Delaware 2013 Bicycle Friendly State “Report Card”
Between May of 1997 and March of 2008 (over 10 years), Delaware’s unemployment rate was between 3 and 4%. But for the last four years, unemployment has stubbornly...
We know what we want. And it all comes back to the “Bike and Pedestrian Improvements” program authorization for the Delaware Department of Transportation. We...
by Melissa Nann Burke The News Journal February 15, 2013 Relatively few Delaware workers commute by bike, but they might reconsider when cyclists are whizzing...
“When we try to eliminate congestion from our urban areas by using decades-old traffic engineering measures and models, we are essentially using a rototiller in a flowerbed…”
“I’m not going to look back and quibble with the general philosophy of how the interstates and the associated high-speed freeways were planned and designed. On many levels, the approach made sense.
“But it became increasingly less persuasive when applied to the rest of our road network. Unlike interstates and freeways, most roads exist not just to move traffic through the area, but also to serve the homes, businesses, and people along them. Yet in search of high LOS rankings, transportation professionals have widened streets, added lanes, removed on-street parking, limited crosswalks, and deployed other inappropriate strategies. In ridding our communities of the weeds of congestion, we have also pulled out the very plants that made our “gardens” worthwhile in the first place….”
“[M]any designers size a road or intersection to be free-flowing for the worst hour of the day. Sized to accommodate cars during the highest peak hour, such streets will be “overdesigned” for the other 23 hours of the day and will always function poorly for the surrounding community.
“If that isn’t troubling enough, LOS is often calculated using traffic predicted 20 years into the future, even in urban settings. Until the forecasted growth materializes, the roadway will be overdesigned, even during the peak hour. Overdesigned roadways encourage motorists to drive at higher speeds, making them difficult to cross and unpleasant to walk along. This degrades public spaces between the edges of the road and the adjacent buildings, encourages people to drive short distances, and generally unravels a community’s social fabric…”
Read the entire article from the Project for Public Spaces HERE.
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2 Comments
“you can “solve” congestion problems by focusing exclusively on levels of service”
This is generally not the case, when considering induced demand. A stuffy nose doesn’t go away by widening one’s nostrils, for that matter.
And loosening your belt is not the best solution to being fat.