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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.
I was taught the same.
But also going on a skid training course made me realise how much of a difference there is when emergency braking from 30 and emergency breaking for 20, it's quite dramatic when you actually try it (though no doubt when we were doing that they had the weight on the tires reduced using the rig attached to the car so that it took way longer to stop than a modern car). Putting pedestrians closer to and making them less visible to drivers does not make things safer. Just because a car is going slower does not automatically mean it is "safer". Sure it means it will cause less damage if it hits something, but if the car is more likely to actually hit something because of an inattentive driver or insane road designs, then how the hell is that "safer"?
PS the lanes, walkways and roads here in the UK are generally thinner and more lined with cars than those in the US.. I don't know the different accident rates but it would be interesting to compare them. I suspect there would be more here.
which is totally what she said
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.
True, but passenger fatalities will be reduced.... they said nothing about pedestrian fatalities.
As much as their conclusion makes sense for their premise.... they're not looking at the entire picture.
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
You shouldn't assume the entire population can drive. Try that again, but use licensed drivers/registered vehicles in place of the total population of the country. Also, I believe that the US has closer to 350m people (not that it matters since you won't be using that number).
p.s: I would do it myself but I'm just too damn lazy.
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Regarding UK roads - generally, the accident rate in the UK is about 1/3rd of the accident rate in the US - UK roads are vastly safer.
However, this probably has a lot to do with driver training which is generally much more thorough in the UK - as well as other things, such as drink-driving laws where a driving ban really means a driving ban - in many parts of the US, they still allow you to drive to work and back if you're "banned" for drunken driving. On the motorway system, it may have things to do with the general better design of junctions which lack things like decreasing radius turns (which seem depressingly common, at least in Texas where I used to live) and insane junction designs like what can be found on the I-610/I-45 junction in Houston, or the hwy-59 / I-610 junction near Westheimer in Houston (both which have almost permanent traffic jams alongside traffic doing 70 mph one lane to the left, with people trying to get out of the stopped lane from a standing start).
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The problem with drunk driving, as an offence, is that it is meant to be a deterrent. Deterrents work by making the consequences outweigh the gains of a particular action. Unfortunately, if you're sober enough to do the risk calculation, you're probably sober enough to drive safely, so the people it is meant to deter are, by definition, not people who are capable of logically responding to a deterrent (if they were, they wouldn't get in the car while drunk anyway, for precisely the reason you state).
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Well, if you have a look at this paper, I think the most telling statistic is simple: folks in the US travel more than double the distance vs. those in Britain, but total time spent travelling is roughly the same. This means our average rate of speed is nearly double that in GB. Double the speed, 1.4x the fatalities.