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I've seen these 'bump out's and I LOATH what they do to traffic. While they are one, pedestrian focused, solution I do not believe they are the __best possible

I've seen these 'bump out's and I LOATH what they do to traffic. While they are one, pedestrian focused, solution I do not believe they are the __best possible__ solution. """ (with the paragraph broken up into bullet points and some bold text) The U.S. model typically encourages wide lanes and corners to increase driver visibility, but this has the unintended consequence of encouraging cars to go through intersections faster, and and thereby decreasing the peripheral vision they might have retained at a slower speed. Instead, the Safe System intersection is designed to limit car speed and facilitate eye contact between users. It does so by expanding pedestrian areas via * curb extensions or bumpouts, * narrowing crosswalks, and * removing parking within 20-25 feet of an intersection. The crosswalks and narrowing of the lanes encourages cars to slow and to stop well ahead of the crosswalk, while bumpouts shorten the distance pedestrians must be in the road. """ While I agree Eye Contact is important, I think it should not come at the cost of increased driver or pedestrian conative load, but instead in the form of better safety engineering / design. Crosswalks : Take the extreme version of UK's solution. Crosswalks should be either half way along a road segment, or at least half a block from the vehicle intersection. These should include 'bump outs' to disrupt any parking area and LOW, half meter or less tall, shrubs or features should promote HIGH VISIBILITY and Eye Contact between pedestrians and drivers in a dedicated pedestrian / vehicle interaction area. Vehicle Intersections : Should have ZERO interaction with pedestrian features, no pedestrians should cross here. Roundabouts, free inner corner turns, traffic control systems and drivers all interact better in an environment that is less chaotic and more predictable. The optimal engineering safety choice is to remove pedestrians from such danger zones entirely. Yes remove parking within 15 meters (45ft) or better within 2 seconds of vision at road speed. Road Speed : Mark roads at their engineered speed. Do not lie to drivers. Do not intentionally make safety worse by adding distractions and hazardous elements ('traffic calming'). If a road speed IS indicated slower than the conditions appear to permit, time the intersection to intersection speed and post a _suggestion_ to 'lights timed for X speed'. If that's too slow drivers will figure out a more optimal speed within the range of what seems safe.

lotu 1y ago
Marking the road at its engineered speed is ineffective. People overwhelmingly do not use speed limits to decide how fast they drive. They look at how wide and straight the road is and how many things they see. The problem is we built a lot of streets that are engineered to be 50mph roads in residential neighborhoods. People then ignore the 25mph sign and drive 50mph and hit little children playing outside their home. Rebuilding and rerouting the road is impractical, so how do we fix the problem? Empirical evidence shows that by adding "distracting things" people drive slower, and this results in few fatalities. You are thinking of them as "distractions" but counter intuitively it might better to think of them "focus holders". Imagine your job is to sit in an empty room with a single button and at random times, a light turns on and you need to push the button within half a second. If this happens every several seconds or so, this is pretty easy, but if it only happens after an hour or so your mind will be wandering and your reaction time will be shit. Now imagine instead you are given a platforming video game like Mario or Hollow Knight, and every time a certain character appears on screen need to push the Y button. This sounds like something that is easy to do for hours, even if the specific character appears infrequently, it would even be enjoyable. Adding those elements like trees, turns and bumps are the same idea, it ensures the drivers focus is always on the road where it needs to be. Also some people just don't care and race down wide straight roads as fast as they can. The only way to slow these people down is to make it impossible to go extremely fast. I can think of this play ground near my house which is across the street from a school. In orders to stop people speeding down this straight street, the placed large rocks in the middle of the road, so you have to dive this zig zag pattern. I sure this can be somewhat frustrating for drivers but it's now impossible to navigate this road at more than ~20 mph which is what we want. As for moving interactions I think the idea of not having pedestrian crossings at intersections is infeasible. Though it might work if you were building a new city from scratch. When you are walking in a city you are going to cross multiple blocks. Walking ten+ blocks to get somewhere is so normal it’s not something you even think about. Crossing in the middle of the block would at least double and could triple or quadruple the length of the of a walk and city dwellers would simply not do it and cross at intersections. They already universally ignore traffic lights, and aren't going to walk out of their way dozens of times a day. I could imagine a city that was designed around walking and all the shops and homes were on car free streets, with streets behind the houses, like alleyways or underground. That I could see working, but the problems with implementation are obvious.
bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
Two issues with what you say: > Crosswalks should be either half way along a road segment, or at least half a block from the vehicle intersection. Great, so it'll take pedestrians 3x as long to get anywhere. > Do not intentionally make safety worse by adding distractions and hazardous elements ('traffic calming'). When drivers feel confident, they drive fast. When they feel wary, they drive slow. I do not believe evidence shows that when drivers must navigate more complex arenas, they become more dangerous. They may feel less safe, but that's the whole point — to reduce drivers’ confidence and force them to act safely and cautiously.
gs17 1y ago
> Crosswalks should be either half way along a road segment, or at least half a block from the vehicle intersection. This could be fantastic, if the city was designed around it with a pedestrian grid half a block out of phase with the car grid. Without other changes, this would likely be a huge pain, so at that point we might as well work to make the whole thing far less car-dependent.

lotu 1y ago

Marking the road at its engineered speed is ineffective. People overwhelmingly do not use speed limits to decide how fast they drive. They look at how wide and straight the road is and how many things they see. The problem is we built a lot of streets that are engineered to be 50mph roads in residential neighborhoods. People then ignore the 25mph sign and drive 50mph and hit little children playing outside their home. Rebuilding and rerouting the road is impractical, so how do we fix the problem? Empirical evidence shows that by adding "distracting things" people drive slower, and this results in few fatalities. You are thinking of them as "distractions" but counter intuitively it might better to think of them "focus holders". Imagine your job is to sit in an empty room with a single button and at random times, a light turns on and you need to push the button within half a second. If this happens every several seconds or so, this is pretty easy, but if it only happens after an hour or so your mind will be wandering and your reaction time will be shit. Now imagine instead you are given a platforming video game like Mario or Hollow Knight, and every time a certain character appears on screen need to push the Y button. This sounds like something that is easy to do for hours, even if the specific character appears infrequently, it would even be enjoyable. Adding those elements like trees, turns and bumps are the same idea, it ensures the drivers focus is always on the road where it needs to be. Also some people just don't care and race down wide straight roads as fast as they can. The only way to slow these people down is to make it impossible to go extremely fast. I can think of this play ground near my house which is across the street from a school. In orders to stop people speeding down this straight street, the placed large rocks in the middle of the road, so you have to dive this zig zag pattern. I sure this can be somewhat frustrating for drivers but it's now impossible to navigate this road at more than ~20 mph which is what we want. As for moving interactions I think the idea of not having pedestrian crossings at intersections is infeasible. Though it might work if you were building a new city from scratch. When you are walking in a city you are going to cross multiple blocks. Walking ten+ blocks to get somewhere is so normal it’s not something you even think about. Crossing in the middle of the block would at least double and could triple or quadruple the length of the of a walk and city dwellers would simply not do it and cross at intersections. They already universally ignore traffic lights, and aren't going to walk out of their way dozens of times a day. I could imagine a city that was designed around walking and all the shops and homes were on car free streets, with streets behind the houses, like alleyways or underground. That I could see working, but the problems with implementation are obvious.

bobbylarrybobby 1y ago

Two issues with what you say: > Crosswalks should be either half way along a road segment, or at least half a block from the vehicle intersection. Great, so it'll take pedestrians 3x as long to get anywhere. > Do not intentionally make safety worse by adding distractions and hazardous elements ('traffic calming'). When drivers feel confident, they drive fast. When they feel wary, they drive slow. I do not believe evidence shows that when drivers must navigate more complex arenas, they become more dangerous. They may feel less safe, but that's the whole point — to reduce drivers’ confidence and force them to act safely and cautiously.

gs17 1y ago

> Crosswalks should be either half way along a road segment, or at least half a block from the vehicle intersection. This could be fantastic, if the city was designed around it with a pedestrian grid half a block out of phase with the car grid. Without other changes, this would likely be a huge pain, so at that point we might as well work to make the whole thing far less car-dependent.