That singular optimal route funnels traffic away from my kids riding bikes, playing street hockey, drawing chalk cities, or anything else their little minds can come up with. It's why houses on a 'quiet street' are coveted, and sell for more than the same house on a busy street.
To call a design like that 'absurd' you'd have to completely ignore all of the reasons people want to pay more for it...
That didn't stop some busybody dad from flagging me down. I opened my window and he told me I'd better slow down (I had) because there were kids playing. My response to him was that he oughtn't let his kids play in the street. He started ranting, so I pulled away, and he shouted after me "SLOW DOWN YOU ASSHOLE!!".
When I got home, upset by this, I went back and looked at my logs. I also use an app called Torque that logs all the data from my car's OBDII port, and GPS data as well. So I was able to verify that at no point was I going more that 5mph below the posted limit, and from the point where those kids were visible, I was going far slower than that.
My conclusion from just one datapoint is that people are irrational about what they allow their kids to do (play in the road) while expecting other people to accept and mitigate the potential risk; and also that people have little ability to estimate vehicle speed accurately.
Still - a pretty bad overreaction from the "Dad" :(
Furthermore, like was mentioned by previous posters and the article, there are further legal traffic laws that can be implemented to protect side streets from incurring unreasonable or unsafe traffic (e.g. no thru traffic, rush hour restrictions, lower speed limits, additional stop signs or even speed bumps, etc). By all means, local governments should be using these laws and regulations to ensure neighborhood streets are as safe as possible. However, even with minimal traffic, kids playing in a street will always be a risk. If the street does not have adequate safety measures AND enforcement then as a parent you should not allow your child to play in or near the street without accepting the risk.
It is a public street that was designed to service the neighborhood and the traffic traveling to the neighborhood. It is not a highway.
It is easy to share a pie between two people. It is very hard to share a pie between 400 people. In the US roads ARE NOT designed as a shared space between people and cars. If you play in the road you could very well die due to one person on a phone when they shouldn't be.
Stay alive, keep off the road.
That's the problem. Kids cannot safely play in the street in many "safe" neighborhoods in the US. They should be able to, but they can't. Americans practically worship cars. The roads are treated like sacred land. Safety and happiness are set aside for the sake of motoring.
Why should they be able to? Mass + velocity = splat. You can't deny the physics.
The Americans worshiping cars boat sailed like 70 years ago, it is too late to do anything significant about that in a short period of time without spending trillions. Unless you think replacing most of our infrastructure and moving massive numbers of people is a good idea.
And the roads are treated like scared land. They are the arteries and veins of our economy and life.
His son was hit and killed while crossing the street a few years ago.
Why is it that when it comes to driving safety, the first and paramount factor that people jump to is speed? To be sure, speed can make some accidents more likely, and probably worsen the results of many accidents. But I don't see that it's a more important factor than inattention, failure to respect traffic signs or lane discipline, failure to signal properly, poor training, poor automobile maintenance. Of these, inattention (viz cell phone usage, but not other contributors such as interacting with passengers) is the only other one I ever see addressed.
Why doesn't society tell people "keep to the right lane" or "signal your turns"? I'm willing to bet that your neighbor never yells at motorists "stop arguing with the kids in the backseat".
It's funny, because I live in California, and I find myself wanting to yell these things a people all the time.
And in at least some states you can be ticketed for improper lane use and failure to signal.
I hate these people. They never have any idea how fast you're actually driving. In my experience, the person complaining is deflecting blame. The only times this has happened to me is the result of someone's dog running in front of my car because they couldn't be bothered to control it (or let their kids walk a 100lb dog next to a road).
Speed on residential roads is definitely a problem, but yelling at the people who aren't speeding isn't going to solve the problem.
Instead of creating gigantic roads that give drivers a false sense of confidence, employ smaller roads that encourage people to drive more slowly and use the same space to create safe paths and trails for pedestrians, cyclists and joggers to enjoy.
It's beyond bizarre that the roads in most subdivisions are so broad, and yet by design so lightly used. The amount of space in a typical subdivision devoted to roads and setbacks is staggering.
Study after study shows that the wider the lanes and roads are the faster the traffic will go. Making a street feel like you should drive slowly causes people to drive slowly.
For example, the average suburban cul-de-sac has a wider road than a country highway where you're expected to go at least twice as fast. It's two lanes plus a generous curb-side allowance for parking that, in another twist of irony, a lot of homeowners associations don't even allow.
I've lived in grid-based neighborhoods and apart from a few hours a day when things are unusually busy it's no worse than a street I lived on that connected to nowhere. A little traffic now and then isn't going to kill you, and nobody I knew growing up ever got rubbed out by a car. You quickly learn to respect traffic and avoid it.
Those things are all done safely on grids. Your example does not work to the logical end you want it to.
Like most other plans for ameliorating heavy traffic, it is somewhat effective for a short time, but it soon just causes that many more cars to try to drive through the area.
I've hit gridlock at 3am on the 101 before. The whole city feels like it was designed to be some elaborate torture device for commuters.
I guess any system of transportation would feel like torture for commuters if that system is overloaded and operating beyond its reasonable capacity.
One data point: As bad as it can be at times, especially on/near The Strip, Las Vegas still seems less congested than LA.
http://articles.latimes.com/1985-06-07/local/me-16088_1_traf...
as for the 3am traffic, that was probably night time caltrans work, or a drunk driving accident :(
I think that LA takes pride in its traffic, like some kind of shared struggle.
It is the only city I have lived in that has an implied 30 minute allowance for traffic delays. Everyone understands and you can use the excuse anytime or day of the week.
In a dense area like Manhattan, transport is not so bad because walking, cabs, or the subway are all viable alternatives in many cases.
In a lower density sprawl area like Los Angeles, cabs are prohibitively expensive for most trips, the subway usually doesn't go anywhere near where you are or where you want to go, the buses are stuck in traffic like any other vehicle, and walking is dangerous (due to the lack of pedestrian-friendly sidewalks in many areas) and would take many hours for each trip.
I think the best way to fix LA traffic would be to greatly increase the density and start building upwards so that walking and public transport become viable options for many more cases, but that seems very unlikely to happen anytime soon. It'd take decades to do anyway. So for now, it looks like LA is just stuck with its insane traffic status quo.
I also completely disagree with your evaluation of pointlessly twisty roads. I dislike them too, but they work really well at keeping through traffic out of the neighborhoods. Many of those pointlessly twisty roads are useless for going anywhere besides the houses they serve, and even when they are useful, they're usually less useful than the main roads. Cut-through traffic is usually a problem in areas with grid layouts, because that makes the side streets nearly as good at getting places as the main road, which can easily transform into "better than" if the main road is congested. For example, the first story in the article is about Takoma Park, which is pretty griddy.
I say this as someone who bought a house because of most of the reasons mentioned here. That being said, buying property does not somehow imbue you with the right to keep things exactly as they are for three decades while you pay it off.
Cities expand, people move in, population increases. If your quiet, picturesque residential street turns into a rush hour parking lot six years later, that's nobody's fault but it doesn't mean the right thing to do is put up speed humps (the oversized, usually movable plastic speed bumps) or whatever other nonsense you can think of to stick it to people because you were unlucky in your choice of property.
If it's not obvious I am using the royal you, not you specifically mikeash :)
Then one day they build more subdivisions around your subdivision and suddenly your street becomes a convenient way to get to this newer subdivision just as you were driving down roads that were quiet before until your subdivision got built.
Increasing traffic on your street is going to be a fact of life if we insist on building out and out rather than up. Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems as with increased density comes other transit options, especially public transit, as well as the reduced need to travel so far since everything's packed into a smaller area.
Instead of grocery stores being a mile apart, you might have two or three within a single square mile because of demand.
Its also a fact of life if we insist on building up. I've never seen a suburb that could compete with NYC on traffic snarls.
> Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems
Yes, it does, though it tends to be limited (at about the level where traffic is frequently slower than walking) by lack of parking spaces limiting the number of cars.
> as with increased density comes other transit options
Other transit options are necessary to allow densifying existing areas, because of the point above; you rapidly hit the point where you can't get more people in and out with existing infrastructure. That doesn't mean you don't cause the same traffic problems with density as with sprawl -- you do, and in fact you maximize them that way.
Suddenly they get a taste of why people living downtown are not too enthused about highways bringing in more people.
A lot of this mess stems from the absurd designs of modern American subdivisions with their pointlessly twisty roads. A grid-based layout might mean more through traffic, but the traffic can filter through many, many different cross-routes rather than funnelling through the singular optimal route.