Design Streets and Intersections Using Proper Methods
Counterintuitively, it is backward (and ruinous) to design streets and intersections for motor vehicles.
The proper method is to design motor vehicles (and how they are driven) for streets and intersections that are designed to create places that humans outside of motor vehicles find appealing, attractive, and safe.
In a town center, that means streets and intersections that obligate attentive driving -- that is, streets and intersections are designed to be human-scaled and slower-speed. They are not designed to maximize the number of high-speed motor vehicles that can conveniently and mindlessly barrel through.
Since we have largely gone about this backward for a century (because we have designed streets and intersections single-mindedly to maximize motor vehicle speeds and volumes), it will require many years and some difficulty to correct our methods.
In the near term, it means oversized vehicles (including [gasp!] emergency response vehicles) will be inconvenienced. Note that proper design does not make it impossible for oversized vehicles, but merely more inconvenient. If the inconvenience is high enough, some oversized vehicles will need to be replaced by smaller vehicles.
Peter Swift clearly showed in his Longmont Colorado study that larger street and intersection dimensions to enable oversized vehicles to travel without inconvenience lead to a substantial increase in speeding and inattentiveness by smaller yet much more common passenger vehicles. That increased speed and inattentiveness, Swift showed, results in a net increase in injuries and deaths because the few seconds saved by oversized fire trucks save a comparatively small number of lives compared to the much larger loss of life due to increased speed and inattentiveness by the common passenger vehicles.
Livability consultant Dan Burden, by the way, is a master at orchestrating in-the-field demonstrations showing how even large emergency service vehicles can negotiate neckdowns and traffic circles. It was folks such as Dan who taught me – when working to improve the design of streets and intersections -- the importance and
desirability of emphasizing horizontal interventions such as street and intersection narrowing neckdowns, rather than vertical interventions such as speed humps. The former is much more compatible with emergency service vehicles than the latter.