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][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]

It really amazing how you can launch into these voluminous diatribes about all manner of factors that you assert create traffic accidents and yet manage to avoid completely the one factor that is both a necessary and sufficient cause of almost any traffic fatality: speed. And what is of course the one factor that causes drivers to speed? Wide roads. Hence the traffic calming.

I'm sure you that your proud of your edgy "alternative" perspective on road planning and traffic safety. And I'm sure that there are ample selfish folk out there who embrace your perspective as it helps absolve them of the embarrassment they should feel for breaking traffic laws by driving at unsafe speeds. But the reality is that it reveals that, if you know anything about traffic at all, you have no interest in giving voice to it.[/quote]

I doubt speed is a primary cause of most accidents, or that when speeding occurs and does cause accidents it happens on mostly on fairly straight multi-lane roads and involves cars operated by unimpaired drivers.  Those premises seem extremely shaky.

Instead: intoxication due to alcohol and drugs, inattentive/distracted driving, failure to obey traffic signals, reckless driving, and general incompetence at the wheel of what can be a lethal weapon seem like much more likely contributors to accidents.  In any case, multi-lane roads don't cause accidents in themselves; it's the vehicle operator(s) who cause accidents, and that's where the focus should be - operator behavior.  Roads, no matter how many lanes, are usually built to standards which are sufficient for user safety, if users drive intelligently, a huge caveat but one which has nothing to do with the roads themselves.  
[/quote]

Thanks for your opinion.

Speeding is not necessary nor sufficient to cause a crash.

Speeding is both necessary and sufficient to cause a fatal crash.

If you care about protecting property, focus on eliminating factors - intoxication, distracted driving, general incompetence - that cause crashes.

If you care about protecting lives, focus on eliminating excessive speed. The most effective means of doing this is to narrow road width.[/quote]

Increased congestion combined with increasing distractions while eliminating means of avoidance and decreasing margins for error INCREASES accidents which INCREASES the chances of fatalities.[/quote]

Opinions are fun. Science is funner.

[url]https://highways.dot.gov/safety/other/road-diets/road-diet-informational-guide/2-why-consider-road-diet#:~:text=Studies%20indicate%20a%2019%20to,over%2065%20years%20of%20age.&text=Road%20Diets%20improve%20safety%20by%20reducing%20the%20speed%20differential.[/url][/quote]

That's not science that's public relations.  Notice the key word "potential".  There have been hundreds, if not thousands of hard data studies over decades of human existence that support what I said.  You, on the other hand, have vibes.

Any analysis that obsesses on a single factor, to the complete exclusion of not only context but everything else, is beyond meaningless.[/quote]

What the hell are you talking about?

The results of the scientific studies that demonstrate that road diets reduce fatalities are highlighted for you in bright yellow and yet you somehow manage to ignore that and instead focus on a single word in the introductory sentence.

And then you claim that there are “thousands of hard data studies” to back up your position, fail to cite a single one, and accuse others of basing their arguments on “vibes”.

Do you really not see how deeply hilarious this is for the rest of us?

There was a time, a few decades ago, when ignorance - and maybe even a confidence in stupid, uninformed positions - was perhaps excusable.

In those days, you and I could have been debating this issue in a bar, a bowling alley, VFW hall or wherever, and - without a visit to a university library and days of combing through volumes of obscure journals looking for a survey article - none of us would be any the wiser as to what the data showed, if there even was any.

The idea that you could have all the evidence literally at your fingertips would be incomprehensible to us back in those days. And if we could comprehend it, we would surely have nothing but contempt for those who - amidst such untrammeled and instantaneous access to a wealth of knowledge - nonetheless see fit to promulgate stupid uninformed opinions (and very especially those deployed against policies that, studies show, save people’s lives).

Which is a very long way of saying that just as my younger self would have nothing but contempt for what you are doing, so do I right now.[/quote]

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