New and Old #201
Friday roundup and commentary
Reckless Driving Isn’t Just a Design Problem, The Atlantic, Gregory H. Shill, January 12, 2025
In the past decade, though, an ideological faction within the road-safety movement has downplayed the role of law enforcement in preventing vehicular crashes. This coalition of urbanist wonks, transportation planners, academics, and nonprofit activist professionals has instead fixated on passive measures to improve drivers’ vigilance and conscientiousness: narrower lanes that encourage drivers to slow down, curb “bumpouts” that widen sidewalks and shorten crosswalks, and other physical changes meant to calm vehicular traffic….
the design-first approach has become a substitute for individual responsibility rather than a complement.
Interesting. I’m familiar with this debate, although I’ve never thought of the design-first emphasis as being progressive or anti-law enforcement, but really temperamentally conservative, in understanding and working with human behavior.
See this:
American street-safety activists used to demand better enforcement. Now, rather than focus on curbing dangerous conduct by individuals, many of them cast about for bigger villains, placing the blame for high roadway mortality on indifferent state highway departments and greedy automakers who profit from oversize SUVs. In this view, individuals are merely passive users of the transportation system, hostage to invisible forces.
And my thought is kind of, yes. A road system built for easy, fast driving imposes an immense mental burden on someone who wants to resist it. This doesn’t mean enforcement isn’t necessary, but it means enforcement isn’t the primary way to ensure good driving. I think of how much mental effort it takes to observe a speed limit of 20 or 25, when the road is telling you go to 50 or 60. When I think of good roadway design, I think of roads where—for 90 percent of motorists, not the dangerous, antisocial outliers that Shill mentions—driving unsafely would be too scary to even do it. Enforcement would then be focused on the truly unsafe drivers, not the regular people who go fast because the speed limit feels in your bones arbitrary and absurd.
Now maybe that is trying to find someone else to carry my personal responsibility. Maybe driving is supposed to be a mentally exhausting task. But it’s hard to get someone to want to impose that burden on themselves. I suppose the threat of enforcement makes it easier.
Here’s a related piece, noting that a certain type of road design is especially dangerous:
That Frankenstein of a human-centered street and a car-centered, highway-style road is often referred to as a “stroad” — and state highway agencies aren’t big fans of them either, since all those pesky pedestrians and stoplights make legacy highways highly inefficient at moving cars. The Oregon DOT relinquished control of 82nd in 2022, opening the door for the city to redesign it.
“State governments often don't want [these kinds of roads],” Blumenauer added. “They don’t have the resources to take care of them. They can’t make the modifications that are necessary for the functions that have grown up around them. We have example after example where they end up being not safe — and often, they end up being extraordinarily dangerous.”
In other words, you simply can’t have pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists in an environment that both encourages speed (for motorists) and also has a lot of stopping and turning. There’s a lot going on, and the risk of crashes goes up. As Charles Marohn put it in his book on traffic engineering, it raises the cost of an ordinary human error to an unacceptable level.
These “stroads” are so ubiquitous we might not even think of them as a specific thing. Pretty much any old U.S. Highway stretch outside a city is like this. They just kind of gradually filled up with stuff. I guess you could say this is such a massive failure of road design that it’s difficult even to perceive it as such.
The Battle for Attention, The New Yorker, Nathan Heller, April 29, 2024
I was moved from snowy Iceland to the edge of a lake near Mt. Hood. The landscape, quiet and perfect, with no other creatures in sight, revealed itself in measure with my gaze; scenery came and went by way of menus, which I called up with a button near my eyes. When I watched a 3-D video clip of a girl blowing out the candles on a cake, my heart broke with loneliness. I felt as if I were the last human being on Earth.
On the other hand, wherever my eyes moved, something happened. When I opened Microsoft Word, a keyboard floated up. I was told to type using my eyes. I did—or, rather, D-i-d—moving my gaze from letter to letter. For someone used to touch-typing while sometimes ranging his eyes around the room, this immersion in the key-by-key process was a surreal way to write, like driving a car from the camshaft.
This is a sort of history of the idea of attention, and it probes the question of falling attention spans. It’s quite long and meandering; maybe you’ll have the attention span to get through it.
A Catholic deacon looks at a bunch of cartoons showing Jimmy Carter going to Heaven, and analyzes them in terms of theology. It sounds like it could be silly or overly academic or something, but it’s a wonderful read. And, of course, may the late former president rest in peace.
Related Reading:
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My city is has two "legacy highways" that run through the downtown. Except for the neighborhood destruction, their effects are very much like those of the interstate highways that unnaturally cut through major cities.
That "passive" phrasing is mildly annoying in that it's not an either/or issue like that author is implying. Like most things in this world, there is no "one thing" that is the root cause of the nation's traffic death problem. Likely an "all of the above" approach is needed and the low hanging fruit is very much context dependent. STROADs are an obvious problem that Strong Towns deals with well. But I also think there are a number of cultural-based issues around bad driving that have nothing to do with design. In Annapolis we have plenty of pedestrian/bike/car collisions that are a result of - I'll try and say this as neutrally as possible - bad choices when operating a motor vehicle. I have some theories about why people make the choices they do (ie driving like an asshat - sorry that is not so neutral...) but it's beyond the scope of this comment and for those cases, the only think I can think that would have much influence is enforcement and rather draconian consequences. Not that we would ever do that in this country and you know the old saying about committing the perfect murder? "Run someone over with a car and drag a bike under them."