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RickyDaytonaJr t1_javwtkh wrote

Reply to comment by Intru in More accidents in Route 4 by Few-Afternoon-6276

Engineers could design every road in New Hampshire like a bumper car track and there would still be lots of crashes. Next time you are out and about, take a look at how many drivers are looking at the phone in their lap rather than the road, or how many drivers cross the centerline, or how many drivers tailgate at unsafe distances, or how many drivers cut people off at turns, or how many drivers are traveling at excessive speeds, or how many drivers don’t understand the right-of-way rules at stop signs, or how many drivers speed up to go through the yellow light at an intersection. You’d need to find one hell of a team of engineers to develop designs that preemptively avoid all of that behavior.

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Intru t1_jax1nn6 wrote

Correct, I do a lot of my work and advocacy in the field of transportation. I know what people are doing and how smart phone are contributing to the sharp increase in automotive related crashes, I also know that the pandemic has sped up a lot of bad behavior especially in areas where traffic disappeared and it just coming back, people got used to having free rain over empty roads and copping with the increase in driving again has not come without a cost.

There's a lot of design considerations that have already been vetted through testing and implementation that can do things like this, we just don't use them in the states. This does need to go in tandem with policies reform and there need to be a heck more public will and that is where the problem lies, not necessary on the engineering side.

We know how to do this; a lot of traffic calming and safe street guidelines exist. We just don't do it because of bureaucratic inertia (engineers that might have the knowledge aren't in positions to change 50+ years of DPW/DOT bureaucracy and archaic policies), political will (politicians aren't willing to stake their careers on safety if it means inconveniencing commuters and getting them voted out) and public opinion/will (people just don't like change especially change that in the short term might inconvenience them, traffic is a very complex and fluid topic that has a lot of counter intuitive aspect to it that people might not fully be able to grasp making it a tough sell unless people are already wanting safety improvements on their street).

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RickyDaytonaJr t1_jax5y8q wrote

Your safety utopia will become a reality when CAVs become ubiquitous and humans are taken out of the equation. I’m not an engineer, but it seems like the Chuck Marohns of the world have convinced bike/ped advocates that engineers are inept, hate bike/ped infrastructure, and can prevent bad driver behavior by uniformly implementing a certain set of design guidelines (like NACTO). The reality is that there are about 5-6 communities in NH where those sort of design guidelines make any sense whatsoever. The rest of the State is rural and sparsely populated, and will always be automobile oriented.

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Intru t1_jaxlapx wrote

I as most people that work in planning and design are more than aware of the limitations at societal, geographical, and political levels. I was focusing here on safety in road design and not by any means focusing on land-use and ped/bike improvements. There's a lot that can be done in just the vehicular right of way to improve safety of just vehicular users especially on route 4 which is a mayor commuting corridor with descent amount of commercial and suburban development.

I really wouldn't describe myself as somebody that prescribe to what Chuck and his beef with engineering has built-up into a bit of an engineering witch hunt, but I don't believe them to be completely absolved from blame either and was pretty clear about that in my last post when I describe the multiple systematic issues outside of engineering.

At the end we need to always try better and not be conforming to bad behavior as an inevitability, you have your thought on addressing it and I have mine and I'm sure we intersect on a few points.

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