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Petar, a fellow road fan, helps us indulge in a highly unscientific experiment: Sending a Tesla Model 3 (loaded with “Full Self Driving” tech) down California’s crookedest street! Sources cited: “Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability,” Tesla company statement. Retrieved 18 Oct. 2022. https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot “SAE Levels of Driving Automation™ Refined for Clarity and International Audience,” SAE […]
At one point, Los Angeles had over 100 cameras to catch red-light runners. Then the city tore ’em all out. Here’s why. Research: “Police look to cameras to catch traffic violators”The Los Angeles Times, 13 Jun 2000, p.B4A “Voices: A Green Light on Red-Light Cameras”The Los Angeles Times, 8 Sep 2001, p.B21 “Red-Light Cameras Focus […]
Some stop lights are broken. Even if every corner had a red-light camera, many people would still run red lights. Here are the three toolkits engineers use to reduce or eliminate red-light running— often without a camera!
Red-light cameras seem to magically know when a driver runs a red light. Here’s how engineers build real technology to take pictures of cars that don’t stop.
San Diego installed “Edge Lanes” (also called “Advisory Bike Lanes”) along a short neighborhood block in Mira Mesa, California. And the people living nearby lost their collective minds. Here’s why these lanes aren’t quite as bad as local TV coverage claims.
Crossing the street on your bike should be easy and safe. Stop lights to help you, also invite cars onto your bike route. Engineers in Tucson, Arizona solve this dilemma with two special signals just for bicycles (Toucans and BikeHAWKs).
Middle-of-the-block crosswalks are terrible. Most do not qualify for a stop light. I meet the inventor of the Pedestrian Hybrid (HAWK) beacon, a traffic device that fixes America’s forgotten crosswalks.
So, you’re having this really nice walk across town when suddenly, there’s a freeway you have to cross. Seeing a large bridges with nice big sidewalks can be a relief. But what about those pesky interchanges where cars are entering and exiting the freeway? It gets a little bit scarier at newfangled designs which work […]
America loves “diamond” highway exits. Which is too bad, because when life gets busy, they work pretty terribly. Gil Chlewicki, the “adoptive” father of the Diverging Diamond Interchange (DDI), explains why it’s time to untangle our freeway interchanges.
Avid bicyclists roll their eyes as state engineers rebuild a highway through town. Tyranny of the car, right? Here’s a project in Utah which added a raised median that unlocked an avalanche of really cool safety improvements — including a traffic signal just for bikes!
Raised medians reduce left turns which prevents crashes (and saves lives). But cities only block left turns for some businesses and not others. How can the engineers decide fairly? And what do we do with drivers who still need to turn left? ——————————- Additional reading: ——————————- Federal Highway Administration. https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/saferjourney1/library/countermeasures/16.htm. Accessed Jun. 9, 2021.
Traffic travels in both directions. So it makes sense we’d have a malicious moniker for two-way left turn lanes (TWLTLs). Are they actually dangerous, though? Let’s look at the safety of these middle lanes. After all, they are on roads pretty much everywhere in the United States. ————– Sources cited: ————– Mukherjee, D. Choosing Between […]
The light turns yellow and you find yourself in a panic. Should I slam on my brakes and risk getting rear-ended? Or should I run the yellow— and possibly in the process, the red too? Every stop light on the planet has one of these “A BAD PLACES.” Radar technology can act like a life […]
Getting a red light ticket feels really crummy. When yellow lights (“change intervals”) are set long enough, red light runners vanish. For safety, why don’t we double or triple the length of yellow lights? Check out pt. 2: Our brains and yellow lights — https://youtu.be/P_EmAKRrlBc ——————————- Sources cited: ——————————- “Guidelines for Timing Yellow and All-Red […]
If we let more people live ¼-mile from the train, everyone saves money.
America is not affordable because building lots are not affordable. And there is not nearly enough people who ride our billion-dollar light/commuter rail trains. Here’s how these two problems solve one another.
All you want to do is get on the freeway. Then a seemingly superfluous traffic signal stops you. Do ramp meters work?
In the 1970s, Arizonans resoundingly voted “NO” to completing Interstate 10 through downtown Phoenix. But that’s because I-10 would have been a ten-story tall freeway bridge through the north of downtown. But the “NO” vote canceled all new freeways, including finishing Interstate 10 coast to coast.