6 ms·

The Benefits of Slower Traffic, Measured in Money and Lives

51 points by DarkContinent 11y ago

nextweek2 11y ago
Not to put down the hard work these people do, but I really think slowing traffic is backwards thinking. Its the same advice that tells us to turn off electrical appliances to save the environment. That kind of thinking is really about scaling back technological advances. To save something. Really technology should be employed to solve the problem. Automated cars will solve the problem being reported here. New energy research will solve the power problem. Why do we need to take civilization back 50 years to get a benefit?
- gjm11 11y ago
  We don't have automated cars yet. We don't have (e.g.) fusion power yet. Why should the possibility of improvements in the future stop us doing things that benefit us overall now? And ... where does "taking civilization back 50 years" come into this? Isn't that a ridiculously overblown way to describe what's actually a proposal to convert a 4-lane road to a 3-lane road plus bike lane and actually enforce the existing speed limit?
- melling 11y ago
  "Drivers seldom heed the 25 mph speed limit, and the result is that Livingston has a higher rate of pedestrian crashes than other roads in the same county." Do you think automated cars will violate the speed limit?
  - nextweek2 11y ago
    The old human rules shouldn't apply to robots, they obey programmed rules rather than humans which are real wildcards. The 25mph speed limit is a statistical number chosen based on accident numbers with human drivers. A robot might not need to stop at a traffic light for example. Their perception, reaction and concentration is going to be far greater than any human.
- everyone 11y ago
  Why do you think everyone driving cars and using a lot of electricity is progressive? I think it would make more sense to use metrics like happiness, health, education standard etc. of the population and whatever policies increase those should be deemed progressive. The prevalence of cars for example, I would argue is a regression for society. They emit greenhouse gases, fill our air with toxins and carcinogens, encourage many diseases through lack of exercise, are the number one cause of violent death, and their popularity has changed the urban fabric into an environment that is not fit for humans and for human societies to grow.
  - everyone 11y ago
    Perhaps you simply think that all the changes that have happened since 1965 are progress. Well, in that time the wealth gap between the rich and the poor has increased, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, contamination of soil, over-irrigation, flogging the land, overfishing etc. have all increased and many other non-renewable resources have been consumed or otherwise destroyed.
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    My car brings me happiness. Human societies are filled with people, who tends to make me unhappy.
- majormajor 11y ago
  Will automated cars solve the problem? Or will automated cars make people more willing to put up with long commutes since it's then a passive activity and they can do something else in the meantime, making traffic no better and causing a net increase in energy usage? Seems like it could go either way—people often talk about how they'd rather sit 50 minutes on a train than do 30 minutes driving for that same reason, but if it becomes 50 minutes with everyone in their own car then we're worse off.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    These are certainly fair questions to ask. On the other hand, it seems likely that the infrastructure and automation of a new generation of vehicles might end up much more efficient than what we have today. Better co-ordination between vehicles and response to changing conditions is likely to improve the overall efficiency of the system. Reducing the risk of accidents and the resulting congestion and delays could be a big win for efficiency as well. It seems conceivable that these sorts of effects could more than compensate for, say, the environmental cost of doubling average commute distances, making the overall change a net benefit even with some increase in commuting range. People are still going to want to keep commutes within a limit they personally find tolerable anyway, so there is always going to be some bound on how much extra distance gets covered as a result of automation making commutes more traveller-friendly. Of course there are also other benefits from things like reducing accidents, but I'm just considering the efficiency of the transport system and its likely environmental impact here.
    - Steltek 11y ago
      How much more efficient? Aren't most of the promises of automated cars predicated on having dedicated highways, forbidding hands-on driving? Is that ever likely to happen inside of a decade? And once we do get there, is the earned capacity from full automation going to equal other options, in both cost and efficiency, that we could be pursuing now? I don't think it's reasonable to block real progress with illusory claims that in a decade or two, cars may finally stop killing people and ruining the environment.
- Steltek 11y ago
  "To save something"? Like people's lives? If you're under 35 in the US, you are more likely to die from a car collision than anything else. If you're under 14, you're probably just better off playing with the stuff under the kitchen sink. And tell me about this amazing new energy research that will be cheaper than gasoline and better for the environment. I must have missed that TED Talk. You're offering solutions that don't exist yet in order to block the solutions that do.
  - hugh4 11y ago
    If you want to bump up the number of traffic fatalities, encouraging cycling is a pretty good way to do it. Every major injury I've ever had has come from cycling and before you blame cars -- none involved a collision with a car.
    - Steltek 11y ago
      Your personal anecdotes and opinions do not trump national safety data. Statistics say bikes are safer than cars. Further, common sense says bike crashes involve far smaller amounts of kinetic energy. Lastly, you make several assumptions that education, enforcement, culture, and bike infrastructure would not change with a persistent focus on increasing active transportation.
dre85 11y ago
I don't see how increasing traffic jams is ever a viable long term solution. Why not consider things like pedestrian overpasses for large 4 lane streets. I guess in north America there's no point of even mentioning the possibility of having a reasonable public transportation system...
- userbinator 11y ago
  Or underpasses, as are common in other countries.
- maxsilver 11y ago
  > I guess in north America there's no point of even mentioning the possibility of having a reasonable public transportation system... This is the main problem. If there was fast/rapid public transit available (read: not just crappy bus lines), much of the car traffic would be reduced, and you could safely remove traffic lanes and slow traffic down without increasing congestion or trip times. But that would involve spending money on a public service. Which is an impossibility in the US. So instead, we get "urbanists" rushing to eliminate traffic capacity because that has no cost. But in truth, all these "road diets" actually do is increase congestion, increase drive time, and displace (not eliminate) the traffic accidents the author is concerned about.
  - skybrian 11y ago
    You're assuming zero sum rather than supply and demand. When supply is decreased, fewer car trips happen in the first place because some marginal trips are combined or cancelled. This less likely to happen for commuting but can easily happen for shopping and entertainment where there are lots of choices.
    - Silhouette 11y ago
      This is a point that seems to be overlooked surprisingly often in transport debates: people generally travel for a reason. There are as many reasons to run a safe, efficient transport infrastructure as there are reasons for people to make a journey. Every time we make a change to the infrastructure that deters someone from making a journey, there is almost certainly a consequential loss to someone's business and/or someone's quality of life. We could obviously make the roads much safer and more environmentally friendly overnight by just banning all motor traffic, but the effects on our society wouldn't be pretty.
Steltek 11y ago
I think the article's argument is framed terribly bad. It's not about "increasing traffic jams". It's about bringing back a vital and necessary balance in our infrastructure, city planning, and our cultural approach. You can not solve automobile traffic and long travel times by adding ever bigger roads/overpasses/tunnels without facing exponentially increasing maintenance costs, expensive land requirements, and massive works projects. On top of that, the surrounding property value and economic generation plummets as roads expand and become congested. Everything points to an urgent call to scale back our automobile oriented country: for our health, humans lives, economy, foreign policy, and environment.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  Funny, I thought the article was about safety, about not killing people, rather than any sort of car-bike urban balance. >>One way to improve safety on this type of urban street is through a road diet. [...] with any leftover space going to curb parking and perhaps bike lanes. It would seem that making thing better for bikes is a lower priority in the OP than pedestrian safety, even lower than on-street parking for cars. Given that the author draws the bike lanes between parked and moving cars, bicycle safety is clearly not the goal. They are out to protect pedestrians from all things faster than a walking pace. I wouldn't read in any car v. bike politics.
  - Steltek 11y ago
    Unsurprisingly, I usually bike to work and take a keen interest on bike safety improvements. I hate the "protected bike lane" phenomenon with a passion. My most common incidents with cars start with not being seen by the driver. A "protected" bike lane destroys whatever little visibility I have to begin with and worse, the increased turning radius means that what was once a mild sideswipe will become a T-bone. As a protected bike lane is usually also a wider than normal bike lane, ~8' vs ~4', I posit that you see a huge perceived and actual safety increase by just taking the existing normal bike lane and widening it.
everyone 11y ago
Similarly to the US's problems with gun violence. Other industrialised nations have implemented a solution to the problem of over-reliance on cars. Look at Denmark. They faced similar issues in the 70's and have since methodically scaled back car infrastructure in favour of rail, cycling, walking, made possible by suitable city planning. http://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport http://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport
anon4 11y ago
A bike lane between traffic and parking lane? Are those people insane?
hugh4 11y ago
Another day, another article filled with twenty something single professionals who don't own cars because they live in a 600 square foot apartment in a dense downtown core for $4000 a month saying "Why can't everybody be more like me?"
- TheCoelacanth 11y ago
  Or "Why can't everyone else pay for their own lifestyle choices instead of getting subsidized by me?"
sandworm101 11y ago
Traffic and vehicle speed are two different things. Slowing cars can be done without slowing traffic. Traffic is limited by the carrying capacity of the road. More, but slower and smaller, lanes can handle the same amount of traffic while still slowing cars. Simply halving the number of lanes (4 to 2) without replacing the carrying capacity, only offloads through traffic to other areas. It would be better to replace the one fast+big road with multiple slower and smaller roads. And the bike lanes in the OP are awful. Those bikes don't want to share pavement with moving cars. Put that lane on the other side of the parking lane, preferably with a line of grass/trees shielding it from moving traffic. That keeps everyone happy. (Those painted green lanes are also a horror for motorcycles in the rain. They must turn, lean and accelerate all at once on that wet paint when entering such a road.)
- Silhouette 11y ago
  You're right that the cycle lanes shown are awful in almost every way. They're too narrow, in the dooring zone for the parked cars, barely separated from the main traffic lane, and so on. I just wanted to add that putting dedicated cycle paths along the outer edge of main roads with hard segregation also brings challenges of its own. In particular, if the cyclists then have to give way at every side street their path crosses, this is horrendously inefficient for cycling and will cause most experienced cyclists to simply use the main road instead in a residential setting. From what I've seen so far, the Dutch seem to have some of the most promising ideas about designing genuine multi-modal transport routes, with proper attention paid to motor traffic, cycles and pedestrians both at junctions and on longer, faster, less interrupted routes. I wish more people were paying attention to their ideas, because they've figured out much better solutions to a lot of common scenarios than most of us have.

51 points by DarkContinent 11y ago

Not to put down the hard work these people do, but I really think slowing traffic is backwards thinking. Its the same advice that tells us to turn off electrical appliances to save the environment. That kind of thinking is really about scaling back technological advances. To save something. Really technology should be employed to solve the problem. Automated cars will solve the problem being reported here. New energy research will solve the power problem. Why do we need to take civilization back 50 years to get a benefit?

gjm11 11y ago
We don't have automated cars yet. We don't have (e.g.) fusion power yet. Why should the possibility of improvements in the future stop us doing things that benefit us overall now? And ... where does "taking civilization back 50 years" come into this? Isn't that a ridiculously overblown way to describe what's actually a proposal to convert a 4-lane road to a 3-lane road plus bike lane and actually enforce the existing speed limit?
melling 11y ago
"Drivers seldom heed the 25 mph speed limit, and the result is that Livingston has a higher rate of pedestrian crashes than other roads in the same county." Do you think automated cars will violate the speed limit?
- nextweek2 11y ago
  The old human rules shouldn't apply to robots, they obey programmed rules rather than humans which are real wildcards. The 25mph speed limit is a statistical number chosen based on accident numbers with human drivers. A robot might not need to stop at a traffic light for example. Their perception, reaction and concentration is going to be far greater than any human.
everyone 11y ago
Why do you think everyone driving cars and using a lot of electricity is progressive? I think it would make more sense to use metrics like happiness, health, education standard etc. of the population and whatever policies increase those should be deemed progressive. The prevalence of cars for example, I would argue is a regression for society. They emit greenhouse gases, fill our air with toxins and carcinogens, encourage many diseases through lack of exercise, are the number one cause of violent death, and their popularity has changed the urban fabric into an environment that is not fit for humans and for human societies to grow.
- everyone 11y ago
  Perhaps you simply think that all the changes that have happened since 1965 are progress. Well, in that time the wealth gap between the rich and the poor has increased, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, contamination of soil, over-irrigation, flogging the land, overfishing etc. have all increased and many other non-renewable resources have been consumed or otherwise destroyed.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  My car brings me happiness. Human societies are filled with people, who tends to make me unhappy.
majormajor 11y ago
Will automated cars solve the problem? Or will automated cars make people more willing to put up with long commutes since it's then a passive activity and they can do something else in the meantime, making traffic no better and causing a net increase in energy usage? Seems like it could go either way—people often talk about how they'd rather sit 50 minutes on a train than do 30 minutes driving for that same reason, but if it becomes 50 minutes with everyone in their own car then we're worse off.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  These are certainly fair questions to ask. On the other hand, it seems likely that the infrastructure and automation of a new generation of vehicles might end up much more efficient than what we have today. Better co-ordination between vehicles and response to changing conditions is likely to improve the overall efficiency of the system. Reducing the risk of accidents and the resulting congestion and delays could be a big win for efficiency as well. It seems conceivable that these sorts of effects could more than compensate for, say, the environmental cost of doubling average commute distances, making the overall change a net benefit even with some increase in commuting range. People are still going to want to keep commutes within a limit they personally find tolerable anyway, so there is always going to be some bound on how much extra distance gets covered as a result of automation making commutes more traveller-friendly. Of course there are also other benefits from things like reducing accidents, but I'm just considering the efficiency of the transport system and its likely environmental impact here.
  - Steltek 11y ago
    How much more efficient? Aren't most of the promises of automated cars predicated on having dedicated highways, forbidding hands-on driving? Is that ever likely to happen inside of a decade? And once we do get there, is the earned capacity from full automation going to equal other options, in both cost and efficiency, that we could be pursuing now? I don't think it's reasonable to block real progress with illusory claims that in a decade or two, cars may finally stop killing people and ruining the environment.
Steltek 11y ago
"To save something"? Like people's lives? If you're under 35 in the US, you are more likely to die from a car collision than anything else. If you're under 14, you're probably just better off playing with the stuff under the kitchen sink. And tell me about this amazing new energy research that will be cheaper than gasoline and better for the environment. I must have missed that TED Talk. You're offering solutions that don't exist yet in order to block the solutions that do.
- hugh4 11y ago
  If you want to bump up the number of traffic fatalities, encouraging cycling is a pretty good way to do it. Every major injury I've ever had has come from cycling and before you blame cars -- none involved a collision with a car.
  - Steltek 11y ago
    Your personal anecdotes and opinions do not trump national safety data. Statistics say bikes are safer than cars. Further, common sense says bike crashes involve far smaller amounts of kinetic energy. Lastly, you make several assumptions that education, enforcement, culture, and bike infrastructure would not change with a persistent focus on increasing active transportation.

dre85 11y ago

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

userbinator 11y ago
Or underpasses, as are common in other countries.
maxsilver 11y ago
> I guess in north America there's no point of even mentioning the possibility of having a reasonable public transportation system... This is the main problem. If there was fast/rapid public transit available (read: not just crappy bus lines), much of the car traffic would be reduced, and you could safely remove traffic lanes and slow traffic down without increasing congestion or trip times. But that would involve spending money on a public service. Which is an impossibility in the US. So instead, we get "urbanists" rushing to eliminate traffic capacity because that has no cost. But in truth, all these "road diets" actually do is increase congestion, increase drive time, and displace (not eliminate) the traffic accidents the author is concerned about.
- skybrian 11y ago
  You're assuming zero sum rather than supply and demand. When supply is decreased, fewer car trips happen in the first place because some marginal trips are combined or cancelled. This less likely to happen for commuting but can easily happen for shopping and entertainment where there are lots of choices.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    This is a point that seems to be overlooked surprisingly often in transport debates: people generally travel for a reason. There are as many reasons to run a safe, efficient transport infrastructure as there are reasons for people to make a journey. Every time we make a change to the infrastructure that deters someone from making a journey, there is almost certainly a consequential loss to someone's business and/or someone's quality of life. We could obviously make the roads much safer and more environmentally friendly overnight by just banning all motor traffic, but the effects on our society wouldn't be pretty.

Steltek 11y ago

I think the article's argument is framed terribly bad. It's not about "increasing traffic jams". It's about bringing back a vital and necessary balance in our infrastructure, city planning, and our cultural approach. You can not solve automobile traffic and long travel times by adding ever bigger roads/overpasses/tunnels without facing exponentially increasing maintenance costs, expensive land requirements, and massive works projects. On top of that, the surrounding property value and economic generation plummets as roads expand and become congested. Everything points to an urgent call to scale back our automobile oriented country: for our health, humans lives, economy, foreign policy, and environment.

sandworm101 11y ago
Funny, I thought the article was about safety, about not killing people, rather than any sort of car-bike urban balance. >>One way to improve safety on this type of urban street is through a road diet. [...] with any leftover space going to curb parking and perhaps bike lanes. It would seem that making thing better for bikes is a lower priority in the OP than pedestrian safety, even lower than on-street parking for cars. Given that the author draws the bike lanes between parked and moving cars, bicycle safety is clearly not the goal. They are out to protect pedestrians from all things faster than a walking pace. I wouldn't read in any car v. bike politics.
- Steltek 11y ago
  Unsurprisingly, I usually bike to work and take a keen interest on bike safety improvements. I hate the "protected bike lane" phenomenon with a passion. My most common incidents with cars start with not being seen by the driver. A "protected" bike lane destroys whatever little visibility I have to begin with and worse, the increased turning radius means that what was once a mild sideswipe will become a T-bone. As a protected bike lane is usually also a wider than normal bike lane, ~8' vs ~4', I posit that you see a huge perceived and actual safety increase by just taking the existing normal bike lane and widening it.

everyone 11y ago

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

anon4 11y ago

A bike lane between traffic and parking lane? Are those people insane?

hugh4 11y ago

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

TheCoelacanth 11y ago
Or "Why can't everyone else pay for their own lifestyle choices instead of getting subsidized by me?"

sandworm101 11y ago

Traffic and vehicle speed are two different things. Slowing cars can be done without slowing traffic. Traffic is limited by the carrying capacity of the road. More, but slower and smaller, lanes can handle the same amount of traffic while still slowing cars. Simply halving the number of lanes (4 to 2) without replacing the carrying capacity, only offloads through traffic to other areas. It would be better to replace the one fast+big road with multiple slower and smaller roads. And the bike lanes in the OP are awful. Those bikes don't want to share pavement with moving cars. Put that lane on the other side of the parking lane, preferably with a line of grass/trees shielding it from moving traffic. That keeps everyone happy. (Those painted green lanes are also a horror for motorcycles in the rain. They must turn, lean and accelerate all at once on that wet paint when entering such a road.)

Silhouette 11y ago
You're right that the cycle lanes shown are awful in almost every way. They're too narrow, in the dooring zone for the parked cars, barely separated from the main traffic lane, and so on. I just wanted to add that putting dedicated cycle paths along the outer edge of main roads with hard segregation also brings challenges of its own. In particular, if the cyclists then have to give way at every side street their path crosses, this is horrendously inefficient for cycling and will cause most experienced cyclists to simply use the main road instead in a residential setting. From what I've seen so far, the Dutch seem to have some of the most promising ideas about designing genuine multi-modal transport routes, with proper attention paid to motor traffic, cycles and pedestrians both at junctions and on longer, faster, less interrupted routes. I wish more people were paying attention to their ideas, because they've figured out much better solutions to a lot of common scenarios than most of us have.