Reply to Road Diets Coming to Fairfax County

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[quote=Anonymous][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. [b]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.[/b] 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]

Transit planners are always spouting these embarrassing aphorisms. Y'all need to get out of the sociology department and study economics. [/quote]

I used to find it weird that driving advocates have such a limited understanding of traffic, but it makes sense once you realize they only are driving advocates because they don't understand traffic.

Do you truly believe that when a road goes from 2 lanes to 3 that it increased as much capacity as when it when from 1 to 2? Do you really think cars flow like a fluid in a pipe? You don't see cars bunch up in a lane? You don't see people change lanes resulting in someone having to hit their brakes? Why do multi-lane roads have more accidents than single lane roads?

That's before you even get to the issues of intersections, the wider you make a road, the harder it is to make a turn across one. People and businesses start demanding new stop-signs and signals as roads get wider. Surely you prefer to make an unprotected left across one lane than three? You must realize this at some level, even if it counteracts your linear lane increase concept. [/quote]

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