cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/17900996
These are supposed to be satirical, but this one is literally true.
Source: I'm a former traffic engineer.
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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They are supposed to be satirical
My life has been a lie
We have the middle design at my closest freeway on-ramp. The lights on both sides aren’t synced so it causes traffic to back up for a mile at any time more people are on the road. It is insane.
When you say the lights "aren't synced," I assume you mean that they're exactly out of phase such that traffic going straight can never get all the way across on one green. FYI that's on purpose, because the whole point of that design is to prioritize the left turns to and from the ramps.
Crossing both lights isn’t a problem. It’s the left turn onto the freeway that gets backed up.
The thing is that two more lanes will fix a lot of traffic.
They have to be a special kind of lane though, made put of metal, with metal above, and require a special car, with metal wheels and a weird antenna on the roof
Yeah, though my experiences with rail cars are more of the Volvo PV801 kind....
Your rails are smaller?
That is a narrow gauge railroad at 891mm, it used to be part of the Roslagsbanan network, but it got cut down and this part is a herritage railroad.
A decent part of Roslagsbanan is still active with commuter traffic
You had me there at the first half, not gonna lie. 🤣
As tired as I am of this meme format, I have to agree. Traffic engineering is bunk.
I dislike cars generally but how is engineering traffic to be safer for all parties like the designs pictured a bad idea?
the idea that you can design safer traffic patterns isn't a bad idea. the idea that you can come up with some super efficient method to solve traffic in cities is. cities in asia literally were like "if your license plate starts with [x] you can't drive in rush hour on this day of the week". it led to car manufacturers selling more cars so that people could keep driving in rush hour, instead of any semblance of less traffic on the road
https://www.vice.com/en/article/odd-even-scheme-coding-traffic-worse-asia-philippines-indonesia/
... That's not an example of bad road design.
Incrementally making better intersections is still a good idea.
safer for all parties
If you were a pedestrian who had to walk through one of those designs, I guarantee you would not feel very safe.
The problem with traffic engineering is that it's solely concerned with vehicle traffic. Making roads safer and easier to drive on for cars actively makes them worse for everyone outside a car.
The more people drive, the more we all die. Even if you manage to engineer an intersection where no one gets run over, it still causes hurricanes, droughts, flooding, etc. It's all still enabling yet more bad behaviour.
This is a classic case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
This, but unironically
The graphic designer has a misinformed idea about engineering.
Cars are not meant to travel fast through cities.
This is true. City traffic planning was designed to maximize efficiency, not speed. This is no longer the case of many cities which now engineer congestion into design.
Rush hour traffic still goes to a crawl
People assume traffic represents failure, but the road still holds capacity, even if flowing slowly. Government data collection on infrastructure utilization and traffic recovery is prohibited in my area by vocal minorities to obstruct studies countering their goal objectives.
... Something something Trains
Trains are fun!
Just one more lane will fix it
I agree adding one lane won't "fix" traffic. Cities are organic and traffic balances out with infrastructure pressure and necessary.
On the other hand, many lanes around my area have converted to dynamically priced toll lanes; the resulting increase in congestion for remaining lanes drives up the cost of tolls. This has been very profitable for the government and flies in the face of this argument; if it were true, it wouldn't be so lucrative.
People assume traffic represents failure, but the road still holds capacity, even if flowing slowly
I mean... They still hold the same STATIC capacity, but when congested, their capacity to actually move people to their destination drops significantly, further aggravating congestion. But yes, the same number of people are still able to occupy the road at the same time. More, in fact.
Except actually tho
Working from home is the solution to all infrastructure problems and I'm sick of pretending it isn't.
Fuck your cars, buses, trains, the lot. Housing too expensive where you work? Live in a small cheap town. Roads too busy? Don't use them.
Are we all supposed to pretend the covid years didn't exist now?
I agree, but there are plenty of jobs that cannot be done in home office. During covid years I commuted like crazy (by train though) because I worked in a lab developing antiretrovirals. Even the project managers in biotech/pharma need to be on site especially in intense times (like covid) to be able to be in the lab. There are tons of jobs (isn't it 50%?) that cannot be done from home office. We need a strong public transport either way.
As a side note: The stupidest form of work is hybrid. So you still have to live relatively close to work to be able to commute, i.e. likely in an expensive metropolitan area, and pay higher rent prices because you need a working room, and the room is not fully tax deductible because you theoretically could be in the office (at least in Germany they deduct 6€/day for voluntary home office). It's a shame we don't have much more and much cheaper coworking spaces. They should be literally everywhere so you don't need to go further than 15 minutes.
Even if we assume everyone can work from home, people still need to go places for other reasons.
Yeah, but not all at the same time.
Where the roads are busiest is 8-9am and 5-6pm. That ain't shoppers or people going to the park.
So we can build things to a somewhat lower capacity sure. That helps, but what exactly does it solve?
I recognize the first two, but what’s the right most image of?
Looks like a jersey jughandle. Searched for an article explainer and found the source image.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/07032/
Don't ask me, i only crossposted.
But they could move both arcs together, to make it more compact.