Roads that make you drive faster in places you should drive slow

This highly informative excerpt regarding excessive street widths is from a much longer post at Veritas et Venustas, the blog of John Massengale, who describes himself as a "recovering architect":

Our land use policies support the idea that everyone will drive everywhere for everything, and our traffic policies funnel everyone to just a few roads. Soon those roads are too small, and the traffic engineers widen them and cover them with yellow paint to direct us here and there: judging by the width of the roads and the amount of paint, they must assume we have the driving skills of a blind drunk. Although pedestrians or cyclists trying to use the roads take their lives in their hands (or feet). These hostile, ugly roads offend the soul.

At the new sidewalks by my house in Bedford Village (a wonderful idea that will make it easier to walk from the Food Emporium to the village), the curb cuts in the sidewalks that allow access to the parking lots along the road have entrances with sweeping curves that can be successfully driven at 50 mph.

It's been proven that the wider crossings and faster entrances made by these curves are more dangerous for the pedestrian, but the criteria used by traffic engineers place the safety of the car over that of the pedestrian. A year or two ago in New York City, approximately a quarter of the people killed in traffic accidents were pedestrians. But the money spent on fixing the problems where the pedestrians were killed was a twentieth of the amount spent fixing the intersections where only cars were involved in the accidents.

We make roads that are too fast, and then we put speed bumps in them to slow people down. But the roads would be safer, and more beautiful, if we didn't over-engineer them to begin with.

Link: Veritas et Venustas: From the Bedford Record-Review:Why Are Our Towns Getting Worse?.

Massengale elaborates on the "but what about accomodating emergency vehicles" bugaboo in another post here:

Big streets for big trucks is always presented as a safety issue. Big streets have been proven to be more dangerous than smaller streets. We have 40,000 traffic deaths a year in the US, and we owe many of those to the "bigger is better" philosophy of the traffic engineer and the fire chief.

I live in New York City, where we have very big buildings and relatively small streets. We have big trucks to serve our big buildings, and our trucks navigate our "sub-standard" streets just fine.

Below are some photos of a big fire truck navigating a 20' rear alley in Kentlands, a New Urban development in Maryland. The truck got through here just fine too...

There's also a "Boys With Toys" factor here. Do small towns need giant trucks? No. Do their firemen like big shiny trucks? Yes. But smaller, less expensive trucks get the job done. Mayors and town managers should keep that in mind.

Here in Franklin, wide, curving roads within residential subdivisions are the rule, consistent with the "roads as sewers" philosophy I've bemoaned here before. In areas where children, pedestrians and bikers are sure to appear, the roads are constructed to accomodate faster-than-safe speeds. Even at intersections where streets meet at right angles, the curb radius is so huge that A) pedistrians have a longer, more dangerous crossing to traverse, and B) cars can (and do) take the corner without slowing down.

Consider the lazy, almost banked curve below. You could keep your foot on the gas all the way through this turn.

Now, look closer - - to the right of the black maibox and flagpole you see at upper center, there is a pedestrian/bike path that empties right on to the curve itself! Note also the small trees and bushes that will soon grow and thicken, further obscuring the "exit of death" from both directions.

Look at the overhead view, to which I've added green "blobs" to indicate trees:

I run the path every two days or so, and, as you might imagine, kids on bikes come rocketing out of this slot with great regularity, their speed encouraged by the fact that there's a slight incline on the path right before it terminates onto the road (you gotta pedal faster to make it up the slight slope, you know...)

This neighborhood is very fortunate; though there are very few sidewalks, they have great access to a park and park path (the park has tennis courts, playground equipment, a sand volleyball pit, and a baseball diamond), but the developers and planners dropped the ball in locating this path. It's amazing to imagine that the need for speed is so great that they couldn't have made this a traffic-calming right angle turn.

On the plus side, the nearest Franklin Fire-Rescue station is a half-mile away as the crow flies - - unfortunately, the arbitrary curving, non-grid streets of the subdivision add a quarter-mile to the route that the ambulance will have to take.

Comments

[Al Hsu]

I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, and the east side of my suburb was older, pre-WWII suburbia, laid out in grid formation, while the west side was newer, post-WWII suburbia, with curved streets, cul-de-sacs and circles. I didn't realize until much later that these geographic street patterns were intentionally designed to keep cars driving slowly, so they didn't just zoom through neighborhoods. The streets that looped and curved were much safer for us kids to play around - generally we didn't have a whole lot of through traffic, and we could play Kick the Can in the middle of our cul-de-sacs without worry.

[John Michlig]

When you say that "streets that looped and curved were much safer for us kids to play around," are you comparing those streets to the ones with a grid configuration? If so, I would have to disagree - - unless your point is that the cul-de-sac itself had very little traffic. In that case, you were fortunate, while the folks who lived near the "feeder street" that your cul-de-sac emptied out into were not.

You may also be interested to learn that the perceived safety benefit of cul-de-sacs is an illusion. There's an interesting book excerpt in pdf form here: http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2006/jun/culdesac/book.pdf

Kick the Can - - now THAT was a game, huh? You almost HAVE to play it in a traditional neighborhood. In my hometown, we used to have epic Kick the Can games that encompassed two or three blocks.