Reply to Road Diets Coming to Fairfax County

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]

You are my stereotype of transit planners. They ignore all the big issues with safety like drunk driving and stoned driving and a complete lack of police enforcement of traffic laws and poorly designed intersections and people texting while driving and an epidemic of road rage and ridiculous amounts of double parking and the creeping sense creating by mopeds/cyclists/scooters doing whatever they want that only suckers obey traffic laws, and instead they obsesses over minor issues like the number of lanes. [/quote]

Ignore? Who got traffic stops and pursuit outlawed? Who opposes camera enforcement, interlock devices and speed governors? Who does the double parking and parks at bus stops?

It wasn't "traffic planners" and you know that.

In the zero enforcement environment drivers have created, design is the last tool left to reduce the carnage.

This is the world of your own making. 
[/quote]

Can the DC folks shut up? Thus entire thread is for people who actually live in the impacted area. Your post makes it obvious that you are focused on DC laws and enforcement and commute issues and do not know jack about living and commuting and the roads of outer Fairfax county.

Louder for the folks in the back:

THIS THREAD IS ABOUT FAIRFAX COUNTY NOT DC. [/quote]

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