831
Guess which one of these vehicles has a motor that prevents it from going too fast for the safety of others?
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
831 points (95.9% liked)
Fuck Cars
13007 readers
1496 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There are no sidewalks where I live. Everyone is bound to the roads.
America has the weirdest solutions to the weirdest problems.
Municipal development staff worker here. Sidewalk networks are a bitch to implement.
Say you want to put in 6ft sidewalks on either side of a one-land road with a turn lane:
You have a ROW width of 50 feet. With the Existing road, shoulder, storm sewer, and utilities, you have no more room. So you either need to expand the ROW or build the sidewalk on private land.
Expanding the ROW has 2 realistic options. Imminent Domain or ROW dedication as part of the platting process. Imminent Domain is politically impossible in most cases, and if land is already platted, it may not get replatted for another century.
So you have to build it on private land. Most of the time, that takes the form of requiring sidewalk standards as part of site development. That works pretty well, but it requires all the private land in the entire network to re-develop. It's why you see these weird sidewalks in front of newer business parks that are 50 feet long and don't connect to anything. When the next property re-develops, they have to connect, but it doesn't really mean anything until all the properties develop. And "Jimbo's thrift shop, billboard, fire hazard, gun range, and playground" makes buckets of money by not meeting any modern building, planning, or health codes, so they'll NEVER re-develop because they'd lose their existing non-conforming (grandfathered) status that allows them to keep doing dangerous shit cheaply.
This is deeply fascinating and I need to hear more about businesses and sidewalks!
Why are some houses in my neighborhood missing sidewalks? I thought all houses had to have them! This is an individual house level, there's no hoa or the like.
Lots of times, it's because the house is older than the rules. Other times it may be because of a variance granted to that property. Variances are really only supposed to be granted when meeting code is otherwise essentially impossible because of a unique physical characteristic of the site, but the Board of Adjustments (appointees who decide zoning variances for the city in many states) is made up of political appointees, and the reality is that if everyone likes Dave he gets what he wants even though he shouldn't.
The area is old, and the houses weren't here in the 70s (but were here by the 90s) so it feels like the rules should be 90s. But that's my soup brain going everything should be around by the 90s, maybe.
I'll blame it all on this mysterious Dave letting these people not have sidewalks when it would be really nice to have sidewalks all the way to the end of the fucking block so I can walk to my polling place without walking into the street.
Thank you!
You've got 50' of ROW but still need more for sidewalks? 🙄
By the time you've added curbs and striping, you're looking at about 15 feet per auto lane. One lane each direction and a dedicated turn lane, and you're at 45 feet. That leaves 2.5 feet on each side of the road for drainage infrastructure and utility lines.
Where do you put the sidewalk?
Why the left turn lane? 15' per auto lane?
It's actually 12 feet per lane, plus a little extra for striping with a center turn lane, plus a small shoulder and curb. It ends up averaging about 40-45 feet depending on the road classification.
Roads have center turn lanes for a variety of reasons. A big one is so that people turning left don't stop traffic..Not only is it good for traffic control, but it improves safety during peak traffic because you don't have impatient assholes whipping onto the shoulder (or sidewalk or bike lane) when someone is trying to turn left.
It also gives room for traffic diversion in case of a wreck, breakdown, or construction while still allowing traffic to flow both directions. Just throw down some cones and make it work.
No offense, but your response is classic American traffic engineer Stroad-design. "Need big wide stroad to improve peak traffic!"
The width of the lanes is for fire trucks. the middle lane is for flexibility and traffic management. It's not that complicated.
There's no efficiency increase in road safety and traffic management greater than the transition from 2-lane to 3-lane.
Go out on winding country roads without a turn lane and the fatality rate skyrockets, because people end up drifting into the center 2-3 feet as they speed around curves, and when people are doing that in both directions, you have offset head-on collisions, which are some of the deadliest crashes.
Having that middle turn would allow those cars to miss each other by 6 feet instead while providing greater visibility in the turn. It also allows cyclists to ride on the edge of the road while giving motorists room to pull slightly into the middle to pass without going into ongoing traffic so long as there isn't someone actively turning im that same spot - in which case the motorists can drive slower for 20 feet then pass the cyclist.
If that middle lane was swapped for a bike lane, you'd have cars using the bike lane to pass people instead, which is much more dangerous to the cyclists.
If you have a grade-separated bike lane, then you have nowhere to route traffic in the case of a wreck or construction.
Ideally, you'd have separate lanes going each direction, separated protected cycling and biking lanes, and rail in the middle. But that takes a whole lot of space and only really works in extremely dense metro areas. For most cities, that isn't practical.
What many places are doing now is expanding the ROW corridor to 60 or 70 feet so sidewalk or ped lanes can be added, but it takes decades to get all that ROW. Hell - we still haven't got the 50 feet everywhere in the city where I work. We've got places where the ROW is 30 feet, so it's single-lane, no shoulder, no sidewalk, no stormwater system, and utilities buried under the pavement (huge PITA when a water or gas line breaks under the road).
Fixing this shit requires space, and getting that space takes time.
In the Netherlands, fire trucks are small enough to drive down the bike lane
American firefighters pack their gear like this:
Dutch firefighters pack their gear like this:
50' ROW is plenty wide enough for big American firetrucks. The usual standard is 20' unobstructed width; i.e. two 10' travel lanes. NACTO specifically recommends against lane widths greater than 11' because that induces excessive speeding. Any traffic engineer recommending a big wide stroad for "safety" (especially 15 foot!! lanes) should have their license revoked.
Our pumpers are 10' wide and our ladder trucks 11'. You can't build legally a private driveway to your own house less than 12' because of fire truck access requirements.
If you have an 11' firetruck making an emergency call on a 20' roadway and there's a commercial vehicle on the same road going the opposite direction, you've got a problem.
Your equipment must be non-standard, because 102 inches is the regulation width of ladder truck (8.5'). Maximum legal width for commercial truck is also 8.5'. Unless the commercial vehicle is an oversized load, it will not block the firetruck. Add some bike lanes (with mountable curb) and you get even more space.
Wider lanes width is only needed if you are building high-speed Stroad -- and you are in the wrong Sub if you think those are a good idea.
So you make the cars slow down. You narrow their lanes and put a median in. Add speed bumps or pavers if necessary. Here in Hanoi (terrible example), you're lucky if you have 30' ROW on non-thourghfare roads. If cars need to go long distances, they take the highways. When they're on streets, they go slowly, stopping to crawl around eachother when they need to pass, not insist its their God-given right to barrel down a street at 80 km.
Just moved to a place with sidewalks and walking my dog is actually relaxing now.