This one is in a school zone. People really shouldn’t be speeding through them unless they’re a “fuck them kids” kinda person, and if you are you’re a piece of shit.
Even better solution though: (re-) build the street at a school zone so that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
Even better solution though: the street at a school zone that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
It’s simple. If you design the road to be wide, straight, with wide, clearly marked lanes, clear sides and a smooth surface, people will naturally be inclined to drive faster. This is based on experiences with forgiving design. For motorways, this is fine. But for residential neighbourhoods and school zones, it’s a bloodbath waiting to happen.
So out there, you do the exact opposite. Make the street so narrow that anything bigger than an average pickup truck barely fits in a lane. Make it out of brick and don’t mark the centre of the road. Surround the street with shrubs and other obstacles, and stick it full of sharp chicanes.
This is the deliberate inverse of forgiving design, called traffic calming.
Problems that are all reduced, eliminated or rendered irrelevant altogether if traffic moves slowly, which it probably does, thanks to all the other modifications.
Plus, they add a ton of road noise inside the vehicle, further increasing the level of discomfort at higher speeds, contributing to a lower design speed.
Main roads shouldn’t be brick, but local residential streets certainly should. The speed limit should be 30 km/h or less anyway, and in a well-designed road network they should only make up a tiny portion of your overall drive, so wearing tyres and suspension isn’t an issue.
Schools have more than one bus and they have to pass each other. There are also school buses for the other nearby schools like the middle school and high school running at the same time even when school starts times are offset.
Schools have more than one bus and they have to pass each other.
No they don’t they can enter from the same side. You’re just looking for excuses. Also why do you need buses in the first place why aren’t the kids walking or biking.
Let me look at a map… maybe 1km max anywhere in my 30k town to the next primary school and that’s when you’re living on the very very edge of town. Should be under 500m for most pupils.
If you’re living in a rural area, outside of the next village (which will have a school), which is an absolute exception as things tend to cluster into villages in rural areas, it might be 5km. Not really an issue with a bike, I biked what 3.5km to Kindergarten (together with my mom). If you have less density than that you probably should have boarding schools.
For secondary education, if you’re living in a village you’ll probably have to take the bus to the nearest city. Regular public transport though the schedule will take school times into account. Yes, kids can walk 500m to the nearest station.
Bonus: All that school density – smaller but way more of them – means that there’s obvious places to hold elections as there’s a municipality-owned place in Sunday stroll distance to pretty much everywhere. The only downside are the ludicrously low tables.
Above you wondered why we need buses and I said that when I was 6 I lived 15 miles (24 km) from my school (and it was suburban, not rural). You then said that your school was 3.5 km away. I don’t see how that answers my question.
US suburbia has a higher density than the German countryside, having to travel 24km is nuts. That’d be defensible if you live in a tiny settlement 24km from a place with more than two dozen houses – I’m sure those exist in the US but suburbia isn’t that.
How many pupils were there at your school? My state has 106240 pupils in 393 primary schools, that’s an average of 270. Minimum size under ordinary circumstances is 80, the smallest is on Nordstrandischmoor: An island, 18 inhabitants, five families, one school, one teacher, two students, here it is. That’s because we don’t do boarding in primary education so there’s a maximum tolerable commute time/distance, once those kids are old enough they’ll spend Monday through Friday on the mainland.
If your system insists that a school have at least 2k students or such then, yes, of course, walking to school will be an impossibility for most. Fix your school sizes and like 99% of students will be able to walk or bike, use buses or minivans or whatnot for the rest we do that too (not really possible in Nordstrandischmoor, thing doesn’t even have a ferry but a rail link that’s only usable when the tide is low).
And no it wasn’t my school it was my Kindergarten, which wasn’t, by a long shot, the closest to home it was the one my parents chose. I mentioned it to say that biking 3.5km is something a 4yold can do, physically, without any issue at all really.
Are your schools connected directly to highways or something?
Roads are typically 2 lanes one in each direction. You already know this because you said a solution would be to remove the lane marker.
So you have a road with an elementary school, and 2 miles further down is a middle school. Even without that you have buses passing each other during pickup because busses only pickup kids on one side of the street so you don’t have young kids crossing roads. So one bus runs in one direction down a road picking up kids direction down the road.
We don’t have blocks.
What do you call a section of inner city bounded on all sides by a road in your country?
Roads are typically 2 lanes one in each direction. You already know this because you said a solution would be to remove the lane marker.
I’m someone else.
So you have a road with an elementary school, and 2 miles further down is a middle school. Even without that you have buses passing each other during pickup because busses only pickup kids on one side of the street so you don’t have young kids crossing roads.
Lots of questions here: Why can’t kids walk 500m to the next bus stop? Why are streets so unsafe so that kids can’t cross them?
Why assume that there’s no larger road in between those smaller roads? Roads generally form a hierarchy, you have big ones feeding into middle ones feeding into small ones. Small ones should absolutely be safe to cross, also without explicit crossings, because they’re traffic calmed and don’t have much traffic in the first place. That’s where houses and schools are, where there’s no through-traffic because even if they aren’t cul de sacs who would drive through a road you can’t drive fast on when there’s a mid-level road that you could take.
What do you call a section of inner city bounded on all sides by a road in your country?
Straßenblock. Let me put it differently: We don’t have grids and nothing is regular. This is about as grid-y as it gets and if you zoom in you’ll notice that the interior streets have no lane markers and some even are cobbled. Those connect to a street ( south, Hallerstraße) with bike lanes (don’t need those on smaller streets because there’s not enough traffic to warrant them), which connects to a four-lane (plus bus lane) street, Grindelalle, west. The intersection looks a bit crazy but it’s actually safe for pedestrians and you should’ve learned how to cross streets safely and what traffic lights are in Kindergarten. You’ve also been there with your parents (going shopping or whatever) a lot of times, nothing scary really. That kind of density and housing is probably illegal to build where you are (it’s illegal pretty much everywhere in the US and Canada).
And mind you Hamburg is awful when it comes to urbanism, way too car-centric. Not because of lack of public transport but because politicians are unwilling to kill off car traffic and the whole city is full of rich fucks with too much disposable income.
Why can’t kids walk 500m to the next bus stop? Why are streets so unsafe so that kids can’t cross them?
I suggested banning cars.
“We don’t have blocks”
Straßenblock
THAT TRANSLATES TO STREET BLOCK!
A block in the US doesn’t mean a square either.
I already suggested, “Just ban cars. Easy.”
It is required that children do not cross two lane roads to be picked up by school buses. I don’t make the rules. I don’t have a solution to US car culture. But making roads unpassable by school buses isn’t an answer.
Yes, great, blame a non native speaker for expressing himself incorrectly, correcting himself, and then quadruple down on it. I was thinking of unprioritised NY-style blocks you see all over the place in US cities, gridlock magnets. You know, places where people say “down the block” and generally measure distances in blocks.
It is required that children do not cross two lane roads to be picked up by school buses. I don’t make the rules. I don’t have a solution to US car culture. But making roads unpassable by school buses isn’t an answer.
If you look back at that Hamburg link, at those streets internal to the superblock, you’ll notice that they are wide enough for buses to go through. There’s no regular bus lines through there (there’s two metro stations and plenty of bus stops surrounding it) but a school bus isn’t regular service, it doesn’t need to play by the same rules. You can make a pickup at one of those very spacious intersections. It’s not being done because there’s schools in walking distance and German kids can cross roads but it could be done. Would you, however, ever speed on those roads.
The op picture is a rural US school. Bringing up how things are done in the city center of Hamburg is rather irrelevant. New York City children take the subway to school.
I already said I don’t have a solution to US car culture. I only took issue with the ridiculous idea that the roads in front of rural US schools could be made safer by making them impassable by busses.
Things aren’t done differently, in principle, in villages. You were the one brining up blocks or did you mean “buildings surrounded by roads and fields”.
This is Wacken (the Wacken), I zoomed you in on the primary school. There’s surrounding villages without school so it’s bound to get bus traffic. Note how it’s on a street that’s wide enough for that, but not the main road, the one with all the through-traffic. Can you understand that principle. (Main Roads, actually, Wacken has two, Schenefelder and Hauptstraße).
I only took issue with the ridiculous idea that the roads in front of rural US schools could be made safer by making them impassable by busses.
I brought up blocks because the poster attempted to reframe the argument from a rural US school into a city center where one way streets are possible. I pointed out that this wasn’t applicable. It was not an inner city with blocks. One way streets are not a possible solution for this rural US school.
Wide enough for one pickup and no opposing traffic, but so narrow that two pickups are going to really have to negotiate to move around each other."
When you replied to me, this is what you were replying to.
That quote was the only point I am trying to address. I stated that a road that did not allow two small pickup trucks to pass would not be wide enough for two school busses to pass each other.
Why can’t you have one-way streets in a rural area? Fork off the main street on one end, merge on the other. Pedestrian and bicycle traffic can be bidirectional, cars can take a little detour they don’t use muscle energy.
Wide enough for one pickup and no opposing traffic, but so narrow that two pickups are going to really have to negotiate to move around each other."
How does that translate to "block the street for buses? If a street fits two pickups it fits two buses. They’ll have to negotiate to move around each other so if you have many (which, as I told you a lot, you shouldn’t) you should consider a one-way road, or maybe a meeting bay, or a wider street with choke points, or whatever. But it’s not “blocking the road for buses”.
Why can’t you have one-way streets in a rural area?
Cost. That separate road means buying land from someone and turning it into road. Do they have one way roads for rural schools in Germany? Because I looked at a few Grundschule in Bavaria on Google maps and didn’t see any.
How does that translate to "block the street for buses? If a street fits two pickups it fits two buses.
He said small pickup truck such that two small pickup trucks could not pass without needing to maneuver.
A bus is .5 meters wider than a pickup truck.
It is cheaper and more convenient to have a speed camera that is active only during school hours.
Cost. That separate road means buying land from someone and turning it into road. Do they have one way roads for rural schools in Germany? Because I looked at a few Grundschule in Bavaria on Google maps and didn’t see any.
You’ll have a hard time finding a village with literally one single road. Certainly not one 1-2k which is the size that gets the school for the surrounding ones.
It is cheaper and more convenient to have a speed camera that is active only during school hours.
And also completely ineffective at preventing anything.Heck at least use road bumps. Narrow the road only in spots so that two monster trucks if you please fit on comfortably side by side for 50-100m or such, but then it narrows down to half that for just 5m. While you’re at it build a crossing there, narrowing the roads at pedestrian crossing is standard practice in many places and it makes a hell a lot of sense. Yes, that slows down traffic because you might have to negotiate with oncoming traffic who goes first. Yes, that’s precisely the point.
All located off a main road in the same style as US schools. Just like US schools, many have their own driveway that goes off the main road to the front of the school. (In the US this school driveway is one way.) It’s the main road that has the speed camera for US schools. It is the main road that the original poster I replied to suggested making impassable to two way bus traffic.
That’s not on a main road. Zoom out a bit, the main roads are the ones leading to other villages, named after those villages (or in the case of Ulm a city in that direction).
Just like US schools, many have their own driveway that goes off the main road
Those are residential roads. This a view of the Niederstotzingen school from the road it’s on, the gymnasium is on the other side. Look up and down the road, there’s residential buildings there. Looking at the signage (or rather lack thereof), it’s two-way. No lane markings though small roads just don’t have them, you slow down and make sure to not shear off your side mirrors with the side mirrors of oncoming traffic. The little shack with a sign with an H is a bus stop. Only seems to be served by one bus line (at least I can’t find more), here’s the schelude. It connects to two train stations (including thie Niederstotzingen one) roughly every 30 minutes. Frankly speaking you can walk from there you’ll be faster than waiting for the next bus.
Niederstotzingen is classed as a city btw, almost 5k inhabitants. It’s not really a size thing in Germany though and nowadays the title doesn’t have any legal meaning, city rights were granted by Kaiser Sigismund in 1430, meaning it served as the local trade hub or such. Congratulations, thanks to wikipedia I know now more about a tiny city I don’t care about in a state I don’t care for :)
Is Bergstrabe one way? Does it connect to more than just the school? That’s a main road. Does it have speed bumps? It is not a highway which was mentioned in the first reply when someone asked if US schools are on a highway.
There are residential houses on the same road as American rural schools. Look at the map of Comer elementary which is what this entire thread is about.
And yes you also see residential buildings on main roads. The reason this is a residential and not main road is due to its size and position away from through-traffic. It’s a road where you have a quick look and then just cross, main roads are of the “eh I can look but I probably need to get to a crossing to get across” territory.
And no there’s no speed bumps why would there if the road is narrow enough and people naturally drive slow enough, there’s no through traffic, the residents don’t race on it, etc.
If you want to use the definition of a main road being one that goes directly from one town to another that’s fine. In the US that’s called a highway.
No matter what you call it, the larger road that goes near a school is the same in Germany and the US. Both have two way traffic.
And no there’s no speed bumps why would there if the road is narrow enough and people naturally drive slow enough, there’s no through traffic, the residents don’t race on it, etc.
Given that it is residential that connects to two other roads, it has through traffic. It would need to be a dead end to not have through traffic. The road isn’t so narrow that busses can’t pass each other. It’s why I linked one school that has a labeled public bus stop.
The urban planning in many cities is so absurd and not meant for buses. This means school bus routes are absolute madness and can take hours to get everyone home
Wrong. Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance. Which leads to less people walking and cycling plus more local air pollution. You want nice grids. People walk in NYC they don’t walk in burbs. This is what city planners refuse to grasp. You don’t make driving more difficult, you make alternatives easier.
I agree with that last point, but the rest ignores the fact that this refers especially, specifically to school zones, where, as stated previously, fast traffic is a bloodbath about to happen.
Might be less children around exiting vehicles if road wasn’t designed for one fucking vehicle at a time made out bricks because some moron hired a city planner. Why don’t you just post snipers and shot ambulance drivers?
The road can have unnecessary curves that the sidewalks and bike lanes do not.
There are other ways to slow vehicles as well such as chicanes that narrow the street at certain points such that only 1 vehicle can pass fit through it at once, raised crosswalks, etc. There are a lot of ways to design the street to force drivers to slow down and pay attention.
Unfortunately, if drivers have room to speed then it comes at the expense of the well being and safety of everyone else (even other drivers).
I agree that winding culdesacs suck btw, but a street grid doesn’t solve the problem if safety in front of a school. If designed poorly it can make it worse since long straight streets can easily be turned into drag strips of speeding vehicles. Street grids are fine and good, but they should not allow drivers to go faster than is compatible with a pleasant and safe environment for people outside of the vehicles.
Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance
You don’t do this everywhere. You do it where you want traffic speeds to be low. Residential streets, school zones, shopping precincts, and the like.
Plus, you further aid pedestrians and cyclists by having these residential streets not be through-traffic, except to pedestrians and cyclists. Use “modal filters”.
Not an issue in Europe. Though granted the US would probably need to replace their fire trucks with sanely-sized ones. You also don’t need to haul a big-ass ladder in a low-density area what’s your plan use it to do a header into a suburban pool.
Regarding response time absence of gridlock will be more important than the last hundred metres on a residential street, consider investing in public transportation, walkable cities, and generally everything that abolishes owning and using a car being mandatory.
I really want to see these cities. They have a dedicated grid of streets for cyclists, a different grid for fire trucks, a different grid for pedestrians, and a Kafkaesque nightmare of curves for cars. Cars that presumably often break down and the drivers are found later fleshless with teeth marks on their bones. Somehow 4 seperate roadway structures are imposed on a single city.
I wish my suburb’s streets were rebuilt to pedestrian/cyclist friendly style. It would be easy as every street has very easy access to the 80km/h square of main roads that surround it
You could block every street in the suburb in its middle and force all drivers to take the shortest path to a fast road, and let bikes and walkers take the short paths within the suburbs.
My street has about 2000 cars a day, with over 90% of them using it as a short path between two fast roads, or accessing or leaving a destination in a different part of the same suburb.
A friend lives in a suburb that’s a tree structure, that’s about a third best as there are no destinations from the “trunk” roads to anything but destinations within the suburbs. I’d hate to see that suburb needing to be evacuated quickly, but they’re deep in suburbia and on a hill, so safe from fire and flood
Hey, I live on a road like that. It’s not even bricks, but good ol’ cobblestone. The cars also share it with a tram.
There’s a lot of pedestrians crossing. It’s a residential area with shops in the ground floor of all the buildings.
There’s multiple schools and kindergartens around, so they set the speed limit to 30km/h. Does that matter? No. People go 50-60 during the day and 70-80 at night. The only times that doesn’t happen is when the cops set up a mobile speed camera.
The road is fairly straight, I’ll give you that, but I guess they can’t just demolish a few kilometres of 100yrs old houses to make to road a bit winding.
I mean, if the road street takes up only part of the width of the right of way, you can do a lot with blocking off half the road street and alternating which side every few dozen metres. No demolition required.
Upon closer inspection, what you just described is a street, not a road.
Also, even with a narrower street, with strategically placed obstacles, you can convince drivers to zig-zag and reduce their speed that way.
I didn’t know there was a difference, I’ve been using them synonymously.
With the proposed changes traffic would have to wait constantly to let the other side pass. You would not only limit speed, but als throughput. If you just go slower because of speed cameras, the amount of traffic can stay the same.
There’s a lot of cars and lorries going through here. Sometimes a road/street that has a lot of traffic just goes through a fairly residential area and we kind of have to live with the fact.
And if you think that’s bad city planning call the eighteen hundreds and complain to these people.
There’s a difference. A road is meant to be a fast connection between points at the ends. This calls for forgiving design and higher speeds.
Meanwhile, a street is meant to be for allowing access to the nearby land. That warrants lower speeds, and the expectation that anyone can be on any of the sides as they see necessary. A street should function less like a vehicle artery, and more like an outdoor room.
Notice that these are incompatible uses. North American traffic engineers clearly didn’t, allowing main streets to become the main thoroughfare, i.e. the main roads through an area as well. This produces the most dangerous type of transportation infrastructure: the stroad. Which is both meant to be a fast connection AND access to the nearby land, and in doing so fails at both.
If this stretch of car infrastructure you were discussing is supposed to be a street, vehicle throughput should probably be one of the last priorities, and vehicles are better off on a road a few blocks over.
“Take this road that’s in good condition and spend public money rebuilding it over months instead of installing a camera today to push drivers to be responsible.”
Besides, speed cameras, especially in NA, enforce by punishment. Punishment that some people are unable to afford, because for some reason they coddle billionaires while letting a fifth of their citizens rot in the gutter.
Meanwhile, a traffic calmed school zone enforces proactively. Are you sure you’d like to risk scratching your brand new $50k truck’s pristine paintjob? A properly traffic calmed street will force drivers to face that question, and in many cases, they’ll answer the question with “no”, and slow down. Mission accomplished.
Punishment that your don’t need to pay if your just respect the legal speed. We’re not talking about someone stealing food because they can’t afford to eat, we’re talking about someone driving a car and being unable to get their foot off the gas pedal for a bit. Your reaction to that is “People shouldn’t take their responsibility to respect the law, it’s the state that should spend money to make it so they don’t want to drive like morons!” while ignoring the fact that speed cameras are proven to be effective at keeping people under the sites limit and cost way less than just rebuilding roads. Add to that the fact that your solution means years or even decades of people driving too fast for safety while roads are getting rebuilt based on their speed limit and there’s nothing to enforce the speed limit in the meantime because “speed cameras aren’t the solution”.
If you’re unable to slow down just because the road is wide enough that you feel safe driving fast then you’ve got no business owning a car.
How often do you think most people watch their speed gauges?
You and I might do so regularly, but you sure as hell cannot say that for sure about every other person on the road.
Furthermore, how obvious is the speed limit?
I can tell you with certainty that, outside of a few, mostly European, places, this may be unclear. North American traffic engineers happily design roads with speed limits anywhere between 40 and 80 km/h, with no changes to the cross-sectional geometry of the (st-) road.
Systemic speeding because of misguided road design is more common than you’d like to admit. And a few cameras probably only do so much to fix that.
The speed limit needs to be indicated in order to be valid so that’s a completely ridiculous point you’re trying to make.
If people don’t pay attention to their driving they need to be penalized for it because no matter the road design, they’ll commit infractions and no matter the road design, speed limits need to be enforced otherwise they become suggestions.
See another of my comments with sources proving that speed cameras do reduce speeding by a wide margin, proving that drivers pay enough attention to their speed that when they fear they might be penalized for speeding, they slow down.
And putting up signs and cameras literally only does so much to convince people to slow down on wide, straight roads. How likely is the average driver in your area to speed? I can assure you, half of the road users are worse than that.
Not Just Bikes isn’t the fucking second coming off Christ, you need to push your reflection a bit farther than his message.
You never replied to the “Ok, but what about between now and when all the roads have been redesigned?” part, weird right? That’s decades and trillions of dollars you’re saying we should spend to reach a solution, so, what happens in the meantime?
What’s your REALISTIC solution that works NOW and can be QUICKLY applied EVERYWHERE?
And “realistic solutioins that work now and can be quickly applied everywhere” are far too easily quick fixes. And nothing is as permanent as a quick fix.
Besides, at least one of your sources is a Canadian car journalist, someone who’s probably personally invested in sucking GM’s metaphorical dick.
And let’s also face it, Canada, a country where a city of half a million people was “too small for a rapid transit network,” while cities a third its size have about as much, if not more, absolute track mileage and ridership on their tram network than Toronto.
Who’s the biased one here, mister pot, accusing the kettle he’s black?
You still don’t present any solutions and you dismiss sources based on your personal bias against car journalists and a country without presenting any actual evidences that’s they’re wrong (because you won’t find any).
You can at least create the chicanes by putting up concrete barriers. Just as simple as a moveable speed trap, achieves much of the traffic calming effect, no extra police resources needed.
EDIT: In fact, now I think about it, using planters will have most of the same effect, while looking prettier.
Damn, you finally did it, you proved that you’re actually able to come up with a solution instead of just acting like it’s either 100% or nothing, bravo!
Speed cameras would still be required to catch people still speeding through them though.
This, is an occlupanid. To read further about the fascinating research on these, see the “Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group” (HORG) website. www.horg.com/horg/
Indeed not! Australia has some interesting ones not yet classified, if you come across an occlupanid in your daily life that has not yet been classified and catalogued, you can contact HORG and send them in. :)
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