No one should be the second person to die on a dangerous street

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/1/26/no-one-should-be-the-second-person-to-die-on-a-dangerous-street

by jseliger • 2 years ago

26 24 2 years ago

mc322• 2 years ago

Included in the article is an illustration of/for a modified intersection that has so-called bulb-outs which slowen cars and make crossing a street shorter for walkers.

What is their solution for trucks and buses? It's not only walkers and drivers who navigate on or across streets. A regular old box truck or articulated truck delivering goods (people move house and businesses need to receive and ship goods) even city busses would have a difficult time with a narrowed intersection, unless they made provisions for them.

You have to assume traffic is flowing both ways. The illustration does not depict a vehicle in the opposite direction stopped waiting for traffic/light/stop sign, etc.

jeffbee3• 2 years ago

80-foot trucks with massive sleeper cabs are not naturally occurring. They are a policy choice/failure. They are never, ever seen in many real cities around the world, none of which are deprived of goods or mobility.

Vecr• 2 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean, if I need something shipped directly from Colorado to my house I want it shipped directly to my house, I don't want to require the the delivery to happen somewhere else and then be put on some short truck.

Jtsummers• 2 years ago

Per the article, this is a change to the lanes and intersections via paint, not a physical change by adding a structure. Trucks should be able to handle it pretty well.

Adding paint at a dangerous intersection should be a quick project that can be undertaken by a roadway maintenance crew in a couple of hours.

But if you did make it a physical bulb-out, there are two things: It's till 24' across, most trucks seem to handle that in neighborhood streets reasonably well already. If it's still a concern, use an approach I've seen in some similar situations where they want to control speed. Make the bulb essentially a very large speed bump, don't give it a steep curb. This prevents most people from speeding around the corners because they won't want to damage their cars, but gives plenty of space for trucks and emergency vehicles, they just have to take it slow.

mc322• 2 years ago

Only as a modified speed bump/grade separation would this work. Drivers would not respect paint. But extra manoeuvering space is necessary to allow trucks and busses -even if raised. Trucks and busses have wheels large enough to accommodate something like that.

Also you have to account for two way traffic missing from this illustration ---so it's 12' of space for a turning bus/truck.

aimor• 2 years ago

This is the intersection BSMB wanted to save when they posted the image in 2023: https://maps.app.goo.gl/XLZ6VLo4x2JBmVBa9

ianburrell3• 2 years ago

Bulb outs usually don’t shrink the road so that larger vehicles can’t get through. They replace the parking lanes to increase visibility and slow down vehicles.

lacker2• 2 years ago

I'm not convinced these changes makes the street safer. It's purely anecdotal, but nearby me in North Oakland there are several intersections that I often walk along where it seems like they just keep putting more stuff in the street. Plastic poles that don't actually prevent cars from driving over them, signs, flashing lights, cross hatched regions, color coded painted regions, little roofed extensions of restaurants, bicycle lanes that criss cross the other things.

It seems so distracting for drivers. But it doesn't really seem like the drivers slow down enough to make it safer. I personally prefer to walk along a street that just has a simple stop light or stop sign and crosswalk, rather than a street that has all sorts of weird things in the road that allegedly make it better.

aeternum• 2 years ago

Yes, these kind of "paint the street" solutions give pedestrians a false sense of safety. Sure most cars pay attention but that actually makes things more dangerous as you start to let your guard down when walking and think of that painted bulb as safe.

Then you nearly get clipped by a driver that simply ignores or is oblivious to the painted bulb.

If you really care about pedestrian safety, give pedestrians the entire intersection. All red so pedestrians can confirm cars are stopped, then they proceed across or diagonally through the intersection. Aka the pedestrian scramble. It's quite rare in the US.

jeffbee3• 2 years ago

The fact that it is distracting for drivers is the point. Making the street appear dangerous to drivers is the positive outcome. In the specific case of the Oakland bike lanes and associated junk in KONO and Temescal, all objective indications of safety are better.

"""OakDOT found that the protected lanes caused cars to slow down, addressing the most critical factor in surviving collisions. The speed of the fastest cars went down to about 24 mph, while the pace of most other vehicles went down to 17 mph. Collisions between bicyclists and cars also fell by 40% in the first year the protected lanes were in place. The number of pedestrians on Telegraph Avenue also went up 103%, and the number of bicyclists using the street nearly doubled."""

lacker2• 2 years ago

Huh, this area is more controversial than I had realized. I think you're grabbing that quote from this article:

https://oaklandside.org/2021/07/08/protected-bicycle-lanes-t...

But even the head of OakDOT is quoted as agreeing with me here, that their project turned out to be too unsafe! And yet many of the statistics, as you point out, look good. I dunno, I guess we'll see.

It's a nice area, regardless, I just have fundamental doubts about the theory of "if we distract drivers, they will slow down, thus making the roads safer".

livueta• 2 years ago

One of my least favorite antipatterns in my area is a crosswalk with a bunch of signs around it that flash constantly, regardless of pedestrian presence or input. They flash in a slightly different pattern if you push the button. Alert fatigue, anyone? Most drivers just blow through it.

As a distance runner who spends a lot of time on the roads, I'm increasingly convinced that signs, speed limits, flashing lights and other flavor of the month gizmos are totally ineffective excuses for not doing what actually needs to be done to improve pedestrian/cyclist safety, which is changing the built environment to a) reduce maximum possible vehicle speed by changing the physical structure of the road and b) providing robustly physically separated infrastructure, extending even to tunnels/overpasses, for non-vehicle traffic. I trust concrete way more than I trust laws.

ianburrell3• 2 years ago

The Dutch standard is to raise the level of crosswalk. This creates a speed bump that slows down cars. It also means pedestrians don’t need curb cuts because the sidewalk is same level as crosswalk.

nomoreusernames• 2 years ago

once i was on a terpentine road up a mad tall mountain in a car with a driver who drove fast as balls and there was no railing and i told him "someone should put up fucking thicc railings up in hyaa"

and he said "there used to be railings but the poor people take it and sell it to buy food for their families"

made me think and forget about the panic i felt from the dangerous and dodgy slithery road i was on for a moment.

roenxi• 2 years ago

I have two windows open - one for this conversation and one for the chatter about the cultural decay at Boeing that has killed maybe ~350 people in the Boeing 747 MAX accidents.

There is a fascinating look here into how groups of people handle risk assessment and mitigation. This article isn't even complaining about a lack of mitigation, the complaint here is local communities attempting to mitigate these hazards is illegal. The gap in responses is as wide as it is lopsided.

As soon as it is taxpayer funded and people are directly involved in eating the costs for making things safer, previously high standards drop to ankle level.

Overtonwindow• 2 years ago

As soon as it is taxpayer funded and people are directly involved in eating the costs for making things safer, previously high standards drop to ankle level.

Probably the number one argument against universal healthcare, or any governmental program.

anon-sre-srm• 2 years ago

And these designs are typically implemented with impediments and hazards to non-vehicular traffic. Instead of these control-freak, half-assed solutions they should adopt Dutch transit planning approaches that avoids hidden blocks of concrete in unexpected places.

57FkMytWjyFu• 2 years ago

Safteyism is economically infeasible, and a blog post isn't going to change that.

No one should be the second person to die on a dangerous street

Related Stories