http://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Sign%201.JP...
> Vision Zero is based on an underlying ethical principle that "it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system." In most road transport systems, road users bear complete responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation system designers and road users.
Using Los Angeles as an example:
https://ladotlivablestreets.org/programs/vision-zero
https://laist.com/news/transportation/2020-traffic-deaths-lo... for the graphic "Traffic violence in Los Angeles" showing the increase since Vision Zero was adopted.
Then you have enforcement issues like jaywalking laws, the wording and culture around collisions and referring to them as "accidents", etc.
The entire country was REbuilt (US cities were not always like this) around the car. Until that changes, no city will reach Vision Zero.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/nyregion/traffic-deaths-n...
https://www.snowyvalleys.nsw.gov.au/News-Media/Brungle-Road-...
i dont know how widely this turn of phrase is used, but where i grew up in the US, we called the middle turn lane in a 5 lane road the suicide lane.
A 3-lane is a road design where you’ve got one lane in each direction, and a shared passing lane in the middle.
These used to be quite popular as they were not much more expensive than a 2-lane but allowed better throughput, however as density and speeds increased they became more and more deadly as they’d encourage trying to pass and high-speed frontal collisions.
They’re mostly gone now, replaced by either 2+2 or 2+1 (the latter is very popular in europe, it’s basically a 3-lane except there’s a hard barrier which regularly swaps the center lane’s direction to allow safe passing sections — or more rarely a 1+1 with a protected turn lane).
You would never put one in a newly designed road, but when a road needs to be upgraded, they are a great solution.
The newspaper had regular reports of truck "capsizings", where a truck would lose control and turn over. It was common for a truck to have laborers who would fill up the truck with some bulk product like dirt, then ride on the top to go to the destination, then unload it. When one of these trucks capsized, it was a major disaster.
I dunno. People pack in as tightly as possible around here and we still get traffic. I think it is just inevitable.
On a serious note, the overtake left thing (or right for those strange people driving on the wrong side) is a big reason German Autobahn is as safe as it is. Reckless idiots notwithstanding.
Colloquially called a "suicide lane".
Having just a general all-purpose two-directional left-turning lane looks incomprehensibly dangerous to me.
When evaluating the danger of such a design, you have to consider the alternatives. You’re probably considering 3/4 head on collisions from drivers misjudging the turn. Those happen, but how many rear-end collisions are avoided?
They are about improving throughput.
What makes them dangerous, particularly in the five lane configuration, is the poor visibility for crossing uncontrolled intersections of multiple traffic lanes.
There's a stroad on Staten Island that scares the crap out of me - Hylan Blvd. I have family that live on it. It's six lanes with a median, but sometimes and in certain places parking is allowed in the outermost lanes. So you can suddenly come up on parked traffic but only at certain times of day in certain places. It's totally insane.
To get in the driveway, you have to loop the block to the closest light, wait for the green, and then drive halfway down the block and back-in before the light changes and traffic starts up. It's quite stressful.
The businesses hardly complain; they love to be where the greatest numbers of eyeballs and potential impulse shoppers are going by.
Maybe you could start with a strong street vs. road discipline, but I would predict that within 40 years any American polity will surely break it, and the stroad will re-emerge.
I am reminded of that cartoon where aliens arive on earth, and assume that cars are the dominant species, since so much of our world has been dedicated to them.
When I go to the shop, I walk or take my bike. And even here, the shops aren't in my street, but there's a small shopping center (with two supermarkets, a pharmacy, two drugstores, a bakery, a butcher, two organic food shops, a small bookstore, a fast food place, a pizza place, and some other shops) two streets over. It's easy to reach by car, but even easier to reach on foot by the entire neighbourhood they serve.
In the other direction, there's the big shopping street of the next neighbourhood over, still walkable, though it's more than a kilometer so I always take my bike, and there's tons more shops and great restaurants there. It's an older neighbourhood, more a shopping street than a shopping center, and cars constantly clog that street. Maybe less fun to live in that street, but it's still a very popular street to live in. Personally I'd prefer to see cars banned from that street, but maybe that's not an option for some reason.
Still, it's a great neighbourhood and a great shopping street, and it's nice to have not one but two such shopping areas close to my home. (There's a third not far from that second one, which had a fantastic cheese shop and has a daily market.)
Car-dependent suburbia is about imposing your car on everyone else while not allowing anyone else to impose their cars on you. It is inherently selfish city design.
With single-family zoning being the overwhelming norm in the U.S, it would be unfair to call this a refusal - the supply is artificially constrained. Had multi-family housing been legal to build, then it's pretty likely that people would move into them at higher rates.
While driving through that stroad, I remember thinking that the only people who benefit from this planning disaster is the local PD, as every corner gas station had cop cars hidden with their lights switched off.
Attempting to use zoning to stop that runs into the problem that by and large people don't want to live in dense areas. Most of them want the cheap home in the burbs. And they'll vote for those that give it to them.
This is the root problem with Strongtowns and their ilk. They love to navel gaze and contemplate the platonic ideal of how a city should be laid out. But for the most part fail to provide a viable option that people can and will choose.
No, strong towns "and their ilk" (biased much?) provide an unlimited supply of solutions to a variety of problems. If you're not seeing them it's because you don't want to see them.
There isn't a "now the city is better" red button you can hit. It takes a lot of effort to get there. One of the efforts is in fact a marketing one: you need to spread awareness of where the problems actually are and why they are a problem. Stroads are a good example; I had never realized they were a problem, but since I discovered them I've been noticing them whenever traveling and thinking a lot about the implications and how they could be redesigned in that spot.
Stroads are very difficult to find in western Europe by the way, compared to the US. In some countries they're non existent. Clearly you're mistaken about how they can and will just appear out of nowhere. Maybe things are more nuanced and complex than your three second opinion lets on.
The reason donuts cost more at your local walkable place is because real estate prices are higher in walkable places, because walkable places are so in-demand that as a nation we've bid the prices of those places to the moon. So we ought to change our zoning rules so that the market can build more of them. That's the whole point of Strong Towns idea.
Yes, Strong towns loves to say this too despite it being obviously not true.
Infrastructure stuff like roads and pipes and so on is cheap. Usually 10-15% of the budget. The real cost of government is in providing services to people. And those are invariably more expensive in the cities than the suburbs.
Show me even one city in the US that has lower taxes and spends less per Capita than the surrounding suburbs.
For one, suburbs are pretty economically difficult for low-earning households. Low earners are more likely to live in cities, therefore cities tend to have more social services.
You need to do an apples-to-apples comparison, which unfortunately is not easy.
Of course property tax rates are inversely correlated with property values so it's a bit tricky to compare, but the point is it's not always true that suburbs have lower taxes than the central city. Transportation costs are also typically much lower in cities (transit fares/passes are typically significantly cheaper than car ownership).
Notice how the second statement doesn't disprove the first.
It's true there are also other, superior, options, but that's a bonus!
edit: here it is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
The law mandates that everyone drive everywhere whether they want to or not.
It's easy to see why people choose the suburbs.
If people in the suburbs had to pay enough property tax to recoup their share for the cost of roads, water, sewage, electric, telecoms, mail and other ancillary services to their large, non-productive plot of land, they'd likely consider other options.
Suburbs look nice in the short term, before the roads need repaving and the utilities need major overhauls; but the total lifetime cost to the public far exceeds how much tax they bring in.
With single-family zoning being the norm in the U.S, it would be unfair to call this a choice. The supply of other types of housing is severely constrained.
These shops aren't on the stroad because the US is an anarchy where everything goes, they're there because it's designed that way. But the design is inefficient and dangerous.
It kills me that US road planners don't even bother putting in medium-term solutions that would fix most of the issues, like a road with separated through lanes in the middle and a one-lane service road for the driveways.
https://www.google.com/maps/@32.8276267,-117.2033566,3a,75y,...
This ofc doesn’t solve everything, like how crossing a super wide stroad is terrible for both cars and non-motorized users given the large number of conflict points, the long cycle times needed to move cars through fat intersections, etc.
They fail to provide a viable option because, as they point out, cities are complicated so universal prescriptions will fail. If no one in your place cares enough to come up with a local solution, then any intervention would have failed anyway, as we've seen for decades with aid work throughout the world.
Most of what they do is showing that what we have now is on a predictable, medium-term trajectory to insolvency by its fundamental financial unsound structure. Their 'ilk', so much as they have any, would be Urban3, who do GIS mapping of financial productivity within cities. So, 'navel gazing', I guess.
Separate traffic that requires different speeds.