Traffic Calming Drives Me Bananas
Posted on | September 27, 2008 at 10:31 am | 1 Comment
It seems to me like the roads are getting worse. Ever since summer ended, traffic has gotten weird. Not only is my morning commute more congested, but it seems like there are more accidents than ever. These days, more often than not I encounter the aftermath of an accident on my morning commute. I used to take pleasure from driving, but now I’m beginning to experience fear and inevitability (no doubt due in part to my crash last year).
I’ve mentioned before Tom Vanderbilt’s book and blog about Traffic. I still don’t have the book, but I’ve been keeping up with the blog, which is fascinating. One of the points that Vanderbilt keeps hammering home is that the roads would be a lot safer if people drove slower and paid more attention. He appears to be an advocate of “traffic calming” – doing anything you can to get people to slow down and focus on their surroundings. In this area, that includes putting stoplights where there aren’t cross streets, turning one-way streets back into two-way streets, lowering speed limits, and things like that. Roundabouts have started appearing too. Roundabouts are supposedly good for traffic calming, because since there are no stoplights or anything, you really have to pay attention to the other cars and to what you are doing. A lot of cities (especially in Europe) are trying radical measures along these lines, including implementing the “shared space” concept, where you take away all traffic signs, lights, crosswalks, road lines, etc. See this blog entry for an example of a German village where they did that to the central town square.
I think this is all very interesting, but I don’t know how I’d approach something like that happening locally. I’m all for paying attention while driving. But I’m the kind of person who needs direction. Though I like to drive and feel that I’m very good at avoiding distractions and being totally aware of the traffic flow around me, and even probably drive too aggressively than is warranted, I still get stressed out when I have to make a decision. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I will purposely avoid taking routes where I have to make decisions, such as right turns on a red light where the cross traffic is heavy.
I know I should probably just be riding the bus to work, but there are too many things I need my car for. I don’t feel that guilty about the gas because I *smug alert* drive a Prius. If I were paying more for gas, it would probably be a different story. But also, I want to keep my hand in driving. Don’t want to become rusty. I love cruising down the open road with some good tunes on the stereo. I like executing a perfectly timed passing maneuver. I think I even like getting angry at other drivers, because it makes me feel superior or something. It makes me feel. I would never do anything road-ragey, but I do like to talk smack. As long as they don’t see me doing it.
So, though I see its value, I’m not really a fan of traffic calming. What happened to all those studies that showed the mandatory 55 mph speed limit didn’t really save lives after all? There’s a reason it got revoked. People like to get where they’re going in the fastest way possible. It’s just unnatural to go that slow (please, no quoting of Sammy Hagar the Horrible), and I also think that makes it more dangerous, because it’s going against the Rhythm of the Road. But if it is more dangerous to drive faster, so be it.
Latre.
(Speaking of Vanderbilt’s blog, there’s an interesting entry here talking about a new system for Audi cars where the stoplights will communicate with the car and let it know when the light will turn, so that the driver can judge whether or not he needs to speed up or slow down. It even calculates the optimum speed needed to avoid stopping. But as Vanderbilt says, it doesn’t take into account how many cars are stacked up ahead of you or any other road conditions. My question is: Where are these miraculous communicating stoplights? I bet they’re pretty rare. I’m not even sure I want traffic lights talking to my car. Next thing you know, the car will be talking back to the stoplight and telling it that the driver just ran a red light.)
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “how to get a snake out of a building”.
Comments
One Response to “Traffic Calming Drives Me Bananas”
September 27th, 2008 @ 11:30 am
I read parts of the book about Traffic, but couldn’t stay interested enough to read the whole thing. Personally, I think I like the German approach to driving. Make it hard to get a license in the first place and easy to lose it. Then don’t make cars with vanity mirrors, cup holders, cell phone chargers, etc. Germans know that when you get in the car you are there to drive, not eat breakfast, drink coffee, apply lipstick, read the newspaper, or talk on your cell phone. When the smallest of errors can result in your firey death, it isn’t the time for multitasking. (Odd, that’s the second time today I’ve made an online reference to firey death.)
I have to agree that I don’t want my car to have a conversation with street lights. Once that happens, how long can it be before Skynet is sending cyborgs through time to retroactively defeat the human enemy?