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Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These r

Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc. What makes this so hypocritical is that hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened. There were no studies on how wide, fast roads would negatively impact neighborhoods. How they would make it dangerous just to walk around, or increase the local pollution (air and particulates ending up in streams). They didn’t study how these widened roads might negatively impact downtowns, etc. All of this car investment happened as though it was for the greater good, and many people still believe this.

SoftTalker 2y ago
Studies like this always seem to me to be a formality. The conclusions are what the person paying for the study wants them to be. If a local municipality is anti-car, they will run a study justifying adding bike lanes everywhere, even though once they are built you never see bicycles in them, and they create more difficulty for cars by narrowing or taking away lanes. Or they'll install "traffic calming" speed bumps, chicanes, or curb-extension bottlenecks on neighborhood roads when (almost) nobody in the neighborhood wanted them. On the other hand, if they are pro-development, their studies will show that a new or widened road will lead to more business development, more jobs, more tax revenue.
- jeromegv 2y ago
  Bike lanes success are well measured and will often carry more people than a car lanes will.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    They carry more bicyclists, you mean. /s
    - bluejekyll 2y ago
      No, they also carry people on trikes, in motorized wheel chairs, scooters, joggers, people on those mono wheel things. Bikes might be the most popular choice, but many people are starting to refer to these lanes as “mobility-lanes” because they improve the lives of more than just bicyclists.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    > Bike lanes success are well measured Where? Outside of cities with very high density I don't see this being true. For medium density and less, what I've seen is that bike lanes remain empty. Bike counters basically show them to be failures, since the utilization barely increases over time or even lags population growth, while the car lanes remain fully utilized.
    - oopsallmagic 2y ago
      Are these the same bike lanes that start and stop randomly and are often just the shoulder of a 45-mi/h road with a bike, and implied middle finger, painted on?
    - oblio 2y ago
      Have you EVER tried to bike for commuting, grocery shopping, transportation in general, on those bike lanes? If cyclists aren't using them, they're not doing it to spite you. They're doing it because there's no network and 500m of bike lane doesn't take them somewhere useful or because they're badly designed and dangerous or very unpleasant due to heavy car traffic, pollution, etc.
      - pandaman 2y ago
        There is a bike lane going to a popular trail and crossing multiple major streets, also with bike lanes, as well as passing by multiple apartment complexes near my house. A two way lane with curbs and bollards, no cars parked there, with bike traffic lights and many side streets with 2 way stops (no stop on the street with the lane) or, at least, 4 way stops. I do drive on the same street from/to work as well as ride on the same lane to the trails. There are not many cyclists on it, orders of magnitude fewer than there are cars on the same street. "Urbanists" greatly exaggerate the number of cyclists. And on top of being in the vast minority, cyclists don't ride many miles per day, they are limited by the biology. So, naturally, even if every motorist had the vehicle confiscated and replaced by a bicycle, you would not see nearly as much traffic of cyclists. And in reality the vast majority of the tiny minority of cyclists also own a car and use it for most trips, only riding for exercise/fun.
- tom_vidal 2y ago
  Your car bias is showing here. The reason bike lanes and traffic calming measures get installed is because people are literally dying due to poor road design that prioritizes car speed over everything else. You might not want traffic calming, but everyone else who has to deal with your driving does.
  - bloomingeek 2y ago
    And isn't it really about how people are driving? In my state, we drive like maniacs, constantly speeding at least ten MPH over the limit. The term, "drive friendly" is scoffed at. Slowing down to let someone on the highway is unseen. On city streets, tailgating is common, jacked up pick-ups are drenching the interior of your car with their headlights after dark, making all your mirrors a blinding image. Can we please put our phones down for safety's sake? Sometimes I ride a motorcycle, so I'm hyper aware and see all kinds of just plain terrible driving practices. Most of it is simply a lack of patience behind the wheel. On the turnpike, when that car passes doing twenty over, do we really think they think about the possible consequences?
    - bluecalm 2y ago
      Yes, people in general are terrible at driving. Teaching them is hopeless that's why we need solutions that works. There are two right now: infrastructure that makes it hard and very inconvenient to go fast and heavy handed enforcement. The latter option only works in very well developed civilised societes like Switzerland or Nordic countries have. Most others are stuck with traffic calling measures as their population has too little too lose to care about safety.
    - orwin 2y ago
      The solution is easy, I just saw it implemented in a nearby town (8k people): make the road curb a little, never fully straight, add bollards everywhere on the side of the road, and narrow the road at every crossing (with metal/concrete bollards). Bollards are great: they protect pedestrian and are intimidating it seems. According to the mayor (I ate with him, friend of my mother) the architect who gave him the idea was a nudge expert, and they tested it first with thin, plastic bollards around the town (it worked, but wasn't protective enough). The city is halfway between two economic 'centers' (28k and 50k population) and see a lot of traffic as those cities grow. No pedestrian death in the last two years AFAIK, when pre-covid you had half a dozen injuries every year and a mortal accident every other year. So the bollards do seems to work. Install bollards!
- II2II 2y ago
  At least in my city, devices were installed in many bike lanes in order to count the number of userd. They show that people do use them. As for traffic calming, curb extensions, etc.: the city only started adding those modifications after pedestrian fatalities started going up and people started demanding them because they got tired of hearing about deaths all of the time. None of this is because the city is pro/anti-development since most of the projects could be construed either way. In a lot of cases it was simply to see which measures were effective because we often lack the data to know what will be effective.
- jimberlage 2y ago
  We did a study in my neighborhood after two pedestrian deaths. The deaths definitely were the motivator for the community action and studies. You know why the idiot traffic engineers made the streets so wide in the area where these oversized cars killed two people? “The average commute on the road would be extended by 1 minute.”
rootusrootus 2y ago
> hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened Where do you get this idea? NIMBY works every bit as well on new or expanded roads, and it gets used constantly. Hell, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars just trying to decide if we can build a new bridge, and that doesn't even involve actual planning. It's amazing we get any infrastructure projects done now given that every single person can stall them indefinitely.
- bluGill 2y ago
  only when someone speaks up. The worst roads are in nobodies backyard (who likes on a stroad - nobody, they all live on cul-de-sacs off the stroad)
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    Perhaps you live somewhere were everyone is content? My neighborhood is full of people (admittedly, many older) who mobilize at the slightest rumor of change anywhere in our vicinity. Bigger road? No way, that means more traffic. More houses? No way, that means more traffic. The neighborhood associate is quite active about staying on top of anything planned for this region of the city so they can light up our inboxes with information. Probably the one thing they wouldn't really be bothered by is expanding that cul-de-sac, as long as it will still be a dead end and not a new connection that traffic might choose to use to transit across the neighborhood.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  This might be true now, but it wasn't when all these massive highways, roads and stroads were built. US cities weren't destroyed because the people that lived there voted on it. For the most part you had a bureaucratic elite come in over the top and simply create laws and change the regulation.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    > US cities weren't destroyed US cities were not destroyed, and this is just misinformation, or hyperbole at best. In fact virtually all cities benefited from car infrastructure, since it brings people and things to the city, lets people efficiently get around, and so on. It helps the economic value of a city and also improves quality of life. If this wasn't true, there would have been a response with a broad political base. But there hasn't been. At best, a tiny minority of residents gets upset about roads and organizes into activist groups that make such claims. But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
dmix 2y ago
> Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc. I thought you were going to say they spend all their effort on studies to appease every special interest group instead of actually fixing things.

SoftTalker 2y ago

Studies like this always seem to me to be a formality. The conclusions are what the person paying for the study wants them to be. If a local municipality is anti-car, they will run a study justifying adding bike lanes everywhere, even though once they are built you never see bicycles in them, and they create more difficulty for cars by narrowing or taking away lanes. Or they'll install "traffic calming" speed bumps, chicanes, or curb-extension bottlenecks on neighborhood roads when (almost) nobody in the neighborhood wanted them. On the other hand, if they are pro-development, their studies will show that a new or widened road will lead to more business development, more jobs, more tax revenue.

jeromegv 2y ago
Bike lanes success are well measured and will often carry more people than a car lanes will.
- Filligree 2y ago
  They carry more bicyclists, you mean. /s
  - bluejekyll 2y ago
    No, they also carry people on trikes, in motorized wheel chairs, scooters, joggers, people on those mono wheel things. Bikes might be the most popular choice, but many people are starting to refer to these lanes as “mobility-lanes” because they improve the lives of more than just bicyclists.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  > Bike lanes success are well measured Where? Outside of cities with very high density I don't see this being true. For medium density and less, what I've seen is that bike lanes remain empty. Bike counters basically show them to be failures, since the utilization barely increases over time or even lags population growth, while the car lanes remain fully utilized.
  - oopsallmagic 2y ago
    Are these the same bike lanes that start and stop randomly and are often just the shoulder of a 45-mi/h road with a bike, and implied middle finger, painted on?
  - oblio 2y ago
    Have you EVER tried to bike for commuting, grocery shopping, transportation in general, on those bike lanes? If cyclists aren't using them, they're not doing it to spite you. They're doing it because there's no network and 500m of bike lane doesn't take them somewhere useful or because they're badly designed and dangerous or very unpleasant due to heavy car traffic, pollution, etc.
    - pandaman 2y ago
      There is a bike lane going to a popular trail and crossing multiple major streets, also with bike lanes, as well as passing by multiple apartment complexes near my house. A two way lane with curbs and bollards, no cars parked there, with bike traffic lights and many side streets with 2 way stops (no stop on the street with the lane) or, at least, 4 way stops. I do drive on the same street from/to work as well as ride on the same lane to the trails. There are not many cyclists on it, orders of magnitude fewer than there are cars on the same street. "Urbanists" greatly exaggerate the number of cyclists. And on top of being in the vast minority, cyclists don't ride many miles per day, they are limited by the biology. So, naturally, even if every motorist had the vehicle confiscated and replaced by a bicycle, you would not see nearly as much traffic of cyclists. And in reality the vast majority of the tiny minority of cyclists also own a car and use it for most trips, only riding for exercise/fun.
tom_vidal 2y ago
Your car bias is showing here. The reason bike lanes and traffic calming measures get installed is because people are literally dying due to poor road design that prioritizes car speed over everything else. You might not want traffic calming, but everyone else who has to deal with your driving does.
- bloomingeek 2y ago
  And isn't it really about how people are driving? In my state, we drive like maniacs, constantly speeding at least ten MPH over the limit. The term, "drive friendly" is scoffed at. Slowing down to let someone on the highway is unseen. On city streets, tailgating is common, jacked up pick-ups are drenching the interior of your car with their headlights after dark, making all your mirrors a blinding image. Can we please put our phones down for safety's sake? Sometimes I ride a motorcycle, so I'm hyper aware and see all kinds of just plain terrible driving practices. Most of it is simply a lack of patience behind the wheel. On the turnpike, when that car passes doing twenty over, do we really think they think about the possible consequences?
  - bluecalm 2y ago
    Yes, people in general are terrible at driving. Teaching them is hopeless that's why we need solutions that works. There are two right now: infrastructure that makes it hard and very inconvenient to go fast and heavy handed enforcement. The latter option only works in very well developed civilised societes like Switzerland or Nordic countries have. Most others are stuck with traffic calling measures as their population has too little too lose to care about safety.
  - orwin 2y ago
    The solution is easy, I just saw it implemented in a nearby town (8k people): make the road curb a little, never fully straight, add bollards everywhere on the side of the road, and narrow the road at every crossing (with metal/concrete bollards). Bollards are great: they protect pedestrian and are intimidating it seems. According to the mayor (I ate with him, friend of my mother) the architect who gave him the idea was a nudge expert, and they tested it first with thin, plastic bollards around the town (it worked, but wasn't protective enough). The city is halfway between two economic 'centers' (28k and 50k population) and see a lot of traffic as those cities grow. No pedestrian death in the last two years AFAIK, when pre-covid you had half a dozen injuries every year and a mortal accident every other year. So the bollards do seems to work. Install bollards!
II2II 2y ago
At least in my city, devices were installed in many bike lanes in order to count the number of userd. They show that people do use them. As for traffic calming, curb extensions, etc.: the city only started adding those modifications after pedestrian fatalities started going up and people started demanding them because they got tired of hearing about deaths all of the time. None of this is because the city is pro/anti-development since most of the projects could be construed either way. In a lot of cases it was simply to see which measures were effective because we often lack the data to know what will be effective.
jimberlage 2y ago
We did a study in my neighborhood after two pedestrian deaths. The deaths definitely were the motivator for the community action and studies. You know why the idiot traffic engineers made the streets so wide in the area where these oversized cars killed two people? “The average commute on the road would be extended by 1 minute.”

rootusrootus 2y ago

> hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened Where do you get this idea? NIMBY works every bit as well on new or expanded roads, and it gets used constantly. Hell, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars just trying to decide if we can build a new bridge, and that doesn't even involve actual planning. It's amazing we get any infrastructure projects done now given that every single person can stall them indefinitely.

bluGill 2y ago
only when someone speaks up. The worst roads are in nobodies backyard (who likes on a stroad - nobody, they all live on cul-de-sacs off the stroad)
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  Perhaps you live somewhere were everyone is content? My neighborhood is full of people (admittedly, many older) who mobilize at the slightest rumor of change anywhere in our vicinity. Bigger road? No way, that means more traffic. More houses? No way, that means more traffic. The neighborhood associate is quite active about staying on top of anything planned for this region of the city so they can light up our inboxes with information. Probably the one thing they wouldn't really be bothered by is expanding that cul-de-sac, as long as it will still be a dead end and not a new connection that traffic might choose to use to transit across the neighborhood.
panick21_ 2y ago
This might be true now, but it wasn't when all these massive highways, roads and stroads were built. US cities weren't destroyed because the people that lived there voted on it. For the most part you had a bureaucratic elite come in over the top and simply create laws and change the regulation.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  > US cities weren't destroyed US cities were not destroyed, and this is just misinformation, or hyperbole at best. In fact virtually all cities benefited from car infrastructure, since it brings people and things to the city, lets people efficiently get around, and so on. It helps the economic value of a city and also improves quality of life. If this wasn't true, there would have been a response with a broad political base. But there hasn't been. At best, a tiny minority of residents gets upset about roads and organizes into activist groups that make such claims. But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.

dmix 2y ago

> Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc. I thought you were going to say they spend all their effort on studies to appease every special interest group instead of actually fixing things.