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:
By doing it this way, suddenly all the unpredictable things are predictable and tucked inside neat little painted lines.
What Ian said!
Competent professionals know that half the people who use the streets are below average in intelligence. And the other half didn’t read the press release about the cute new design.
“Glance recognition” is a key element of good design of traffic control devices. A new design, no matter how cute, can be dangerous if it flunks the glance recognition test. And the more places you make a vehicle operators look as he approaches an intersection, the more any individual sign or marking is going to flunk that test.
anyone notice the wrong way bike lane is the same as the red light express lane? solve two problems at once?
Sort of a swiss army/quantum mechanics of transportation – all solutions are possible at the same time and we have a tool for it…somewhere!
Don’t forget that you really need to have some boxes and/or lines on off-road cycle paths too. The number of cyclists (and joggers wth ipods (grrr!!!)) who don’t consider that it just makes sense for everyone to stay on the same sides of the cycle paths as if they were using a road (another Bikesnobbism – no salmoning!).
It just makes it all a bit more predictable if you can expect which side you will meet oncoming people, or which way they will travel around a roundabout… (sortry – I’m in the UK and we have roundabouts).
Cycle paths in your area are wide enough for people to use only half of their width? Luxury! Around here, they tend to be 3ft wide, so any passing or oncoming traffic has to turn off into the grass. Just one more reason I avoid them like the plague.
There’s an unsegregated shared-use path alongside the main road into the city, that I use sometimes. About a third of it is a long straight flat section about five feet wide. The rest (the bits going up and down hills, where you really don’t want to have to stop halfway up) are only about three feet wide (and pot-holed, and overgrown). But everyone knows what to do on the narrow bits; it’s on the wide bits where people go “Whee! Look how spacious this is… Why, I think I will wander about over the whole thing in a state of bicycle bliss!”
The dreaded “j” word:
http://rwdaily.runnersworld.com/2010/12/the-curse-of-the-jogger.html
Also, aren’t those on foot supposed to be going the “wrong way”?