Friday, 1 July 2011
Another nail in the coffin for traffic lights
BBC News today with an article about how the US are taking to roundabouts to REPLACE traffic lights (not the UK where we have both at the same place!). There are some nice logical reasons for this in the article including a 40% in accidents, a 90% drop in fatal accidents and £150,000 savings per year because of maintenance savings as well as drivers saving fuel. Of course Britain are so arrogant about such things we are no longer pragmatic about these decisions, it is corruption, inept councillors and mad health and safety laws that make our once great country simply Mediocre Britain.
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Have read your blog Need to keep it going but would it not be better if there was a forum to which other people could contribute? Your analysis of the lights in Cheltenham is interesting. Many people have experience of broken lights where the traffic flows better. Mine include the traffic lit roundabout at the M5/A42 junction at rush-hour and the A46 through Painswick. However what everybody needs to understand is the incentivisation of the traffic planners.
ReplyDeleteSurprisingly the traffic planners are not motivated to improve traffic flow. They are motivated by a set of guidelines, some of them of European origin, and also by some dubious statistical measures of accidents. Theirs is a world of needing to be seen to make the roads safer, not faster. The measures they use to improve safety are simplistic. The same misuse of logic enters into decisions regarding traffic calming measures.
So it seems to me very difficult to influence the traffic planners by suggesting that traffic lights and traffic calming should be removed and the burden placed on the motorists to drive more responsibly. They do not agree that liberation will engender responsible behaviour despite the indications by the Danish experiment of turning traffic lights off and our own anecdotal evidence that it will make the roads faster and safer.
I once asked the traffic planners what the carbon cost (of damage to car suspensions, surrounding houses, extra fuel etc) of some traffic calming measures near me were. It was not part of their equation.
Unless the incentivisation of the traffic planners is changed it is difficult to see the situation on the roads improving.
Yeah, sorry about the forum thing, I need to see if it is something I can add to the blog. I agree about the calculations that planners do being based in safety which seems to trump any other consideration - something that is the bane of many other industries too. To be honest though, I often can't understand these people's decisions, not even if it were based on safety.
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