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Road design plays a massive part in accident rates but it's often unacknowledged as a factor. Many roads in the USA combine high-speed design (wide lanes, mult
by NumberWangMan 5y ago
Road design plays a massive part in accident rates but it's often unacknowledged as a factor. Many roads in the USA combine high-speed design (wide lanes, multiple lanes, clear zones) with frequent turns, intersections, busy shopping plazas with entering and exiting traffic, and generally complex traffic flows. To be safe around turns and intersections, traffic should be slow, but everything about the road design is telling our subconscious mind "it's safe to go fast here", regardless of the speed limit.
- hansvm 5y ago> multiple lanes I'll bite. Suppose you have enough peak traffic that multiple lanes are necessary to transport it even at low speeds. What do you do instead?
- maxbond 5y agoI think adding more lanes is a mental trap. It seems like when you have a lot of traffic, what you need to do is add more capacity to your road. But that doesn't end up working the way you'd expect, roads aren't like pipelines, because a road network is not only capacity for transportation but a subtle system of incentives. It's easy to add capacity and lose throughput because you change people's decision making and reap results you didn't anticipate. So, I would say, invest in a bus system to make better use of the lanes you have. Invest in a subway system to give people safe, cheap alternatives to car ownership. Change zoning so that people don't have to travel so far to get where they want to go. These are all incredibly expensive, a subway is certainly more expensive than adding a lane, but they have the advantage of actually addressing the problem. Transport really matters and we need to pony up for it, and we'll reap the benefits for generations.