I live just off Blackstone Boulevard (GPS coordinates available for GM Black Ops rotary winged aircraft). It's RI's urban highway: two-lanes in each direction with a large, leafy central island (once a streecar route, now joggers' paradise). The Boulevard is also the Mother of All Speed Traps; I'll pay anyone who can drive down that piece of tarmac at 25mph to wear one of those Mission Impossible masks and sit through my kids' school plays. Well, that's the way it used to be. Suddenly, Renaissance City Planners have added a bike lane to Blackstone Boulevard, restricting traffic in each direction to a single lane. As a two-wheeled boulevardier, I can only say WTF? The new lane places two-wheelers closer to the traffic (there's a lane for parking next to the curb). Why didn't my unelected representatives ban parking and put the bike lane next to the curb? And now I hear these self-same traffic planners [sic] are going to install speed bumps. All I've got to say about that is this article about a Canadian traffic calming strategy gone serious awry. "[Local resident Brenda] White says cars and a motorcycle have spun out of control after hitting or dodging [constricted] curbs. Some cars spin onto lawns, she said. Some shear off trees or dent traffic signs and cable boxes. Curbs are chipped and blackened by the many tires that have struck them. A recent survey found residents are almost as concerned about the curbs as they are about speeding. Their concerns are justified. Between 2004 and 2006, five drivers lost control on Heritage Drive and crashed. Five more vehicles crashed for other reasons. One of these 10 collisions claimed a life."
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Looking at Google Maps for Heritage Drive:
http://maps.google.ca/maps?um=1&hl=en&q=%22heritage%20drive%22%20%22kitchener%20ontario%22&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il
I get the impression that the effort was lackluster. They should add more curb extensions, speed cushions, make a chicane, etc.
But of course, only if the local residents approve.
that center island should make a perfect bike path (or jogging/bike path).
a center island bike/ jogging path, paved with appropriate safety guard-railing, would also eliminate the need for cutting the grass on the damned median, would it not, thus lowering the cost of maintenance as well as gutting fuel consumption for the municipality…..
Someone should call in Max Mosely to ensure the new road is redesigned as boringly as possible.
Heritage Drive has a posted speed limit of 40 kilometres an hour. Most drivers reach 60 or less, slowing to 55 or less near the curbs, a speed survey shows.
Speed kills.
This reminds me of my former home town, Ypsilanti, Michigan. There are, or I should say, there were, several four-lane boulevards on the east side of the town that were put in place around WWII that made travel a pleasant affair through an otherwise meh town. Well, the powers that be decided to start making them into two-lanes with a turn lane and a bike lane. It totally messed up the flow of traffic and took away one of the last remaining finer points of a deteriorating city. It drives me nuts!!!
@Dynamic88: Speed kills.
Yes.
And narrow lanes, poorly designed bike baths right next to them, and speed BUMPS kill, too.
What we have here are idiotic champions of the nanny state gone wild.
Off Blackstone Blvd? You must be making mad intartubes bux. You guys elected Sissyline as mayor; you’re lucky he even lets cars on the Boulevard. Hey, not to rub it in, but how much do you pay on your Boxster every year in property taxes?
Just another part of the dumbing down of driving.
The typical police response to “speeders” is to set up a radar trap. This busts the local residents who then get mad at the cops, who showed up due to resident complaints in the first place.
Do what I do…when faced with a stupid “traffic calming” situation which is not due to a hospital or school, take action.
I lean on the horn as I go over the bump at 5 mph, because I am well and truly scared of being tail ended. We have one road locally with three of these things, big enough to bump the bottom of my car while going over them slowly.
Slow down….hit horn…hold horn until over bump.
proceed……..after all, I think that there is a legitimate safety issue, making me almost stop in an otherwise open road.
lean on that horn.
@speedlaw
A big +1
Also hated: a traffic light (esp no left turn w/o a green arrow) where there is no need, and a four way stop where formerly only the significantly less traveled cross street had to stop.
They tried those “traffic calming” devices in a neighborhood here. Cars swerved around them and drove through peoples front yards to avoid going over them. The devices also only had a slight effect on cars. Trucks and SUV’s could run over them full speed. I’d actually speed up over the ramp in an attempt to go airborne.
At a local Lowes hardware store, they installed gigantic 1′ tall, 12′ square type devices. Idiotic to put those in front of a hardware store where the majority of the customers drive trucks/suvs. I go full speed over those. The devices punish the Honda driving female customers of the Target next door more so then the hardware customers.
Mr. Farago, Welcome to social engineering Vancouver. BC style. Traffic calming is all the rage here but I recall no votes from citizens in favour of the ridiculous and expensive constructions thatr have sprung up to frustrate drivers.
Speed bumps now abound on streets and alleys, apparently being standard equipment on all streets adjacent to school yards. This completely ignores that we don’t usually run down children near schools…or anywhere else, for that matter.
Barriers and barricades are a way of life so that in parts of the city it’s become necessary to drive down back lanes instead of blocked streets to get anywhere. In a city whose residential areas often don’t have curbs, just grass berms and gravel beside the pavement, we have the absurd situation where curbs are installed only at intersections to narrow the streets and make it impossible for one vehicle to pass another one that’s waiting to turn.
It’s all about impeding vehicular movement but at the same time motorists are vilified for wasting fuel. And we see traffic circles installed at who knows what cost, in many residential intersections (of course, they were not originally made large enough to hold the circles) so that cars are forced to drive around them by driving on the pedestrial crosswalks. Garbage trucks, moving vans and other large vehicles often have no option but to short cut the circle or just drive through the planting in the middle.
It’s completely ridiculous. We even had one of the main bridges reduced from four lanes to two with bicycle lanes instead of vehicular lanes, as an experiment. I counted the bikes every time I crossed the bridge and never ever saw more than 5 at any one time on the bridge.
And the latest thing is to bring curbs out to the right hand lane so buses don’t pull in any longer and cars pile up behind them. Remember the argument for getting rid of streetcars? Buses will not block traffic. Ha. That’s come full circle here.
So, if you want to see what’s coming, make a trip to Vancouver, and try to drive in this city. It’s a joke, or would be if we weren’t paying $1.50/litre for gasoline. Happy motoring, my ass.
I live in Kelowna, BC. I’m starting to see many of these traffic calming speedbumps appear here too. The most asinine thing, however is that they have signs that tell you the safe speed to go over them but they are completely inaccurate.
One zone in my neighborhood has signs that say 30km/h by the speed bumps and my car gets shaken to bits at that speed. They have one in another neighborhood that says 40km/h yet I can do 60 over them without any effort.
Who do you blame, the engineers or the people who built them?
The UK is home to thousands of speed bumps. After a while people soon realise that the slower you go the greater the effect they have on your vehicle. Hit them at high speed and they loose their effect – traffic calming no the exact oppposite
You know what? This obviously calls for new regulations on car design. All cars must now be designed to travel over these bumps at the same speeds that SUVs and trucks can. This should solve all our problems.
The thing I like about the speed bumps in Montreal is that they have to remove them in the fall because of all the snow plowing – they’d just rip them up. If I recall, the only thing that calmed traffic in Montreal was the congestion, and intersections where both the light was red, and traffic was moving across your path. (You needed both… just the light was often not enough.) That worked – I don’t think I could ever get my Honda over 60 mph in downtown.
I met the father of the Kid who died on Heritage drive, he was drinking and driving. and doing like over 100 mph in the rain.
It is time to try the Danish solution:
http://www.speedbandits.dk/
John Horner: [topless traffic signs]
It’s flat out against the law in the United States. Probably all of North America.
Except Ontario, Canada. (I have personally witnessed topless women in downtown Toronto.)
However, it is well known that in aggregate North Americans can not properly deal with the sight of an exposed breast. Even innocent stuff like breastfeeding can send them into a conniption! So it is likely that the “traffic sign” would require a side arm.
And that is explicitly illegal in all of Canada.
But I get the (hopefully false!) impression from the commentary here that the nature of the traffic calming mechanism is irrelevant. All that matters is that a rhetorical open season is to be declared on anything that stands in the way of upstanding Americans from exercising their inalienable, God given right to go 60, 80, or even 100km/h in a 40km/h zone. One would expect that the vituperation would scale with the effectiveness of the measure.
mdf, why would you even suspect that? Honestly…WHY?????
The reason for our ire is the law of unintended consequences, which some people — especially those in government, for some reason — don’t seem to believe really exists.
OK!
I drive down Blackstone and I ride it a couple of mornings a week too. The bicycle lane is an improvement, IMHO. I don’t live as close to it as RF – evidently – but my friends who live in the area say it is an improvement to the neighborhood.
There won’t be any speed bumps. Speed bumps increase carbon emissions as they necessitate braking (asbestos release) and acceleration (carbon) that is above what would happen if folks just drove down the Blackstone at a steady 40 – or so. There won’t be speed bumps…even if I have to get all my liberal, lycra-clad, carbon fibre-riding cyclist friends to argue how disruptive that would be to our rides! ;-}
And…ah…we definitely don’t want most of the inhabitants along Blackstone to bare their breasts in an effort to slow traffic. That would eliminate traffic from the Blvd altogether.
that center island should make a perfect bike path (or jogging/bike path).
I live about half a mile away from Blackstone blvd and go running there all the time. There’s a lot of foot and bike traffic on the boulevard during the warm months, and the center island isn’t really wide enough to accommodate all of it. I think it would be a cluster f*** trying to put all the cyclists and runners in the middle with auto traffic on either side.
Providence has a fair number of people who commute and use bikes as their main means of transportation. It’s not just recreational riders pedaling slowly by on a sunny day, so there’s no reason cyclists should be confined to the center island. They have have the same legal right to the road as motorists have.
Here in Toronto, traffic calming speed bumps are everywhere on side streets in the core. However, emergency services have become vocal about the lives that have been and will be lost because it takes much longer to get to people that need help.
Great idea “Speedlaw”.
At least once a week there is something on TTAC that puts a huge smile on my face. This AM, the bare-breasted Danish speed monitors. Bring them here!!! (Thanks, John Horner!)
Love Speedlaw’s idea. In fact, I was already doing that. But fortunately, very few speed bumps in Massachusetts.
Finally, as a serious cyclist, I would take a very dim view of a bike path down a center strip. As dgduris says, bicycles have all the rights and responsibilities cars do, and forcing them to use a path in a median strip would slow them down.
Anything that encourages people to get out of cars and onto bicycles saves fuel, carbon emissions, etc., and reduces traffic and parking problems–all of which are good.
I guess we have come full circle in another way too – our roads here in North America are so good that people forget to slow down.
Time to start cobblestoning streets leaving out an occasional brick or two. Folks would start paying closer attention to their driving…
Maybe pop up spike strips for people driving too fast?
The problem with Americans and bare female breasts is that there are far too many male Americans who can’t separate the naked human body and sex. Can’t handle it…
Too bad Americans don’t spend a few years in Europe at some early point in their adult lives so they can learn to deal with this problem.
In Italy we had beautiful girls strolling the beaches topless. I know in other parts of Europe it is not a big deal for folks to sunbathe in the nude in city parks. In Naples there were topless girls on billboards advertising either skin creme or bras. I don’t remember which.
I come from a long line of Victorian era prudes unfortunately (friends and family). Just get over it.
Is there any evidence that speed bumps damage your car even if taken at the posted speed? Some of these things are insane and can’t be good for (suspension, shocks, whatever).
I believe that cyclists should have the same legal status as drivers and, therefore, should also be licensed; their bikes should be licensed; they should have to carry liability insurance; and they should be subject to the same rules as any other vehicle/driver combination. That means no passing on the right on city streets and no making cars stop to let “pedestrians” cross who then ride across in crosswalks, no riding on sidewalks, parking only in designated areas (and paying for it); and active ticketing of violators by police. In Vancouver cyclists pay no road tax so why should they be allowed to use roadways and cycleways for which they don’t pay? They’re not required to carry liability insurance so who pays when they smash into your car? It’s not as if we live in a little village with a population of 36.
@MagMax,
Aren’t road taxes determined by weight class?
If so, I am sure that the costs of administering a road tax on cyclists would certainly outweigh the revenue thus collected.
I don’t disagree that cyclists should be licensed. The biggest problem I see with motorists and cyclists is that cyclists are frequently unpredictable – running stop signs, cutting in and out of traffic and going the wrong way up one-way streets… That makes motorists nervous and disdainful of cyclists and rightly so. What ever helps to stop that I am for.
And whatever helps motorists (including occifers of the law) understand that moving over 50cm and squeezing your right foot down a little harder to pass a cyclists should be done sans single-finger salutes…I am for that as well. I know it is soooo difficult to press that loud pedal a little further.
Finally, all you non-drilling, non-nuclear, non-wind farming, high-tax, car loving East Coast liberals…move over! You’ll be sharing the road with far more cyclists in the immediate future!
License bicylists? Do you not remember the sense of accomplishment your 5 year old self felt when you first rode w/o training wheels? Will you license 5 year olds? Thats crazy. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we enforce the laws we have! Cyclists should obey traffic laws. Pedestrians shouldn’t jaywalk. And so forth. There should be proportionate consequences for failure to do so. Licensing cyclist and pedestrians won’t fix any of these problems. It will merely add more useless government dead weight.
Cyclists smashing into your car? Damage is almost always cosmetic – bad enough mind you. The other way around it can easily be fatal – apply proportionate penalties.
Wear and tear on a roadway goes as the third or fourth power of axle weight – the damage done by even a fat cyclist amounts to about a butterfly fart.