Ever heard of roundabouts?
Roundabouts are amazing, but they have 2 drawbacks. Throughput is limited and the size of the intersection becomes larger. Hence, there will always be a lot of places where traffic lights are the better option.
Not great for pedestrians either I think
Road designers say if you want traffic throughput in high traffic situations, use traffic lights instead of roundabouts. Apparently there are a lot of studies that show that.
Meanwhile our downtown intentionally makes it so you won’t make it more than a light or two for pedestrian safety as it keeps speeds down.
Luckily it’s not a big downtown.
We need more downtowns like that.
Cars shouldn’t be able to break 25 mph in city limits.
Let’s increase the pollution of the city by making cars idle!
Roads that are safer for pedestrians and cyclists get more people out of their cars. Longer car commute times make people consider alternatives such as public transit, walking, or biking. Every additional person who isn’t in their car has an exponential decrease in automobile congestion. This is all relatively well understood within urban planning and traffic engineering.
This is all relatively well understood within urban planning and traffic engineering.
I feel like someone neglected to tell this to every American urban planner then
Politics and money quite often make the decision, not sound urban planning.
If it’s inconvenient enough people simply won’t drive.
Which is the goal.
In the long term, this won’t be an issue, since EVs don’t idle.
I’m still waiting for the day EV’s will be reasonable for people who don’t own a home that they can charge their vehicle at. It’s a humongous population and people don’t seem to have great ideas to incentivize people to tackle the problem.
Yeah, there definitely needs to be more incentives for apartment owners and condo managers to install Level-1 and Level-2 changers in tenant parking spots. The question is how to fund it, of course. Perhaps some sort of increased petrol tax could help accelerate the implementation of EV infrastructure?
This is the basic stuff that AI could be used for to improve everyones life.
Don’t count on it. For instance, one of the main drags in Plano,TX was set so that doing the speed limit would cause you to sit at the lights - because one of the city council owned those an ad business and the combo billboard/bench made him money. And the police liked it too, since impatient people would speed the whole way to avoid getting caught at the lights.
This is not good news. Cramming more cars onto the road means more emissions and more collisions
Maybe it’s a matter of short- vs long-run? The article seems to describe the short-run effects. fewer idle cars is better. But you are saying that in the long run this might lead to more cars, which is worse.
My only ticket in 20 years of driving was a bullshit running a red light charge. It was fucking yellow! It was unsafe to stop. Fuck traffic cops.
Had same situation. It was pouring rain. 3 way intersection, I didn’t even see it turn to red only yellow. Cop took like 2 min to catch up to me to pull me over and say “you almost killed me” I was so confused.
I went to court to talk to magistrate or whatever and there was like 20 people and they all were getting reduced to non moving violations but when it was my turn she was like “you may have noticed everyone before you got reduced to non moving violation but we can’t just have that for everyone can we, gotta make an example out of someone and I was promptly denied reduced offense.
So I went to court again to go against the judge but the cop that pulled me over pulled me aside and asked why I was here and I told him “I never ran a red light. It was pouring rain and the light turned yellow as I went through… and he’s like fine and told the judge to drop it.
I think mine ended up being a $600 fine and a point on my driving license that dropped after like ten years. I recently tried to get the paperwork for it, but it was so long ago there’s no record of it.
Sadly pedestrian wait times are not being optimised as well, so there is not much to help with liveable cities.
Google amd uplifting news usually don’t mix together
Looks like another data harvesting attempt
In general, I guess. But strictly speaking, not everything google does is bad. Translate, Earth, are all cool projects.
Just network the sensors. Let intersections know about adjacent intersections. Anything more distant than that doesn’t exist.
You don’t need any intense city-wide apparatus, or a big-iron traffic brain flipping every light from afar. (Though internet access might be the cheapest way to move the data to and from each intersection.)
Just… stop letting a red light… trigger another red light, further down. That’s what happens when a crossroad waits for a lull in a main road. Usually that lull is from a red light, nearby. And if only a few cars cross, each red will be pretty short, and the lull will move along with the cars, and those drivers will wish everything evil in the world happens to you, and your little dog too.
If an adjacent intersection just turned green, and this intersection is green for them, keep it that way, at least until that bulk of cars tapers off.
Other than that - yeah, roundabouts. Controlled intersections should be the last resort, and we have the technology to let sparse traffic just blow through. It’s a circle.
