Urban Replanning

I don’t know much about designing roads- but I think I know a little about it just from biking around the city. I really think the streets could be designed to better suit everyone’s needs. Maybe something like this:

Urban Replanning

By doing it this way, suddenly all the unpredictable things are predictable and tucked inside neat little painted lines.

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43 comments

  • Ian Brett Cooper August 16, 2012  

    Don’t worry, we’re getting there. Another few years and we’ll need a Ph.D just to navigate in downtown areas. And the more complexity they add, the more smug they get about making roads ‘bike friendly’. Meanwhile, more people get confused on the road and it just gets more dangerous.

    Just give me a strip of tarmac 20ft or more wide – we all know what to do on that. We keep right, we go at a reasonable speed and we use what we learned in our Driver’s Handbook. Does it really need to be more complicated than that?

    May the god of cycling protect us from traffic engineers and their infernal roadway paint!

    • BobBentBike August 16, 2012  

      Around here the urban planners get the credit for these “innovations”, not the engineers.

      • Ian Brett Cooper August 16, 2012  

        Here in MD, if you complain about paint on the road, you get to talk with a transportation engineer, who dutifully tells you that the painted stripe/sharrow/etc. meets guidelines. When you explain why it doesn’t, he/she goes silent. I’ve had this happen twice now.

        • Dan Fazzini August 21, 2012  

          Yep, same here. Actually you usually get the cite to the MUTCD *only* when it is in DOT’s favor. But they cite some exception when they ignore it or just don’t follow it themselves.

        • DOT/employee September 5, 2012  

          yes, this is true, I work for a DOT.
          it even frustrates me because we are not consistent with our own standards.
          we wiggle with the “engineering judgement” clause.

    • focus503 August 20, 2012  

      With 20 ft of tarmac, SUV’s would soon be 16.5 ft wide, and 25% of car drivers would still cut corners, and drift in and out of their lane like they haven’t got a care in the world

    • Brian Potter September 19, 2014  

      Ian, amen. I’ve had great luck on narrow multi-laned roads with NO special markings or bike “infacilities.” Drivers change lanes to pass. Simple driving behavior.

  • mech1 August 16, 2012  

    This is incredibly clever idea! Meeting everyday all those groups and this is really easy and good solution 😉

  • Louie Garcia August 16, 2012  

    I love this, especially the “circling fixie bike box’!

  • Steve August 16, 2012  

    Let’s apply Boyles Law here… you know the one, a gas will expand to fill it’s space…

    Order is good, but the members of Kaos (get smart??) are even better. For every one of us compliant control agents, Kaos deploys 3, 1 upstream salmon biker, 1 double parked car driver and 1 I’ll put my my truck here because the legal truck spots are full of cars with the blinkers on forcing the UPS trucks to park in the bike lane.

    Sometimes i picture a street with no markings… and wonder, usually out loud, would it be any different.

    • JCH August 20, 2012  

      Steve, look up the concept of Shared Space. It proposes just that; remove the markings and force people to think and interact (i.e. negotiate) with other roadway users. We have become so dependent upon being told everything to do that we shut off our brains (so that we can text, talk, etc).

      This diagram is actually a great demonstration of why even with the best planned/engineered infrastructure one cannot blithely go along and expect to be free of interaction and conflict on a roadway, even if space is separated (except for where it is not, which is one of those unfortunate realities that is often ignored). Roads and other transportation facilities are dynamic environments with constantly changing conditions and interactions.

  • Janice August 16, 2012  

    What is a “shoaler”? (sorry, not from a ginormous city)

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