Driving Wishes

[agentsteel53]

more yield, less stop.

[DaBigE]

More cops enforcing anti-drag racing/cruzing laws, less retiming traffic signals out of sync to try and achieve the same goal (but only succeeding in pissing off people just trying to get in/out of town).

As a truck driver, no...just no.  Especially small multi-lane roundabouts, as it's not possible for my vehicle to maintain lane around tight curves.

You're not supposed to try and stay in-lane within the roundabout with a larger vehicle. If you're using the inside lane, that is what the truck apron is for (trailer off-tracking); if you're in any other lane, you take up two lanes thru part of the maneuver. No different than making a right turn at 99% of signalized/stop-controlled intersections.

[agentsteel53]

what's wrong with cruising?  I like to do that.  as long as I am not driving carelessly/recklessly, I should not be prevented form circling the block 60* times.  I may be stupid and inefficient, but it's my life and my gasoline bill.

drag racing?  seriously, that's why traffic lights are timed so poorly?  here I thought it was more attributable to no one having bothered to make an engineering study in N years, during which traffic patterns have changed drastically.

* okay, that's exaggerating, but most cruising laws state 3 times is too much, and I've definitely done that before, just looking around, trying to find old signs, etc.

[jeffandnicole]

what's wrong with cruising?  I like to do that.  as long as I am not driving carelessly/recklessly, I should not be prevented form circling the block 60* times.  I may be stupid and inefficient, but it's my life and my gasoline bill.

drag racing?  seriously, that's why traffic lights are timed so poorly?  here I thought it was more attributable to no one having bothered to make an engineering study in N years, during which traffic patterns have changed drastically.

* okay, that's exaggerating, but most cruising laws state 3 times is too much, and I've definitely done that before, just looking around, trying to find old signs, etc.

drag racing - no (and that's usually done late at night in areas where there really isn't any other traffic, so they aren't really concerned about lights or any traffic laws for that matter).

But, it does appear to be done when a town wants to slow traffic down.  Easier to change a signal timing than most other things.

[DaBigE]

what's wrong with cruising?  I like to do that.  as long as I am not driving carelessly/recklessly, I should not be prevented form circling the block 60* times.  I may be stupid and inefficient, but it's my life and my gasoline bill.

drag racing?  seriously, that's why traffic lights are timed so poorly?  here I thought it was more attributable to no one having bothered to make an engineering study in N years, during which traffic patterns have changed drastically.

* okay, that's exaggerating, but most cruising laws state 3 times is too much, and I've definitely done that before, just looking around, trying to find old signs, etc.

Whoa...I never said anything was wrong with cruising or drag-racing, just the methods some cities use to try and prevent it. The example I was thinking of is this stretch of US 151, between roughly US 51 & the Interstate. Drive it during the day and the lights are mostly sync'd. Drive it any day after 9 or 10 pm and you'll be lucky to catch 2 greens in a row.

And yes, many areas do use 3 as the magic number, but most times there's so much low-hanging fruit, a roadgeek or someone lost has next to nothing to worry about.

[agentsteel53]

I never said anything was wrong with cruising or drag-racing

I can tell you right now, there's plenty wrong with drag racing on public roads.

[hbelkins]

I never said anything was wrong with cruising or drag-racing

I can tell you right now, there's plenty wrong with drag racing on public roads.

Yeah, people who are racing on public roads should dress appropriately for their gender. 

[DaBigE]

I never said anything was wrong with cruising or drag-racing

I can tell you right now, there's plenty wrong with drag racing on public roads.

No shit...really??

The point of my original post was not about whether cruising or drag racing is good or bad.

[Duke87]

more yield, less stop.

On a related note, speed bumps can rot in hell, too. Especially when they're installed on a through street, like here:
https://maps.google.com/?ll=41.136698,-73.543435&spn=0.00446,0.007725&t=m&z=17&layer=c&cbll=41.136889,-73.54347&panoid=nmgbEwoJRosSgzNAoxOJOA&cbp=12,348.62,,0,13.25

In this particular case the "problem" is that cars used to drive down this street at a good clip while at the same time people who lived on the street would walk in it to walk their dogs or whatever. Combined with some blind-ish curves this was a safety hazard.

The proper solution in a situation like this is to install sidewalks, to remove the conflict between cars and pedestrians. But that might have involved cutting down a few people's bushes (god forbid). So the city was lazy and put speed bumps in instead.

[bugo]

More cops enforcing anti-drag racing/cruzing laws, less retiming traffic signals out of sync to try and achieve the same goal (but only succeeding in pissing off people just trying to get in/out of town).

What's so bad about cruising?  I did it as a kid and it kept me away from cigarettes and beer.  It was just good clean fun (even though the thought of dragging Main in Mena, AR sounds absolutely dreadful today.

[1995hoo]

more yield, less stop.

On a related note, speed bumps can rot in hell, too. Especially when they're installed on a through street, like here:
https://maps.google.com/?ll=41.136698,-73.543435&spn=0.00446,0.007725&t=m&z=17&layer=c&cbll=41.136889,-73.54347&panoid=nmgbEwoJRosSgzNAoxOJOA&cbp=12,348.62,,0,13.25

In this particular case the "problem" is that cars used to drive down this street at a good clip while at the same time people who lived on the street would walk in it to walk their dogs or whatever. Combined with some blind-ish curves this was a safety hazard.

The proper solution in a situation like this is to install sidewalks, to remove the conflict between cars and pedestrians. But that might have involved cutting down a few people's bushes (god forbid). So the city was lazy and put speed bumps in instead.

As annoying as speed humps are, I can accept them in preference to stop signs and the like provided you can easily traverse them at the posted speed limit. The ones I hate are the ones that are so sharp that you have to slow to a crawl or to well below the speed limit. That sort is clearly put there not to enforce the speed limit but to discourage people from using the street. If the road is privately-owned and privately-maintained (which is the case in some subdivisions around here), then I guess it's their prerogative to try to push people to other roads, but I've encountered plenty of them on publicly-maintained secondary roads. It's a giant middle-finger gesture to drivers. I get it–people don't like cut-through traffic in their neighborhoods, especially when the cut-through traffic goes way too fast. But the way to combat it is to push the authorities to synchronize the traffic lights and improve turn lanes and such to make the more important roads more appealing so drivers won't feel the need to cut through your neighborhood.

For those folks familiar with Northern Virginia, the neighborhood I've always found to be by far the most uppity in campaigning for speed humps, stop signs, etc., is the Mantua neighborhood just east of Fairfax City (I attended Mantua Elementary for three years in the early 1980s after my first school closed and my parents live nearby, though not in Mantua). They had a lot of cut-through traffic and I will concede there was a serious speeding problem, but their solution was to get tons of stop signs put up and to install 15-mph speed humps on roads posted at 25 mph.

I think what may be all the more annoying is that when you do encounter the speed humps that allow you to proceed at the speed limit, a lot of drivers slow to practically a dead stop anyway, probably because they're so used to the other sort.

(Our neighborhood has only one way in and out. The street was originally planned to run through and connect to a VDOT secondary route at the other end, but some "legacy" homeowners refused to sell and so there's no connection. We're all thankful for it. Some people in our neighborhood already go 45+ mph in the 25-mph zone. If the street had been finished, we'd get cut-through traffic going way too fast and we'd probably have wound up with speed humps too.)

[Scott5114]

I think one of the overarching problems here is that people don't understand the concept of the minor collector and realize there is a need for a type of street between 4 lane arterial and 25-mph residential street. So they try to turn the minor collectors into residential streets and wonder why it causes problems.

[Duke87]

Oh, yeah, that's another one: stop building suburban neighborhoods so full of dead ends and cul-de-sacs. Yes, not doing that means people who don't live in your neighborhood may drive down your street. Deal with it, that's what streets are for.

If a town is properly planned, no street should ever dead end unless topography dictates it must (it ends at the water, it ends at a cliff, etc.). The more streets go through, the better connected everything is and the more redundancy your network has, which is invaluable when something distrupts flow on what's normally the major street. Furthermore, it makes things more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists, since you remove the absurd situations where in order to get to something that's a quarter mile away you have to travel over a mile because you live at the end of a cul-de-sac and have to head north, then east, then south, then west to get to that store that's just south of you.

I especially hate neighborhoods with only one way out because then if something makes that way out impassible (tree falls across the road, nasty car accident, police investigation, bridge washout, sinkhole, whatever), then everyone in the neighborhood is trapped (and anyone not home cannot get home) until the problem can be fixed. Chipmunks are smart enough to build two exits to their burrows so they can run out the back if something threatens the front (not that I know this from experience or anything...), why do people act dumber than chipmunks and not build themselves a back exit?

[hm insulators]

I wish cars could automatically dim their lights via a sensor that detects the lights of other vehicles.

My dad's 57 Chevrolet had one of those.

So did my father's '69 Cadillac.