the idea that you can design safer traffic patterns isn’t a bad idea. the idea that you can come up with some super efficient method to solve traffic in cities is. cities in asia literally were like “if your license plate starts with [x] you can’t drive in rush hour on this day of the week”. it led to car manufacturers selling more cars so that people could keep driving in rush hour, instead of any semblance of less traffic on the road
If you were a pedestrian who had to walk through one of those designs, I guarantee you would not feel very safe.
The problem with traffic engineering is that it’s solely concerned with vehicle traffic. Making roads safer and easier to drive on for cars actively makes them worse for everyone outside a car.
The more people drive, the more we all die. Even if you manage to engineer an intersection where no one gets run over, it still causes hurricanes, droughts, flooding, etc. It’s all still enabling yet more bad behaviour.
I dislike cars generally but how is engineering traffic to be safer for all parties like the designs pictured a bad idea?
the idea that you can design safer traffic patterns isn’t a bad idea. the idea that you can come up with some super efficient method to solve traffic in cities is. cities in asia literally were like “if your license plate starts with [x] you can’t drive in rush hour on this day of the week”. it led to car manufacturers selling more cars so that people could keep driving in rush hour, instead of any semblance of less traffic on the road
https://www.vice.com/en/article/odd-even-scheme-coding-traffic-worse-asia-philippines-indonesia/
… That’s not an example of bad road design.
Incrementally making better intersections is still a good idea.
If you were a pedestrian who had to walk through one of those designs, I guarantee you would not feel very safe.
The problem with traffic engineering is that it’s solely concerned with vehicle traffic. Making roads safer and easier to drive on for cars actively makes them worse for everyone outside a car.
The more people drive, the more we all die. Even if you manage to engineer an intersection where no one gets run over, it still causes hurricanes, droughts, flooding, etc. It’s all still enabling yet more bad behaviour.
This is a classic case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.