5 ms·

MUTCD is great if you're in a car on a grade separated highway. But it's staggeringly awful for when you're outside of a car. It could even be argued that the

MUTCD is great if you're in a car on a grade separated highway. But it's staggeringly awful for when you're outside of a car. It could even be argued that the MUTCD is awful for driving in an urban area. MUTCD designs streets similarly to rural highways, and this can create conditions where people speed when they need to be driving slowly, because the design of the street doesn't reflect the speed the sign says you need to be driving. The MUTCD needs a different approach to urban streets. One that creates an environment where making a mistake doesn't lead to death. One where the design of the street reflects the posted speed limit. It will make the experience better for everyone. https://americawalks.org/how-the-mutcd-creates-unsafe-conditions-for-people-trying-to-access-food/ https://americawalks.org/how-the-mutcd-creates-unsafe-condit... https://nacto.org/program/modernizing-federal-standards/ https://nacto.org/program/modernizing-federal-standards/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-05/it-s-time-to-rewrite-the-road-builders-rule-book https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-05/it-s-time...

clairity 4y ago
my dream: urban roads (and parking) underground and multimodal streets above-ground severely road-dieted, with ample trees and micromobility lanes along them all. trees provide shade, reduces the heat island effect, reduces noise pollution (a bit), reduces air pollution (a bit), preserves soil and helps it hold more water, and overall reduces stress for pedestrians. adding mixed-use everywhere, with smaller pedestrian/micromobility alleys for accessibility, means people have somewhere to walk to rather than hopping into their cars for everything. then you don't need to rely so much on speed limits, signs, and signals, because you've segregated (most of) the cars from people.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  It's a beautiful dream but we can barely manage upkeep in our existing road network, which is mostly just layers of dirt and asphalt. If we need to maintain tunnel systems I imagine the maintenance goes up by at least an order of magnitude.
  - danny_codes 4y ago
    The great part is that we don't need fancy underground roads at all because trains and subways exist! So we can just do all the multi-modal mobility stuff and just skip the car-tunnel part
  - clairity 4y ago
    japan has an extensive network of tunnels and manages them just fine. and it's not a money problem. california, for instance, is the 5th largest economy in the world (~$3.6T), with greater LA ~$1.2T and the bay area ~$1T of that. cars have great utility, and while the economic benefits of roads/streets more than offset their cost in urban areas, a better mix of transportation reduces the amount of roads & streets we need overall (not to mention needing to repair them less often when usage is lower), mitigating the cost issue a bit. people react viscerally to moving away from a sole reliance on cars, but most people intuitively enjoy human-centered environments more than car-centered ones. i wouldn't advocate taking away cars, but rather providing a more human-centered environment that de-emphasizes cars in our lives so that we can better build relationships and communities with each other.
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      I agree it's not a money problem, but it seldom really is when we're discussing big projects. It's a problem of priority and perception. These might seem like trivial things when you're making grand designs but it matters a great deal when it's time to actually do something in the real world.
      - tomcam 4y ago
        How is it not a money problem?
        idiotsecant 4y ago
        It's not a money problem because we spend vastly more money on much more trivial and wasteful things. If there is anything I have learned, it's that if powerful interests care about a thing it doesn't really matter how much it costs.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  there are places like you describe and they get along just fine without those underground car roads. if you're going to the enormous expense of tunneling you should get your money's worth by building high-capacity transit.
noirdujour 4y ago
> MUTCD designs streets similarly to rural highways, and this can create conditions where people speed when they need to be driving slowly, because the design of the street doesn't reflect the speed the sign says you need to be driving. Not Just Bikes covers this shortfall in a video on speed limits[1], and it really opened my eyes on the relationship between rules and actual behavior. Essentially, speed limit signs affect driving speeds slightly, but the street design is important. Wide, open, straight roads naturally prompt drivers to drive to highway speeds, even in more suburb areas. It's amazing how often I check the speedometer and find that I'm driving much more than the posted speed limit when following the flow of traffic. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc
diebeforei485 4y ago
There are also other issues - for example, MUTCD doesn't allow for multiple languages on street signs. This is an issue in New York's Chinatown for example, where old bilingual street signs that need to be replaced have to be replaced with English-only signs.
- senkora 4y ago
  Link for the curious to an article about the New York Chinatown street signs (not much discussion in the thread): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30739996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30739996
Spooky23 4y ago
I agree. Not only does compliance to stuff like this create bad solutions into contexts where they don’t belong, but they make things worse by making normal maintenance activities capital projects. Case in point. A major avenue near me has no lines at all. There’s a small component of a turn lane, that’s it! Why don’t they just paint lines? Well… the city has to hire an engineer for $900k to send a couple of $25/hr engineering technicians to measure stuff for a few days, then they think about it and produce one or more designs for lanes and signage. The engineers are required to accommodate ADA requirements and offer multimodal options to accommodate bikes, etc. So instead of $20k for stripes, we have a $6M capital project to replace crossings, which requires state and federal highway funds. This was delayed by COVID chip and labor shortages and, is excepted to start in August 2023. (It started in late 2018) In the meantime, there’s a front end collision 2-3 times a month.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Meanwhile, we have another front page article (now page 2) with many posters lamenting that National Electric Code does not require a “You touch it? You have to fully upgrade it!” approach to code compliance as code evolves. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34339608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34339608
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    That’s what happens in a forum over represented by Californian apartment dwellers. I had to spend like $15k on top of a kitchen remodel to replace a panel, install spark breakers and whole house ground fault gear for a pretty marginal benefit.
blindstitch 4y ago
https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/10/rewriting-our-nations-deadly-traffic-manual/ https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/10/rewriting-our-nations-d... Good read about how MUTCD stymies ped/bike safety improvements for everyone: "...the Manual creates sewers of constant, fast traffic that impede walkability and safety."
u801e 4y ago
> MUTCD is great if you're in a car on a grade separated highway. But it's staggeringly awful for when you're outside of a car. > >It could even be argued that the MUTCD is awful for driving in an urban area. MUTCD designs streets similarly to rural highways, and this can create conditions where people speed when they need to be driving slowly, because the design of the street doesn't reflect the speed the sign says you need to be driving. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding about what the MUTCD is for. It's mainly about traffic signs and pavement markings. Road design is covered in the AASHTO publication "A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets"
- hardcopy 4y ago
  No, I'm not misunderstanding. I talk with traffic engineers on a regular basis on how the MUTCD is a large barrier towards safer streets. Pavement markings, including lane widths, bike lanes, counter flow bike lanes, HAWK signals, transit lanes and crosswalks affect the street design. My largest personal pet peeves with the MTUCD is the requirement for far side signal heads. Far side signal heads cause crosswalk encroachment. If signals were near side only like in EU, crosswalk encroachment would be impossible because you lose sight of the signal head. https://streets.mn/2021/04/30/thinking-outside-the-pedestrian-box/ https://streets.mn/2021/04/30/thinking-outside-the-pedestria... If you check out my second link in my first comment from NACTO, near the bottom there is a table of various cities and their specific issues with the MUTCD. Mine (Madison, WI) is here: https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258 https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258
  - u801e 4y ago
    Your previous comment was mainly referring to traffic speed which is primarily a function of geometric design of the road (width, superelevation, sightlines, etc). > Pavement markings, including lane widths, With commercial vehicle traffic, lane widths cannot be more narrow than the vehicle. At the body, a commerical vehicle is 8.5 feet wide. Adding mirror width makes them over 10 feet wide. In any case, looking at the scatter plot in this particular study[1], you can see that the 85th percentile speed doesn't really change regardless of whether the width is closer to 10 feet or 12 feet (the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 37 to 50 mph in both cases > bike lanes, The MUTCD doesn't really specify the minimum width of a bike lane, but the AASTHO Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities does specify a minimum usable pavement width of 4 feet, despite the fact that they say that a cyclist has an operating width of 5 feet. The MUTCD, unfortunately, allows for a straight through bike like to the right of a general purpose lane that allows for right turning traffic, which leads to the situation that increases the risk of right hook collisions for cyclists. NACTO does not really address that problem with conventional bike lanes as far as I've seen. > counter flow bike lanes These shouldn't be allowed mainly because vehicular traffic will not be looking in the direction that counter flow cyclists are coming from and will fail to yield to them as can be seen here[2]. The other problem with contraflow bike lanes is that it increases the cyclists exposure to glare from automotive headlamps because the standard asymmetric beam pattern directs more light to the right and allows for a higher horizontal cutoff. This can basically make it very difficult for cyclists to see where they're going and will make it difficult, if not impossible to spot road hazards in time to avoid them. > My largest personal pet peeves with the MTUCD is the requirement for far side signal heads. Far side signal heads cause crosswalk encroachment. If signals were near side only like in EU, crosswalk encroachment would be impossible because you lose sight of the signal head. Wouldn't that lead to more red light running? > https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258 https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258 >> The draft 11th Edition of the MUTCD takes away tools that engineers can use to improve mobility and safety for vulnerable users in challenging and complex urban settings, such as counter flow bike lanes next to parallel parking and the use of HAWK signals (Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons) with bike signals. Lack of these treatments will make many locations more dangerous and harder to access by vulnerable road users One difference between cyclists and walking pedestrians is that cyclists move much faster. This means that they're further from the intersection when a motorist is making a turn in a situation where they may need to yield. Normally, a pedestrian is very close to entering the intersection, meaning that a motorist can see them without having to turn their head to look down the sidewalk/path to check for any approaching pedestrians. On the other hand, a cyclist could be 30 feet away from getting to the intersection and out of sight of the motorist unless the motorist makes a conscious effort to look down the sidewalk/path in order to see any approaching cyclist. Most motorists aren't going to do the latter, which means that cyclists are at increased risk of a collision in those situations. The best option is to enforce protected movements through the intersections with traffic signals and not rely in yielding at all. Unfortunately, most pedestrian and cyclist facilities rely on mutual yielding between them and motorists, which doesn't really work out that well. But if we were to use signals, then everyone will experience significantly more delay and there would be a problem with non-compliance with the signals. [1] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/review_lane_width_and_speed_parsons.pdf https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/review_lane_width_and_speed_pars... (figure on page 6) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6-AI_X1qE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6-AI_X1qE

clairity 4y ago

my dream: urban roads (and parking) underground and multimodal streets above-ground severely road-dieted, with ample trees and micromobility lanes along them all. trees provide shade, reduces the heat island effect, reduces noise pollution (a bit), reduces air pollution (a bit), preserves soil and helps it hold more water, and overall reduces stress for pedestrians. adding mixed-use everywhere, with smaller pedestrian/micromobility alleys for accessibility, means people have somewhere to walk to rather than hopping into their cars for everything. then you don't need to rely so much on speed limits, signs, and signals, because you've segregated (most of) the cars from people.

idiotsecant 4y ago
It's a beautiful dream but we can barely manage upkeep in our existing road network, which is mostly just layers of dirt and asphalt. If we need to maintain tunnel systems I imagine the maintenance goes up by at least an order of magnitude.
- danny_codes 4y ago
  The great part is that we don't need fancy underground roads at all because trains and subways exist! So we can just do all the multi-modal mobility stuff and just skip the car-tunnel part
- clairity 4y ago
  japan has an extensive network of tunnels and manages them just fine. and it's not a money problem. california, for instance, is the 5th largest economy in the world (~$3.6T), with greater LA ~$1.2T and the bay area ~$1T of that. cars have great utility, and while the economic benefits of roads/streets more than offset their cost in urban areas, a better mix of transportation reduces the amount of roads & streets we need overall (not to mention needing to repair them less often when usage is lower), mitigating the cost issue a bit. people react viscerally to moving away from a sole reliance on cars, but most people intuitively enjoy human-centered environments more than car-centered ones. i wouldn't advocate taking away cars, but rather providing a more human-centered environment that de-emphasizes cars in our lives so that we can better build relationships and communities with each other.
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    I agree it's not a money problem, but it seldom really is when we're discussing big projects. It's a problem of priority and perception. These might seem like trivial things when you're making grand designs but it matters a great deal when it's time to actually do something in the real world.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      How is it not a money problem?
      - idiotsecant 4y ago
        It's not a money problem because we spend vastly more money on much more trivial and wasteful things. If there is anything I have learned, it's that if powerful interests care about a thing it doesn't really matter how much it costs.
_dain_ 4y ago
there are places like you describe and they get along just fine without those underground car roads. if you're going to the enormous expense of tunneling you should get your money's worth by building high-capacity transit.

noirdujour 4y ago

> MUTCD designs streets similarly to rural highways, and this can create conditions where people speed when they need to be driving slowly, because the design of the street doesn't reflect the speed the sign says you need to be driving. Not Just Bikes covers this shortfall in a video on speed limits[1], and it really opened my eyes on the relationship between rules and actual behavior. Essentially, speed limit signs affect driving speeds slightly, but the street design is important. Wide, open, straight roads naturally prompt drivers to drive to highway speeds, even in more suburb areas. It's amazing how often I check the speedometer and find that I'm driving much more than the posted speed limit when following the flow of traffic. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc

diebeforei485 4y ago

There are also other issues - for example, MUTCD doesn't allow for multiple languages on street signs. This is an issue in New York's Chinatown for example, where old bilingual street signs that need to be replaced have to be replaced with English-only signs.

senkora 4y ago
Link for the curious to an article about the New York Chinatown street signs (not much discussion in the thread): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30739996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30739996

Spooky23 4y ago

I agree. Not only does compliance to stuff like this create bad solutions into contexts where they don’t belong, but they make things worse by making normal maintenance activities capital projects. Case in point. A major avenue near me has no lines at all. There’s a small component of a turn lane, that’s it! Why don’t they just paint lines? Well… the city has to hire an engineer for $900k to send a couple of $25/hr engineering technicians to measure stuff for a few days, then they think about it and produce one or more designs for lanes and signage. The engineers are required to accommodate ADA requirements and offer multimodal options to accommodate bikes, etc. So instead of $20k for stripes, we have a $6M capital project to replace crossings, which requires state and federal highway funds. This was delayed by COVID chip and labor shortages and, is excepted to start in August 2023. (It started in late 2018) In the meantime, there’s a front end collision 2-3 times a month.

sokoloff 4y ago
Meanwhile, we have another front page article (now page 2) with many posters lamenting that National Electric Code does not require a “You touch it? You have to fully upgrade it!” approach to code compliance as code evolves. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34339608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34339608
- Spooky23 4y ago
  That’s what happens in a forum over represented by Californian apartment dwellers. I had to spend like $15k on top of a kitchen remodel to replace a panel, install spark breakers and whole house ground fault gear for a pretty marginal benefit.

blindstitch 4y ago

https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/10/rewriting-our-nations-deadly-traffic-manual/ https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/10/rewriting-our-nations-d... Good read about how MUTCD stymies ped/bike safety improvements for everyone: "...the Manual creates sewers of constant, fast traffic that impede walkability and safety."

u801e 4y ago

> MUTCD is great if you're in a car on a grade separated highway. But it's staggeringly awful for when you're outside of a car. > >It could even be argued that the MUTCD is awful for driving in an urban area. MUTCD designs streets similarly to rural highways, and this can create conditions where people speed when they need to be driving slowly, because the design of the street doesn't reflect the speed the sign says you need to be driving. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding about what the MUTCD is for. It's mainly about traffic signs and pavement markings. Road design is covered in the AASHTO publication "A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets"

hardcopy 4y ago
No, I'm not misunderstanding. I talk with traffic engineers on a regular basis on how the MUTCD is a large barrier towards safer streets. Pavement markings, including lane widths, bike lanes, counter flow bike lanes, HAWK signals, transit lanes and crosswalks affect the street design. My largest personal pet peeves with the MTUCD is the requirement for far side signal heads. Far side signal heads cause crosswalk encroachment. If signals were near side only like in EU, crosswalk encroachment would be impossible because you lose sight of the signal head. https://streets.mn/2021/04/30/thinking-outside-the-pedestrian-box/ https://streets.mn/2021/04/30/thinking-outside-the-pedestria... If you check out my second link in my first comment from NACTO, near the bottom there is a table of various cities and their specific issues with the MUTCD. Mine (Madison, WI) is here: https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258 https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258
- u801e 4y ago
  Your previous comment was mainly referring to traffic speed which is primarily a function of geometric design of the road (width, superelevation, sightlines, etc). > Pavement markings, including lane widths, With commercial vehicle traffic, lane widths cannot be more narrow than the vehicle. At the body, a commerical vehicle is 8.5 feet wide. Adding mirror width makes them over 10 feet wide. In any case, looking at the scatter plot in this particular study[1], you can see that the 85th percentile speed doesn't really change regardless of whether the width is closer to 10 feet or 12 feet (the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 37 to 50 mph in both cases > bike lanes, The MUTCD doesn't really specify the minimum width of a bike lane, but the AASTHO Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities does specify a minimum usable pavement width of 4 feet, despite the fact that they say that a cyclist has an operating width of 5 feet. The MUTCD, unfortunately, allows for a straight through bike like to the right of a general purpose lane that allows for right turning traffic, which leads to the situation that increases the risk of right hook collisions for cyclists. NACTO does not really address that problem with conventional bike lanes as far as I've seen. > counter flow bike lanes These shouldn't be allowed mainly because vehicular traffic will not be looking in the direction that counter flow cyclists are coming from and will fail to yield to them as can be seen here[2]. The other problem with contraflow bike lanes is that it increases the cyclists exposure to glare from automotive headlamps because the standard asymmetric beam pattern directs more light to the right and allows for a higher horizontal cutoff. This can basically make it very difficult for cyclists to see where they're going and will make it difficult, if not impossible to spot road hazards in time to avoid them. > My largest personal pet peeves with the MTUCD is the requirement for far side signal heads. Far side signal heads cause crosswalk encroachment. If signals were near side only like in EU, crosswalk encroachment would be impossible because you lose sight of the signal head. Wouldn't that lead to more red light running? > https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258 https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258 >> The draft 11th Edition of the MUTCD takes away tools that engineers can use to improve mobility and safety for vulnerable users in challenging and complex urban settings, such as counter flow bike lanes next to parallel parking and the use of HAWK signals (Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons) with bike signals. Lack of these treatments will make many locations more dangerous and harder to access by vulnerable road users One difference between cyclists and walking pedestrians is that cyclists move much faster. This means that they're further from the intersection when a motorist is making a turn in a situation where they may need to yield. Normally, a pedestrian is very close to entering the intersection, meaning that a motorist can see them without having to turn their head to look down the sidewalk/path to check for any approaching pedestrians. On the other hand, a cyclist could be 30 feet away from getting to the intersection and out of sight of the motorist unless the motorist makes a conscious effort to look down the sidewalk/path in order to see any approaching cyclist. Most motorists aren't going to do the latter, which means that cyclists are at increased risk of a collision in those situations. The best option is to enforce protected movements through the intersections with traffic signals and not rely in yielding at all. Unfortunately, most pedestrian and cyclist facilities rely on mutual yielding between them and motorists, which doesn't really work out that well. But if we were to use signals, then everyone will experience significantly more delay and there would be a problem with non-compliance with the signals. [1] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/review_lane_width_and_speed_parsons.pdf https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/review_lane_width_and_speed_pars... (figure on page 6) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6-AI_X1qE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6-AI_X1qE