Requiring people to climb over traffic doesn't seem like an unreasonable imposition in most cases. That sort of physical activity is even a health benefit for most people. I'm sure there are exceptions.
All of the calming proposals create an imposition. The whole point of traffic calming is to impede the flow of traffic so as to reduce its speed. Without effective alternatives, reducing the speed of this road reduces its capacity to get people from one part of town to another, and it appears that state road 108 is, in fact a major road. It provides access to a number of businesses including a Walmart supercenter, churches, four public schools and city hall.
The obvious alternative to driving is a public bus service, which also uses the road. It stops near the two schools hourly most times of day.
So to make the interaction of the road and the schools safer, the city could redesign the road and make traffic worse, more substantially redesign the whole transportation infrastructure, or add a pedestrian overpass. The latter is not an insignificant project, but it usually costs less than the examples you linked.
The increase in traffic in some areas can be a safety issue. Close to where I live is a lower school. During rush hour, many drivers choose to drive down the parallel side street for about 5 or 6 blocks to bypass a minute of traffic. Often, these drivers speed and ignore pedestrians, stop signs and cross walks. Just recently, a child was hit by one of these drivers in front of the school and suffered major injury.
The community has organized with the city to add in more stop signs and is attempting to get speed bumps put in place that would control the speed of the traffic. Everyone understands that they cannot legally stop someone from driving down the street but they can add in traffic controls to lower the risk to those who live in the area and make it less appealing to leave the main road designed for higher traffic.
In our case, it isn't about owning the streets, but rather is a matter of safety.
The solution is to make the streets safer. There are well-documented traffic calming methods that work. On neighborhood streets like the one you may be describing that could include things like chicanes and mini roundabouts.
The rub is that they make driving less convenient, so it’s hard to get people to support them. But between making our streets safer for kids and making driving a little easier I will always choose safety.
I believe the author is advocating for "traffic calming" measures, which are a fairly standardized set of measures that urban planners and developers use to slow down traffic on streets to make them safer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming
I can't speak for the commenter you're replying to, but there is an alternative to just building more highways in the form of traffic calming measures. Small villages and towns really shouldn't have through-traffic moving through them at high speeds. Or even moderate speeds, if we're being realistic; pedestrians will usually survive the initial impact at 20mph or less, whereas at 36mph it's usually fatal.[0]
Traffic calming sends a very clear, very obvious signal to drivers: slow the f*ck down, because you don't have a choice. It can include big tree branches hanging out over the road, narrower lanes, pinchpoints, speed humps and raised pedestrian crossings, and more.[1] Many of which are relatively low-cost to implement. Certainly, it's far cheaper than building a new highway.
I doubt that those rules were implemented strictly because of pedestrian safety versus expectations of Sunday as a "rest day" versus latching onto it as a post hoc justification--or really just an extra perk--for the rule. And hey, if it does make Sunday a bit safer for kids to play, it's not like that's a bad thing. It's just that the next thought should be "well, how do we make the other six days safer as well?"
Another thing we can do is force city and state government transportation departments into rebuilding roads as they wear down into more actively calming roads. Making them narrower, put in raised pedestrian walkways (basically turns the intersection into one speed bump for cars), reduce the signage and markings to the essentials, and even make residential or high density roads physical rougher as to make it feel worse to drive fast. All these could help with residential/non-highway accidents.
This isn't an issue with traffic, but city planning, not allowing pedestrians to actually have the right of way, and poor policing of laws.
You can build tunnels and overpasses for pedestrians. Button-operated lights for walkways. Strict laws requiring vehicles stop for pedestrians. Planned speed bumps. You can route traffic away from paths kids would likely walk. Do things so that it is more reasonable that kids will be safe in neighborhoods, even if they are playing in the road (at elementary ages, of course, when they are old enough to be aware). You can also have more public green spaces within a child's walking distance where they can play outside with others and make sure school grounds are open for play when school is not in session instead of calling the police for trespassing.
Traffic calming measures is how you tackle things like that. Adding a sharpish S-curve to the roads approaching the T should remove enough speed to make it safer. Won't even need a sign.
I think there are plenty of people who can shoulder this blame, the city planners that put two schools on what is basically a highway come to mind.
Look, the schools are already there, no sense tearing them down now and traffic calming is a fine solution but it shouldn't have been like this in the first place. There are plenty of areas marked as too dangerous for pedestrians when it comes to zoning decisions and this should have been one of them.
Surrounding my child's school are blind s-curves and streets barely wide enough for 2-way traffic. All densely lined with parked cars. And yet I people speed through these areas on most days during pick-up time, and often they looking at their phones (or whatever else they might be up to behind blackout-tinted windows).
The only thing narrow streets and turns do is make it harder for parents to check for oncoming traffic before crossing. No amount of "traffic calming" will protect us from these rotten drivers. We need at least a modicum of enforcement.
Obstacles are only one of the ways you can calm traffic.
Planting trees near the streets, narrower lanes, speed humps, roundabouts are all measures with a proven record that they improve safety.
Crossings should also be one lane at a time.
> In all my experience with high-visibility roads, even though you'd expect people to be better able to pay attention to everything on road with good visibility and clear markings, they actually seem much worse in those conditions
This is nothing new. You shouldn't design a street like a road. You will end up with something called a stroad, that is bad at both beeing a street(a place where you can live, shop and whatever) and a road(something that connects two places)
As a pedestrian I am terrified by streets with occlusions and random obstructions in the name of traffic calming. There's a road in Oxford with build-out with a tree in the middle of it. You can't see cars coming and they can't see me. Same goes for removing lines from the road. I'd rather cars knew where they stand and focus on what's important like looking out for other road users.
I've always thought it was a perverse conclusion that the way to make someone operate heavy machinery more safely is to increase cognitive load of the people operating them.
Why not have a the straight roads you describe, with rigid automatic enforcement and penalities that take dangerous drivers off the road? And then put in place infrastructure to make sure that not driving a car is a viable option, so that stricter enforcement has public support. I see this option as a self-reinforcing route to reducing car use.
This is called "traffic calming", the notion that you have to design the streets so it's impossible for drivers to go at unsafe speeds, rather than making wide straight roads and plonking down a "pls no speederino" sign.
Leave wide straight roads for segregated highways and build streets for people, not just cars.
Wide roads do cut neighborhoods in half and make them so much less walkable. We don't need freeways everywhere. While I like driving fast, there are other concerns than speed and even safety. I recommend strongtowns.org's article on "stroads": https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/3/4/the-stroad.html
I have a similar straight road with a school near my house. To make matters worse it's a main artery to the freeway. However, the city solved this much better. As suggested in the article the road is fairly narrow and there are physical separators in the middle of the road in the area where the school is. You can still easily go the speed limit, yet from my anecdotal experience of driving the road at least twice a day I'm pretty much the only person going slightly over the speed limit. I would argue that the road very much works as intended to transport cars efficiently and children safely.
I'm a homeowner and an active Waze user. The street I live on is not "my" street. It's a public street that any licensed driver may use.
I did have an issue with drivers coming around a blind curve too quickly to be safe, though, so I did what these homeowners ought to be doing and contacted my local government about getting my street assessed for a traffic calming project.
The city created a three-way stop before the curve that has slowed traffic on the street and seems to have reduced non-local traffic.
Sure, that project took time and may not have even happened in the first place if the city hadn't judged it worth doing, but that's the appropriate course in my opinion. Anything else just feels like NIMBY entitlement.
Most roads don't need through traffic, at least in densely populated areas. We should focus on making it so cars do not drive where people want to be walking.
In my small town, there are a lot of aggressive drivers. Of course there are many ways to get where they are going, they just end up on a street where there are people crossing the road. Then they are super aggressive about it.
Slowing down traffic via traffic calming does wonders for pedestrian safety. When cars are moving slowly, drivers have more opportunity to notice pedestrians and crashes are less likely to cause serious injury or to be fatal.
One other option there is to add raised crosswalks or a raised intersection, depending on the situation. That physically slows down cars as they enter the space where pedestrians may be.
Limiting access to the road, e.g. using pedestrian overpasses, fencing, segregated sidewalks and bike lanes, etc... is among the options I had in mind. I don't think one solution fits every problematic road.
All of the calming proposals create an imposition. The whole point of traffic calming is to impede the flow of traffic so as to reduce its speed. Without effective alternatives, reducing the speed of this road reduces its capacity to get people from one part of town to another, and it appears that state road 108 is, in fact a major road. It provides access to a number of businesses including a Walmart supercenter, churches, four public schools and city hall.
The obvious alternative to driving is a public bus service, which also uses the road. It stops near the two schools hourly most times of day.
So to make the interaction of the road and the schools safer, the city could redesign the road and make traffic worse, more substantially redesign the whole transportation infrastructure, or add a pedestrian overpass. The latter is not an insignificant project, but it usually costs less than the examples you linked.
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