I continued on Johnson Road, driving right at the posted speed limit (30 miles per hour), and a car following very close behind me was flashing its headlights. At the intersection at Briarcliff, Johnson Road becomes two lane. I was in the right hand lane, waiting for the light to change, and the car that had been behind me pulled along side me and the driver gestured and honked before pulling forward in the other lane. Apparently I had completely ruined this man's day by slowing him down to the speed limit for a few minutes.
But drivers take their cues from the road more than from the signs about how fast is too fast to drive, and that stretch of Johnson Road is wide and gently curving. It feels like you could comfortably drive 45 or 50 miles per hour or faster on that stretch of road, and some people do. They shouldn't do it, but part of the reason they do is that some of the streets -- especially streets like Johnson Road or even Wessyngton Road -- are so wide they feel like they were designed for speed. So many drivers drive fast, regardless of what the posted speed limit says.
There's a wonderful video online about a redesign of a major intersection in a town in England. The town was cut into quarters through its center by two main roads. As a consequence the town's business district was an unpleasant place to be and pedestrians felt unsafe and tended to avoid the area. Someone came up with a shared space design that removed the traffic signal and directed the traffic into something that looked kind of like a figure eight but with pedestrians walking through it. Some in the town predicted that traffic gridlock and chaos would result. It didn't. The design signaled to drivers that they needed to drive slowly, and they did, and because the cars weren't going fast the pedestrians were no longer terrified and the center of the town became livelier and a much more pleasant commercial area. And the traffic did get through.
I've been thinking about this recently because on one of the neighborhood email lists there has been enormous backlash against the city's plan to add bicycle lanes at the expense of traffic lanes on some city streets. How dare the city reduce space for cars to make way for bikes! No one rides bikes, no one ever will ride bikes, and drivers have an inalienable right to drive wherever they want as rapidly as possible regardless of the impact on anyone else. The only place the drivers thought bicycles possibly belonged was on the sidewalks, where presumably they would only inconvenience the pedestrians.
Last week I was in Geneva, where it's possible to get everywhere I needed to be by riding a city bus. Every morning I would walk a few blocks to the area near the train station, where cars, bicycles, motorcycles, buses, trams, and pedestrians all use the streets. There I would catch the bus to my meeting and then in the evening I'd get off the bus there and walk back to my hotel. I tried several times to take pictures there but none of them captured the sense of the place all that well. But here's the point -- when the design of the place requires cars to slow down, they do. And there's room for the people on bicycles and on foot.
It's possible to design a city so that it's for everyone, not just for people who drive cars. And when that's been done in other cities, it has made those cities better, livelier, healthier, and more prosperous and more pleasant places.
Atlanta's different, I've heard people say. No one here rides a bike, no one ever will. We don't have public transit here and we never will, we're too spread out. Atlanta is all about cars. Space for cars is all that matters. To hell with kids too young to drive, people who can't afford cars, and people who are too old to drive -- they don't matter. All that matters is cars.
But I don't think this is true. Atlanta can do better than this, and if we do, the city will be a better place to live, work, and do business.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment