Reply to Road Diets Coming to Fairfax County

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"Road diet": is a ridiculous concept.  Roads were built in the first place to meet a need.  That need did not just go away, allowing road capacity to be reduced without affecting road users.  Adding additional pedestrian/bicycle/scooter capacity is one thing, but it's destructive if done by eliminating existing road capacity at the expense of existing road users who don't/can't use those alternative modes of transportation.  Wishful thinking about green and healthy bicycling doesn't magically create thousands of new daily bicycle riders who happily abandon cars for bicycles for long commutes in bad weather, wearing business attire.    [/quote]

If a road is unsafe, because people drive too fast on it, then a diet can be beneficial even if no alternate capacity is added.

If you preserve intersection capacity, which is usually the real bottleneck, then dropping a lane may not even negatively impact through-flow. Part of this is because each additional lane is less useful than the one before it. People start weaving in and out of traffic, changing lanes and its harder to turn across multi-lane roads. This magnifies conflict points and leads to accidents. Accidents tend to bring roads to complete standstill. Single lane roads have far fewer accidents.

This is why road widening rarely "works." [/quote]

Roads are rarely unsafe because of higher speeds.  Accidents typically occur at intersections, and are usually due to inattention, ignoring a red light, pulling out in front of oncoming traffic, or other driver errors.  Not speed as such.  Most drivers drive at a speed they are comfortable with for conditions, which is oftentimes higher than posted speed limits which assume a general level of driving incompetence and likely carnage if speeds are commensurate with road character.  That is not to say there aren't some people who do drive at such excessive speeds relative to the rest of traffic that they are per se obviously a danger to everyone - those are edge cases which can be dealt with through directed enforcement.

Reducing lanes of traffic merely increases congestion which in turn increases pollution from ICE vehicles, increases driving times and reduces quality of life for drivers.  It doesn't make any difference to "safety".  Look at cars going the speed limit or moderately faster on interstate highways - few (if any) spontaneously go out of control due to driving 65 mph or faster.  [/quote]

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