EDIT: since apparently a bunch of people woke up with the wrong foot this morning or forgot to check the group they’re in:
This is a joke. Do not steal or vandalize speed enforcement cameras (or anything else for that matter). That’s against the law and you will likely get arrested.
If you’re addicted to crack or any other drugs, please seek professional help.
Even better solution though: (re-) build the street at a school zone so that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
What?
It’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 in a lane. 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.
School buses are a thing.
They used to be. Now everyone drives their kids to school for reasons.
The urban planning in many cities is so absurd and not meant for buses. This means school bus routes are absolute madness and can take hours to get everyone home
School busses do nothing to solve the problem of speeding in school zones.
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 narrow for a pickup truck, how are school busses supposed to function?
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.
Schools have more than one bus and they have to pass each other. There are also school buses for the other nearby schools like the middle school and high school running at the same time even when school starts times are offset.
No they don’t they can enter from the same side. You’re just looking for excuses. Also why do you need buses in the first place why aren’t the kids walking or biking.
Yup, if a school bus is coming then everyone going the other way better slow down and watch out!
It’s about not making it fit “comfortably”, not that it can’t fit at all. Drivers who feel uncomfortable naturally slow down and pay more attention.
Congratulations, you stumbled upon the key point of traffic calming!
No, not here.
Firetrucks? Ambulance?
My city has exactly one road designed like this. Fire trucks have no problem
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.
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
I wish mine was as well. Just a nice straightforward grid. Minimize the time it takes to get anywhere by any means. Makes navigation easier as well.
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.
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.
I mean, if the
roadstreet takes up only part of the width of the right of way, you can do a lot with blocking off half theroadstreet and alternating which side every few dozen metres. No demolition required.Upon closer inspection, what you just described is a street, not a road.
Also, even with a narrower street, with strategically placed obstacles, you can convince drivers to zig-zag and reduce their speed that way.
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.
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 you were discussing 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.
nah fuck brick roads. the rest sure. not brick. dangerous for panick braking (less traction), wears iunt tires and suspension prematurely
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 inside the vehicle, further increasing the level of discomfort at higher speeds, contributing to a lower design speed.
Do you work for IBM on Lotus Notes?
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.
Panic braking from 20 km/h isn’t going to be impeded by a brick surface, even wet brick.
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.
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.
Define school zone. Like real school zone or town that zoned everything a school zone so they could get rid of sex offenders?
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.
Might be less children around exiting vehicles if road wasn’t designed for one fucking vehicle at a time made out bricks because some moron hired a city planner. Why don’t you just post snipers and shot ambulance drivers?
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.
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.
Hard to find exactly that with a Google search but here’s an example of roughly what I was talking about
https://djelr4m41m2tz.cloudfront.net/br/t/brisbane-dec-06-kf_164.jpg
Not hard to imagine doing the same but with bike lanes and sidewalks
A. That isn’t what you were talking about about
B. You can’t find it because it doesn’t exist
C. Congrats, this shit road is going to delay emergency responses and will cause accidents when there is even a slight amount of ice
People are going to die because of abominations like this, not like you care.
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”.
The pedestrians and cyclists get good straight paths. The curves on the road are made by consuming its excess width
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.
Relevant Not Just Bikes.
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Relevant Not Just Bikes
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Another relevant Not Just Bikes
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Another relevant Not Just Bikes
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
“Take this road that’s in good condition and spend public money rebuilding it over months instead of installing a camera today to push drivers to be responsible.”
Essentially, yes.
Besides, speed cameras, especially in NA, enforce by punishment. Punishment that some people are unable to afford, because for some reason they coddle billionaires while letting a fifth of their citizens rot in the gutter.
Meanwhile, a traffic calmed school zone enforces proactively. Are you sure you’d like to risk scratching your brand new $50k truck’s pristine paintjob? A properly traffic calmed street will force drivers to face that question, and in many cases, they’ll answer the question with “no”, and slow down. Mission accomplished.
Punishment that your don’t need to pay if your just respect the legal speed. We’re not talking about someone stealing food because they can’t afford to eat, we’re talking about someone driving a car and being unable to get their foot off the gas pedal for a bit. Your reaction to that is “People shouldn’t take their responsibility to respect the law, it’s the state that should spend money to make it so they don’t want to drive like morons!” while ignoring the fact that speed cameras are proven to be effective at keeping people under the sites limit and cost way less than just rebuilding roads. Add to that the fact that your solution means years or even decades of people driving too fast for safety while roads are getting rebuilt based on their speed limit and there’s nothing to enforce the speed limit in the meantime because “speed cameras aren’t the solution”.
If you’re unable to slow down just because the road is wide enough that you feel safe driving fast then you’ve got no business owning a car.
Counterpoint:
How often do you think most people watch their speed gauges?
You and I might do so regularly, but you sure as hell cannot say that for sure about every other person on the road.
Furthermore, how obvious is the speed limit?
I can tell you with certainty that, outside of a few, mostly European, places, this may be unclear. North American traffic engineers happily design roads with speed limits anywhere between 40 and 80 km/h, with no changes to the cross-sectional geometry of the (st-) road.
Systemic speeding because of misguided road design is more common than you’d like to admit. And a few cameras probably only do so much to fix that.
The speed limit needs to be indicated in order to be valid so that’s a completely ridiculous point you’re trying to make.
If people don’t pay attention to their driving they need to be penalized for it because no matter the road design, they’ll commit infractions and no matter the road design, speed limits need to be enforced otherwise they become suggestions.
See another of my comments with sources proving that speed cameras do reduce speeding by a wide margin, proving that drivers pay enough attention to their speed that when they fear they might be penalized for speeding, they slow down.
And putting up signs and cameras literally only does so much to convince people to slow down on wide, straight roads. How likely is the average driver in your area to speed? I can assure you, half of the road users are worse than that.
If we’re going to start pointing to other discussions, make it as easy to find your point as you can. Case in point, what I’m talking about.
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I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
“How likely is it that drivers are speeding?”
Much more likely if there’s nothing to punish them for doing so.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/7705481
Not Just Bikes isn’t the fucking second coming off Christ, you need to push your reflection a bit farther than his message.
You never replied to the “Ok, but what about between now and when all the roads have been redesigned?” part, weird right? That’s decades and trillions of dollars you’re saying we should spend to reach a solution, so, what happens in the meantime?
What’s your REALISTIC solution that works NOW and can be QUICKLY applied EVERYWHERE?
And “realistic solutioins that work now and can be quickly applied everywhere” are far too easily quick fixes. And nothing is as permanent as a quick fix.
Besides, at least one of your sources is a Canadian car journalist, someone who’s probably personally invested in sucking GM’s metaphorical dick.
And let’s also face it, Canada, a country where a city of half a million people was “too small for a rapid transit network,” while cities a third its size have about as much, if not more, absolute track mileage and ridership on their tram network than Toronto.
Who’s the biased one here, mister pot, accusing the kettle he’s black?