Making Our Transportation System Better, Not Worse
A local elected official submitted a post to my “Next Door” neighborhood email list regarding local traffic calming. I sent a note to him to thank him for doing that. I told him I was grateful for his work to improve the safety and quality of life in neighborhoods by designing streets to slow down motor vehicles.
I then went on to say that I’ve been working in transportation planning for 40 years, and am a strong supporter of designing streets for slower, more attentive driving.
Having said that, I went on to say that I dislike speed humps. I tipped my hat to him for pointing out that humps are a problem for emergency vehicles. I added to that by reminding him that in addition, humps increase neighborhood noise pollution, damage even slower-moving vehicles, and create problems for cyclists.
I believe, I said, hump installation in Greenville (the city I live in) should end, and existing humps removed.
There are far better ways to slow vehicles.
The cheapest and easiest is to allow on-street parking on the many local streets that currently do not allow such parking – preferably with attractive landscaped bulb-outs that create parking “pockets.”
Other desirable options are reducing the width of travel lanes, removing turn lanes (at a minimum, by converting double-left turns to single-left turns), replacing continuous left-turn lanes with raised medians, and shrinking road width with road diets (removing travel and turn lanes).
Another helpful strategy is traffic circles and roundabouts – both of which should be mountable so they are less of an obstacle to emergency vehicles.
An important but too often neglected strategy is to use human-scaled street elements to signal to motorists that they are in a low-speed environment. This involves reducing the height of street signs and street lights. It also means planting trees to create a street tree canopy. In addition, we need to replace highway-oriented “mast arm” intersection traffic signal lights and lights that hang well above the intersection with human-scaled post-mounted signals. Gateway features at neighborhood entrances can also help.
I know of nothing that more effectively and affordably improves a city and its neighborhoods than designing streets and roads for slower, more attentive driving. We have an obligation, I pointed out to my elected representative, to advance this objective more vigorously.
The first step is to stop our increasingly unaffordable, century-long efforts to make our transportation system worse.