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 his 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 passenger vehicles (even if they are slower-moving), 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, quickest, and easiest way to slow vehicles is to allow or install 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, affordable, quick 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 (i.e., 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 – such as decorative wrought iron archways -- 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. Efforts that have focused on speeding up motor vehicles, maximizing how many motor vehicles can be accommodated, and applying socialist economics to motoring.
That is, having society pay for motor vehicle driving and parking, rather than the motorist. Socialism for motorists is the root cause of much of our transportation woes.