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| Re: What Really Causes Traffic Congestion (1234431) | |||
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Re: What Really Causes Traffic Congestion |
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Posted by BrooklynBus on Fri Jul 12 16:50:53 2013, in response to Re: What Really Causes Traffic Congestion, posted by fdtutf on Fri Jul 12 16:00:15 2013. When I studied Urban Planning in 1972, my transportation professor that the "new thinking" was to separate pedestrians and vehicles at intersections to minimize conflicts. I finally saw that thinking in action on the strip in Las Vegas in 2010. It works quite well. It is a slight nuisance for the pedestrian, but it would be much worse to cross at street level crossing twelve lanes of traffic. Congestion would be much worse and there would be many pedestrian car accidents. I can't even imagine that area without the overpasses. You should be able to see what it looks like on Google Earth or Google Maps.In NYC the overpasses would obviously be much narrower and shorter, but they would definitely be an improvement at about half a dozen intersections. If you are comparing someone who walks his entire trip and another who drives most of the trip, of course the driver walks less. But what does that prove? I already stated that drivers and pedestrians are not two mutually exclusive groups. In a Venn diagram the two circles would intersect. That's all I was saying. It doesn't matter what the interests of the groups are, they will conflict if they both need to use the same space at the same time which happens at 6th Avenue and 42 Street and at Times Square. You avoid that with overpasses which really do not have to be inconvenient if no stairs are involved. Pedestrian overpasses definitely do improve pedestrian and traffic flow since people aren't crowding the sidewalk waiting for the light to change. They are constantly moving. I can see merchants near the overpasses opposing them because fewer people will pass their stores for impulse buying. The Barnes Dance I referred to was separate cycles for walking. It was in use for over 30 years but slowly was phased out. I sort of liked it. We had it near my house until about five years ago. Supposedly, green time for cars was increased since it was discontinued, but I haven't noticed any improvement in traffic flow. The only problem I could see with it is that people still crossed the street during the time allocated for vehicles because they didn't want to wait for the pedestrian cycle. |
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