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How To Build Roads To Control How Fast You Drive
An anonymous reader writes "They're the holy grail of transportation engineering: streets and highways specifically designed to encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates of passenger fatalities and generally encouraging a safer urban environment. And now new research shows that, if built right, they just might work. A new study out of the University of Connecticut suggests that minor reductions in vehicle speed are possible through changes in the street environment. Through the use of roadside parking, tighter building setbacks, and more commercial land uses, road designers can make drivers subconsciously drive more slowly." All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car-sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates.
Good grief. From TFA:
And:
Who would have thought that by reducing a driver's visibility, the driver would go slower to give themselves time to react to surprises? You? You in the back? Are you some kind of smartass? The Connecticut Department of Transportation studied this for four years. There's no way you could have arrived at the same conclusion so quickly!
This study was useful in determining how much people slowed down -- quantifying it at about 10% -- but sweeping on to claims like, "reducing the rates of passenger fatalities and generally encouraging a safer urban environment" is silly. Streets packed with parked cars, pedestrians, nearby buildings, et. al. are generally more dangerous precisely because clear lines-of-sight are cut off. Sane drivers know this, reduce their speed, and then -- making wild hand-waving guesses, here -- wind up with about the same overall level of "dangerousness" as when driving on uncluttered roadways.
people overcome the psychological trickery, then it becomes MORE dangerous!
Toll booths. Yes, tool booths will slow down traffic. Or speed bumps, but they aren't as irritating as the toll booths.
Done. In fact many roads are already like this!
Of course doing so, MAY slow down drivers, but doesn't necessarily make it any safer. Probably the opposite of that.
Here in Minnesota they like to add roundabouts everywhere to force you to slow down. What the traffic engineers did not seem to anticipate is that people do not know how to use them and routinely stop traffic into the circle (instead of yielding) or don't signal in and out of them so people have no idea what traffic is doing.
Now, this just adds to the whole slow down of traffic idea they were trying to get at but it causes many other issues including accidents (even though they claim they're reduced), higher short-term costs (they claim that over 25 to 30 years it's less expensive than a four-way), and poor design (including one-way streets into one side of the roundabouts causing exiting confusion).
Ugh.
Encourage fast driving, and set up speed cams everywhere. Rake in the dough. Profit! (Oh, worried about driver safety? The govt isn't)
That way people are on the road for less time.
All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates.
Nonsense, be a little bit more persistent. Apply for a government grant. Work out a deal with the overpopulated prison system to allow test inmates good behavior parole if they survive the course. Conduct a double blind study to see which method drivers prefer.
... in the name of science! I mean, the dystopian Mad Max future isn't going to herald itself!
Don't underestimate your ideas, you may have something here. I think with a few minor modifications (like filling the pits with black mambas or loaded claymores) we could gently urge drivers through natural human fears to drive slower. I'm already afraid of getting a ticket when I speed, why not step it up a notch or two?
Conduct your experiments
My work here is dung.
Isn't the Holy grail of highways, a highway that encourages people to drive as fast as possible and lets them do so safely? The purpose of a highway is to move people from A to B, safely and preferably as quickly as possible.
The author was obviously never 17.
. . . mobilists? Really?
How To Build Roads To Control How Fast You Drive?
Simple ... speed bumps! [Speed dips also acceptable.]
1) You can make the road look more dangerous, e.g. with optical illusions to make it look narrower
2) You can make the road actually and obviously more dangerous, e.g. reducing sight lines and adding on-street parking
Number 2 works, but it doesn't increase safety. Number 1 works... for a while. My concern with #1 is that drivers will realize they are being fooled, and start speeding up again. That's OK, except they may then interpret the real situation that the illusion was imitating as an illusion, and fail to take it into account, resulting in a net decrease in safety.
All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates. Sadly, your strategy seems to have been widely adopted across the UK recently. I preferred the speed cameras - at least they didn't destroy your suspension ..
While this may cause cautious drivers to drive slower, it doesn't entirely inhibit reckless drivers from behaving dangerously. Granted, though, that reducing vehicle fatalities is an admirable goal, I dislike this method. Causing my line of sight to be cut off will piss me off, all the more so when I get stuck behind a driver than drives too slowly for the conditions, which is frustrating enough without cars that a pedestrian may walk out from unexpectedly. Any town with a tunnel will notice, though, that drivers instinctively slow down when entering a constricted space, to my chagrin. If you can drive at 75 + on the bridge, why can't you with a roof over your head? The walls aren't any closer to the road, and the speed limit hasn't changed.
There is a stretch of road in Maryland where the dashes that separate the lanes are longer than they are anywhere else. The speed limit is the same. It may not seem important but I believe they did this on purpose because I've gotten many tickets in that area.
I think subconsciously, we see the lines as going slower. So naturally we speed up. I've never gone out there and measured the lines. But I have gotten used to where the police officer sits to catch speeders.
Small border towns will not like these "improvements" because much of their budget is based on the revenue that speeders bring. Most limits are not about safety.
We don't live in Shouldland.
Studies show that drivers adjust to the speed at which they feel safe, regardless of posted speed. So the only way to make them go slower is to make the road inherently *less* safe.
Also, similar studies show that driving about 5-10 mph faster than posted is actually about the safest speed you can go.
http://www.motorists.org/speedlimits/
There's also the argument that restricting the ability to drive quickly kills, as you slow emergency response vehicles as well. http://www.bromleytransport.org.uk/Ambulance_delays.htm
All in all, one of the dumbest proposals I've ever heard. It seems that one of the easiest mistakes to make as an organization is to try to optimize for one contributing factor (speed) while ignoring the point of restricting that factor in the first place (reducing accidents).
Most roads are already quite curvy in Europe and I'm pretty sure new roads are constructed in the same manner to encourage lower driving speeds. Straight lines make people want to speed, lots of turns and twists make people want to break, so maybe making all your roads as straight as possible and thus creating grid-like layouts isn't such a good idea after all.
A side effect of less straight roads could also be a decline in traffic jams, because curved lines are longer than straight ones and thus can hold more cars.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
So, now they suggest that we build roads intentionally that will make us waste more time on the road, reduce visibility and cause more accidents? That is total brain damage!
Wow. These people are idiots. Their plan is to make the roads less safe, so that it forces to make people drive slower, because driving slower makes the roads safer???
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
speed bumps also greatly slow down emergency vehicles. If you have ever been in an ambulance going over speed bumps you will curse the name of whoever came up with such a painful idea
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
In Portugal I saw a cute system - if you pass a sensor driving faster than the speed limit, then a traffic signal 200yards/metres down the road turns red for 10 seconds, making you (and again anyone behind you) stop.
The psychology behind these systems is interesting - both rely on shaming you in front of other drivers. The Portugese system goes further and makes other drivers angry with you for speeding.
There's the solution! Instead of changing all our roadways to have less visibility to people drive 10% slower, how about we have the fed/state governments sell off all their roadways to private owners. We now have a toll booth on every road and people are driving 100% slower! TADA!
As a former employee of an international road transportation company, we studied the exact same thing.
Interesting fact. When someone is driving in a place they don't know, they drive slower. You can duplicate the effect by making changes to a known environment, like this study does by adding cars to the roadside. Second interesting fact? Once the changes become 'known', speeds return to what they were previously. I notice this part is somehow absent in the claims that "the lower speeds make things safer."
If I was from the University of Connecticut, I'd be embarrassed to be releasing this study.
and thereby use more gas.
Is that also a good idea?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
It's designed for me to not be able to peak over 60mph.
I shouldn't be able to physically push over 40mph in the corners.
Most people will be too scared to go faster than 25, if they even go that fast.
Yet, the little MX-5 Miata hits those curves at 75, no problem, on the R030A's with the steering and throttle control just right...
This is really going to work.
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Am I the only one annoyed and offended by the flashing "reduce speed" signs, which implore me to slow down without knowing my current speed? Would they stop blinking if I stopped completely?
It is like that mother asking her husband: "Go check, what the kids are doing, and tell them to stop."
Citation needed...
Roads are for us to get somewhere — and quickly...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sure, it would make most of us drive slower, just like blind corners or a slippery road surface would, but are you sure it would make things safer? Mabye someone gets their bonus based only upon how much they get the traffic speed down.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
It is my experience that congested roadways are considerably more dangerous than ones with free flowing traffic, and when you slow down traffic you also increase congestion. It may be the case that free flowing traffic has more deadly accidents (due to the higher speeds involved) than accidents on congested roads, but the congested roads have a much much higher rate of accidents.
But as a person who actually drives, it always bugs me when I see these studies that invariably conclude that the worse you make driving, the safer it is. First it was cities with no street signs, and pointless traffic circles, and zigzags in the road, or just traffic lights programmed to jam up traffic as much as possible. Now we're going to remove the safety margins between vehicles and magically improve safety.
Maybe I'm nuts, but it seems like city planners would prefer it if just nobody drove at all and just took mass transit everywhere, which would be wonderful if they actually had usable mass transit outside of the city center.
I read the internet for the articles.
The article seems unclear as to whether it is dealing with two-lane roads in urban or rural environments. There are a lot of rural two-lane roads in my area that I would prefer to see rebuilt with wider lanes and sholders that would let me safely drive faster.
Overall though, I'm not sure that designing roads (at least roads for automobiles) to slow down traffic is the problem that needs to be solved. My idea of road is a device that allows cars and other vehicles to travel _quickly_ and efficiently while preventing accidents that result in property damage, personal injury, and death. Instead of slowing roads down, I would prefer fast straight roads (within the constraints of preventing highway hypnosis) with additional controls and seperations to prevent the mixing of pedestrians, cyclists, and wildlife. That would include seperated grade automobile, bicycle, and pedestrial pathways, and fences and barriers to reduce cross-grade intrusions.
Sane drivers know this, reduce their speed, and then -- making wild hand-waving guesses, here -- wind up with about the same overall level of "dangerousness" as when driving on uncluttered roadways.
I remember reading about a study done for motorcyclists, they were observed riding both with and without a helmet. Those that normally didn't wear a helmet were asked to wear one, and in response to the 'added safety' increased their speed to compensate.
People take a set amount of perceived risk, what they need to do is find ways to make a situation seem more dangerous than it is, as people would overcompensate and thus safer.
Looking at this from an evolutionary POV, it makes sense that a population would evolve to have a certain amount of risk-taking on the part of its individuals. Often when a risk is taken, and the result is poor, the individual takes the punishment (often death), but when the result is positive the population benefits, thus populations with a certain amount of riskiness flourish (enough to advance, not enough to be wiped out). Consider the new food problem, most populations have a set of known good food, known bad food and unknown food; they eat the good food and mostly avoid the bad and unknown foods. Some individuals will eat the unknown foods, if it is bad they die, and the population is largely unaffected, if it is good, the new food is then eaten by the population and everyone benefits.
Places all girls colleges close to the road. Make sure the athletic fields are visible from the road and the school uniforms are low cut and the school's policy is NOT BRAS or underpants.
There may be some unintended consequence of traffic jams though.
Unfortunately this puts a kibosh on the lifeblood of many towns -- ticket revenue from speed traps. Y'know, where they purposefully lower the speed limits on open stretches of road so they can snag unsuspecting drivers. If they were to redesign the roads so that people drive slower they'll start to cut into their lucrative legal organized crime and extortion business. Hey, safety is good and all, but I'm betting they'll choose profit over safety every time.
Stop maintaining the roads so giant potholes and sinkholes form, forcing drivers to slow down or destroy their suspension.
Not only do we save money on infrastructure that can be better spent on bank bailouts and the Pentagon, but we increase safety!
Many states are already way ahead on this plan, time for our Federal government to get in gear.
"Automobilists" What the....?????
How far up your own rear do you have to be to use make up the word "automobilists" instead of just saying "drivers".
Gah. I'm not even your typical /. grammar-nazi, but this one really annoyed me.
Actually -the study was originally done by European regulators, who found that as drivers were isolated from external stimuli, they drove faster. So for example a town with no traffic lights had a lot lower average speed for cars - than in towns with traffic lights, stop signs etc. When the signs are taken out, the responsibility directly shifts to the driver, and while it is a bit more tiring, the results are fascinating.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448747,00.html
Read it.
do not negate the existence of the assholes barreling by at 90 mph
that's the whole point
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
cut grooves in the road. Their space will be dictated byt the speed you want people to go.
If you want the number 1 lane to be used for passing, keep the other lanes in better condition.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They've perfected the formula for higher scores: more targets...er...obstacles
How about research to improve safety, productivity and collision costs as a goal - instead of this 30 year blind devotion to the slogan "Speed Kills"?
This is the same dingbatted "slowar is safar" logic my aunt has. She'll be passing a pulled over car on a narrow road with a high speed limit, requiring her to go into the oncoming traffic lane... and she slows down to idle and CRAWLS around it at, making sure she is in the high-risk "wrong lane" position for as long as humanly possible, because driving slower and being able to come to a stop faster is ALWAYS safer.
Safe following distances, maintaining good visibility, coasting through high risk intersections with your foot already over the brake, and reducing speed WHEN BENEFICIAL are great driving practices. But setting up distracting (storefronts), low visibility (line of 30 SUVS parked RIGHT along the road, often with pedestrians weaving between them) and otherwise outright dangerous driving conditions because they will scare people into slowing down is so stupid I'd like to smack around everyone involved in this study.
Remember that car commercial with the musical notes playing by the grooves in the pavement? Do this to all of our roads, but do it so that the right speed makes the ride quiet. Not sure if they would have to play the inverse frequency like on noise cancellation headphones or something to do it, but would be more foolproof...
By neglecting the roads they become full of potholes, making them more dangerous and forcing drivers to slow down. I guess we could also remove all crosswalks and stoplights in order to encourage pedestrians to cross the roads in random places and at random times. The plentiful potholes will make crossing the road even more difficult; pedestrians will need to zigzag to get across so they'll spend more time in the road. What else could be done? Maybe remove safety netting that prevents rocks from falling into the roadway, and weakening the root systems of roadside trees so they're likely to fall over into the road. Plenty to watch out for there.
Finally, if we really want to spend some money on this "safety improvement": landmines.
First of all, "holy grail of transportation engineering"?? Bullshit. The goal of transportation engineering should be to achieve the best balance of maximized capacity, efficiency, and safety. You can always make roads safer by slowing things down - until you try to make them safer by causing congestion.. and the congestion causes frustrated and aggressive driving. The study basically says to throw more shit in the way of drivers to slow things down.. That's because it's creating an unsafe environment.. and drivers naturally try to compensate for it.
Here in Florida, the transportation engineers have decided that old people react slower. Therefore, all traffic lights change slower.. So that causes inattentive driving since people can be waiting as much as 5 minutes between lights. Then, people are very slow to start proceeding through the intersection once lights turn green - partly because desperate drivers run all the yellow lights because they have to wait another 5 minutes between lights. My argument would be that traffic rules should not change to accomodate for people unable to follow the rules. Chicago's lights change quickly at an intersection..
Also, our political wanker of a governor (Charlie Christ) decided he did not like the 'move over law' because he said it promoted speeding. So, people are free to sit in the left lane of major highways going under the speed limit while others try to get around them. Florida interstates are a clusterfuck.. Nobody moves over.. So you have a clump of cars bumper to bumper for a mile.. and then a mile of highway that hardly has anyone on it.. I would argue it would be safer to have an actual passing lane and allow people to spread out.
Cars today have more horsepower, more traction, better safety, and more braking power than cars 20-30 years ago.. Yet, our speed limits have decreased.. Why?
Traffic is an absolute mess.. and the idea that 'slower is safer' is contributing to that mess.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Why are goverments so obsessed with speed rather than safety? On many 30mph roads here in the UK 45mph is perfectly safe but on others anything above 20mph is dangerous. The safe speed also changes depending on the weather conditions, time of day and other factors.
Despite this the govermnet sticks religionsly to the ideal that "above 30mph bad, below 30mph good". Now it seems some people want to make driving conditions more dangerous to get people driving at the "good" speed.
stupidy is the fact that the authors of the project miss the fact that the roads are invented to move faster from point A to point B. If to believe the study German Autobahn would be called the Road of Death, but somehow it's not.
If you really want to move slower then just get rid of the roads altogether, then you will have 0.0000% fatalities associated with cars and driving.
What DOT should be concerned about is "how to make roads to INCREASE the speed and INCREASE the safety at the same time"
We should research how to drive faster, while staying safe, instead of reducing speed...
There are exactly TWO reasons to drive, and virtually all reasons are either one, the other, or a combination of the two:
1) To get from point A to point B
2) To enjoy or experience the trip
If a person's primary motivation is #1 and they have very little or NO motivation from #2, the optimum method is to drive as quickly as will safely accomplish the task. (Because if you aren't safe, you may not get to point B, destroying your motivation).
If a person's primary motivation is #2, they are either enjoying the scenery, the car/vehicle, or some other aspect, and so speed-of-journey may or may not be relevant to them.
A polite driver with motivation #2 will ALWAYS be willing to allow other drivers with motivation #1 to pass them safely and quickly, without holding them up unduly. An impolite driver with motivation #2 may block traffic and thus destroy the safety of the road.
A polite driver with motivation #1 will not follow too closely, nor cut off drivers with motivation #2 who may be going slower.
There are some drivers with a variation of motivation #2: they desire to force other drivers to behave a certain way and derive pleasure or reward from it (i.e. they deliberately drive slower than is optimum for the safe flow of traffic enjoying holding others up, or they wish to enforce their personal view of what safe speed is when others disagree with them).
As a driver who most often drives with motive #1, I wish to safely get from point A to B as quickly as is safe for me and safe for others around me. It is amazing how many other drivers are oblivious to drivers like me and, with a degree of motivation #2, impolitely block traffic, drive in passing lanes when they really should not, being slower than the traffic average, and all-around cause unsafe conditions to a much greater degree than do those speedy drivers (motivation #1 OR #2) who are driving too fast for conditions (or are cutting people off dangerously).
So many drivers in my locality call in to radio talk shows and complain about how fast everyone drives. Yet in my experience, it is the slowpokes of the world (and it is OKAY to go slowly in my opinion, just do it POLITELY) want everyone else to drive just like they do. They WANT to reduce speed limits. They would LOVE this proposal, in spite of the fact that it would overall make roads more dangerous. This is just plain STUPID.
Please, slowpokes (and fast drivers), drive POLITELY, SAFELY, and respectfully of others on the road. When going slower than others, allow them to pass safely. Pull over onto the shoulder if you have to now and then. Your relaxation and enjoyment of the drive will improve. Fast drivers (me included), be a bit more patient. Give slowpokes a little more distance between vehicles, don't cut them off, don't follow too closely. We can all do better.
Dutch drivers are less than half as likely as their American counterparts to die in a road accident.
but fail to mention if they are counting urban and highway accidents separate. Thats kind of a big difference as you are much more likely to die in a accident at 70 than 25, yet Europe has a tiny fraction of the highways we have.
I can absolutely see some idiot city planner designing a new residential zone following these rules, only to have home shoppers refuse to buy anything in the area because the roads suck. People won't want to live with this crap.
Further, they are happy over a reduction of 2.3mph? That's less than the margin of error on your speedometer! Hit someone at 22.7mph and you will do just as much damage as at 25mph, and with less visibility and tighter proximity, collisions are going to be more likely.
that roads and cars could talk to one another... tiny rfid's in the road itself, little readers in the car... the road says 'hey, I'm 35mph!' and the car replies 'oh ___!' ... what happens after that can be debated.
This is how to get people to slow down, and crash into curbs. http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=320+W+8th+St,+Bloomington,+Monroe,+Indiana+47404&ll=39.164332,-86.544446&spn=0,359.995177&t=h&z=18&layer=c&cbll=39.16433,-86.544337&panoid=dVxqyUQGNti362tBQsyx4Q&cbp=12,272.99,,0,12.91
Well in the communications arean we are trying to increase speed and throughput. In cities the problems are clogged roads that slow the commute and thereby increase polution. Seems like rather than slowing things down by making the envirionment more dangerous (cars parked close by, with doors that might open and pedestrians walking out between) to slow things down we might do better finding a way to speed things up safely. There are aerodynmic cars that increase efficency (www.aptera.com), if we can increase throughput of the roads we make everything more efficient. True higher speeds are less efficient and collisions more deadly, but we can work on both those problems to come up with a way to make travel safer and more green. The assumption that we need to reduce car speed seems missplaced as a given. Of course the speed traps in the small towns that rely on the speeding ticket revenue will suffer. But then who needs wholesale police records in their community.
Wow, I'm presently visiting Tel Aviv and have experienced small roads with cars parked on the sides. Traffic is slower only because there is no room for near misses. Many cars have dented fenders etc. Personally I don't mind wide open urban sprawl with high speed freeways and consider it a wonderful thing.
To me this study is an attempt to grab more tax money. If you slow traffic down, more fuel is consumed, the government, counties and cities with collect more fuel taxes.
In my state traffic engineers control speed through the judicious and stratigic use of potholes.
"All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates."
We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
designed to encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates of passenger fatalities
This is a classic case of correlation not equal to causation. While it is very true that accidents at high speeds are likely to cause fatal rather than non fatal injuries, and it is also true that the greater the number of people driving at high speeds - non-perfect humans being what they are, the greater the number of fatal accidents are to be expected.
However from an engineering point of view it will be interesting to see if designing a road ONLY to force people to drive less quickly actually reduces the number of accidents. Of course roads could be designed like a brick wall, which will discourage people from driving AT ALL, thus eliminating all automobile accidents. At some point the engineering gets in the way of what a road is actually supposed to do, if you follow me.
This is typical bureaucratic thinking. Instead of focusing perhaps on increased driver education, increased safety mechanisms, or alternative mechanisms that prevent accidents entirely, the bureaucrat wants to design a 5 million dollar per mile of construction high speed highway with a maximum speed limit of 5mph.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How about designing roads that are safer to drive fast on.
Fast is good if it's safe
We should be working out how to drive faster, not slower! Sure, it would be safer to ban driving altogether, but most of us prefer to travel expediently.
speed bumps also greatly slow down emergency vehicles. If you have ever been in an ambulance going over speed bumps you will curse the name of whoever came up with such a painful idea
I dislocated my knee cap completely (was still out) and got taken by hill billy ambulance (back of a pickup) for about 10 miles, crossed 3 sets of railroad tracks and I can tell you those were the most painful part; it was almost as bad as coming to from the patella realignment 3 weeks later!
Well, duh.
Except that if you can’t trust people to go a speed that you consider safe in the first place, why on earth would you make it more dangerous to get them to slow down?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Through the use of roadside parking,
Good news is cars drive slower.
Bad news is more dead children from running between parked cars.
If the whole point is making the street less safe, thus they drive slower, couldn't they do it cheaper by just installing lots of potholes or not salting the roads in the winter so as to build up a thick ice layer?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I totally agree with dissenters on this one. As population becomes more and more dense, we need to come up with better ways to handle the increase in traffic. Slowing it down intentionally by poor design and an overabundance of lights is piss poor planning. 20 years from now when we're all moving an average of 10 miles an hour and drivers are as nuts as they are in NYC, you'll be wishing you never liked this idea.
Nevermind that all this stop and go crap we put up with is terrible for the environment. Ever wonder why your city MPG is so different from your highway? How much would we save in gas and emissions if we raised each city's effictive fuel economy by just 10% (2mpg)?
Someone put it perfectly: cars are safer than 20 years ago. Increase driver education if you want to make the roads safer. Let's space out the intersections and stop trying to slow people down.
Around here, we have a law that says the state (as in US state) sets the speed limits on all roads unless a waiver is given to a locality (city or county) to override the speed limit that would ordinarily apply to a given road.
I'm sure the purpose is both uniformity (so everyone "knows" how fast to drive on unfamiliar or unposted roads) and to prevent municipalities from changing speed limits arbitrarily (speed traps, etc).
The side effect to this in the larger urban areas is that in response to heavy traffic, people seek out residential through streets as means around the major arterial streets, which are clogged. The people living on those streets hate the traffic and the speeding that goes with it, so the residents are able to petition the council to get speedbumps installed on their streets.
IMHO these suck. One, they don't really slow or divert that much traffic. Usually you see people driving the speed limit and then braking hard at the speed bumps and then accelerating hard to get back to their speed limits. While I sympathize with the people living on those streets, they ARE through streets that belong to everyone who pays taxes, not private roads for the benefit of the residents -- you only ever see speedbumps in upscale residential areas.
I also think they are illegal usurpation of the state speed limits -- you can't drive the legal speed limit on the street without damage to your vehicle and/or creating a dangerous situation flying off the bumps.
In America, we are used to wide open spaces, and drive slower in closed in spaces.
In the U.K., we are used to closed in spaces, and drive like maniacs throughout.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Disclosure:
This study was funded by the American Association of Car Jackers
Reached for comment, President Markavius Jones stated, "We be approvin dis shit fo sho! This shit be makin' ma j-o-b mo easier!"
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Folks in our town have been trying to slow down traffic on one of the main routes that passes along a mixed-use corridor: residential housing, commercial, and industrial properties all along a half-mile stretch. The speed limit is 45 mph.
That wouldn't be too bad if not for two factors: 1) the street lies between a residential neighborhood and the local elementary school, and 2) there's a convenience store along the route with very high vehicle and foot traffic. Since we moved onto that stretch, we've witnessed about six accidents each year in front of the convenience store. The convenience store happens to be at the most-common crossing point for kids going to the school, too. Since we are living along the stretch and have young children, we've added our voice to local efforts to reduce the speed to 30 mph. The city would like the speed reduced, but it is technically a county road, and the county won't change it. For the past few years, we've told our kids not to play in the front yard (facing the street) or in the driveway. This year, we reversed ourselves. Just last weekend, we erected a basketball hoop in our driveway. As soon as we were out there playing, traffic started to slow down. Sometimes, unfortunately, to speeds well below 30 mph!
We figure it's only a matter of time before there is either an accident or before we get a letter from the city and/or county asking us to take down the basketball hoop. Some of the other residents along the route appreciate the change, but only time will show whether or not they start using their front yards and driveways again. For now, I'll enjoy the sound of engine breaking as the big trucks (the ones that want to run through the stretch at 55 mph!) slow down each time they see the kids in the driveway or the yard.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Germany: No speed limit; fatality & accident rates amongst the lowest world-wide.
You were saying?
Simply mount large, sharp spikes to the center of the steering wheel in place of the airbag pointed directly at the driver's chest. I'm sure speeds will come down quite a bit...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They could get the same law abiding effect merely by increasing the speed limit. The gimmick here is that they make everything more complicated and less safe in order to slow drivers down. When they do that, they also should lower the effective speed limit. But they don't. In other words, they create a tougher road with an elevated speed limit.
Instead, they could have just raised the speed limit. It's far cheaper since you're just changing some road signs rather than massively redesigning the road.
It was just yesterday that I posted this comment. In short, why don't we install small transmitters on speed limit signs, and receivers in cars? Then our cars will automatically know what the posted speed limit is, and limit how fast we can drive to that speed. I'm not advocating it, but I wonder why we don't do this. The technologies (and patents) are already there.
This is really idiotic, what is it, the 'survival of the slowest' law? Here is what I see on roads in Baden Baden, Germany. There are many narrow mountain roads here, you'd think people would slow down, many drive very quickly right through the turns, the twists, whatever. The autobahn is amazing, no matter how fast you are going, there will be someone zooming right past you. In the city there are limits that are a bit lower than what I am used to from North America, but those are normally very short stretches of the road where they don't want you to make too much noise, people really mostly follow the speed limits very closely. There is a very well developed public transit system here, and this is not including the railroads. There are many roundabouts and they are wonderful, you have to slow down but often you can go through it without any stop, and it is an intersection, there are no lights there. Seems intuitive and friendly enough, however in the city core the streets are often so narrow between two very close buildings that you just can't go fast, but you don't expect to. But this would not work for a large city, it would be completely stuck, there are only a few tens of thousands of people living here. It would not work for Toronto for example (which was just named as the city with the worst traffic ever, it takes people more than 80 minutes on average to commute both ways and the public transportation is not growing.)
No no no, if you want people to slow down, you are doing it wrong. You need to get people into public transportation system, then there will be fewer people driving and there would be more space on the road, yes people would go faster, but there would be fewer fatalities still, if fewer people are behind the wheel.
You can't handle the truth.
from J.G. Ballard's short story "Subliminal Man" ... "All around him cars bulleted along, streaming toward the suburbs. Relaxed by the smooth motion of the car, Franklin edged outward into the next speed lane. As he accelerated from 40 to 50 mph a strident, ear-jarring noise drummed out from his tires, shaking the chassis of the car. Ostensibly as an aid to lane discipline, the surface of the road was covered with a mesh of smaller rubber studs, spaced progressively farther apart in each of the lanes so that the tire hum resonated exactly on 40, 50, 60 and 70 mph. Driving at an intermediate speed for more than a few seconds became physiologically painful, and soon resulted in damage to the car and tires."
How about we take a page out of New Hampshire's book? They actually enforce their speed limits to to the letter, and I've heard that people drive *under* the speed limit to avoid getting tickets all the time. The whole "10 mph over" unwritten rule (what we have in MD) really screws with people's respect for the law. When the rules are enforced reliably and to the letter, people are much more likely to respect them.
When I lived in Cleveland in the late 80's, Martin Luther King Blvd. had the curves sloped out instead of sloped in. If you drove too fast, you couldn't stay on the road. You learned quickly to slow it down.
I've noticed that cars on the freeway always slow down to look at accidents.
Just insert gory car crashes on the side of the road. Problem solved.
The smart one is to build cars to control how fast you drive.
Not really responding to the parent here, it was just a good point to jump in on the same sentiment expressed throughout.
Basically, what the study is doing, and what you say the Germans and Dutch are doing, is making the roads more dangerous, so that, out of fear, people slow down.
But the fact is, you are making the roads more dangerous! How can this be a good thing?
Why not build roads that are conducive to high speed AND safety?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Road Fatalities per Vehicle-Kilometers (or miles) is indeed how this statistic is normal measured. However, the results still favor the UK over the US (but stay the hell off the road in the United Arab Emirates). Country Road Fatalities per Billion Vehicle-Kilometers Sweden 5.9 UK 6.3 Australia 7.9 France 8.5 USA 9.0 Canada 9.2 NZ 10.1 Japan 10.3 South Korea 19.3 UAE 310 Source: List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
I really think we need to focus on getting faster instead of slower traffic... or reduce the number of vehicles around.
According to friends of mine who drive or used to live in Germany, driving is a much safer affair with higher or no speed limits. This is supposedly in part due to a stricter (and more expensive) license granting process. Everyone knows that most of the other drivers on the road (foreign visitors being the exception) are running under similar assumptions and skill level as the others because they would not have passed the license test (and invested the time, care, and money) without them. Very different from the way I drive here, which is driving for myself AND every other driver within a 2-car radius around me. This is in case (as happened a few days ago), a driver decides to merge two lanes to the left without signaling or looking over his or her left shoulder in case, I don't know, there's another car there (like mine).
Cars have gotten faster, more stable, and safer. We have ways to build roads to make traveling at higher speeds ever more safe. But the thing we refuse to do is to fix the nut behind the wheel. Driving as a right, not a skilled activity.
It's gotten to the point where in some counties (Marin County, in this example) actually had illegal aliens protest the police taking away their licenses because "they couldn't work without them." Man, if people who have absolutely no right to have a driver's license in this country (legally speaking) are protesting not having licenses, I wonder how much they're really worth.
In our local newspaper I keep reading about someone was speeding and swerved off the road killing a child. Person was speeding and ran over an old man crossing at a cross walk. Person was speeding and ran into a pole. Person was speeding and drove into a living room. Person was speeding and killed the driver and passenger of another car.
Then the article goes on to talk about the speeding plague for paragraphs. Most of these involve the person not going straight on a straight road and then one of the last lines usually says that the person was drunk out of his gourd.
What was more the problem, that he was speeding, or that he was piss drunk? Well obviously it was that he was speeding.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
I live in a major metropolitan city in the US Northeast. Our road, a medium-busy street was reconstructed recently to include these so-called traffic calming mechanisms. Near the major non-intersection crosswalks, the road was narrowed by expanding the sidewalk. If you look at a plan of the road, it seems to make sense, the road gets significantly narrower at exactly the points where you want the traffic to slow for reasons of pedestrian safety. Great.
Except that the urban planners failed to take into account that this road is in a section of town that has too-few metered parking spaces, so the parking spots are always full. And by "always", I mean over 90 percent of the time. Mornings, afternoons, evenings, nights. It's hard to find metered parking. This means that the parked cars are *already* performing the narrowing function, and all that happened was the city eliminated four parking spots (two on each side of the road) per crosswalk. Where there used to be parked cars the vast majority of the time, there's now sidewalk. Traffic calming failed utterly, as from the driver's perspective, the width of passable road has not changed one whit, and we are left with even fewer metered spots than before.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Negatives:
Comment removed based on user account deletion
More dangerous roads = fewer casualties?
Really, does this work? Lower speeds do not equal safer roads.
The people that designed my area took this approach and there are daft priorities on many of the junctions. Eventually people get so used to no-one coming out of that minor side turning that has priority, they don't slow down as much any more. Then one day someone does come out as they go past...
Almost as good as the kiddy-designed "kill your speed" signs that are so hard to read they are just a distraction.
Stricter testing on licensing. If it were harder to get AND keep a license, then crappy drivers will be off the roads. Tougher initial test and retesting every 5 to 10 years. I bet more than half 60+ year olds couldn't pass a drivers test. If nothing else, road laws have changed over the last 40-50 years. Yet no one is re-tested to make sure they know the current laws and etiquette.
"Automobilists"? Whatever happened to the perfectly useful English word "drivers"?
Exactly. The whole problem is that what people perceive to be a safe speed is, in fact, not safe. The only way to change that perception is through massive PR campaigns and enforcement. No amount of environmental modifications will change how people determine what a safe speed is.
I don't know about other parts of the US, but throughout Kansas there are very few roundabouts.
I have one on my daily commute, everybody slows down for it, but it is far less of a time burden than a traffic light that would stop traffic half the time and require extra fuel to accelerate from a dead stop.
It would seem that replacing traffic light controlled intersections with roundabouts would lower speed, decrease fuel consumption, reduce electricity demand (eliminates traffic lights), and possibly even decrease drive time for commuters. Has serious consideration been given to this?
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
"encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates of passenger fatalities"
Weird, because increasing the speed limit from 55 to 65 reduced the rates of passenger fatalities.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Japan does exactly the opposite. It's common in Japan to have barriers between heavily traveled urban roads and sidewalks. On the other hand, Japan has speed limits well below what US drivers would consider "normal". The general urban speed limit in Japan is 25MPH (40Km/h)
A basic truth about highway design is that capacity of a lane is maximized around 35MPH. Above that, the increased spacing between cars brings the vehicles-per-minute figure down. On-ramp metering systems work to that number, limiting cars entering freeways to keep speed around 35MPH at peak periods.
The trick is not to make slower drivers, the trick is to make SAFER drivers. Slower drivers are not always safer drivers.
1) Set accurate speed limits so people will actually follow them. It is ridiculous that "following traffic" means having to break the law.
2) Mandate *better* and *harder* driver license tests. In the US it is all too easy for someone to get a driving license with little or no training. (seriously; check out this test: "Drive in a straight line, drive backwards in a straight line, parallel park, do a 3 point U-turn", and the kicker is, many states only require you to do TWO of the above. And if you fail the test, you can pay the fee and take it again, and in the mean time despite failing, you're allowed to continue driving with your permit.
3) Have the police start enforcing SAFE driving concerns. Enforce laws about people driving in the wrong lane, driving while on the cell phone, driving with improper equipment. Yes, I know, speeding tickets are great revenue, but stop enforcing only the speeding laws, especially when you're not making anyone any safer you're just picking up revenue from some unlucky sob (or more likely these days lining the pockets of a traffic lawyer).
If the focus was on safety, we could raise speed limits and increase traffic flow and reduce congestion.
disclaimer: I catch a lot of crap for driving a "sporty" car, but I focus all my attention on safe driving. driving should be a cooperative adventure, not a competitive sport. Take all the a-holes and distracted drivers off the road and we could all enjoy our commute and weekend drives a lot more. =) Just telling people to slow down, or trying to find ways to force them to slow down won't really change anything, other than perhaps an increase in speeding tickets. =/
I used to live in Bradley Stoke in the UK, one of Europe's more sizeable housing estates, and they put the idea in TFA to use... And it was horrible. They introduced speed bumps every 150 metres or so in some areas, specifically designed to damage your tracking if you went over them faster than 20mph, they put cycle lanes into roads that had not been designed for them, thereby forcing traffic closer to the centre of the road (on one road, hilariously, the cycle lane actually switches sides in the middle, with no road island to help the cyclist cross over), introduced pedestrian crossings with traffic lights that *instantly* begin to switch to red when a pedestrian has pushed the walk button, and my personal favourite; put a pedestrian crossing around a blind bend on a hill so dangerous that they had to replace the road surface to increase grip in the winter.
Making roads more dangerous to decrease the speed of motorists only makes the road more dangerous.
If you're not passing, you shouldn't be in the left lane, period. I don't care if you're doing 50 or 80 MPH, the left lane is for passing! It's people like you that fuck up good traffic flow.
I think TFA has a point. I have observed that the more something looks like a freeway, the more people drive on it like it was one. We have expressways in the SF Bay Area. These look pretty much like a freeway: have nice wide multiple lanes, with a barrier in between the two directions. But there's a big difference: they have stop lights. So people drive on these just like a freeway, but it's not as safe to do that on the expressway. The limit is 50 but it is widely ignored. Same thing with a wide street near my home that leads up to and turns into a freeway. It not only has stop lights, but it's curvy and has limited visibility ahead. But it's a nice wide divided road so people drive on it like bats out of hell, despite the 35mph limit.
So, one theory is that the drivers are smarter than the traffic engineers and it really is safe to drive over the limit. But I don't buy it. If you drove unsafely and it increased your chances of an accident 3x, you still have a low probability of anything bad happening. So people see no consequence (most of the time), they're inherently prone to over-confidence anyway (everyone is a good driver - right?) and besides, it's fun to drive fast (personally I don't get much of a kick from it but it appears many do). So - all good, no bad. Until the bad happens.
He may have chosen the wrong nomenclature, but the logic is still there. Change "fast lane" to "passing lane". Grandma should not be in the passing lane at all unless she's passing someone. End of story.
Self awareness - try it!
Actually, it depends on where you are. First of all, in CA they have laws that specifically state that it is illegal to block faster moving traffic if you're in the left hand lane. Therefore it's just as illegal to speed in the left hand lane as it is to drive slow in the left hand lane.
Secondly, I don't think that anyone should ever be cruising down the road in the fast lane unless traffic is very heavy in the first place.
The problem you're complaining about is the fact that people don't know how to merge/accelerate to get onto the freeway. That is an issue that needs to be addressed also.
Finally, you're making the false assumption that I drive 85mph on the freeway. Certainly not in town, maybe if the highway is 70mph and is rural. I set my cruise control to 70-75 and don't like to touch the pedals after that. It irritates the hell out of me when I have to break because people clump up due to people driving slow in the fast lane. Why? Because I'm going the same speed as 80% of the cars on the road and its always a couple of people blocking all lanes of the road (with wide open road ahead of them) causing the build up.
Sorry to continue my rant but the fact that you take such offense to my post leads me to believe that YOU are part of the problem and are too inconsiderate to consider how you're hampering the flow of traffic and creating unsafe driving conditions.
My town (in Connecticut) has inadvertently experimented with varying driver speed based on road surface quality. In the street leading up to my neighborhood it used to be quite bumpy and potholed. The speed limit was 25 mph and on a good day you could do 30 mph. Two years ago they repaved it because of complaints from residents... the result was a very nice smooth surface with no additional impediments, and my observed average speed is 45 mph. Now the police regularly patrol this road and always have someone pulled over when I drive home from work. Since the town does not get revenue from tickets the patrol officer is part of my tax expense. I'd say it was not worth it.
Another road in town has a section that is washed out from the recent rainy NE weather. Again we all have to slow down to the posted speed limit. I propose we simply repair our roads to a minimal degree instead of following what the CT DOT suggests!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't know the traffic laws. There IS a fast lane concept in the USA (actually called "passing lane" or "keep right" laws). Of course it is the same speed limit, but the leftmost lane on the freeways is prohibited for vehicles going slower than the normal speed of traffic according to the US Uniform Vehicle Code. Most states have more explicit laws that make it illegal to drive in the left lane when not passing, and some make it illegal not to move to the right when you are in the left lane and a faster car is approaching from behind. Look it up http://www.google.com/search?q="keep+right"+laws
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Please, please, please, may this study never encourage more construction work in Connecticut, let alone at UConn. I have enough trouble getting to work as it is, and I don't think they'd pay attention to the study's conclusions anyway.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
We have these sighs in the US too.
I always try to get the high score as I go past. It's kinda fun...
They're supposed to do what you say??
They could find a way to discourage people from standing on the brakes at the entrances to interstate highway tunnels in my city!
(which there is no such thing in the U.S. - there is one speed limit. PERIOD)
Wrong. Most states designate (by law) that the left lane is for passing only. Which means even if you have to speed to pass, that's the lawful thing to do.
Making more blind spots only makes sense if you're looking at velocity as the sole independent variable. Besides, you could accomplish a similar effect for a much lower cost by lowering the overhead street lights to 4 feet above the ground so that the blinding glare of the lights forces drivers to slow down every 100 feet.
At the local road level, this "worse roads == better safety" notion could conceivably work by diverting traffic, but this would probably end up having a long-term destructive effect on the commons. If I don't want drivers using my street as a connector, I fill it with hazards until drivers learn to take alternate routes. People living on the alternate routes then fill their streets with hazards and the drivers are back on my street. I then have to out-hazard the other routes. Eventually the whole neighborhood looks like a junkyard, filled with hazards, with everyone's car banged up because they can't even get their car out of their driveway without running into something.
With all the anger and condemnation flying around on here it seems like a lot of us are missing out on exactly what this study is and what it isn't.
What it is:
- A study of existing roads in Connecticut that evaluates the actual accident rate and driving speeds of roadways throughout the state.
- An evaluation of those resulting numbers that finds a common cause for otherwise similar roads that have different accident rates and average speeds.
- Evidence supporting the conclusion that human psychology systematically influences our driving habits more than posted speed limits do.
- Evidence supporting the conclusion that the design philosophy of American highway safety is fundamentally limited.
- A starting place in American academic civic design research that explains the amazing results other countries are experiencing .
What it is not:
- A blanket recommendation to pile up distractions and dangers on roads.
- Anything to do with speed bumps.
- A rejection of the "safer is better" design philosophy. Safer roads still save lives, but making roads safer by making them more "fault tolerant" has limited utility in actually minimizing harm.
I'm glad we are starting to realize the extent to which psychology and unconscious judgments effect our driving habits. It's time to recognize the great things we've done as a country to limit harm from driving, recognize the limits of those practices, and investigate new ways to further increase safety.
-Grae
Wider lanes, rumble strips, automatic transmissions, ABS, GPS... Americans are given training wheels to keep from falling over and hurting ourselves. So what do we do? Let our driving get that much worse.
Overall speed is not the issue. Distractions, carelessness, and a lack of skill are. Anyone wanting a driver's license should be subjected to a test a hundred times more rigorous than the one we have now.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
All they have to do is look at the streets of Seattle, WA, US for good examples.
This sig no verb.
Signs make drivers assume everyone is following the rules and then they get lazy and don't pay attention to their environment. Remove the signs and everyone will pay close attention to their fellow drivers and maybe even motorcycles! Also, cars are too safe and comfortable (at least, precieved to be). Airbags, large SUVs, DVD players, etc. They need to be stripped down to almost nothing. A tender meatsack will pay very close attention to road at 60 MPH in this kind of death trap.
Similarly, signs could be used in such a way as "Danger! Pay Attention" or this sign might work, too.
I love driving fast as much as the next guy but if the government really wants us to drive slower why doesn't it simply mandate speed limiting devices? Why is it legal to build cars that can drive 3x the maximum speed limit?
What a good idea: let's reduce the speed people can go at, make roads thinner and harder to drive in, make people lose more time in commuting and spend more money on petrol while polluting our suburbs!
That way, not only will we reduce efficiency, but also increase traffic and danger (which was supposed to be reduced by reducing the speed...).
People need to understand the best way to deal with cars is to allow them to drive simply and efficiently in right lanes (i.e. motorways).
Require all new cars to have computer controled throttle limiters, with built in GPS. THe computer knows when you are driving in a 30mph zone, and limits the speed to 30mph.
Later on you can require older vehicles to be retrofitted with the device.
Enjoy your stay!
Better built and safer cars with active restraint systems. Better drivers. Better roads. Faster and SAFER speeds. Driving age should be raised to 18 and mandatory vision and driving tests every 3 years for drivers over 70. We don't need roads to slow us down, we need technology to speed us up safely.
How about if, rather than trying to design ways to make the roads so completely unsafe that even a monkey can see that he needs to slow down, we find ways of designing roads so that they are safe at a speed people actually want to drive?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Not that it stops anyone. I can't count how many times I see people merge onto a nearly empty freeway and immediately merge over and park it in the #1 lane - even when there is no reason for them to use the left lanes as there are no cars in front of them.
I get the feeling that a lot of people object to the idea of slowing down traffic in urban areas. After all, it keeps them from getting to their destination as fast as possible.
At the same time, these same people would probably welcome slower traffic IF they lived in and around these areas and were threatened by faster traffic. People are odd that way.
It reminds me of a situation where a city council had two major groups: developers and environmentalists. You could depend upon the developer group to vote against anything that limited development and you could depend upon the environmentalist group to vote against most developments.
Then came a situation where a developer wanted to put some houses on a hill top. One of the developers joined the environmentalists in voting against the development. Oddly enough, the proposed development was not far from his house.
'Everybody' is an environmentalist when their quality of life is threatened. 'Everybody' is a capitalist when their financial well being is threatened.
Kills me how what looks like a nice Dutch success is translated into stupid conclusions. Dutch succeeded by changing lane widths and planting trees. Americans now change this to nearby cars and buildings, so when a car does have an accident, it will also hurt nearby property. The nearby houses will also suffer from the traffic. Huh?
It takes no talent in the US to get a drivers license. We should do it more like Finland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_Finland
...that the more we slow down traffic "for safety" the more incidents of "road rage" we generate by forcing people to drive longer? What good is all this safety going to do if the guy behind me snaps and tries to ram past on the shoulder?
The principle problem with gov't today is the level of frustration it creates in people. That is the real source of the anger in the country, and the real genesis of the Tea Party. People are already at the breaking point, why does anyone think that making the problem worse is going to make us safer?
As more roundabouts are installed, more people will get used to them. I suspect that the traffic engineers anticipated the problem and figured that it would go away in time. The fact that there is confusion gets people to slow down, which shows that they do work, even when people aren't used to them.
While the roundabouts may or may not reduce the total number of accidents, I wouldn't be surprised if they reduced the severity of the accidents. Their geometry forces people to slow down so that it becomes a lot more difficult to have high speed t-bone accidents.
As a cyclist, I'd love to see the study impact on cycling accidents along these same streets. Tighter roads, less visibility and cars parked along the side of the road spells dangerous conditions to me.
I'll take a wider road with a marked bike lane, thanks.
Necron69
Hi. Please go back to the DMV and review the driving rules. The left lane is, in fact, for passing. If you don't want to pass, stay out of it. And if you have more than two lanes, stay out of the merge lane as much as possible.
These are very simple rules designed to allow for a smooth flow of traffic.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
This has been taught in urban planning courses for decades.
Roundabouts, roundabouts, roundabouts.
I've always had a very bad opinion of speed cameras, they've never been shown to reduce accidents. The best approach I've seen to speeding was in New Zealand. There speed limits are fairly high compared with most other countries and drivers use common sense on when to go slower than the speed limit. Dangerous speeders are discouraged not so much by speed cameras (especially outside of cities), but by marked and unmarked patrol cars with onboard speed detectors - I 've been busted by one for doing 117kph along the Upper Buller Gorge in an Integra, I asked the copper about the system and he said it was effective independent of the relative movement of the vehicles. It totally beats guys at the side of the road with a speed gun - and you generally don't see much speeding because a patrol car could come around the corner at any second, and the 110kph speed limit is usually feels fast enough for all but the straightest road. But you know if you go out on the backroads at 3am, you aren't going to get snapped by a camera. Yes they have a very high accident rate but a lot of this is because there are almost no motorways and intercity or rural travel generally includes steep grades, mountain passes, one lane bridges etc, and many of these roads are fairly or totally empty and pass through wilderness, encouraging higher speeds. I remember overtaking a double tanker truck climbing up a 30km twisty minor road mountain pass at 2.30am going into a blind bend because I drove the road regularly and knew that at that time of night, 4 times out of 5 I wouldn't see a single vehicle in the whole half hour drive in either direction. I was desperate to get past, and knew the risk would be in the tens of thousands to one against a head on collision and decided to go for it.
It seems that most of the posters here just want to go fast! I wonder why everyone is always in a hurry? Does everyone have along commute? Is everyone an asshole?
(Yea, I'm slow, I'm that guy in front of you going the speed limit!)
"...encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates of passenger fatalities..."
We should also encourage people to eat less ice cream, reducing the rates of skin cancer. After all, places where people eat more ice cream see a higher incidence of skin cancer, so ice cream is clearly the cause.
There is a deep flaw with statements like, "Speed is a factor in X percent of fatal accidents", "Mobile phone use is a factor in X percent of crashes", etc. And it's sad to see this flaw repeated thoughtlessly on Slashdot, a community of people who purportedly believe in the scientific method.
The presence of a characteristic in a given scenario does not make it an influencing factor. These individual actions are not causal factors - many of them (driving "fast", using a mobile phone, etc.) can arguably be done perfectly safely in the right circumstances. The causal factor is bad judgment: not understanding when it's prudent to slow down, when to ignore a phone call in favor of driving more attentively because the situation calls for it, etc.
We do our society a disservice when we ban or try to eliminate everything that COULD be a danger if done foolishly, rather than try to redress the foolishness. It leads to needless restrictions that limit self-determination with little to no benefit.
(Note: I do believe it's fair to say that drunk driving is a factor in accidents - the difference being that alcohol is a cause of bad judgment while things like driving too fast for the conditions are an effect of bad judgment.)
Bravo! Wish I had mod points. Don't apologize -- you're absolutely correct.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Really? That's simply not the rule nor the convention in most states in the US. Some (perhaps most/all?) states have a 'slower traffic keep right' rule and/or convention - so if someone advances on you from behind in the fast (note we don't call it a 'passing' lane in this case) lane, you should move over.
When we start calling a freeway an autostrada, maybe we will adopt the "left lane for passing only" rule/convention.
From a practical standpoint, many freeways and highways in the US in urban areas are highly congested during portions of the day. To eliminate a lane for use by normal traffic flow would be ridiculous -- when traffic is moving along at 15-30 MPH on a stretch with a 65 MPH limit, designating a "passing only" lane would slow traffic down even more and the passing lane would be unused (you can't/shouldn't be passing in that kind of traffic).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
They’re the holy grail of transportation engineering: streets and highways specifically designed to encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates of passenger fatalities and generally encouraging a safer urban environment.
That's not the holy grail of transportation engineering. That's the holy grail of technically ignorant busybody safety nazis. Traffic engineers are concerned with the big picture. Simply slowing down traffic on average doesn't make the road safer. Idiot politicos have this notion that because accidents at higher speeds are more damaging, lowering speed limits is safer. The problem is that lower limits--- either through signage or optical illusions or whatever--- simply create a wider speed differential. Speed differential is what causes the majority of accidents. Slightly reducing the injurious result of accidents is no help when the means of doing so increases the accident rate.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I thought the purpose of using a vehicle was to go MORE quickly.
If there was a way to get people from point A to point B faster, while not increasing the danger, this should be the holy grail. If we simply wanted to make sure drivers go less quickly the solution is obvious. Stop building roads.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
...more people are going to get mowed down when they try to cross the street.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
especially on my palm pre but i agree with the premise that roads are dangerous, that's why i'm not looking now...
The residents of this road fought for 20 years to get it closed off after new construction turned their quiet suburban neighborhood into a 75 mph on-ramp for Interstate 95.
Eventually they shifted tactics and got "traffic calming measures" installed.
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&layer=c&cbll=39.6814,-75.680048&panoid=ahLR2oaJziy1Hp2tOcx6NA&cbp=12,5.72,,0,5&ll=39.681314,-75.680033&spn=0,359.999032&z=20
Note the marks on the concrete. That curb was replaced last year because repeated impact of wheel rims at high speed pulverizes it after a while.
So, the normal speed on that road is now down to about 40 (speed limit is 25, of course, since it's residential) with occasional loud noises as someone tries to see what the functional limit is.
I think of it as a "stupid driver tax" and I heartily approve.
I bet if they installed large steel bollards in the center of the road, and moved them to a slightly different place every time they had to re-install one, they could get the traffic speed down to 25 mph. Basically by killing off all the people incapable of learning that compliance with the speed limit was no longer voluntary...
Unless I'm making a long, cross country trip, the amount I pay in taxes for transportation bond issues is greater than the amount I pay in gas taxes on a yearly basis. And this is in a state with fairly high gas taxes.
That ignores the money that comes from the general fund and other sources like license fees. It also ignores the 'hidden' taxes for the transportation oriented services provided by the fire department, the police department and other services.
"Secondly, I don't think that anyone should ever be cruising down the road in the fast lane unless traffic is very heavy in the first place."
It just doesn't work that way. Traffic flow depends *heavily* on the average distance between cars. If you have too many cars per mile of *lane* (not *road*), the flow of cars is no more a free flow. There's enough feedback between drivers that you end up having packets of cars flowing down the highway, eventually there are points where the speed of those packets is zero -- A.K.A. localized traffic jams, where there may be "free" road just a mile ahead.
So having everyone in one lane just because they are not passing is *crippling* and you *do not* want that. When traffic on a freeway is heavy enough, you want all lanes to be in use -- and that's what you will see happen, and that's OK and by design.
Never mind that what is a "fast lane" to you on a multi-lane freeway, like most metropolitan rings in the U.S.? Those things may have 5-6 lanes in places. There is no concept of a "fast lane" on those. During rush hour those places are anyway 2 lanes short of being able to sustain the traffic flow, thus the "traffic jams". You definitely don't want to waste a perfectly good lane for some abstract concept, when it just kills the traffic flow.
Go to a traffic control center some time and look at graphs of traffic flow vs. time. You'll see a nice periodic waveform as soon as traffic demand is higher than the number of lanes supports. That periodicity is seen, from drivers perspective, as traffic jams.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
because Firetrucks can fly and go right over slow trafic :)
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
As roads fall into disrepair (potholes, etc.) and become bumpy, driving fast becomes more difficult (or at least less pleasant). Ever tried going fast on a gravel road? Therefore, not fixing roads leads to safer drivers!
> All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car-sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates.
I think the City of Portland is already doing that. Recently had over $3,000 damage to my Harley from a pothole. Usually I can avoid them but twilight and traffic conspired to miss it. I didn't even lay the bike down. Impact destroyed both wheels and blew out forks and shocks.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
No. People like you are the problem. YOU fuck off. We're all just trying to get somewhere. If you aren't driving faster than the person in the lane to your left, then you are driving like an asshole.
From TFA:
> to encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates
> of passenger fatalities
Most accidents derive from differences in speed, not the speed themselves.
> A new study out of the University of Connecticut suggests that minor
> reductions in vehicle speed are possible through changes in the street
> environment.
Minor reductions = minor reductions in the best case. But to get even that far:
> Through the use of roadside parking, tighter building setbacks, and
> more commercial land uses, road designers can make drivers subconsciously
> drive more slowly.
So cluttering up the road with parking on both sides and close-in buildings will induce a minor slowdown.
Meanwhile, how many will be killed because of collisions with the parked cars, people who suddenly step out, and the like?
And, most importantly, don't take my word for it! Let's see tests where the net result are fewer deaths than more deaths. Precious few laws take this into account. Vis nutritional signs in fast food joints leading to an average 100 calorie increase per order, in spite of people saying they "took the info into consideration when ordering."
Common sense =/= science, and politics is, at best, only have common sense and half outrage-of-the-moment to begin with.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The roads like this are often called freeways or highways, and involve separating various types of traffic. Sometimes they are even special arterials with extra wide landscape areas surrounding them.
Unfortunately, traffic from these forms of road eventually mixes with residential, commercial and other land uses that involve people not in vehicles, which is where you need to slow things down. While you could continue separating vehicle traffic from other forms of traffic, it becomes extremely expensive. (Imagine having vehicle only tunnels to every home, business or other location. Or imagine prohibiting people from using roads unless they are in an approved vehicle.)
Fast isn't safe when vehicles and pedestrians interact.
do Autobahn drivers drive 200 miles per hour?
Yes some do! My first time driving on an unrestricted section of the autobahn (lots of it does actually have speed limits) I was pushing my car to see how fast it would go (180 kph or about 110-120 mph) while still been overtaken by BMWs and Mercedes which passed as if I was standing still. While I do not know for certain that they were going at 200 mph it was certainly not much below that. In fact this made overtaking a little scary since pulling out to overtake a car in the far distance could end up right behind you in a matter of seconds because the speed difference was so large.
I've always wondered what the effectiveness of animal crossing warning signs is. Does it have any impact at all on the way people drive? Do people become demonstrably more alert?
Casca
(despite having a traffic density twice as high)
Actually it is probably partly because the traffic density is so high. The average speed of cars on a British motorway I would guess is well below that of cars in the US because there is so much traffic. In addition the relative speed of vehicles colliding will be less because there is less chance to be able to build up a large speed differential this likely makes accidents in the UK far less fatal than in the US. Of course to prove this you would need statistics of all motorway collisions in the US and UK, not just the fatal ones, but I could not find any to compare.
I was always told that pedestrians (even jay-walking) have the right of way.
Having right of way means that you have to give way to them whenever you see them. If they jump out at you from between parked cars such that there was no chance for you to see them and no way for you to stop in time then you are not at fault. Of course the problem is that you have to be able to prove in court that there was no reasonable way for you to see them and give way which is not easy.
This damn topic comes up all the time... Faster driving equals {more deaths, higher fuel consumption, etc}. And it's crap. Let's see... Even if given our current conditions deaths were reduced by slower average speeds the proposition of the article would not necessarily save lives.
Fine, build tighter setbacks... That means bringing the buildings closer to the road. This would lead to people living, playing and existing closer to the road. This means people stepping off their front porch and WHAM! Basically, were is the study that shows that bringing the buildings closer doesn't increase deaths more than is decreased by the reduction of velocity?
Do you REALLY want to decrease traffic fatalities? Fine.. Kill drunk drivers. No you don't get a second chance. Next, require driver road tests for licensing... EVERY year. Not just a "sign here on the dotted line"... but a god-damn TEST! Do it in a simulator. Simulate stalling an engine. Simulate a blown tire. Simulate a skid on ice. Simulate a 5 yr old jumping in front of you. Measure reaction times. Basically do for drivers what airline pilots have to go through. You don't have to handle everything 100% but you do need to achieve some sort of success to pass. No this is not insane. Pilots have to do it and the probability of them harming someone is far less than the operator of a motor vehicle. Thus we should actually require more of a motor vehicle operator. This would either weed out EVERYONE who is a poor driver or force them to educate and train themselves well enough to be acceptable drivers.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Like I said, if traffic is heavy you don't want to have people crammed into 2/3 of the lanes available. But most of those localized traffic jams occur because people can't pass. We all know that in the US people tailgate so badly its ridiculous, so I don't think the traffic is spread out because they're worried about following distance.
Clearly there are times when traffic is just too bad to have optimal traffic flow. However, I go into work early and leave early to avoid it and I still get screwed by people who bunch up. Sometimes just three/four cars all in a line and no other car in sight. You can't tell me the traffic is too dense for them to spread out a little and share a couple of lanes. It's a matter of drivers not being properly educated before they get their license and people not thinking of others. If someone wants to speed the safest thing to do is let them and not try to be a vigilante and block traffic.
Speed is not the cause of bad driving...bad driving is the cause of bad driving, regardless of the speed.
As a matter of fact, the main cause of accidents is failure to yield (at low speeds), not driving too fast for the conditions like oft cited (myself being too lazy to cite...huge interest of mine, and my office mate is a civil engineer who points me to the right data all the time).
Now if they would just invent roads that eliminate bad drivers (those who lack the physical dexterity required to control a vehicle, those who lack the judgment required to share the road with others, and those who lack the intellect to understand the rules of the road)...
Or even better, use cops to enforce the 99% of non-speed related laws that are broken far more often than exceeding the artificially low, revenue generating speed limits.
Minigun Emplacements with speed cameras.
You go too fast, you get a cap or few in your ass.
Let's see people speed now! Yeeah.
The "bullying out of my lane" idea shows what the problem really is. It's the same entitlement problem that plagues everywhere else in America. The slow driver in the left lane feels entitled to be there and does not feel like he should make the effort to move (actually, I've had a few people tell me that they just don't want to "do all the work of moving over") for someone else. In addition to that, he feels it's his duty to enforce the law because he's driving at the speed limit so "there's no reason for anyone else to be driving faster". The most dangerous ones are the vigilantes that proactively try to move in front of you to "slow you down". I've had someone swerve towards my lane (with no other cars, on a three lane highway) to force me to brake.
Are the same on the restricted and unrestricted sections. Speed is not the problem, and they do pass at 150mph.
I would dispute the "and a lot of unskilled people simply not driving" statement, the autobahnen are regularly packed solid here in Germany just as they are in the US.
Deleted
Its differences in speed that cause problems, not speed itself.
Dropping the speed limit is actually more dangerous because it causes more frustration and lane-swapping.
The speed limits are already ridiculously low because its beeen subverted into a revenue-generating mechanism under the guise of safety. To save lives they need to increase speed limits and make driving tests harder, not block the roads up even more.
The cops should spend more time watching out for all the morons that apply makeup or text while driving. I see cops ignore that stuff all the time, but driving safely wile going more than 5 mph over an unrealistically low limit will get you stopped all the time.
To encourage drivers to slow down, they use CHICANES.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
The key is not to build roads.
You seem to enjoy spewing your frothing bull all over the page here, using less than polite terms, while you are in polite company. So guess who is the a-hole and idiot here. You clearly are. Additionally, quit trying to play civil engineer. You don't do a good job of it. The perfectly safe and normal thing to do would be to ban you from this website because you are nothing but a foul mouthed dunce.
Would you prefer that you (or your five year old daughter, or grandmother, etc) would be dead after being hit by a car, or merely injured?
My city recently did something interesting, on several 4-lane streets, they increased the speed limits from 45 mph to 55 mph.
needless to say, people now drive 45 instead of 55. the streets go through areas where driving fast isnt smart. People naturally slow down to the old speeds.
I also saw this effect up in a high desert city, 60 mph for the main road through town. most people drive below 50 mph.
it's conditioned response.
alternatively, setting the limit to 45 mph makes people rebel and go faster.
It's almost like a rebellious response.
Simple way of calculating how fast an overtaking driver is going. As he passes start counting slowly to ten. Mentally note the spot he has then reached. At that moment start counting from 1 again until you reach the same spot. Multiply the number you reach by 10. That is the percentage by which he is going faster than you.
I live in California, where there is a serious concentration of illegal immigrants. I am not passing judgment on their presence here, just stating a fact. In particular I grew up in Santa Cruz, which is right in one of the most important agricultural regions in the state of California, and now live in Kelseyville, a town which is taking out pear trees as fast as they can (burns nice, though) and putting in grape vines which require even more water. If you live in SoCal and you're having water problems even though we have about as much water as ever, now you know why. Wine country has probably doubled in planted area in the last decade, if not worse. In both places there are super-shitloads of unlicensed illegal immigrant drivers. And even tons of the licensed are uninsured; my ex and I sold a car to one such, who wrecked it the same day he bought it, then abandoned it. Guess whose door the cops came knocking on? "Why did you abandon this car?" Sorry dude, it's not mine. Here's the paper we aren't even legally required to have sent in yet... signed yesterday.
Official estimates of illegal immigrant population are over 12M. These estimates are almost certainly low.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There seems to be a common misconception around here that if someone is killed, somebody must be guilty of something. But it isn't the case, and it's nothing to do with the judge's discretion or how cute the deceased is.
In short, if there was no intent to injure, no negligence and no recklessness there's no manslaughter. If you're driving within the law (license, sober, roadworthy vehicle etc) then an accident is basically an accident and that's it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You are correct for open freeways. In a city that rule DOES NOT APPLY. Because both the left and the right lanes are merge lanes.
Go ahead and try to convince a chicagoian that the left lane is for passing only, you will be laughed at non stop even while they beat you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
i thought motorist was silly enough.
The word is DRIVER. It's six letters. This nonsense term is more than twice the letters needed to convey the same information. It's worse than writing "okay" when it's supposed to be OK.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
TL:DR version:
Durp.
Yes, they do "fuck up good traffic flow" and in fact break the law in many places by driving in the left lane. However, they are not endangering lives like the aggressive and reckless drivers breaking other laws. It's important to keep that difference in context.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Somebody should study the thought process used for their conclusions. In their way of thinking, I'd add that lining the streets with people and allowing 2 inches of space between them and the cars would slow the cars down even more. Until some drunk driver came along an took out a block or two of people.
If implemented, think of all the lost speeding ticket revenue the governments will have. They aren't going to like that.
In Vermont we have cliffs on the sides of the roads that encourage speeders to stop. The pot holes and frost heaves also serve to enforce speed limits. People foolish enough to drive to fast get caught in the mud when they stop or spin their tires. It is very effective. Fight pavement. Keep dirt roads!
We have already mastered this method of traffic control, and I'm gonna let you in on the secret - potholes like a result from a bomb-strike.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
i work at a major metropolitan tunnel, HRBT (google it), or Hampton Roads @ www.trafficland.com for live cams.
folks speed until they're faced with a looming hole, and the choke-up starts...even with few autos on the road, the 70 mph idiots become the 35 mph morons at the tunnel.
the walls (25+ feet apart) and roof (15+ feet up) on the eastbound 2-lane highway intimidate a LOT of folks. the westbound (23+ @ 14' 1") is a Fear Factor.
a 100' covered road every 5 or 10 miles might make 'em slow down. maybe.
In Wisconsin, on freeways, the left lane is explicitly for passing only. I don't know how many other states have a similar law, but I bet it is higher than you think.
The hypothetical situation you speak of doesn't occur in practice though, both lanes are always used in heavy traffic. It does mean however that if there is someone in the left lane crawling along with a huge gap in front of them and a long line of cars behind, that front car can be fined for impeding the flow of traffic. Without the passing lane law in place, that sort of enforcement would be difficult.
See subject, & see Clone do so -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1591778&cid=31703134
Utterly hilarious - Clone opened up his piehole & now he can't back up his pure b.s.! Instead he avoids providing proofs that his mouth writes checks his b.s. CANNOT CA$H (like most trolls).
He was indeed talking about the highway. I have driven in Chicago before and there is no way in hell you get to 70 going through the city! :)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
This page (which is referenced by Wikipedia, so it must be correct) only shows ten states as being "left lane for passing only" (and some of those are only on roads with specific speed limits of 65 or 70MPH).
Interestingly though, this doesn't show Wisconsin as a "passing only" state. I started to take a look at the Wisconsin law to figure out what was going on and got bored (and distracted by the parts having to do what one should do when "Passing or meeting frightened animal").
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
They tried that in Luxemburg. They added a lot of rotaries, and made the road in all curving fall off to the outside.
Of course this made driving much more dangerous, since people did not want to slow down, but drive normal. Which caused massive centrifugal forces, so that you had the feeling of the car nearly tipping over, and a hard time keeping it on the track.
I think the number of accidents rose dramatically because of this.
Why not just build roads that you can drive safer?? You know, wider, with banked curvature, etc.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You say my reasoning is stupid. You say that you would prefer a smaller number of collisions, but you would be happy that they are all fatal. I would suggest we'd both prefer no collisions, but if there are to be collisions then it would be better if they were non fatal. This is the theory behind reducing speed limits in urban areas. I am in the UK and there is much debate about reducing the speed limit in residential streets from 30mph to 20mph as this significantly reduces fatal accidents. This is being supported by evidence collected in pilot trials in the UK and from wider adoption in the Netherlands.
One of my arguments is that statistics count for nothing when you are the 1 in a 1000 who gets hit, I'd prefer a broken arm than death! But on a global scale, see above, we have evidence that lower speed equals roads that are safer to pedestrians. I can't speak for your country but in the UK the vast majority of urban roads involve close interactions between pedestrians, cycle riders, and powered vehicles. People cross roads frequently, pavements are alongside the roads, cyclists need to change lanes and move out into the middle of traffic often.
Wisconsin had been a "Slower traffic keep right" state for a long long time. They took on the left lane is for passing only law only relatively recently... Couple of years ago maybe.
Do the speed limit. Don't climb up my ass. I had my share of speeding tickets. Now I always do the speed limit. Don't like it, change the law. My state DOES NOT dictate that left-lane is for passing only (except on Turnpike). Only if move less than speed limit.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.