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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: 1) by anubi on Thursday June 04 2015, @06:41AM

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday June 04 2015, @06:41AM (#191937) Journal

    Me too. Usually people are parked along the side of the road. When the lanes are narrow, I know there is no room to maneuver should a child, dog, or whatever suddenly appear in front of me and I may be forced to ditch the kinetic energy of my car into a parked car. Either that or hit the kid. Or the thing jutting out of the parked vehicle I cannot avoid by simply swerving around it.

    I lived in a neighborhood with narrow streets once, and finding parked cars dented during the night was commonplace. No humans involved, but it was like trying to navigate a theater aisle without stepping on someone's feet.

    Once in a while, there is still the a-hole which rips through our neighborhood like it was a freeway. Not all that often though, as the people planning our neighborhood provided no incentive to cut through our neighborhood to get somewhere else. We generally know who the guy is who is, and he gets gently reminded that should he ever have an accident in our neighborhood, he will have a hard time trying to find anyone that won't testify he has a history of ripping through the place.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]