people commute to work and carpool their kids to school and ballet and such. They're not going to ride bikes 5 hours a day to make that kind of commute.
Oh, and where the traffic engineers failed to account for, and accommodate heavy traffic on a couple of heavily-traveled segments of the road, motorists now drive their cars illegally in the bike lanes during periods of congestion.
IMO the project is mostly a failure. The safer pedestrian crossings are a great improvement. But the bike lanes such as they are, and the narrower lanes, just a waste of money. Putting the bike lanes on a side street would have been really great, a win-win for both cyclists and motorists.
>People slowed down at first, but now people go just as fast as they used to, typically 5-10MPH over the speed limit, and some 15 MPH over (that's 50MPH). The radar signs installed as part of the project always read 40, 42, 45 and not just for my car.
Radar signs that basically just say "shame on you" are worthless. Traffic enforcement cameras ("speed cameras") that actually hand out fines would have an actual impact. Those speeders would change their ways if they had to pay a fine every time they drove over the limit. Preferably the fine would be scaled based on the driver's income.
In my baseless opinion, the "shame on you" radar signs are probably pretty effective. And definitely preferable to robot overlords handing out tickets. And doubly less offensive than charging people more based on income. At least here in the US, we have the concept that all citizens are treated equally in the eyes of the law. I don't want a system that intentionally punishes rich|poor|black|white|smart|dumb people more than any other.
Also, what if someone's wealth changes between the ticket and the penalty? If they are rich when given the ticket, but lose it all, is it still fair to charge them the higher rate?
My point is: changing from an absolute value to a relative one introduces complexities in the system. Philosophically, the law needs to treat everyone the same, which to me, means the penalties are the same for everyone regardless of sex, race, income, height, weight, or any other characteristic. This is encoded in the Constitution. I do not see how two different people, convicted of the same crime in the same contexts, should have different punishments. (Yes, I know it happens, but I think that's a bug, not a feature, and wish it would be cleaned up.)
Should we also do prison sentences based on life expectancy?
Suppose the penalty for murder is 50% of your remaining life. Should we put a 20 year old away until he's 50 (assuming 80 years expected lifespan), but only lock a 60 year old up for 10 years?
I live in LA, in Eagle Rock, and this somewhat describes what the LADOT has done on Colorado Blvd.
Anecdotally, where I live, the truly extreme speeding (50 mph in a 35) seems to have decreased. Also, most of the jockeying for position, weaving in and out of the lanes, has stopped, due to the reduction of 3 car lanes to 2 narrower car lanes plus bike lane. As a result, I'm quite in favor of this experiment.
Just because a street runs parallel doesn't mean it will have all the same intersections or traffic flow as the main street. I don't specifically know the streets you're talking about from any personal experience or map, but I bet the main drag at least has a longer span through town making it an attractive route for many difference commutes by bicycle.
You can probably cram them through since they are flexible, but they wouldn't fit without some force; a regulation rim is 18 inches inside diameter and a basketball 9.5 inches diameter.
I remember when the speed limit was raised from 55 to 65. Politicians paraded all kinds of studies from engineers, PhD's and mothers crying on TV. The claim was that blood would run down our streets and highways. The effects of making this change, the "experts" and politicians said, would be cataclysmic.
What happened in reality?
Nothing of the sort. Actually, some of the opposite. Accident and fatality rates went down.
So I call hogwash. Maybe this guy has some sort of bias, financial or political interest in this idea. Maybe it is about hiring a million new union workers across the nation to repaint all of our streets and buy votes for the democratic party in 2016. Maybe it is about giving a few huge corporations juicy contracts to try to buy financial support and votes for republicans.
I don't know. My life is about science and data. So, yes, I do value honest studies with solid data and conclusions. I also know that you can't take a sentence or two our of a study and quote it completely out of context to support your case. When put into context the reality of the study could be very different and the conclusions could be really flawed.
Ask almost anyone who drove pre-65mph how they feel about the change to 65. I would be surprised if anyone said it got worst. It's a lot more relaxed. You don't have to be constantly focused on the darn speedometer or become a human highway patrol detector.
In fact, I think the speed limit ought to be raised to 80mph. People are not suicidal. They'll drive at whatever speed is safe and comfortable for them. On average, today, that seems to be somewhere around 75 to 80mph, except when CHP gets on the road and everything slows down causing traffic backups, etc.
If we are really that concerned that blood will run down streets it is a relatively simple technological matter to legislate that no automobile sold in the US can go faster than, say, 70mph. An automatic speed limiting system could also be put into place to limit speeds everywhere in real time. A low power emitter in every traffic signal in the nation could tell cars what the max speed limit might be and the software in the car keeps you from exceeding it. Done deal.
If the issue is so serious let's just do that. I'd rather have cops devote their time to chasing bad guys than hiding behind a fence to give dumb traffic tickets to all the mommies taking their kids to school during the first week of class (happens almost every year here).
Do you have a source for your factual statement about what happened when speed limits were increased? I ask, because you write, "My life is about science and data," and I would have liked to see some links to some science and data in your comment. I was just Googling around with searches on open-ended questions like "effect of speed limit changes," and I found some links to official reports and scientific studies
that suggest that raising speed limits increases the rate of road fatalities, at least on highways that are not designed with the features of the Interstate Highway System highways. But perhaps you have found other studies whose methodology you would like to explain here that reach a different conclusion.
I am so glad someone other than me took the time to google this and post it here. People want everything spoon fed these days. They don't even want to take a few moments to say "Let me see if this guy has a point" and do a little research before running their mouths through the keyboard. Thank you for posting this limk.
How about it folks? You are not going to take back all those down votes and nonsense counterpoint posts, are you? You are not going to apologize and say, "Sorry, you were right", are you?
Of course you are not. You probably won't even take the time to read the PDF this person posted. No, it's much easier to hate those with opposing views and smash them down as hard as you can than to make an effort to understand and learn something.
What makes it so difficult to provide evidence for your own argument? I don't understand why you think that making a contrary point and then saying it "isn't worth your time" to corroborate the claim would persuade anybody.
Why do I have to? Why does everything have to be spoon fed?
Some of the most valuable learning I have done has been through researching topics out of my own interest, sometimes spurred by and idea or a couple of words I came across somewhere. You learn very little by being spoon fed. I am not here to spoon feed anyone.
If someone wants to refute what I said, take the time to go ascertain whether or not my point is valid. Googling is pretty easy. Until you (plural you) have done that, don't spew off a bunch of irrelevant nonsense that makes you (plural) look like a fool.
The punch line here is very simple: If you ready my original comment, there's NOTHING whatsoever on there that is false. Yet it was attacked mercilessly and down-voted to hell and back. And so was nearly every single comment I had to make after that to defend myself and my position.
Shooting the messenger is a sport around here.
And then someone really smart came along and he/she decided to take a few moments to actually and see if I was full of shit or not. And a link was posted. And, guess what, it corroborated absolutely everything I said about the transition from 55 to 65.
Yet nobody apologizes and the barrage of down-votes and attacks continues because, well, the kids just don't want to be wrong. Well, fuck you all. Grow up and go learn something.
HN sucks at this.
It is ruled by what I perceive to be a petulant mob of post-adolescents who just got free from Mommy and Daddy and now have to be right all the time in the face of reality. And don't get me started about the manure-filled ideas they soaked-up in college and took to be true without any thought, consideration or validation with reality at all.
Important? Not really. HN is mostly a waste of time as a participant exactly because of this mob of post-diaper members who make discussing anything just about impossible. The sport is to find holes in your comments and savagely attack them with comments, down votes or both. It's a true mob of bully's.
I've been pretty busy lately and have mostly ignored HN for probably months (don't really have a clue how long). I've picked up reading an article here and there from a quick browse of the first page but no discussions of any substance in a while. Frankly, not sure why I got into this thread. I'm on vacation, that must be why. And I actually regret it. I hate dealing with ignorant, entitled, petulant 20-somethings. And that's what HN is full of.
I'll phase myself back into read-only mode. I'll let the morons own the castle.
Of course this comment will be met with the usual dosage of savage come-backs and down votes. Have fun kids, whatever floats your boat.
> I was a college debater and enjoy many sorts of intellectual argument, but your posts do not advance an open objective of persuasion,
Welcome to the real world then! College debating is not equal to real life conversations.
> you seem to be concerned with the opinions of other HN readers.
I couldn't care less. I am concerned with bigotry and bullying. Even then, these people have little value in my life, as it should be, you should not let bully's gain value in your life.
> In fact, many of the points you raise are completely valid, but the manner in which you deliver them repel others from joining with your side.
Disagree. Firstly, the form of the message has nothing whatsoever to do with the validity of the message. I could say "Joe is an asshole and a thief" or "Joe is a man who exhibits nothing but condescension and lack of consideration towards others. He is also known for his lack of respect for property ownership rights and has been known to, at times, take other's property and use it as his own.". Both true. Both deliver pretty much the same message. One is VERY efficient. The other one could be an attempt to sound erudite and pseudo intellectual.
I go for brevity and clarity. I am not concerned with what people think about the form of the message. In fact, it says a lot about a person when they can discuss the merits of an idea without judging the form that stands in front of them. A homeless man in dirty clothes can utter just as valid a statement as a Wall Street millionaire in a $2,000 suit. The bigot is the one who is only interested in having a discussion with the $2,000 suit.
Go back and read my very first comment on this thread. This one:
Now, pray tell, what about that post "repels others from joining" my side?
Instead I got an immediate stream of attacks from people who didn't bother to go over to Google and type:
"effects of repealing the 55 mile per hour speed limit"
And, of course a bunch of FLAWED articles with opposing views.
And so, my post would have been a trigger for learning. Rather than me hand-picking links that only support my view of the universe it is left up to the reader to do a little work and try to understand where I may have been coming from. I mean, we are arguing over typing half a dozen words into Google and spending some time reading.
Instead these people prefer to immediately down-vote, post a bunch of one sided flawed links and, to use a term from another thread, pour hot flaming oil on the messenger. I call these people morons. And rightly so. I mean, in one case the poster listed a bunch of links and then admits:
"raising speed limits increases the rate of road fatalities, at least on highways that are not designed with the features of the Interstate Highway System highways"
Really? Really? C'mon. Look, I'm not a kid. I probably have 30 years on the average HN member. Please give me the benefit of the doubt when I say that a segment of our youth has lost touch with reality in a measurable way. Everything has to be spoon fed. Nobody wants to work for anything. Everyone is a genius. Nobody wants to get their hands dirty. Respect is an almost non-existing commodity. And critical thinking, well, we are far more likely to find Elvis in the building than solid critical thinking skills in the average population of 20-somethings, college or not.
So, yes, want to debate me? No problem. Go do the research and come back with trustworthy data --not nonsense-- and we can discuss the merits of my position at length with civility. I will NOT do the work for you. I, in principle, REFUSE to do that.
In this particular case I lived through the relevant period and was very familiar with all the arguments of the time. So I didn't pull my statements out of my anus. As verified by a bunch of links you can discover yourself, this happened (the insane political claims about raising the speed limit) and as early as a couple of years later they were all shown to be not a little wrong but monumentally insanely wrong.
So yes, what I said was, as far as I remember, absolutely factual. It just so happened it did not align with the post-diaper sensibilities of the 20-something HN crowd who only know about attacking the messenger and are obviously too fucking lazy to take just a few minutes to learn something before flapping their jaws. I am not saying this is you. I am saying this is "them", whoever "them" might be.
If you are interested in discussing the topic from a frame of reference where you have done the research to learn and come back to me with questions or objections I would be honored to do so. My life has been about constant learning. Nothing better than learning something new. Having an intelligent discussion with someone who is informed and not spewing nonsense is a fantastic way to learn. In fact, I engage in this all the time in real life by participating in a range of meetups from technology to business. Always neat to interact with people who are there to learn an not to put people down because of what they look like, who they are, how they say things, etc.
Right, exactly what I said about the HN cargo cult. So, this guy refutes me with a bunch of nonsense links to studies he admits are about "highways that are not designed with the features of the Interstate Highway System highways". Really? Any moron can understand that raising the speed limit on a road not designed to handle it will result in nothing good. I've travelled on the autobahn at 180 miles per hour (under the right conditions, etc.). I have driven the Nurburgring in an overpowered 911. None of our (US) highways are even remotely designed for that. Yet the transition from 55 to 65 or even 80 isn't a problem at all for the vast majority of our roads.
So I called the guy for doing exactly what the author of the 12 foot vs. 10 foot lane author is probably doing: Using bullshit or irrelevant papers to try to support a nonsense conclusion. And you cargo cult kids down vote me. Well done.
Blood is running down the streets (just not literally). Traffic deaths are the top killer for kids under 15 in NYC; these aren't even people driving! They are killed by others, and often at speeds that are very, very likely to kill upon basically any collision.
If you value science and data, you can tell from a mile what an enormously stupid idea it is to have multi-ton cars roaming cities at even 20mph. Physics tells us it's deadly, everything tells us people are incompetent and unfit to drive, and the statistics bear out the very, very high expected costs.
I'd argue it can only be ignorance that would make you look at the tremendous body of evidence, both theorethically and statistically, and conclude
> People are not suicidal. They'll drive at whatever speed is safe and comfortable for them.
But that's what I'm saying? If the market is happy tomorrow, you might expect Yahoo to pick up some steam, but of course that doesn't make it any more of a viable company.
Indeed the relative comparisons are at the heart of the problem. They come so natural to humans. Everybody drives daily, how dangerous can it be? This very poster attests to the fact that he feels perfectly safe in a multi-ton steel vehicle moving at 65 mph, propelled forward by repeated explosions (well, that part is a bit hyperbole).
So while society tells you it's perfectly safe and why don't you think about those terrorists thousands of miles away, just looking at the absolute numbers for traffic related mortality tells us that the problem is very freaking huge.
The most important figure to monitor though is not mortality/car-distance, but traffic mortality/population. Let me rephrase that in plain English. Care about creating a safer car driving environment, but care even much more about your loved ones surviving traffic in good health.
In addition to lowering mortality/car-distance, one can reduce traffic mortality/population in two significant ways: shifting traffic from car to safer means of transport, and lowering total car-distance. This holds true both on individual and society level.
I'm going to deliberately provocate now by comparing to a very sensitive number. Just hoping it will wake up at least someone.
Improve road infrastructure safety to Dutch standards? Prevent over four 9/11's per year (12850 deaths).
Improve transportation culture to Dutch standards? Prevent up to eight 9/11's per year (24007 deaths).
You don't have to be suicidal to be distractable, tired, or overconfident.
Edit: I also like how in the paragraph after you state your love of 'science and data', you promote vague, theoretical, self-reported anecdotal evidence (that isn't even part of a scientific study) as a basis for your argument.
You sound pretty smart (or at least you think you are).
If you are so interested in proving me wrong about the shift from 55 to 65 not having resulted in blood running down the streets (which is exactly what was predicted back then) go do the research yourself.
I don't think I need a research paper to know that AT WORST it made no difference at all. I was not in diapers when this happened. I had already been driving for a while. So, I went through the transition as and adult. Was exposed to all the "the sky is falling" crap and come out of the other side, years later, realizing these people were all full of it.
Had the transition been horrific the media would still be counting the dead every day just like they did for the Iraq war.
Don't believe me? Fine. Go figure it out. I don't need to waste my time on something I already know to be true.
I don't think I need a research paper to know that AT WORST it made no difference at all.
Then your life is not about science and data. If it was, you'd know that counterintutive findings happen all the time in science. For example, the Big Bang theory was famously named for the 'ridiculous example' presented by people trying to discredit that theory. Finding counterintuitive results are a major part of why we do scientific studies in the first place.
Had the transition been horrific the media would still be counting the dead every day
Shall I start counting the logical fallacies you're throwing out (as a 'lives science' guy, no less)? Why does something have to be carnage, sorry, 'blood running down the streets', to be 'worse'? This is how sensantionalist tabloid journalists talk, not reasoned scientists.
(or at least you think you are)
Ironically, I've had a partial scientific test done which indicates that yes, I am smart, regardless of whether or not I personally think so. Being smart is nice, but it's not everything. I was on track for 140ish - not a genius, but above average. But, given that you 'value science and data', you should probably be made aware of me having done a partial WAIS-R by a properly trained professional. It's not perfect, but it was independently run and it's better than self-reported anecdotal hypothetical 'data'.
I don't need to waste my time on something I already know to be true.
I'm wasn't trying to convince you one way or the other; I was just trying to remind you that danger isn't just from people being intentionally suicidal in the traffic control world.
I'm also calling you on your amazing lack of good scientific process, given you call yourself a 'science and data' person, and that you're trying to convince others. Throwing out a strong, opposing opinion ridiculing the initial point, then countering criticism with "I have nothing to prove!" is just poor form in general, let alone in science.
I wasn't making fun of you. I assumed you are smart and I said so.
I didn't come up with "blood running down the streets" politicians were actually saying such things back then to try to justify their position against raising the speed limit from 55 to 65. I don't know the true motivation behind them making such claims. My best guess is that the Federal Government exerted pressure by means of threatening to remove funding or some such thing. Pure conjecture on my part at this point.
My point is that plenty of people are mercilessly voting my comments down yet nobody is taking the time to learn a little history and research what I am saying. I don't need to because I was there and remember the idiocy of the entire thing. For about a year or so media outlets tried their best to push the "speed kills" and "65 is bad" agenda but reality somehow chose to defy them. Blood did not run dow the highway as politicians predicted. Not even close. And so after about a year or so they all stopped talking about it because everyone realized what the politicians were pushing was nonsense. We actually had less accidents with the increase in speed limit.
Anyhow, as i said elsewhere, HN is a cargo cult club. If i had come here fully aligned with the crowd and proclaimed how 10 foot wide lanes would save lives I'd collect a bunch of little votes and make all of you happy. Instead an asshole who dares to not be in line with y'all and for that I am personna non gratta. And that's sad. This isn't a place where opposing points of view are welcome at all.
I get it. I haven't been reading HN for probably a year. Now I remmber why I stopped.
It's talking about the effect of wide lanes on urban and suburban streets. You're talking about what happens on open highway. Completely different animals. He acknowledges as much, and that wider highway lanes are safer.
I did (friggin verbose!). My point is that people come out of the woodwork with "the sky is falling" messages all the time. More often than not they are full of crap and the opposite is true.
I'm not a kid any more. I am not easily impressed. I've seen too much of this over the years. Particularly around elections.
Living in Los Angeles I see people crossing the street ALL THE TIME without even looking for traffic. I mean, they just continue walking off the sidewalk as if cars did not even exist. Having traveled to many parts of the world and all corners of the US this has always been rather perplexing to me. It is somewhat unique to California, I think. To see people with such low apparent common sense is jaw dropping. Anywhere else in the world they'd be flattened in a microsecond. In Amsterdam you'd have 15 bikes pile on top of you. Unbelievable.
My point is that there are a ton of factors behind how people get hurt or die on and around roads. Someone else was far more eloquent than I care to be right now about how studies can be total garbage. He or she was far more gentle and politically correct than I am interested in being any more. Crap in Crap Out. Bias in Bias Out. That's what a lot of these studies are.
One can scaffold a bunch of bad conclusions and paragraphs from a bunch of crap studies and build a seemingly solid foundation for the conclusion that if we had less men wearing ties the mortality rate while riding bikes in Manhattan would go down. In other words, more crap out.
We have far more important things to worry about than to devote billions of dollars to repainting all of our streets. Take that money and use it to lift people out of poverty. Maybe we can do a study that shows how not spending money in bullshit projects supported by a maze of bullshit studies and, instead, using that money to truly support the education and growth of the economically disadvantaged might reduce mortality rates when the clueless cross the streets in Los Angeles?
Sorry for the tone. I find that as I get older I am far less tolerant of bullshit the might have tantalized me when I was a twenty-something. It's amazing what a few decades of perspective can reveal to you about people, politics, business and society. Not grumpy, just a realist. I think.
In NC, it's the law to stop for pedestrians in a crosswalk.
That said, I'm not sure how the chicken/egg situation worked out but I'm appalled by how pedestrians walk across the street. They just go without looking up from their phones.
The crosswalk by my work has added giant signs and flashing lights and you still see people blow thru at 40+ (speed limit is 25). I'm not sure if I'd be alive if I didn't look both ways before crossing. On the other hand, judging by how mad people are when they stop and you don't cross because someone else isn't stopping, it might not have been much of a gain.
Have you considered alerting the police to the most frequent times that people are blowing through it at those speeds so they can catch the people doing it? That's an incredibly unsafe experience, especially if you're meant to cross at a cross-walk (jay-walking is something different, of course, depending on local laws).
You should certainly look both ways at a cross-walk anyway, again because multi-ton vehicle; but, they should also follow those signs that say "stop here for crosswalk"
Even if people are not suicidal, they are incredibly bad at determining what is actually safe vs what they feel is safe. Very famously 93% of American drivers reported themselves above average in driving ability - math tells us that is impossible. How many times have you heard someome say they can drive just fine drunk? You've got people terrified of a hypothetical terrorist attack, yet will think nothing of texting and driving.
Yet you can somehow concluded that "if I'm not hearing about it (on the news no less!) it doesn't exist?"
I read the papers in the OP and the paper someone linked for you (you're the lazy one, not everyone else) and I still agree with the OP. I suspect you didn't read the papers in the OP because you're not talking about the same things the OP is. The raising the speed limit example is completely irrelevant to the OP's point - we should make certain urban roads narrower because that makes them more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists without making them more dangerous. You can bitch all you want but until you start discussing the article in a reasonable way you're going to get downvoted. Perhaps if HN pisses you off so much you should find a different community to participate in?
I love how HN continues to prove to be a place where only cargo cult mentality is rewarded. Anything outside of that is mercilessly down-voted by the 22 year olds that permeate this mono-cultural society.
It's OK, it's just funny. You still have a few years of reality before you actually get out of the cave and stop seeing the world through shadows on the walls, some of which were painted by your professors in college.
Tolerance is something most people love to talk about just to sound "right" and fit in. In practice intolerance and prejudice are far more common with people who preach it --and behave otherwise-- than in those who do not but rather choose to simply practice it.
Just the way it is.
On HN you can't have a viewpoint significantly opposite that of the underlying HN culture. You just can't.
HN is generally more pro automobile so your stance is not "controversial" by the ethos here. I believe posts are getting downvoted because they are needlessly attacking. Your logical flaws don't help either.
Well, let's just say I disagree with you. There are no logical issues with my original comment about how a lot of these "the sky is falling" articles are nonsense supported nonsense often in support of underlying political motives. Can't say that's never happened before.
On the attack aspect. Look, HN is characterized by some really dumb back and forth discussions full of senseless nit-picking. I call these "programmer arguments" because it is often impossible to argue with some programmers because they are really good about arguing endlessly about utterly irrelevant minutiae. Like the comments in this thread that got into the idea that there's an argument to be made about drivers being more careful when they see bikers not wearing helmets. And the nonsense back and forth continues.
So yeah, I have grown quite intolerant to nonsense over the last five years or so. I've been really busy and have not read HN in a while. I just came back and see a bunch of the same thing and this intolerant cargo cult.
HN is at it's best when the discussions are contained to technology, startups, software or hardware development and related topics. There's a lot of expertise and value here when it comes to these topics.
The minute HN discussions deviate from that world it all derails. I have this vision -right or wrong- of a bunch of real-life ignorant 22 year olds brainwashed by their college professors desperately trying to play adult with their comments here. I'd be funny if it wasn't so stupid. They have little life experience yet have categorical opinions about everything and are incredibly intolerant of anything outside this cargo cult mentality.
Progress isn't made by those who swim with the current. You have to be willing to swim hard against it if you want to change the world, or at least your little corner of it. Going against the flow is not easy, as evidenced here. It would be called bullying in the real world. Or at least bigoted intolerant behavior.
Here's the good part: Despite what is said or done here, reality is as it is. And this they will eventually learn the hard way on the street, not here. I remember having a conversation about taxation with a 22 year old engineer who worked for me at one of my companies 15 years ago. He had swallowed-up the liberal coolaid whole. Nothing I could say could convince him he was wrong. Ten years later he called me up one day to thank me for what he learned from me (mostly in terms of engineering). He also mentioned he now understood the issues I used to point out regarding taxation. Why? Because he launched his own business and got the experience of now having to hold that cat by the tail.
HN is broken. Keep it to science, tech and startups and all is well. Everything else derails into nonsense kiddie bickering almost instantly.
I am not refusing to post anything. I plant a seed. I know the answer. Anyone can google it just as well as I might be able to. Why does everything have to be spoon fed?
So someone finally was interested enough to research my claims and post a link. Here it is:
"In 1995 the Republican Congress repealed the 55-mile-per-hour federal speed limit law. At the time, the highway safety lobby and consumer advocacy groups made apocalyptic pre- dictions about 6,400 increased deaths and a million additional injuries if posted speed limits were raised. Ralph Nader even said that “history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life.”
"...a million additional injuries..."
All bullshit as 20 years of history has proven.
So why the tone? Because this HN trait infuriates me.
Someone posts a factually accurate viewpoint that goes against the "HN culture" and they are mercilessly attacked here. It's bullying at it's best. The difference is that while most people just crumble and leave, I don't. And I am not shy about calling bullshit when I see it.
As to my choice to be short and to the point and even use colorful language. Well, I'd much rather listen to a man who presents facts with straight, even sometimes abrasive, speech out of the need to make an impression than waste any time listening to well-crafted, intellectually brilliant sounding, well articulated, refined, non-colorful, non-offensive language that is full of lies and manipulations...you know, like politicians or those on HN who take the time to write great sounding posts with lot's of links and research that, when you get right down to it, are hardly worth a handful of manure.
So there, someone, not me, was smart and inquisitive enough to ask: I wonder if this guy might have a point? And he or she posted a link to a pretty good PDF.
It echos exactly what I said: politicians, misinformed activists and even government agencies painted apocalyptic i ages of what would happen if the speed limit was raised. It was all nonsense. The exact opposite happened. And that is likely the case with this dumb 12 foot vs. 10 foot lane issue.
Of course, none of the HN down-vote kiddies are going to read this and say "Wow, this guy was right!", apologize and learn something.
No, instead they'll find some other justification for their hatred-driven down vote assault and move on to he next guy who dares to stand up for a truth that happens to go counter tho what makes HN kiddies feel good about themselves.
Apples to apples, this does not really apply to SF or even most of the Bay Area.
Perhaps all of Texas, Arizona or NM.
Not here.
I hope some smart Alec SF supe does not get any ideas, reading this.
The bulb-outs at the intersections [1], the rules-dont-apply-to-us cyclists [2], the abundance of parklets and dedicated Muni lanes are already making driving in SF a hugely cumbersome affair. If it isn't already, with its 20%+ grade roads [3].
From my experience living in SF, drivers here are not the most skilled as it is. This will only worsen things.
If Mr. Wiener catches wind of this, I'm certain he will call for miniature lanes, like when he called for miniature firetrucks, when firefighters expressed concern over the width of streets. [4]
Here's a far more engaging critique of car-first design by James Kunstler: http://youtu.be/Q1ZeXnmDZMQ