One of the most obnoxious things anglophiles do (besides wear hats) is assume that whatever aspect of British society they like can simply be plopped right into US culture problem-free. Like when they're all, "The reason Americans drive so much is because everything outside the cities is too spread out. If they just built concentrated towns where you can walk everywhere, then nobody'd have to drive," and you have to be like, "Maybe that'd work if they were allowed to develop that way over the course of several hundred years, but otherwise you're just describing Over the Edge." "Let's just have more trains like the UK" (a country 1/40th our size) and "let's just legalize all drugs like the Netherlands" (a country with 1/20th of our population where pretty much every vice has been legal for the past however many centuries) suffer from the same delusions of EZ-PZness.This article on why the US approach to driving sucks was written by a Brit, so it technically doesn't count as anglophilia, but it's in the same vein of dickish knowitallism. The basic point is if you cut down on all the signs and weird road-specific restrictions and made traffic rules more uniform, drivers would rely more heavily on common sense and the natural flow of traffic, which would cut down on accidents. This part is almost certainly true, but at the end he blows it by making the "modest" suggestion that all we need to do is rip out our stoplights and replace them with roundabouts to reduce road deaths. We called up an engineer to ask why this is bullshit.Vice: So, this British guy here thinks we should just have roundabouts instead of traffic lights in the US. What do you think about that?
An Engineer: Rotaries/roundabouts used to be more common here. If you look at AASHTO's Policies on Geometric Highway Design in the late 40s they've still got sections on rotary interchanges, then sometime in the 50s they just disappeared completely. In the past decade, however, they've started to creep back in under the rubric of 'contextual engineering.' More often than not when places install a rotary, it's as a speed-dampening measure or an upscale neighborhood that thinks they look classier than lights.That sounds pretty good so far, plus as Brit guy points out they keep traffic moving instead of stopping it every few hundred yards. Where's the rub?
Well, they can help the flow of traffic at smaller intersections, but the issue with rotaries is capacity. There's a cutoff point for them that doesn't exist with lights—once you hit a certain amount of traffic, they won't work. If this guy is worried about the environmental effect of stop-and-start traffic, an overburdened rotary causes way worse congestion than a regular intersection. Also, if you build a rotary and the traffic patterns change for the worse, it's not like you can just reset the lights or add a turn lane to accomodate the exra cars—you have to redo the whole thing.Gotcha. This guy also says that having four-way stops is stupid because they don't favor one road over another like a regular stop or yield sign does.
That's true, but most four-way stop signs you see are bullshit to begin with. The practical application of a four-way-stop intersection is extremely limited. However, anytime a homeowner or parent complains to the local government about cars driving too fast in their neighborhood, the easiest way to shut them up is to put a couple new stop signs at the end of their block. The same is true for a lot of the reduce-speed signs and excessively-low speed limits out there—they're less the product of a some specific traffic "policy" than politicians pandering to the type of chuckleheads who show up at community board meetings to gripe about speeders.
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An Engineer: Rotaries/roundabouts used to be more common here. If you look at AASHTO's Policies on Geometric Highway Design in the late 40s they've still got sections on rotary interchanges, then sometime in the 50s they just disappeared completely. In the past decade, however, they've started to creep back in under the rubric of 'contextual engineering.' More often than not when places install a rotary, it's as a speed-dampening measure or an upscale neighborhood that thinks they look classier than lights.That sounds pretty good so far, plus as Brit guy points out they keep traffic moving instead of stopping it every few hundred yards. Where's the rub?
Well, they can help the flow of traffic at smaller intersections, but the issue with rotaries is capacity. There's a cutoff point for them that doesn't exist with lights—once you hit a certain amount of traffic, they won't work. If this guy is worried about the environmental effect of stop-and-start traffic, an overburdened rotary causes way worse congestion than a regular intersection. Also, if you build a rotary and the traffic patterns change for the worse, it's not like you can just reset the lights or add a turn lane to accomodate the exra cars—you have to redo the whole thing.Gotcha. This guy also says that having four-way stops is stupid because they don't favor one road over another like a regular stop or yield sign does.
That's true, but most four-way stop signs you see are bullshit to begin with. The practical application of a four-way-stop intersection is extremely limited. However, anytime a homeowner or parent complains to the local government about cars driving too fast in their neighborhood, the easiest way to shut them up is to put a couple new stop signs at the end of their block. The same is true for a lot of the reduce-speed signs and excessively-low speed limits out there—they're less the product of a some specific traffic "policy" than politicians pandering to the type of chuckleheads who show up at community board meetings to gripe about speeders.