6 ms·

Traffic engineers didn't decide to put two different school across from one another. Perhaps they could have built the elementary school and high school on the

Traffic engineers didn't decide to put two different school across from one another. Perhaps they could have built the elementary school and high school on the same side of the street? Like say, in the giant empty field right there next to the school (pictured in the article). Traffic engineers didn't decide to put the school on a busy arterial State-Designated Highway. Syracuse Utah has just 6 main arterial roads, and over 50+ small slow neighborhood streets. 90% of the roads in this town are already slow side streets safe for children (the exact ones StrongTowns advocates for), why did they build the schools exclusively on the 5% of roads designated to handle actual traffic needs? -- Ironically, we have a safer way to build streets like this. It's called a freeway, and it's great because it keeps nearly 100% grade-separation between people driving and people walking, while still handling massive transit requirements at high speeds. But we can't have those in cities, because StrongTowns hates them. They are too safe, promote affordable housing too much, and let people get to too many places too quickly. StrongTowns gets the luxury of claiming every street should be impossible to drive on, and can prattle on about how cheap it is to destroy a street (it costs nothing!). Because StrongTowns does not do any actual engineering or design, they are simply a political campaign against cars. Real traffic engineers have to actually handle transportation needs of real citizens everyday. Real traffic engineers don't get the luxury of just wishing away peoples lives, or jobs, or homes. So while I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, I don't see anything wrong with traffic engineers work here. I see a school system that decided building two schools on opposite sides of a "State Highway 108" was a great idea, and is now suffering terrible consequences because of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_State_Route_108 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_State_Route_108

revelation 9y ago
You haven't even established the timeline here. In any case, it doesn't matter, someone decided to put a crosswalk across a four-lane 40 mph road. There is no world where this is acceptable design backed by evidence. And in any case, if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars" I'm sure where an engineers opinion will fall. But traffic engineers aren't all that.
- mistermann 9y ago
  Where are the bold road markings, excessive signage, radar based speed display signs, photo radar, etc? Rarely are these things difficult to mostly solve, but it requires at least some minimal effort. Sadly, that is too much to ask of most people in North America.
- caminante 9y ago
  FTA: >The teen was crossing from the junior high Monday about 8:30 p.m. when a southbound car struck him This didn't happen during normal business hours.
  - revelation 9y ago
    I don't understand, what does that matter to safe engineering?
    - caminante 9y ago
      To answer, I need your help. What does "safe engineering" mean and how is that different than "engineering?"
- maxsilver 9y ago
  > if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars" It never was. The suggestion is "don't put kids in the few areas of the city specifically marked as dangerous". It's like building a school inside of a river, watching kids drown, and suggesting the water is at fault and should get out of the way. Or building a school on an airport runway and complaining the noise scares the children and suggesting the airplanes are at fault and should land elsewhere.
  - revelation 9y ago
    We mark areas as "dangerous" and thats it? A kid is dead, but really, its noones fault? I'm afraid your thinking on this is roughly 60 years behind. Of course vehicular deaths are not "natural".
mnm1 9y ago
I agree. The anti-car rhetoric in the US is simply ridiculous. The US is simply not built for any other lifestyle. Maybe Manhattan and certain very tiny parts of other cities that are already unaffordable to the middle class, let alone the poor. We don't have public transportation and we don't have the proper legislation in place to do anything else. We don't build enough and we don't build densely enough. These problems are widely known and currently, they have no solutions in sight. Most people want to keep the status quo, but even if there was a mass movement to change this situation, I doubt the money would be allocated. The money most certainly exists, but much of it is currently wasted (defense, bailouts, tax breaks for the rich, weapons, more weapons, etc.), at least at the federal level. I don't think any state currently has the budget to even begin to make a dent in car culture. Hell, we can't even replace hundred year old critical infrastructure bridges, yet anti-car people want a whole new infrastructure (either that, or they're delusionally thinking that everyone can cram into downtown somehow). Car culture is here to stay. That's what the market dictates in the US, anyway.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > I agree. The anti-car rhetoric in the US is simply ridiculous. The US is simply not built for any other lifestyle. Er...yes. That's the reason there's anti-car rhetoric. But you're also overstating the problem, which I wouldn't have thought was possible. Car culture is pervasive, but plenty of major American cities have decent-ish public transit. Your whole argument is weird. It seems like you're saying "This problem is real, massive, and pervasive, therefore we need to stop trying to fix it and ignore it completely."
- coding123 9y ago
  This got down voted so much I could barely read it... But it has an actual argument that's not even being contested, that's a horrible way to down vote.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    I replied to the argument. mnm1 agrees that car culture is a problem, so we're on the same page there, but they conclude that the problem is impossible to fix so we should all just stop trying and embrace it, which makes no sense to me. And, living near Seattle as I currently do, the notion that we'd need to completely rebuild everything for public transit to work at all is not accurate. Plenty of major cities have decent public transit already. There may be a few cities that are beyond saving, and it wouldn't work in small towns, but that's true anywhere; no one in rural Germany is taking the bus to work, no matter how great it is in Frankfurt.
zten 9y ago
Take a quick look at Google Maps and you'll see I-15 is a very short distance away. It's not like they decided to go full San Francisco and run major six-lane highway routes at surface level. The people using this sort of route are probably all locals. All of the through traffic is already on the freeway. Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use (then again, it looks like they already made that decision with a bunch of single-family house subdivisions). Notice nearby that the stuff you can access from I-15 is a bunch of big roads, malls, car dealerships, and an Air Force base. Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise. Plus, as we see in any majorly dense area, the freeways turn into buffers for inadequate local traffic capacity as they very quickly turn into parking lots. Low volume exits onto slow surface streets with tons of intersections jams everything up.
- maxsilver 9y ago
  > Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use Neither of these are necessarily true. Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times. Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people. That encouragement doesn't guarantee high density will happen, builders preferences and peoples budgets will still dictate cheap single family houses most of the time regardless. But that's not something the freeway itself influences. (In the same way that a train station encourages high density, but many are still in suburban areas anyway). The only real drawback is price. Ugly, space-wasting rural freeways at ground level are much cheaper. But they are worse for drivers and pedestrians, every bit as bad as what we see here for everyone. > Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise. The air pollution and noise is mostly unchanged (same exact cars making the same trips). And Electric Cars already fully solved both of these problems anyway, it's just a matter of time as gasoline vehicles get phased out. It looks like their current solution to the crosswalk is to add a stoplight to it. Which ironically will actually increase air pollution, as previously-traveling cars will now often sit idling, right next to two schools...
abalone 9y ago
> Perhaps they could have built the elementary school and high school on the same side of the street? Given how politically acerbic your comment is towards StrongTowns and their efforts to save lives, your argument is incredibly badly reasoned. These are separate schools with separate facilities serving separate age groups. It is unlikely the reason this young junior high student was crossing the street at 8:30pm[1] was to visit the elementary school. There are not that many schools along typical commuter routes. It seems unlikely that calming traffic along this one would seriously impact the "transportation needs of real [sic] citizens everyday." [1] https://www.ksl.com/?sid=43931746&nid=148&title=syracuse-tragedy-brings-action-for-safety https://www.ksl.com/?sid=43931746&nid=148&title=syracuse-tra...
- Spooky23 9y ago
  They probably share sports fields or other facilities. There is a pretty obvious solution — put in a traffic light controlled by a button. Lights have high compliance. Strongtowns is what it is. They have a particular agenda and they present questions that fit their answers.
nitrogen 9y ago
I used to live there. I hadn't heard about this loss, but if it's the schools I'm thinking, the open fields are either active farms, or used to have a church when those schools were built. The speed limits are reduced to 20 during school crossing hours. The schools were both built when Syracuse had fewer than 5000 residents and no need for major arteries. The article is blaming all the wrong factors.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I don't get it, how does your post rebut the article? It talks neither about the fields nor the school construction (that was the parent poster), and it specifically says that posting a speed limit is not enough as a deterrent.
  - nitrogen 9y ago
    It's not meant as a direct rebuttal because the article is so far off it isn't even wrong, due to a lack of context around the town's history, and it completely ignores the schooltime 20mph speed limit posted with big flashing signs and enforced by city police. Those schools were both built years or decades before the city even had its first stoplight, long before the other 90% of safe neighborhood streets even existed. There were only farms on a one-mile grid system in most of the city. Then over time developers built neighborhoods and the population exploded, so as the population grew the roads had to be expanded. Traffic planners had to move people somewhere, and they compensated for the wide streets with 20mph school speed limits, volunteer crossing guards, extensive education of children and drivers, and regular active enforcement of the school speed. So the article comes across as clueless, seemingly almost deliberately so to exploit a tragedy.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      I don't understand the relevance of the town's history. Either the crossing is safe, or it isn't. The history may explain why it's unsafe, but it can never be a justification. That there's some reason behind the configuration is not something that must be pointed out - it's obvious that nobody chooses the locations of streets and schools by throwing darts at a panel. What the author is saying is that the situation is not acceptable - however it may have originated. As for the 20mph speed limit - besides the fact that he specifically says they are irrelevant, since drivers don't respect them -, how would that have helped, considering it was 8:30pm when the accident happened? And I'm betting the "volunteer crossing guards" weren't around either. Apparently kids sometimes leave schools outside "schooltime" - who'd a thunk it. Finally, if we're talking about what he left out - maybe you should add the other detail he didn't mention: that there had been already 15 accidents in the crosswalk in question in the last five years. So maybe it should have been clear by now that the methods weren't working. (By the way, "the population exploded and the streets had to be expanded" is false. Governments have tools to control the growth of the population, like permits and zoning.)
7952 9y ago
It seems dangerous to isolate a discipline from all other externalities in this way. Transport infrastructure cannot just exist in isolation to other factors. It can have wide reaching effects beyond just transport.
icebraining 9y ago
This seems like a weird abdication of responsibility. Sure, the schools probably shouldn't have been built there. Let's accept the premise that was the main error. That still doesn't excuse the traffic engineers - fault is not indivisible. You say they can't with away the people's lives. True, but they can't wish away the bad decisions made by others either. They still have a choice to make, between allowing a dangerous situation for children or a worse traffic circulation. And it's valid to judge that decision.
rhinoceraptor 9y ago
It seems like the existence (and requirement for) freeways and fast, pedestrian hostile roads is a self fulfilling prophecy. If we didn’t have them, people would live closer, we would have better public transport, better walking and cycling infrastructure, and we wouldn’t have a wasteful, excessive driving culture. And to many people steeped in the toxic car culture, riding a bike either means you got a DUI or you are crazy and deserve to die.
Aloha 9y ago
The decision not to put in a pedestrian bridge to me speaks more than the location of the schools.
Buttes 9y ago
A highway cuts through my city, largely because it used to be very poor and it was politically expedient to prioritize interstate traffic at the expense of city dwellers (there's measurably higher rates of asthma near highways). Its not just "StrongTowns hates them", it's that a lot of cities have gotten the shit end of the stick, transportation-wise, and people who actually live in the city don't want to live next to a fucking highway for the convenience of suburbanites. It's not a conspiracy, there's political support for these policies in cities. Just use park and ride, cut throughs can go fuck themselves, you sound entitled as hell. It's not your God given right to shit up other peoples' home with your car.

revelation 9y ago

You haven't even established the timeline here. In any case, it doesn't matter, someone decided to put a crosswalk across a four-lane 40 mph road. There is no world where this is acceptable design backed by evidence. And in any case, if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars" I'm sure where an engineers opinion will fall. But traffic engineers aren't all that.

mistermann 9y ago
Where are the bold road markings, excessive signage, radar based speed display signs, photo radar, etc? Rarely are these things difficult to mostly solve, but it requires at least some minimal effort. Sadly, that is too much to ask of most people in North America.
caminante 9y ago
FTA: >The teen was crossing from the junior high Monday about 8:30 p.m. when a southbound car struck him This didn't happen during normal business hours.
- revelation 9y ago
  I don't understand, what does that matter to safe engineering?
  - caminante 9y ago
    To answer, I need your help. What does "safe engineering" mean and how is that different than "engineering?"
maxsilver 9y ago
> if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars" It never was. The suggestion is "don't put kids in the few areas of the city specifically marked as dangerous". It's like building a school inside of a river, watching kids drown, and suggesting the water is at fault and should get out of the way. Or building a school on an airport runway and complaining the noise scares the children and suggesting the airplanes are at fault and should land elsewhere.
- revelation 9y ago
  We mark areas as "dangerous" and thats it? A kid is dead, but really, its noones fault? I'm afraid your thinking on this is roughly 60 years behind. Of course vehicular deaths are not "natural".

mnm1 9y ago

I agree. The anti-car rhetoric in the US is simply ridiculous. The US is simply not built for any other lifestyle. Maybe Manhattan and certain very tiny parts of other cities that are already unaffordable to the middle class, let alone the poor. We don't have public transportation and we don't have the proper legislation in place to do anything else. We don't build enough and we don't build densely enough. These problems are widely known and currently, they have no solutions in sight. Most people want to keep the status quo, but even if there was a mass movement to change this situation, I doubt the money would be allocated. The money most certainly exists, but much of it is currently wasted (defense, bailouts, tax breaks for the rich, weapons, more weapons, etc.), at least at the federal level. I don't think any state currently has the budget to even begin to make a dent in car culture. Hell, we can't even replace hundred year old critical infrastructure bridges, yet anti-car people want a whole new infrastructure (either that, or they're delusionally thinking that everyone can cram into downtown somehow). Car culture is here to stay. That's what the market dictates in the US, anyway.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> I agree. The anti-car rhetoric in the US is simply ridiculous. The US is simply not built for any other lifestyle. Er...yes. That's the reason there's anti-car rhetoric. But you're also overstating the problem, which I wouldn't have thought was possible. Car culture is pervasive, but plenty of major American cities have decent-ish public transit. Your whole argument is weird. It seems like you're saying "This problem is real, massive, and pervasive, therefore we need to stop trying to fix it and ignore it completely."
coding123 9y ago
This got down voted so much I could barely read it... But it has an actual argument that's not even being contested, that's a horrible way to down vote.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  I replied to the argument. mnm1 agrees that car culture is a problem, so we're on the same page there, but they conclude that the problem is impossible to fix so we should all just stop trying and embrace it, which makes no sense to me. And, living near Seattle as I currently do, the notion that we'd need to completely rebuild everything for public transit to work at all is not accurate. Plenty of major cities have decent public transit already. There may be a few cities that are beyond saving, and it wouldn't work in small towns, but that's true anywhere; no one in rural Germany is taking the bus to work, no matter how great it is in Frankfurt.

zten 9y ago

Take a quick look at Google Maps and you'll see I-15 is a very short distance away. It's not like they decided to go full San Francisco and run major six-lane highway routes at surface level. The people using this sort of route are probably all locals. All of the through traffic is already on the freeway. Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use (then again, it looks like they already made that decision with a bunch of single-family house subdivisions). Notice nearby that the stuff you can access from I-15 is a bunch of big roads, malls, car dealerships, and an Air Force base. Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise. Plus, as we see in any majorly dense area, the freeways turn into buffers for inadequate local traffic capacity as they very quickly turn into parking lots. Low volume exits onto slow surface streets with tons of intersections jams everything up.

maxsilver 9y ago
> Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use Neither of these are necessarily true. Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times. Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people. That encouragement doesn't guarantee high density will happen, builders preferences and peoples budgets will still dictate cheap single family houses most of the time regardless. But that's not something the freeway itself influences. (In the same way that a train station encourages high density, but many are still in suburban areas anyway). The only real drawback is price. Ugly, space-wasting rural freeways at ground level are much cheaper. But they are worse for drivers and pedestrians, every bit as bad as what we see here for everyone. > Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise. The air pollution and noise is mostly unchanged (same exact cars making the same trips). And Electric Cars already fully solved both of these problems anyway, it's just a matter of time as gasoline vehicles get phased out. It looks like their current solution to the crosswalk is to add a stoplight to it. Which ironically will actually increase air pollution, as previously-traveling cars will now often sit idling, right next to two schools...

abalone 9y ago

> Perhaps they could have built the elementary school and high school on the same side of the street? Given how politically acerbic your comment is towards StrongTowns and their efforts to save lives, your argument is incredibly badly reasoned. These are separate schools with separate facilities serving separate age groups. It is unlikely the reason this young junior high student was crossing the street at 8:30pm[1] was to visit the elementary school. There are not that many schools along typical commuter routes. It seems unlikely that calming traffic along this one would seriously impact the "transportation needs of real [sic] citizens everyday." [1] https://www.ksl.com/?sid=43931746&nid=148&title=syracuse-tragedy-brings-action-for-safety https://www.ksl.com/?sid=43931746&nid=148&title=syracuse-tra...

Spooky23 9y ago
They probably share sports fields or other facilities. There is a pretty obvious solution — put in a traffic light controlled by a button. Lights have high compliance. Strongtowns is what it is. They have a particular agenda and they present questions that fit their answers.

nitrogen 9y ago

I used to live there. I hadn't heard about this loss, but if it's the schools I'm thinking, the open fields are either active farms, or used to have a church when those schools were built. The speed limits are reduced to 20 during school crossing hours. The schools were both built when Syracuse had fewer than 5000 residents and no need for major arteries. The article is blaming all the wrong factors.

icebraining 9y ago
I don't get it, how does your post rebut the article? It talks neither about the fields nor the school construction (that was the parent poster), and it specifically says that posting a speed limit is not enough as a deterrent.
- nitrogen 9y ago
  It's not meant as a direct rebuttal because the article is so far off it isn't even wrong, due to a lack of context around the town's history, and it completely ignores the schooltime 20mph speed limit posted with big flashing signs and enforced by city police. Those schools were both built years or decades before the city even had its first stoplight, long before the other 90% of safe neighborhood streets even existed. There were only farms on a one-mile grid system in most of the city. Then over time developers built neighborhoods and the population exploded, so as the population grew the roads had to be expanded. Traffic planners had to move people somewhere, and they compensated for the wide streets with 20mph school speed limits, volunteer crossing guards, extensive education of children and drivers, and regular active enforcement of the school speed. So the article comes across as clueless, seemingly almost deliberately so to exploit a tragedy.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I don't understand the relevance of the town's history. Either the crossing is safe, or it isn't. The history may explain why it's unsafe, but it can never be a justification. That there's some reason behind the configuration is not something that must be pointed out - it's obvious that nobody chooses the locations of streets and schools by throwing darts at a panel. What the author is saying is that the situation is not acceptable - however it may have originated. As for the 20mph speed limit - besides the fact that he specifically says they are irrelevant, since drivers don't respect them -, how would that have helped, considering it was 8:30pm when the accident happened? And I'm betting the "volunteer crossing guards" weren't around either. Apparently kids sometimes leave schools outside "schooltime" - who'd a thunk it. Finally, if we're talking about what he left out - maybe you should add the other detail he didn't mention: that there had been already 15 accidents in the crosswalk in question in the last five years. So maybe it should have been clear by now that the methods weren't working. (By the way, "the population exploded and the streets had to be expanded" is false. Governments have tools to control the growth of the population, like permits and zoning.)

7952 9y ago

It seems dangerous to isolate a discipline from all other externalities in this way. Transport infrastructure cannot just exist in isolation to other factors. It can have wide reaching effects beyond just transport.

icebraining 9y ago

This seems like a weird abdication of responsibility. Sure, the schools probably shouldn't have been built there. Let's accept the premise that was the main error. That still doesn't excuse the traffic engineers - fault is not indivisible. You say they can't with away the people's lives. True, but they can't wish away the bad decisions made by others either. They still have a choice to make, between allowing a dangerous situation for children or a worse traffic circulation. And it's valid to judge that decision.

rhinoceraptor 9y ago

It seems like the existence (and requirement for) freeways and fast, pedestrian hostile roads is a self fulfilling prophecy. If we didn’t have them, people would live closer, we would have better public transport, better walking and cycling infrastructure, and we wouldn’t have a wasteful, excessive driving culture. And to many people steeped in the toxic car culture, riding a bike either means you got a DUI or you are crazy and deserve to die.

Aloha 9y ago

The decision not to put in a pedestrian bridge to me speaks more than the location of the schools.

Buttes 9y ago

A highway cuts through my city, largely because it used to be very poor and it was politically expedient to prioritize interstate traffic at the expense of city dwellers (there's measurably higher rates of asthma near highways). Its not just "StrongTowns hates them", it's that a lot of cities have gotten the shit end of the stick, transportation-wise, and people who actually live in the city don't want to live next to a fucking highway for the convenience of suburbanites. It's not a conspiracy, there's political support for these policies in cities. Just use park and ride, cut throughs can go fuck themselves, you sound entitled as hell. It's not your God given right to shit up other peoples' home with your car.