19 ms·
I don't think this article is making the point veey clearly, but it is a very important point: roads are for long distance connections at speed, streets are for
by mcv 5y ago
I don't think this article is making the point veey clearly, but it is a very important point: roads are for long distance connections at speed, streets are for local traffic: reaching houses, shops, people. These stroads try to do both and fail at both because the goals are contradictory; you can't have high speed traffic with lots of side streets and crossing traffic, bikes and pedestrians. It will be too slow for a road or too dangerous for a street, and probably both.
Separate traffic that requires different speeds.
- wffurr 5y agoEvery time I end up on a five lane road with the center turning lane and tons of curb cuts and cross streets and abutting parking lots, I remind myself that it's one of the most dangerous places I am likely to be in.
- kryogen1c 5y ago> one of the most dangerous places I am likely to be in. i dont know how widely this turn of phrase is used, but where i grew up in the US, we called the middle turn lane in a 5 lane road the suicide lane.
- SantalBlush 5y agoI've also called it that for as long as I can remember, and it's probably helped me drive more defensively around that lane. Drivers misuse it all the time.
- eggsmediumrare 5y agoLikewise in Ontario. Strong term, but gets the point across. I also once saw a dump truck with stickers on either side of the tailgate. On the left, "passing side." On the right, "suicide." Had a big impact on my driving habits... I never, ever pass on the right.
- cozzyd 5y agoUnfortunately the majority of people don't seem to understand they're not allowed to pass on the right (and they never get pulled over for it).
- sokoloff 5y agoIf slower traffic kept right, there’d be a lot less passing on the right. (If you’re getting passed on the right regularly, you might consider your own lane discipline as well as that of those passing you.)
- cozzyd 5y agoYes, this is also true, but I think the bigger problem is just speeding. People on the left are usually moving faster than people on the right or middle, on average, but some people want to go 20-30 mph over the speed limit. Normally I'd pull to the right so they can pass, but by the time I start doing that they're already starting to change lanes too!
- sokoloff 5y agoTrue. If you take a highway that people feel is reasonable and prudent to drive at 75-85 mph and post it as 55, people will drive 20-30 mph over. I think the problem is more likely the 55 signage in that case.
- gruez 5y agoThat might make sense for dump trucks because they're bulky and have poor visibility, but what's the increased risk of passing on the right? The only thing I can think of is marginally worse visibility because the right side is slightly further away from the driver's seat. However, I don't think that's enough risk to justify going out of your way to pass on the right. Having to change lanes to pass on the left carries its own risks.
- cozzyd 5y ago
- ehnto 5y agoI wonder how much that specific road design cause FedEx to discourage left hand turns in their routes?
- bobthepanda 5y agoI think you're thinking of UPS, and IIRC the decision is mostly to reduce waiting time/idle fuel burn. (Most jurisdictions in the US allow right-on-red and that makes this even easier to justify.)
- p1mrx 5y agoIf I go somewhere often, I like to find the "chill route" that minimizes complex left turns, even if it takes a bit longer.
- ehnto 5y agoSame, I don't even mind if it takes a bit longer. I am more interested in stress free driving than getting there sooner.
- bckr 5y agoThe only other time I have heard that was during my driving test on small town California
- masklinn 5y agoSounds like a derivative from a road style which has (mostly, thankfully) been abandoned: originally, “suicide lanes” designated the center lane of a 3-lane. A 3-lane is a road design where you’ve got one lane in each direction, and a shared passing lane in the middle. These used to be quite popular as they were not much more expensive than a 2-lane but allowed better throughput, however as density and speeds increased they became more and more deadly as they’d encourage trying to pass and high-speed frontal collisions. They’re mostly gone now, replaced by either 2+2 or 2+1 (the latter is very popular in europe, it’s basically a 3-lane except there’s a hard barrier which regularly swaps the center lane’s direction to allow safe passing sections — or more rarely a 1+1 with a protected turn lane).
- jacobolus 5y agoIn Mexico there are still a good number of 3-lane roads where the middle lane is for passing in both directions. A close family friend died on one: head-on collision with a truck passing a truck on a curving mountain road. (He was an aggressive driver who got lucky for decades until one day he finally didn’t.) Truly horrible road design.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoMiddle shared turn lanes are quite safe though, though I don't have actual stats. It's very hard to hit someone in one because no one is driving more than 50 ft in one, and you're always coming to a stop to prepare for a turn. On busy streets they are usually a bit wider than a normal lane, and on 80 km/h highways, they are a full lane-and-a-half wide. On busier residential streets with lots of single family homes, they are a great alternative to two lanes in each direction, because they allow for separated bike lanes and left-turning cars don't block traffic flow. Many 50 km/h roads in my city have been converted like this. You would never put one in a newly designed road, but when a road needs to be upgraded, they are a great solution.
- jake_morrison 5y agoI spent a summer in India in the late 1980s (Tamil Nadu). Going between cities, the roads were only partially paved. There were two dirt lanes, with a blacktop middle lane. The trucks would play a continuous game of "chicken", driving at each other until someone lost their nerve. The newspaper had regular reports of truck "capsizings", where a truck would lose control and turn over. It was common for a truck to have laborers who would fill up the truck with some bulk product like dirt, then ride on the top to go to the destination, then unload it. When one of these trucks capsized, it was a major disaster.
- chestervonwinch 5y agoHere in Austin Texas, we have lovely signs to remind you of your imminent crash! http://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Sign%201.JPG http://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Sign%201.JP...
- onionisafruit 5y agoI don’t remember ever seeing that sign. Where is it posted?
- chestervonwinch 5y agoI've seen them while cruising S Pleasant Valley, but there are a number of road sections where they're posted: http://austintexas.gov/page/high-injury-roadways http://austintexas.gov/page/high-injury-roadways
- gruez 5y agoI love the "zero excuses" at the bottom. "now that we informed you of the danger, anything bad happening is entirely your fault and the city can't be held liable for its bad decisions"
- nemetroid 5y agoI guess it might come across that way, but I was happy to see the "Vision Zero" thing in the bottom left. Vision Zero has been a very successful road traffic policy in Sweden. > Vision Zero is based on an underlying ethical principle that "it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system." In most road transport systems, road users bear complete responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation system designers and road users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
- this15testing 5y agoI don't think any American city or police department knows what vision zero is. They frequently include the words "vision zero" in their plans or posts, but then car crash deaths continue as normal or even increase. Using Los Angeles as an example: https://ladotlivablestreets.org/programs/vision-zero https://ladotlivablestreets.org/programs/vision-zero https://laist.com/news/transportation/2020-traffic-deaths-los-angeles-pandemic https://laist.com/news/transportation/2020-traffic-deaths-lo... for the graphic "Traffic violence in Los Angeles" showing the increase since Vision Zero was adopted. Then you have enforcement issues like jaywalking laws, the wording and culture around collisions and referring to them as "accidents", etc. The entire country was REbuilt (US cities were not always like this) around the car. Until that changes, no city will reach Vision Zero.
- timvdalen 5y agoI had to look up a 'center turning lane'. Is this[1] it? That looks incredibly dangerous. [1]: https://www.wikihow.com/Use-the-Center-Turning-Lane https://www.wikihow.com/Use-the-Center-Turning-Lane
- sokoloff 5y agoIt is, but they’re more common on one travel lane each way streets. When evaluating the danger of such a design, you have to consider the alternatives. You’re probably considering 3/4 head on collisions from drivers misjudging the turn. Those happen, but how many rear-end collisions are avoided?
- wffurr 5y agoThe center turning lane isn't there to avoid rear end collisions, which are only problematic due to too-high speeds in a commercial area. They are about improving throughput. What makes them dangerous, particularly in the five lane configuration, is the poor visibility for crossing uncontrolled intersections of multiple traffic lanes.
- hef19898 5y agoCenter turning with five lanes? wow, that's crazy...
- wffurr 5y agoThe examples in the article show anywhere from 5 to 7 lanes. The outermost lanes in one of the 7-lane examples are parking lanes. There's a stroad on Staten Island that scares the crap out of me - Hylan Blvd. I have family that live on it. It's six lanes with a median, but sometimes and in certain places parking is allowed in the outermost lanes. So you can suddenly come up on parked traffic but only at certain times of day in certain places. It's totally insane. To get in the driveway, you have to loop the block to the closest light, wait for the green, and then drive halfway down the block and back-in before the light changes and traffic starts up. It's quite stressful.
- closeparen 5y agoWe have lots of slow and calm streets in American suburbia, and we love them that way. We value this calm so much that we refuse to admit shopping or even multi-family housing to them, for fear of disturbing it. These uses have to go somewhere, so they go where there is no presumption of an entitlement to low traffic, and that’s the road. The businesses hardly complain; they love to be where the greatest numbers of eyeballs and potential impulse shoppers are going by. Maybe you could start with a strong street vs. road discipline, but I would predict that within 40 years any American polity will surely break it, and the stroad will re-emerge.
- alisonkisk 5y agoI don't think businesses like being hard to reach outside of a small low density neighborhoodz advertising to cars zooming by who can't slowndown and turn in. Cities are moving toward "30 [mph] in the city" laws, moving stroads back to streets.
- ehnto 5y agoMixed use medium density is my urban nirvana. Anywhere I have been with it just makes so much sense for daily life at person scale. Cars tricked us into thinking life can be comfortable spread across large distances and I think we are suffering in various ways for it. I am reminded of that cartoon where aliens arive on earth, and assume that cars are the dominant species, since so much of our world has been dedicated to them. https://youtu.be/wFaHArkYLsM https://youtu.be/wFaHArkYLsM
- closeparen 5y agoSuburbanites hate cars too, and that’s why they’ll never let you have mixed use. It would perhaps eliminate the snarl in commercial areas, but it would also bring some portion of that traffic into what are now quiet residential sanctuaries.
- joshlemer 5y agoExactly. This video makes that point so crystal clear: https://youtu.be/dqQw05Mr63E https://youtu.be/dqQw05Mr63E Car-dependent suburbia is about imposing your car on everyone else while not allowing anyone else to impose their cars on you. It is inherently selfish city design.
- treis 5y agoBut this isn't how the world works. It's not Simcity where you lay down neat grids of zones and the dutiful citizens follow your orders. People will want to take advantage of cheap(er) land alongside your "road" so that they can own a house while still having reasonable access to the "street". And boom now you have a stroad. Attempting to use zoning to stop that runs into the problem that by and large people don't want to live in dense areas. Most of them want the cheap home in the burbs. And they'll vote for those that give it to them. This is the root problem with Strongtowns and their ilk. They love to navel gaze and contemplate the platonic ideal of how a city should be laid out. But for the most part fail to provide a viable option that people can and will choose.
- woah 5y agoYou're wrong. People want to live in walkable cities. Property prices prove this.
- cozzyd 5y agoAnd the reason people often move out with kids is that it's too expensive to own a large-enough property for most people due to the high demand for walkable places.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agothere's a very simple solution then. build more walkable places.
- cozzyd 5y agoIf only it were so simple. Building walkable places is illegal almost everywhere in the US due to onerous parking minimums, regulations about street design and restrictive zoning. It's still possible to build walkable places with highrises, but low-rise walkable areas like https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9181247,-87.6517955,3a,60y,71.84h,95.3t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqinRW2vFZUSuqeKA70edlQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9181247,-87.6517955,3a,60y,7... are almost lost art in the US. There are entire major metro areas in the US with no street like this.
- N1H1L 5y agoI remember driving through suburbian Atlanta at night a few months back, and there was this road that was 6 lines wide through a residential area, with a speed limit of 40 mph. That road was legitimately wider and straighter than Interstate 75, which I hopped on to in a few minutes. While driving through that stroad, I remember thinking that the only people who benefit from this planning disaster is the local PD, as every corner gas station had cop cars hidden with their lights switched off.