Speed and convenience also matters. I like big, fast, and wide roads because they let me and many others get to where we want to go quickly. It’s a trade off. We shouldn’t let “think of the children” safetyism decide what the balance is, since that line of thinking is extremist and does not consider what is at stake on the other side of the argument. Efforts to eliminate every last death on streets are a waste of time since we’ll never achieve perfection and roads are very safe already. The road diets made under that unrealistic goal are simply making everyone’s lives worse by causing us to spend more time on the roads in traffic.
Think about all the injuries too. All the environmental damage. All the people that don't hang on the street because of the fumes and noise and danger. All the road rage and cortisol that boils within otherwise sane people the moment you put them behind a wheel and into some traffic. All the sedentarism and obesity from people opting to drive 2 minutes rather than walk 10. All the forgone housing for parking stadiums.
I am all for convenience, but the costs are noticeable in more ways than one.
I don't disagree but I would add this adjacent perspective.
It's a bit like we've installed public-funded, unremovable alcohol spigots in everyone's home. People using them within their designed limits lead to awful outcomes. We're reasonably upset about that and respond with thousands of marginally and unequally enforced restrictions. Unhappy with their ineffectiveness, we just keep piling on more punitive restrictions.
Giving up booze infrastructure isn't on the table tho. We're too dependent on it.
Environmental damage is the argument against traffic calming measures. Vehicles are most efficient traveling at a consistent, relatively high speed. The reason the national speed limit was historically set at 55MPH was that was the approximate speed at which aerodynamic losses overcome mechanical losses from low gearing at low speeds, i.e. it was the speed that vehicles of the time were most fuel efficient. Modern vehicles have even better aerodynamics. Moreover, fuel efficiency for electric vehicles is essentially moot, because they have built-in storage that can be charged from intermittent renewable sources during times of oversupply when the power is "free".
Conversely, traffic calming generally results in vehicle speed changes as motorists slow down and then speed back up again in response to obstructions or areas with intentionally low visibility, which not only wastes fuel by operating vehicles below their optimal speed, it results in braking and acceleration that increases brake dust and tire wear.
Environmentally, the optimal road is flat and straight with no traffic control devices or other reasons for vehicles to change speed, i.e. a highway.
Environmentally, the optimal road is the road with no cars on it. Ideally, traffic calming is paired with cities where things are put closer together and where walking, biking, and transit are the most viable options for most trips. Traffic calming a road in a suburb a mile from the nearest store might help with safety, but people will still use cars to get everywhere.
> Environmentally, the optimal road is the road with no cars on it.
But then why is there even a road there? How to reduce the amount of travel required and how to most efficiently get from A to B are two different issues. Doing the former is good, but it requires things like new higher density housing construction, which takes a long time and is not going to cause most of the existing homes in the suburbs to cease to exist under any plausible expectation.
One of the reasons for this is that high density doesn't require much land; if you build 20 units to a lot then you could double the existing suburban housing stock as high density units, but you'd have only bulldozed 5% of them to do it, so the other 95% would still exist. This would reduce housing costs but you'd still have someone living in most of those existing homes, which are in places it's not viable to walk or use mass transit.
And then you might want to ask a question like "how do we make transportation more efficient in the short term, i.e. on a 5-10 year timescale"? To which the answer is things like "make new cars electric" and "optimize high-traffic roads to maximize the efficiency of existing vehicles".
This assumes that cars are the only way to get around.
A bus that starts and stops as it goes through traffic calming with 100 people on it will make an absolute joke of the efficiency of even the most fuel efficient of cars.
In areas where transit is given its own lane, or is a train, the time efficiency is much better as well. Plus if you give buses their own lanes you can remove traffic calming measures for them and give them signal priority, thus making them even more efficient from a resource, and time perspective.
> This assumes that cars are the only way to get around.
Which is true in many cases, and would take decades of construction to do anything about, e.g. because people would have to move out of the suburbs or else at least one end of the trip will require a car, which would require massive long-term new housing construction in urban areas and has no short-term solution.
> A bus that starts and stops as it goes through traffic calming with 100 people on it will make an absolute joke of the efficiency of even the most fuel efficient of cars.
A city bus will get around 5MPG. The most efficient cars get more than 50MPG, so a city bus isn't even as fuel efficient as the cars until it's carrying more than 10 passengers. In theory they can carry 30-40 passengers, but generally in practice they don't, and in theory that 50+MPG car can carry five or more passengers too.
> In areas where transit is given its own lane, or is a train, the time efficiency is much better as well.
"In areas where the time efficiency of car traffic is purposely degraded, car traffic has lower time efficiency" is kind of tautological, but that's a silly argument for doing it, especially when the proposed alternative isn't available, e.g. because one of the endpoints is in the suburbs and the bus doesn't go there.
> Plus if you give buses their own lanes you can remove traffic calming measures for them and give them signal priority, thus making them even more efficient from a resource, and time perspective.
It's kind of odd that the same people who talk about wasted space from parking want to allocate entire bus lanes worth of space for a vehicle that only uses them 0.2% of the time. Also, what are you proposing here? 50+MPH buses traveling next to bike lanes and pedestrians? It would have to be even higher than that, because the bus is constantly starting and stopping to pick up passengers (and is then stationary for several seconds), so to achieve an average speed of e.g. 30MPH, its cruising speed would have to be above 60MPH, which is not only dangerous if adjacent to pedestrians, it's extremely inefficient as you're repeatedly accelerating a huge bus to highway speeds and then back again.
When the alternative is a car traveling a constant 60MPH on a highway, the bus compares unfavorably in terms of both time and fuel efficiency.
I will say that I lived in Vancouver. A city where I have never seen fewer than 10 people on a bus, where driving is frequently slower than transit, where you are rarely more than a 10 minute walk from a bus, where during rush hour, they convert parking lanes to bus lanes. It does take time to change, but it will take longer if we wait.
All of this works fine in places where they have been enacting all the things that you are saying don’t work. Most people just can’t imagine it working until they see it.
> A city where I have never seen fewer than 10 people on a bus
Presumably during rush hour, which is kind of the issue. You can get more people on the bus during peak hours, but then it's off-peak and you're in a place where you don't have a car. Now you're either waiting an hour for a bus so it can be full (which is slower than a car) or you're maintaining frequent service by running mostly-empty buses (which is less efficient than a car).
Vancouver is also a coastal city the size of Boston with a fairly high population density. Things will work there that won't work in smaller inland cities surrounded by suburban and rural areas.
> where driving is frequently slower than transit
But because driving there is slower than it is in most US cities, right? That's not really an attractive way to get the result. The goal is to make the new thing better, not to make the existing thing worse.
> All of this works fine in places where they have been enacting all the things that you are saying don’t work. Most people just can’t imagine it working until they see it.
The real problem is that people propose these things in places where they don't work. If you have an urban city with dense urban housing, obviously people will be able to use mass transit. But you can't just add a bus lane to a city where most of the population commutes in from the suburbs and expect it to have the same effect. Everyone still has to drive and all you've done is remove a travel lane and make the traffic worse.
Allowing the construction of mixed-use medium density buildings reduces the distance of the average trip, which allows more people to choose walking and cycling.
At the end of the day, the more you design a neighborhood to facilitate driving, the more car traffic it will suffer. And the more convenient you make it to any other form of transportation, the less car traffic there will be.
Allowing the construction of mixed-use medium density buildings reduces the distance of the average trip several decades from now, after the new zoning has filtered out into the already-constructed installed base of existing buildings. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it -- in fact we should do it immediately for precisely this reason -- but you can't expect it to have an instantaneous effect.
Meanwhile people keep proposing things like bus lanes as something we should do in the present day, in places where they can't work until after that construction has already happened. Also, bus lanes are never a good idea because the density required to justify a bus lane (which is very high because it consumes a significant amount of surface land in an area with high land scarcity) is higher than the density required to justify a subway line (which doesn't).
Unless we push for better transportation infrastructure today it won't be there thirty years from now. Nobody is suggesting to put a bus lane in a boring cul-de-sac, either.
For several decades, North American suburbanites have been living comfortably in their quiet bubble of car-dependent neighborhoods, completely disregarding the noise, danger and other externalities that their traffic imposes onto the people who choose sustainable transportation options in more densely-populated urban areas. It's time that we design our urban neighborhoods around the daily needs of the people actually living there rather than the speed and convenience of visitors.
> Unless we push for better transportation infrastructure today it won't be there thirty years from now.
It takes 30 years to completely reshape the housing market because there just aren't enough construction companies, and existing homes don't go on the market, to do it faster than that. It doesn't take 30 years to build a subway line, or if it does then your government is dysfunctional and you should focus on fixing that.
Meanwhile if you try to build the transit infrastructure before there is any demand for it, nobody uses it and you lose public support for even maintaining it because it turns into a money pit with high costs and low usage. And you get punished by the voters because the thing you put in place can't be used while the housing situation is still what it is, whereas the thing they have to use is now worse because the bus lane carrying empty buses nobody can practically use is consuming a travel lane that used to carry more cars.
> Nobody is suggesting to put a bus lane in a boring cul-de-sac, either.
The problem is that nobody is suggesting to put a bus in a boring cul-de-sac, because that would be highly inefficient and not have enough ridership to justify it. But then the people who live there can't take the bus because there isn't one, so they also can't use a bus lane when they get to the main road, and become angry with you when the disused bus lane makes the traffic worse.
> It's time that we design our urban neighborhoods around the daily needs of the people actually living there rather than the speed and convenience of visitors.
It's generally worth considering how those "visitors" will respond to that in terms of where they set up shop and how they vote.
LOL, ever heard of particulates from road wear and tire wear? Guess how the production of those scales with higher speeds?
> Vehicles are most efficient traveling at a consistent, relatively high speed.
Guess what, that's changing with EVs. Hybrid or not.
> Environmentally, the optimal road is flat and straight with no traffic control devices or other reasons for vehicles to change speed, i.e. a highway.
> But EVs can charge from renewable sources and then they don't have any fuel-related emissions.
That was my point. Maybe the paragraph order was confusing.
> Roads are used for going from where people live to where they want to go.
They (or stroads, or highways) shouldn't be used in place of streets. A city should have the minimal set of roads to get the job done, everything else should be traffic calmed streets.
1. I do know, higher speeds, higher particulate production from road and break wear.
2. Yes, it is changing, LOL. And this is not about breaks. I was talking about power consumption. EV power consumption, unlike ICEs, is linear. So EV are obviously more power efficient at lower speeds. Besides the particulate generation aspect outlined before.
Traffic deaths are quite literally one of the two leading causes of death of children in the United States, so in this case, yeah, actually thinking of the children makes some sense.
To me that sounds like a safetyist argument. Even if the number of deaths are high in total count, it may not matter when you consider the trade offs. For example if everyone spends an hour more in traffic each day - which is what the effect of “calming” has been in my experience - you’re causing an impact that is worse than the small number of deaths in my city. That delay and damage to our life quality matters, and needs to be weighed against the rare deaths.
Cars are very safe today and are getting much safer. Even basic cars come with many features to avoid accidents now. We will probably see deaths per mile driven go down on its own, without the need for malicious road design.
People with long commutes spend most of that time on highways, which are not affected by traffic calming measures. A surface street going from 35mph to 25mph is not going to add an hour of driving time unless you are driving 100 miles a day on non-highway surface streets, which literally nobody does. You are exaggerating the impact of traffic calming measures.
Cars are getting less safe for pedestrians and cyclists, not more safe. Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it? Easy to pretend the benefits of speeding outweigh the costs when the benefits accrue to you and the costs accrue to other people.
> A surface street going from 35mph to 25mph is not going to add an hour of driving time unless you are driving 100 miles a day on non-highway surface streets, which literally nobody does.
I’ve seen streets go from 45mph to 25mph, lose driving lanes to bike or bus lanes, lose parking, etc. It makes things far worse than you think. What used to be a 20 minute drive will now be 35 minutes. Now consider the drive in both directions, time to find parking, and other trips you might make that day. It forces people to stay confined and not make as many trips because it simply isn’t possible to fit them in anymore. That is a loss of life quality.
> Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it?
They don’t have to and by and large they don’t bear any cost for it. You’re exaggerating things - the probability of a pedestrian dying is incredibly low. I walk as well and am not in fear of cars just like I’m not in fear of other unlikely events.
The quality of life improves for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders when parking and car lanes are converted to bike and bus lanes. Drivers are not the only stakeholders who deserve consideration.
Many of the people who insist that there is no safety impact from high speed local roads nevertheless choose to raise their kids in suburban cul-de-sacs with minimal traffic and curvy roads with low speed limits. They want the right to subject other communities to speeding cars for their own convenience while protecting their own families from them.
Cars now have sensors all over and automatic braking to prevent collisions. The article acknowledges the benefits of front facing sensors in luxury vehicles from the time it was written, which are very common today even in basic vehicles. So are the 360 cameras it mentions.
Also - this article is focused on data from 2016 to 2020 for front collisions. It mentions 744 deaths of children in front collisions on non public roads (where the blind spots it talks about matter more) in that 5 year period, which is frankly a small number. This is a country with a few hundred million people after all. Some number of deaths are inevitable and it isn’t a crisis.
> Cars now have sensors all over and automatic braking to prevent collisions.
Yet pedestrian deaths in the US have kept climbing over the past ten years or so.
I can tell you that as a lifelong pedestrian I do not feel remotely safe walking in North America compared to Western Europe, where I used to live, or Japan, which I've visited a few times.
If you really feel unsafe about incredibly low risk possibilities, your only choice is to stay indoors permanently. Most people feel safe walking because the chance of something happening is so unlikely.
Pedestrian deaths may have climbed in recent years because of increased smartphone use or changing behaviors. I see many more jaywalkers for example, especially by homeless drug addicts in west coast cities, many of whom just blindly step into traffic.
There is no rigorous way to attribute your claimed increase in pedestrian deaths to cars.
There are cell phones everywhere, but pedestrian deaths have only increased in the USA, so it is not that.
Walking in my neighborhood is objectively more dangerous than it needs to be. In the past decade there have been several instances where motorists have mowed down and killed pedestrians, sometimes when they were minding their own business walking on the sidewalk.
I'm sick of motorists only valuing their own convenience and using demeaning language to describe the pedestrians that they victimize.
By that same logic, distance insidiously shaves away at your lifespan and we should build mixed-use walkable neighborhoods so that we can quickly reach our everyday destinations rather than causing traffic every time we want to get anywhere.
Note the way to do this is to follow engineering rules.
Take the 85th percentile rule.
If you take a neighborhood road and change it from 40mph to 25mph in an attempt to "save the children", you can easily make it more dangerous.
The 85th percentile rule figures how fast people go on a road, and sets an appropriate speed limit that people naturally follow. Attempting to set a speed limit too low or too high leads to a wide speed variance, which makes the road more dangerous.
But you're saying the speed limit (being too high or low) makes the road dangerous. Aren't the people driving their cars too fast making the road dangerous?
A great many people when they see a open straight road with little obstacles or pedestrians will go 45-50 MPH. A great many people when they see a 15 MPH sign will go 20 MPH. Pair that low speed limit with a "fast" road and you will end with many people going 45 MPH and many people going 20 MPH. This variance in speed, with some people going much slower than others can be more dangerous than if most went the same speed - e.g. if the limit were 45 MPH.
You are correct that people driving too fast make the road dangerous, but so does people driving too slow. Generally, from a safety point of view, you want the slowest speed at which almost everyone will actually drive at, as large variance in speed between drivers is dangerous. I think this is what the parent post was getting at: a speed limit too fast OR too slow will increase the number of accidents, keeping in mind that there will always be at least some drivers speeding.
> You are correct that people driving too fast make the road dangerous, but so does people driving too slow.
It's accurate to say that people driving too fast are extra dangerous when there are slower vehicles in the road. The danger is still caused by the people driving too fast, not by those driving slowly, though. Speed kills.
I don't think I've ever heard someone argue that the 85th percentile rule is actually a good invention - it's a disaster that codifies the behaviour of speeding drivers.
I agree that merely lowering speeds without changing the design speed is a bad move, though.
The problem is that people are naturally very bad drivers and are especially bad at judging what safe speed is.
We already know it's hopeless to teach them so what is left are traffic calming measures, heavy handed enforcement and technology (automatic speed limiters in cars).
Setting speed limits to speed people choose is a terrible idea.
People naturally choose speeds according to how safe they feel not how safe it is for everyone else.
If you have a residential area road which is straight and wide enough to go fast people will choose higher speed than on a narrow road.
This proves it doesn't work unless you only care about safety of people in cars (which Salomon curve seems to based on meaning it's meaningless for road design with the exception of highways).
I live in BC, where speed cameras are banned by law. Right next door is Alberta.
Last time I was in Edmonton, known for extremely car centric design, wide roads, ample highways, etc. I was shocked by how much slower people drove, and as a result, how much safer driving was in general.
You only have to get slapped with a fine a few times before you start learning to control your speed.
I'd go further and say automated average speed cameras are the most effective I've seen. Point speed cameras just get marked on a map and cause sudden braking and acceleration to dodge them - this can be effective at particular danger spots, but I always feel the average speed cameras in the UK are far more effective at changing driver habits in general.
Yeah, but those probably cost more and don't make for a nice environment outside of cars. Traffic calming can be super cheap and it makes for a super pleasant environment for everyone.
Traffic calming is usually more expensive than speed cameras. A speed bump isn't expensive but people are usually talking about stuff like bump outs and raised intersections and protected bicycle lanes and wide sidewalks when they are talking about traffic calming. Those are six figures per intersection. Cameras are low five figures.
"Fast" and wide roads don't actually help much with moving traffic around as there's such a phenomenon as induced demand. When more lanes are added to a road, more people are encouraged to drive and then the fast and wide roads get congested, especially where they join with smaller roads.
There's also the geometry problem. As more roads are built and more people travel by car, the various amenities get spread further apart (e.g. more parking required) which then makes them more difficult for people to walk/cycle to. This then gets more people to make a car journey when they previously might have walked which increases the amount of traffic. As more traffic builds up, more and wider roads are built which pushes everything further apart. This then encourages more and longer car journeys which results in more congestion - the solution to which would appear to be adding just one more lane to the roads.
The trick to solving congestion issues is to encourage as many people as possible to make short, non-car based journeys. Unfortunately, prioritising car journeys is almost always at the expense of other traffic.
I'm not sure I buy the concept of induced demand. If you widen a road and it results in more traffic, that sounds like there was already more demand than supply.
Induced demand should really be called "insurmountable demand." If there's a million more people who would take a traffic-clogged freeway if it were moving at 6mph, then it will always be clogged with traffic.
There's a non-trivial chance that the only reason you're around to complain about child safety is that we spent so long eliminating unnecessary dangers. The issue is speeding, not that you want to get somewhere faster than the speed limit.
