In France they installed roundabouts. And a lot of them. I mean really a lot! It works.
If you read the article it’s very obviously advocating for fewer green lights. I’ve no idea what this headline is on about
"Essentially, rather than encouraging drivers to speed up by presenting an endless succession of green lights, this strategy makes red the default state for lights on a busy road. When traffic approaches the red light, the cycle triggers. Traffic moving faster than the limit will approach the light while it’s still red, forcing it to slow or stop for the light before it changes, while traffic moving at the limit will be met with a perfectly-timed green.
Drive the limit, in other words, and you’re rewarded with a constant rhythm of green lights."
That’s why the title makes sense
It’s a good thing to have more green lights, because emissions drop a lot. A few cities in my area spent a lot of money in the 1970s to do that. But the problem is that they sync at 30, and also at higher speeds.
Fix road design so that people don’t speed. A six lane stroad signals a limit considerably higher than 40kph, no matter what you do with the stoplights.
Road design doesn’t really stop people from speeding.
The data I’ve seen says it does.
If you design a road to be safe to drive 60, people will drive 60 even if you post a limit of 35.
The exceptions are places where there is always a traffic cop waiting to ticket you.
It does. When the risk isn’t a fine but hitting a curb or raised midsection or wooden pole, people actually slow down. I’m pretty sure I have seen studies on that, but can’t look them up now.
Also roundabouts. Can’t go 40mph through one of those.
Maybe you can’t.
How did you get a video of me?!
Username checks out
this is Lombard Street in San Francisco
you think anyone’s ever broken the 25mph speed limit on that section of street?
Yes, if their breaks failed … briefly.
Noted car enthusiast NotJustBikes disagrees. And so do several generations of traffic engineers, not just in the Netherlands. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc
Traffic calming doesn’t stop speeding, but it stops ubiquitous speeding - the situation where the speed limit is 50 but traffic flows at 70.
Projection much
Do you have anything to back that up?
The main street for all the businesses in a nearby city is set up so you can hit all green lights going down the road from 2pm-~6pm, however if you get caught at a SINGLE light, you’re going to hit reds all the way down.
So it’s become “oh that light is about to change better engage T U R B O M O D E and speed 20mph over the limit to beat this light and stay with the greens” which turns out very predictably at least once a month.
Last week a car rolled twice while speeding up to beat the light and clipped an ambulance coming from another street.
The DOT planning department I worked for (in the 80s) had studies showing that synchronizing the lights 10-15mph ABOVE the speed limit kept traffic flowing “optimally” to minimize congestion without having to expand the infrastructure (mostly: lanes). Even today I see city traffic lights synchronized mostly +10mph over the posted limit in the direction of highest flow on major arteries - you can tell when you “make” one yellow light, then lock in cruise control at limit+10 and “make” the next 3+ lights at exactly the same flash of yellow as you approach.
They do this to delay improvement projects like additional lanes, straightening curves, etc. by showing a higher “level of service” for the roadway than they would have with the lights synchronized at, say: speed limit -10mph. If you’re talking about a 45mph roadway, moving the cars at 55mph instead of 35mph means 157% as many vehicles per hour at the same spacing, and we all know that people don’t actually increase following distances at higher speeds, so… it’s a real, and significant difference. Not as significant as getting people to carpool, or take public transit, but that’s about as likely to happen as increasing following distances.
Wait, you mean the thing where people who do the speed limit have to stop at 3 straight reds while people doing 15 over are able to squeeze through all of them is the result of an intentional choice? It irritates the hell out of me how often that kind of thing happens in my town, but I always thought it was just some kind of oversight or inefficiency on the part of the engineers who set up the timing cycles, given how how clearly and directly it incentivizes speeding…
If driving the speed limit is the most efficient way to get where you’re trying to go, people will tend to drive the speed limit. Seems like that should be pretty obvious, imo.
Some people seem like driving is a game to them. They’ll speed ahead at a green only to slam on the brakes at the next red, as long as they can get around you first.
Anything except public transportation
Never been a fan of the “we shouldn’t make the smaller, easier improvements because we need to do the bigger, harder things instead” argument…
Yes, we need more and better public transit, but that is going to take a whole lot of time, money, and effort to work towards. Yes, it’s worthwhile, and we shouldn’t STOP working towards it because of this, but I don’t think that’s a reason to balk at a smaller, easier incremental change that encourages safer driving while also simply being more efficient.
For public transportation in the US you need medium density living. So you’re talking about getting everyone on board and uprooting everyone as you upgrade cities or build new cities for that.
“Anything except making incremental improvements that are practical instead of doing nothing because the preferred goal is impossible, at least practically impossible” - not as catchy, I admit :P
I’d argue the even bigger deal is mixed zoning. You can even be in a fairly spread out, small town, if you can just walk to the local grocery store, hardware store, etc, that’s even better than needing to transit.
I rarely leave my neighborhood even in a very transit heavy city because I’ve got 3 grocery stores, a green grocer, two bakeries, a hardware store, etc, all within ~5 minutes walk. Both my kids’ schools, a pre-K-K and an elementary, are within a block or two.
A lot of this can be accomplished by simply rezoning and letting the infill slowly change.
Do you want traffic lights to only turn every 5-10 minutes? Lights were always going to be changing more than transit was arriving, if altering how it changes slows speeding drivers why wouldn’t you want that?
I don’t want traffic lights. If you design your cities properly (with no personal cars) traffic lights are not needed at all. Outside cities traffic lights don’t make sense anyways, intersections there are better off as roundabouts.
Sounds great, but I don’t live there and do have to deal with drivers and traffic lights, and I would like to implement whatever measures will slow them down. If the first and easiest is altering traffic light patterns, cool, do it. I’m supposed to not want this?
It depends on whether this is about retiming existing lights (which is relatively cheap) or building new ones. Retiming existing lights is fine, building new ones just shows that engineers don’t care about the problem and would rather waste millions of $ on a non-solution.
I don’t see anything in the article about building more lights, just altering the timing so that the default light state is red instead of green.
…or what if we actually punish people who pilot their two-ton death machines irresponsibly?
Remember, though: if the punishment is a fine, then to the rich, it’s not a punishment. It’s a price.
If it scales with income, it stays a punishment.
If it scales with wealth. The rich are very good at hiding their income.
You don’t even have to be rich-rich. Car-related fines are a joke.
I was thinking more along the lines of losing one’s license.
Indeed, though I would suggest that, for more significant infractions, state seizure of the vehicle (as the tool used to commit the crime) should be an option, with proceeds from vehicle sales by the state going to safety infrastructure and perhaps a victim restitution fund.
People are very attached to their cars, so that’s a punishment, and they won’t be needing it anymore without a license!
state seizure of the vehicle
Absolutely not if you’re talking the US. We already have civil forfeiture which is abused far to easily and frequently.
My wife went to school to be a paralegal. Her first job was working asset forfeiture for a county DA’s office. That experience single-handedly made her have to go back to school to switch careers. It really is one of the most unjust aspects of our justice system, which is really saying something.
Precisely. I’m saying that, if we already have it anyway, we ought to regulate it. If we can abolish it, great. If not, then it should be heavily regulated, with the funds earmarked for things that aren’t enforcement-related, so that there’s less perverse incentive for law enforcement to just grab things for shits, giggles and greed. The government can and will seize your home for nonpayment of taxes, so it’s not like this doesn’t already happen outside of civil asset forfeiture. It’s just a matter of how well-regulated the system is, and what steps are taken to reduce perverse incentives.
Forgive me if I doubt it could be appropriately regulated and properly applied in the US.
In the current situation? Absolutely. I’m fairly certain it would take a violent uprising, then a constitutional convention, to actually count the US as a country with laws. It’s full, mask-off kakistocratic corpofascism.
There are, however, individual states and jurisdictions which could implement it well with reform.
Punishment doesn’t prevent behavior that already happened and is usually missed. Road modifications help every time.
My town has a major road that was one of the most infuriating and dangerous in town. It was two lanes in each direction, constant jockeying for position or to make the light or to get around a turning car.
All it took was repainting. Now it’s one lane in each direction with turning lanes. There is no jockeying for position since it’s only one lane. But turning cars are no longer blocking so no infuriating stop and go. They even coordinated the lights.
Now that road is slower, calmer, no road rage or angry drivers and everyone gets through in less time
Almost all commenters find some problem with this, but I have seen this work on my own dad who unfortunately prefers going 10kph over the speed limit most of the time. Either the traffic lights are timed in sequence or sensors are placed so that with low traffic, lights stay red until a car approaches and the light is timed with the location of the sensor for going the speed limit. The last one also allows pedestrian and bike lights to stay green when there isn’t any car traffic.
Did a speeding driver write this?
No it was a cat
How about just magnetic sensors near intersections that count how many cars are approaching and do some math to decide what would be the most efficient. If no cars coming in the cross streets then dont turn the light red in the opposite direction.
Nothing angers drivers more than sitting through a full cycle and nobody used the green.
This can be solved with sensors and math.
No fucking AI in my traffic lights!
This is actually a thing in some places. I’m sure the cost is why it’s not more widely adopted.
Cost vs flock rollout? (Lol, you mean no profit motive, so no special interests to push it through local government kickbacks)
Cost vs total fuel saved by efficiency gain? (Lol, different budget right?)
Can’t fix opex problems with capex dollars.
Another solution is to go back to actually enforcing it in a meaningful way.
Also you can’t get all lights everywhere synced up that way, and it would only work in places that have a significant number of lights. Places that have 3 on Main Street are still going to have problems.
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.
That way we don’t have little old ladies crossing 6-lane stroads without a crosswalk to get to the market
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.
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.
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
I’ve seen lights with sensors several blocks back that will turn red if you’re going too fast.
Sounds like an amazing solution! Unfortunately, like with almost every way to try to control dangerous driving, it will probably lead to more deaths because dangerous drivers will now be running the reds.
just make all lights green. problem solved
Nah. The trick to stop speeding drivers is to stop listening to drivers whine about the solutions to speeding.
Put a speed camera on every block, and have automated tickets put points on your license like any other ticket. Start revoking habitual speeders’ licenses and word will get around.
Or just put a GPS linked governor on energy car on the road as a condition of keeping its registration active, and use that to make speeding actually impossible.
Whole worlds of options open up when you stop caring that it will make the ecocidal narcissists sad.
You’re seriously advocating for an authoritarian surveillance state?
sees lemmy.ml
Ah, that explains it.
I’ll take the speeding over the authoritarianism thanks
Eh. Maybe reduce a few, but not stop.
Some people like being at the back of whatever pack of cars are in front of them, so they speed up to tailgate.
