Firetrucks? Ambulance?
Comment on Get to work, crackheads
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 7 months agoIt’s simple. If you design the road to be wide, straight, with wide, clearly marked lanes, clear sides and a smooth surface, people will naturally be inclined to drive faster. This is based on experiences with forgiving design. For motorways, this is fine. But for residential neighbourhoods and school zones, it’s a bloodbath waiting to happen.
So out there, you do the exact opposite. Make the street so narrow that anything bigger than an average pickup truck barely fits. Make it out of brick and don’t mark the centre of the road. Surround the street with shrubs and other obstacles, and stick it full of sharp chicanes.
This is the deliberate inverse of forgiving design, called traffic calming.
damnyouclouds@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
psud@lemmy.world 7 months ago
My city has exactly one road designed like this. Fire trucks have no problem
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I really want to see these cities. They have a dedicated grid of streets for cyclists, a different grid for fire trucks, a different grid for pedestrians, and a Kafkaesque nightmare of curves for cars. Cars that presumably often break down and the drivers are found later fleshless with teeth marks on their bones. Somehow 4 seperate roadway structures are imposed on a single city.
psud@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I wish my suburb’s streets were rebuilt to pedestrian/cyclist friendly style. It would be easy as every street has very easy access to the 80km/h square of main roads that surround it
You could block every street in the suburb in its middle and force all drivers to take the shortest path to a fast road, and let bikes and walkers take the short paths within the suburbs.
My street has about 2000 cars a day, with over 90% of them using it as a short path between two fast roads, or accessing or leaving a destination in a different part of the same suburb.
A friend lives in a suburb that’s a tree structure, that’s about a third best as there are no destinations from the “trunk” roads to anything but destinations within the suburbs. I’d hate to see that suburb needing to be evacuated quickly, but they’re deep in suburbia and on a hill, so safe from fire and flood
barsoap@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Not an issue in Europe. Though granted the US would probably need to replace their fire trucks with sanely-sized ones. You also don’t need to haul a big-ass ladder in a low-density area what’s your plan use it to do a header into a suburban pool.
Regarding response time absence of gridlock will be more important than the last hundred metres on a residential street, consider investing in public transportation, walkable cities, and generally everything that abolishes owning and using a car being mandatory.
zakobjoa@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Hey, I live on a road like that. It’s not even bricks, but good ol’ cobblestone. The cars also share it with a tram.
There’s a lot of pedestrians crossing. It’s a residential area with shops in the ground floor of all the buildings.
There’s multiple schools and kindergartens around, so they set the speed limit to 30km/h. Does that matter? No. People go 50-60 during the day and 70-80 at night. The only times that doesn’t happen is when the cops set up a mobile speed camera.
The road is fairly straight, I’ll give you that, but I guess they can’t just demolish a few kilometres of 100yrs old houses to make to road a bit winding.
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I mean, if the road takes up only part of the width of the right of way, you can do a lot with blocking off half the road and alternating which side every few dozen metres. No demolition required.
zakobjoa@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I didn’t know there was a difference, I’ve been using them synonymously.
With the proposed changes traffic would have to wait constantly to let the other side pass. You would not only limit speed, but als throughput. If you just go slower because of speed cameras, the amount of traffic can stay the same.
There’s a lot of cars and lorries going through here. Sometimes a road/street that has a lot of traffic just goes through a fairly residential area and we kind of have to live with the fact.
And if you think that’s bad city planning call the eighteen hundreds and complain to these people.
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 7 months ago
There’s a difference. A road is meant to be a fast connection between points at the ends. This calls for forgiving design and higher speeds.
Meanwhile, a street is meant to be for allowing access to the nearby land. That warrants lower speeds, and the expectation that anyone can be on any of the sides as they see necessary. A street should function less like a vehicle artery, and more like an outdoor room.Notice that these are incompatible uses. North American traffic engineers clearly didn’t, allowing main streets to become the main thoroughfare, i.e. the main roads through an area as well. This produces the most dangerous type of transportation infrastructure: the stroad. Which is both meant to be a fast connection AND access to the nearby land, and in doing so fails at both.
If this stretch of car infrastructure is supposed to be a street, vehicle throughput should probably be one of the last priorities, and vehicles are better off on a road a few blocks over.
milkytoast@kbin.social 7 months ago
nah fuck brick roads. the rest sure. not brick. dangerous for panick braking (less traction), wears iunt tires and suspension prematurely
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Problems that are all reduced, eliminated or rendered irrelevant altogether if traffic moves slowly, which it probably does, thanks to all the other modifications.
Plus, they add a ton of road noise, further increasing the level of discomfort at higher speeds, contributing to a lower design speed.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Do you work for IBM on Lotus Notes?
psud@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Panic braking from 20 km/h isn’t going to be impeded by a brick surface, even wet brick.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 7 months ago
Main roads shouldn’t be brick, but local residential streets certainly should. The speed limit should be 30 km/h or less anyway, and in a well-designed road network they should only make up a tiny portion of your overall drive, so wearing tyres and suspension isn’t an issue.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Wrong. Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance. Which leads to less people walking and cycling plus more local air pollution. You want nice grids. People walk in NYC they don’t walk in burbs. This is what city planners refuse to grasp. You don’t make driving more difficult, you make alternatives easier.
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I agree with that last point, but the rest ignores the fact that this refers especially, specifically to school zones, where, as stated previously, fast traffic is a bloodbath about to happen.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Define school zone. Like real school zone or town that zoned everything a school zone so they could get rid of sex offenders?
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 7 months ago
We’re talking the area just around a school where it’s safe to assume there are likely to be a lot of children outside of vehicles.
wesley@yall.theatl.social 7 months ago
The road can have unnecessary curves that the sidewalks and bike lanes do not.
There are other ways to slow vehicles as well such as chicanes that narrow the street at certain points such that only 1 vehicle can pass fit through it at once, raised crosswalks, etc. There are a lot of ways to design the street to force drivers to slow down and pay attention.
Unfortunately, if drivers have room to speed then it comes at the expense of the well being and safety of everyone else (even other drivers).
I agree that winding culdesacs suck btw, but a street grid doesn’t solve the problem if safety in front of a school. If designed poorly it can make it worse since long straight streets can easily be turned into drag strips of speeding vehicles. Street grids are fine and good, but they should not allow drivers to go faster than is compatible with a pleasant and safe environment for people outside of the vehicles.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I want to see a road that curves with a bike lane that doesn’t that isn’t so bizarre that no one would ever use it.
wesley@yall.theatl.social 7 months ago
Hard to find exactly that with a Google search but here’s an example of roughly what I was talking about
…cloudfront.net/…/brisbane-dec-06-kf_164.jpg
Not hard to imagine doing the same but with bike lanes and sidewalks
Zagorath@aussie.zone 7 months ago
Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance
You don’t do this everywhere. You do it where you want traffic speeds to be low. Residential streets, school zones, shopping precincts, and the like.
Plus, you further aid pedestrians and cyclists by having these residential streets not be through-traffic, except to pedestrians and cyclists. Use “modal filters”.
psud@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The pedestrians and cyclists get good straight paths. The curves on the road are made by consuming its excess width
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Cool show me an example of your fictional city. I want to see one that is a grid for cyclists+people and a burb for cars.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 7 months ago
School buses are a thing.
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 7 months ago
School busses do nothing to solve the problem of speeding in school zones.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I specifically quoted the part about making the road in front of a school so narrow a pickup truck would have trouble.
If it’s too small and narrow for a pickup truck, how are school busses supposed to function?
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Then let me specify:
Wide enough for one pickup and no opposing traffic, but so narrow that two pickups are going to really have to negotiate to move around each other.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 7 months ago
They used to be. Now everyone drives their kids to school for reasons.
Emerald@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The urban planning in many cities is so absurd and not meant for buses. This means school bus routes are absolute maddness and can take over an hour to get everyone home
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 7 months ago
No, not here.