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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
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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.