[M II A II R II K]

Narrow roads often work better than wide ones


By Philip Langdon

Read More: http://newurbannetwork.com/article/narrow-roads-often-work-better-wide-ones-15174

Website: Urban Thoroughfares Manual is "The Right Fix" for Connecting Streets, Connecting Communities.


During the Institute of Transportation Enginers' annual meeting in St. Louis last week, Heather Smith, program director for the Congress for the New Urbanism, hailed the response that a CNU-ITE manual — Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach — has generated.

- LaPlante, Smith, and Jefferey Riegner of Whiteman, Requardt, and Associates discussed complete streets and multimodal level of service as part of a panel discussion at the conference. How can many roads be made safer? LaPlante said that installing signal countdown timers at intersections reduces the crash rate by 25 percent. The new MUTCD manual is requiring these signals.

- LaPlante pointed out that completes streets are a must and showed the benefits of designing speeds to Level of Service D. LaPlante also pointed out that we need better ways to measure non-motorized travel. He referred to TRB's latest Highway Capacity manual (due out in September) that contains more advanced methods of analyzing pedestrian level of service.

.....

• Designing wider roads means more time for pedestrians to cross, which in turn means more wait times for cars.

• Designing more wait times for pedestrians means most cars will go 45 mph on major thoroughfares and stop for 2 minutes instead of going along at 30 mph with less stopping time.

• In scenarios with narrower streets engineers can actually increase car capacity because there is less time for pedestrians to cross the street.

• Mid-block crossings are safer for pedestrians because there is traffic coming from 2 directions instead of 4 at intersections.

.....

 

[W. K. Lis]

Road engineers currently design streets and roads NOT for the posted speed limit, but for 10 km OVER the limit. Guess what happens? Drivers go over the speed limit, because they feel like they can because of the road design.

 

[reaperexpress]

In addition, narrower roads allow for adaptive traffic signals, again because it takes pedestrians less time to cross the street, and therefore pedestrian countdowns can be shorter.

On wide streets it can take over 30 seconds for a signal to be able to change, mainly because there is a mandatory 20sec countdown before anything can happen.

 

[M II A II R II K]

Davenport Road has this and makes left turn lanes at the lights. Although this is dependent on streets that have back alley ways to not have to park on the road.

Lansdowne Avenue also has this setup despite parking on the road but with no actual bike lanes, but a bike symbol painted on the road.

 

[Marko]

Understanding the purpose of the report will tell you why they came away with the result that narrower roads work better

"Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares"

Why not make them even more walkable and have no motorized vehicles at all.

 

[spider]

Why not make them even more walkable and have no motorized vehicles at all.

Including streetcars!

 

[W. K. Lis]

Including streetcars!

Streetcars/trams actually go together with pedestrians & bicyclist, especially in Europe.

 

[spider]

Streetcars/trams actually go together with pedestrians & bicyclist, especially in Europe.

It may have escaped your notice but we don't live in Europe. I am really weary of having Europe waved in my face as an example of how we should live our life, streetcars are a technology that has seen it's "best before" date expire long ago in North America. Only trolleyfans such as yourself still point to Peoria or other such non Toronto like environments for inspiration.

 

[Amy Rose]

It may have escaped your notice but we don't live in Europe. I am really weary of having Europe waved in my face as an example of how we should live our life, streetcars are a technology that has seen it's "best before" date expire long ago in North America. Only trolleyfans such as yourself still point to Peoria or other such non Toronto like environments for inspiration.

Looks like someone doesn't want to learn from someone else. Why don't we make a Trirail so we don't look like a superioir continent in terms of transit!

 

[junctionist]

It may have escaped your notice but we don't live in Europe. I am really weary of having Europe waved in my face as an example of how we should live our life, streetcars are a technology that has seen it's "best before" date expire long ago in North America. Only trolleyfans such as yourself still point to Peoria or other such non Toronto like environments for inspiration.

Our city is dense and predates the automobile. Many people need to get around in limited space and this challenge is one that many cities share. It would be ignorant not to pay attention to how other cities are tackling these issues. It's not about telling people to emulate some far away place; we need practical solutions to live well in our cities and we need to show other North American cities how it's done.

Toronto is not a city that lost neighbourhoods for expressway or freeway construction, we`re not wishing we had a vibrant downtown and we aren`t lobbying the federal government for those first 4 miles of a streetcar line to revitalize at least one old downtown neighbourhood. We didn't go with the crudest infrastructure at the expense of our old city in the 1950s-1970s. We have a lot in common with many European and North American cities, and we should work together. We, too, can innovate and be emulated by similar cities on both sides of the Atlantic. Never mind continent or nation, our biggest link as people may be our urban experiences and the way we solve urban problems.

 

[Paleo]

It may have escaped your notice but we don't live in Europe. I am really weary of having Europe waved in my face as an example of how we should live our life, streetcars are a technology that has seen it's "best before" date expire long ago in North America. Only trolleyfans such as yourself still point to Peoria or other such non Toronto like environments for inspiration.

Almost all of downtown Toronto's main thoroughfares were designed and built with the assumption that streetcars and not automobiles would be doing the transporting.

 

[spider]

Almost all of downtown Toronto's main thoroughfares were designed and built with the assumption that streetcars and not automobiles would be doing the transporting.

Almost all of downtown Toronto's main thoroughfares were designed and built before streetcars and cars were invented.

 

[paraone]

Almost all of downtown Toronto's main thoroughfares were designed and built before streetcars and cars were invented.

Uuummmm, nope sorry. electric Streetcars were invented in the 1880's, but horse drawn streetcars were around for a long time before that. even though we didn't have them in Toronto until 1862, Toronto was a sleepy little town prior to that. So in short, yeas a hand full of streets around the St. Lawrence area did in fact pre-date street cars, over 95% of our city was developed post streetcars, with streetcars and horse drawn cart being the main transportation of the day. So really only areas developed post 1940 had the car in mind for our main source of transportation.

 

[spider]

Most of the downtown streets that later had streetcars placed on them date back into the 1820's, 30's and 40's. King, Queen, Yonge streets may have had different names then but their width was set forever.

 

[paraone]

true, but realistically they were nothing more than country concessions expect for a few km's that travel through a sleepy town. Also I don't think that we could argue that the possiblity of streetcars being implemented wasn't on the drawing table in the 1830's -50's

And until the advent of on-street parking for cars, the width of the streets were totally and still are perfectly wide enough of streetcars.