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posted by CoolHand on Thursday June 04 2015, @03:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the counterintuition dept.

Angie Schmitt writes in Streetsblog USA that city streets with the widest lanes — 12 feet or wider — are associated with greater crash rates and higher impact speeds and that there is hard evidence that wider lanes increase risk on city streets. Dewan Masud Karim conducted a wide-ranging review of existing research as well as an examination of crash databases in two cities, taking into consideration 190 randomly selected intersections in Tokyo and 70 in Toronto. Looking at the crash databases, Karim found that collision rates escalate as lane widths exceed about 10.5 feet. According to Karim "human behavior is impacted by the street environment, and narrower lanes in urban areas result in less aggressive driving and more ability to slow or stop a vehicle over a short distance to avoid collision. Designers of streets can utilize the “unused space” to provide an enhanced public realm, including cycling facilities and wider sidewalks, or to save money on the asphalt not used by motorists." Karim concluded that there is a sweet spot for lane widths on city streets, between about 10 and 10.5 feet.

According to Jeff Speck the fundamental error that underlies the practice of traffic engineering is an outright refusal to acknowledge that human behavior is impacted by its environment and it applies to safety planning, as traffic engineers, designing for the drunk who's texting at midnight, widen our city streets so that the things that drivers might hit are further away. "When lanes are built too wide, many bad things happen. In a sentence: pedestrians are forced to walk further across streets on which cars are moving too fast and bikes don't fit," writes Speck adding that a pedestrian hit by a car traveling 30 mph at the time of impact is between seven and nine times as likely to be killed as one hit by a car traveling 20 mph This tremendously sharp upward fatality curve means that, at urban motoring speeds, every single mile per hour counts. "Every urban 12-foot lane that is not narrowed to 10 feet represents a form of criminal negligence; every injury and death, perhaps avoidable, not avoided—by choice."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:34AM (#191917)
    *yawn* If you really want attention you're going to have to do much better than that.
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:44AM (#191921)

    Well let's see I was simply making an observation that black people cross the street when they don't have the right of way because they think they deserve to receive preferential treatment for things that dead white people did 150 years ago to dead black people. But sure if you want to reply I guess that makes it a SUCCESSFUL TROLL doesn't it you fucking cockfucker.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @06:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @06:00AM (#191932)
      Still bored. Got anything better?