Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 ..
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 the conclusion is this: People can be induced to reduce their driving speeds when cars are parked along the roadways, when buildings are close to the street, and when those buildings include commercial rather than residential activity.
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???
Not only that, but they are designing roads that in a few years* will be driven by self driving automobiles. These cars will always drive the optimal speed and so they are just slowing down the cars of the future.
*Perpetually ten.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
As such, there are more motorbike deaths on this one patch of 600m than in the entire rest of the city.
Natural selection? They should put curves like that in more places.
until we get them fitted with shock collars idiots will always do idiotic things
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
My cynical side suggests the accident rates are lower in the UK because 90% of the cars are stuck in permanent gridlock on the M25...
"It becomes wearisome to add 'except the Italians' to every generalisation. Henceforth it may be assumed."
- A J P Taylor
You have a brain that functions as well as your shift key.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
especially on my palm pre but i agree with the premise that roads are dangerous, that's why i'm not looking now...
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.