My city converted a lot of 4-lane roads to 2 traffic lanes, a centre-turn lane, and 2 wide bike lanes. It's great, cheap, and it really doesn't affect car traffic at all.
Better street design can improve traffic & flow with fewer lanes. My local muni has been converting super cramped four lane roads to two lanes plus turn lane and comfortable bike lanes. They are nicer to bike, nicer to drive, and back up less often (mostly due to the turn lane). Roundabouts on these roads have generally improved flow too.
None of these experience miles of gridlock like LA, but it's been enjoyable to see & experience.
Disagree, slow the cars down. I've seen good results with "road diets" where 4-lane roads are converted to two lanes for cars and more space for bike lanes and center turning lanes. Also, adding pedestrian activated lights to stop cars.
I believe you but have never heard of cities anywhere removing roads or lanes, only adding more. Can you give any examples of cities that have actually done this?
Traffic and vehicle speed are two different things. Slowing cars can be done without slowing traffic. Traffic is limited by the carrying capacity of the road. More, but slower and smaller, lanes can handle the same amount of traffic while still slowing cars. Simply halving the number of lanes (4 to 2) without replacing the carrying capacity, only offloads through traffic to other areas. It would be better to replace the one fast+big road with multiple slower and smaller roads.
And the bike lanes in the OP are awful. Those bikes don't want to share pavement with moving cars. Put that lane on the other side of the parking lane, preferably with a line of grass/trees shielding it from moving traffic. That keeps everyone happy.
(Those painted green lanes are also a horror for motorcycles in the rain. They must turn, lean and accelerate all at once on that wet paint when entering such a road.)
A few towns in my area have been experimenting with "road diets" -- taking streets originally designed with only car traffic in mind, and reconfiguring them (without building new infrastructure) to reduce the primacy of cars and make other modes of transport more appealing -- with varying degrees of success. In one case, there was an observed impact of trip times _decreasing_ despite losing a lane of traffic in each direction -- the change in configuration reduced congestion at intersections.
In some Canadian cities, they build the residential streets with only one lane (there’s still traffic in two directions), and it solves both the speed problem and helps with the density problem. I hated it at first, but once I’ve parked my car (probably to take the bus, no less), I’ve thought, gee this is nice.
Urban real-estate is expensive and valuable terrain, so wasting it on wide lanes that encourage fast traffic in places where fast traffic is the opposite of what you want (eg. where people live and walk and bike) should be an obviously bad idea.
I'm iffy about the removal of lane marking in all but quiet residential roads, but I'm definitely onboard with narrower lanes.
I’m curious if you have any professional experience with this? How well does it accommodate bicyclist and pedestrian traffic flow? In Seattle they’re trying to accommodate these kinds of traffic instead of cars because it’s really expensive to build more streets. And we’ve learned over the past 20 years that optimizing for car traffic means making it less safe and harder to walk or bicycle.
Were I the dictator, I'd just narrow the roads to one lane plus on-street parking and replace the freed area with trees or bushes (or tram tracks). Narrowing forces cars to slow down, making pedestrians safer and allowing bicyclists better blend with the traffic. Cutting down on the lanes adds congestion which effectively removes unnecessary car travel from the city area, encouraging people to walk or pedal. I would also remove huge parking lots as they alienate pedestrians and increase car travel. Certain downtown streets or blocks could be made pedestrian-only zones.
what you can do with bus lanes is take an existing multi-lane road, and turn it into a single lane road + a dedicated bus lane. This has the advantage of making things easier for the bus and also harder for cars. So people start to see they can actually save time by taking the bus
There are cities that tried to solve the problems of having constant traffic congestion on all 4 lanes by demolishing buildings and building 2 more lanes.
yeah, pedestrianizing or making roads into transitways does actually solve quite a bit of traffic locally. The trick is to do it holistically - most of the time everyone on both sides is looking far too short term and pounces on the results after making changes to a block or two.
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