Comment by bedobi
4 days ago
This is a solved problem and it's astonishing the world hasn't just adopted the Dutch traffic engineering standards outright. It's FASTER for cars and safer for people.
4 days ago
This is a solved problem and it's astonishing the world hasn't just adopted the Dutch traffic engineering standards outright. It's FASTER for cars and safer for people.
The lack of adoption of best practices from other countries is generally baffling to me. When I first visited China grim Europe and saw traffic lights with countdowns (like in the US) I thought we did immediately adopt this in Europe. Cultural inertia and lack of looking outwards is really frustrating.
Research on countdown traffic lights is inconclusive with regards to their safety [0]. They can not realistically be described as best practice.
[0] https://www.maxapress.com/data/article/dts/preview/pdf/DTS-2...
Countdown signals don't work with adaptive signalling where phases are dynamically lengthened or shortened (or sometimes entirely skipped) in response to traffic flows. They especially don't work with public transport priority.
A countdown on a traffic signal seems like a fun way to encourage drag racing.
Though it's nice on pedestrian signals.
The driver can usually see the countdown on the pedestrian signal anyway. It's not obvious that this would be worse.
Crazy idea that would be next to politically impossible in North America: Have every traffic light with a countdown also be a speed camera.
It'd eliminate the incentive to drag race, would give drivers more information earlier allowing better driving, and would generally make speeds limits actually a limit on roads with traffic lights.
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Is it a countdown until it turns green, or a countdown until it turns red? I think it's unlikely the latter would encourage drag racing.
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Another example of "this is why we can't have nice things".
How are countdown signal better ?
I know if I still have time to try to cross or not. Especially on wider roads it's nice not to have to worry about being in the middle when it goes red.
Which standards are you referring to?
https://swov.nl/en/fact-sheet/principles-safe-road-network (national institute for road safety research)
https://crowplatform.com/product/design-manual-for-bicycle-t... (non-profit advisor to the ministry of transport)
They are literally referring to the "Dutch traffic engineering standards" when they say "Dutch traffic engineering standards"
What standards specifically? What is the solution to the problem that Dutch standards provide? Duh
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The hard problem isn’t figuring out what to do. Its to get people on board with shifting from a like for like infrastructure development model where the roads and built environment look more or less the same for decades, to a potential status quo changing model of infrastructure development. If you can solve that fundamental issue, traffic is just a footnote of the long list of problems you also solve on our planet.
To clarify, aren't these standards mostly relevant where heavy bicycle traffic exists? Do they still apply in areas with little to no bicycle traffic? I'm assuming you're mostly referring to this famous manual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CROW_Design_Manual_for_Bicycle...
There is no bicycle traffic because there are no bicycle roads. It's incorrect to claim that we shouldn't build bicycle roads because there's no bicycle traffic :)
A similar concept would be to only build airports where there's lots of planes landing.
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