Maybe there should be more lights? That way we don’t have little old ladies crossing 6-lane stroads without a crosswalk to get to the market, while the nearest crosswalk is a half mile in the wrong direction.
Obviously this only works where there’s one major throughway and most perpendicular streets are minor…like every retail center in every city >35k pop in the country. These roads often have very predictable traffic patterns.
Getting lights synced up for a consistent speed is the easy part.
There should be less car infrastructure, not more. Crossing a 6-lane road will suck regardless. Both asphalt roads and traffic lights are very expensive to build and maintain, better to invest a bit more up-front in tram tracks and rip the socioeconomic benefits for decades to come.
Sure. But those are necessary as long as we have a car dependency.
The real hard problem is breaking the car dependency…and this, like piracy, is almost always a service problem.
So the solution must be an alternative that is preferable to cars by almost every objective measure…and then we are stuck in a chicken/egg problem.
Nobody wants to make alternatives that are better (or that make driving worse), because people are going to continue to prefer driving as long as it remains the preferable option. Cars are deeply woven into every layer of our society post WWII. That means hardly anybody alive today has ever experienced that America.
There’s a huge investment, and probably at least a decade of work, per metro area, if everything were to go to plan. That’s relying on city and state governments to organize and build transportation infrastructure while simultaneously discouraging car use by means like removing gas stations and parking garages from inside the city, or designing pedestrian-only zones.
I’m highly pessimistic about such a thing happening. I would love it if it did. In the meantime I will continue being a wage slave for the capitalists in one of the last generations of humanity.
Those kinds of places, usually only have one or two blocks worth of store front anyways. The Walmart. The big box hardware store, two churches, cafe and 3 bars.
I do agree we should make our roads safer, but that’s really not going to happen in small town America. Especially when you’re already not enforcing basic road safety laws
Maybe there should be more lights? That way we don’t have little old ladies crossing 6-lane stroads without a crosswalk to get to the market, while the nearest crosswalk is a half mile in the wrong direction.
Obviously this only works where there’s one major throughway and most perpendicular streets are minor…like every retail center in every city >35k pop in the country. These roads often have very predictable traffic patterns.
Getting lights synced up for a consistent speed is the easy part.
We need more roundabouts, too.
There should be less car infrastructure, not more. Crossing a 6-lane road will suck regardless. Both asphalt roads and traffic lights are very expensive to build and maintain, better to invest a bit more up-front in tram tracks and rip the socioeconomic benefits for decades to come.
The solution is to not have 6-lane stroads
Sure. But those are necessary as long as we have a car dependency.
The real hard problem is breaking the car dependency…and this, like piracy, is almost always a service problem.
So the solution must be an alternative that is preferable to cars by almost every objective measure…and then we are stuck in a chicken/egg problem.
Nobody wants to make alternatives that are better (or that make driving worse), because people are going to continue to prefer driving as long as it remains the preferable option. Cars are deeply woven into every layer of our society post WWII. That means hardly anybody alive today has ever experienced that America.
There’s a huge investment, and probably at least a decade of work, per metro area, if everything were to go to plan. That’s relying on city and state governments to organize and build transportation infrastructure while simultaneously discouraging car use by means like removing gas stations and parking garages from inside the city, or designing pedestrian-only zones.
I’m highly pessimistic about such a thing happening. I would love it if it did. In the meantime I will continue being a wage slave for the capitalists in one of the last generations of humanity.
Those kinds of places, usually only have one or two blocks worth of store front anyways. The Walmart. The big box hardware store, two churches, cafe and 3 bars.
I do agree we should make our roads safer, but that’s really not going to happen in small town America. Especially when you’re already not enforcing basic road safety laws