There comes a time when engineers, planners, and decision makers need to recognize that these aren't fixable and they do serve a regional purpose. There are strategies we can use on other roadways that surround them. You can redevelop the malls and shopping centers around them and put in walkable/bikeable streets throughout. You can add corner stores and bike path cut-throughs. Until the land use and land allocation changes, redesigning the facility will not make a bit of difference in any of the first three pictures you showed. It's like putting a dress on a pig. It annoys the pig and ruins the dress.
Throughput happens--the question is not whether we can get it calmed, but whether we really want to. We don't always.
I don't mean the idealistic, "it would be nice if this were slower and safer" kind of want to--I mean "I still need to get somewhere and you haven't given me a good reason to slow down or any other way to make this trip" want to.
There is a balance needed. We have too many arteries--that's true. We won't be able to effectively transition them until we have network and land use mix to do those trips differently. Look at the east side of Clermont, Florida. There's only one east/west corridor and it sucks. On the west side of US 27, there are 5 parallel pathways. None of them are all that hard to manage. SR 50 is still worse than the others and probably shouldn't be crossed outside of a crosswalk (and maybe not even then), but the rest of it can either be transitioned or doesn't need it. They're working on connecting the network on the east side, but that's going to take a generation--and the best they can hope for at this point is going to be bikeable connectivity. The bad decisions have been made and they're going to be very, very hard to undo.
You can slow a StRoad down enough for a few blocks to keep people from getting killed. We've done it in Orlando on S-OBT. We're at 9 months and no fatalities for the worst mile in the roadway. It took an $8.7 million dollar project to do so. It's still a 6-lane highway, but no more KA crashes since the project finished and we're down to 5 injuries from 20 annually. It worked, but it's not a sustainable model for the entire 40+ miles of OBT or the other 300 miles of this type of roadway throughout the Orlando area. Roads like OBT, SR 50, US 17-92, and a dozen others serve a function in the system. Not every facility can manage a road diet.
If:
-->there is already a network, (redundancy)
-->a tight resolution to the land use mix, (proximity)
and
-->less than 20k/day volume, (scale)
then the curb lines need to be moved in a lane repurposing
-->as soon as the pavement fails. (cash flow timing)
That's a lot of caveats. They can all fall into place within a decade or two, but it will take every bit of that time.
Politicians need to survive long enough to make systemic change. Too much change too fast and you'll set the whole process back a generation or more. Even the Barcelona Superblocks are 15 years in the making--and they had a network to start with. They did one. Then two more, then a few more. Now they're ready to do the whole city, but if they had tried to do that at the beginning they wouldn't have even gotten one done. Paris is moving about as fast as any city has ever even imagined, but even Paris started with a robust network, mixed land use, and well over two decades of incremental changes.
StRoads are a blight but we lean on them. They're awful crutches for a city and they need to go away, but the patient still needs to go to work or they won't be able to afford the next 5 surgeries.
I'm going to balk on this one.
There comes a time when engineers, planners, and decision makers need to recognize that these aren't fixable and they do serve a regional purpose. There are strategies we can use on other roadways that surround them. You can redevelop the malls and shopping centers around them and put in walkable/bikeable streets throughout. You can add corner stores and bike path cut-throughs. Until the land use and land allocation changes, redesigning the facility will not make a bit of difference in any of the first three pictures you showed. It's like putting a dress on a pig. It annoys the pig and ruins the dress.
Throughput happens--the question is not whether we can get it calmed, but whether we really want to. We don't always.
I don't mean the idealistic, "it would be nice if this were slower and safer" kind of want to--I mean "I still need to get somewhere and you haven't given me a good reason to slow down or any other way to make this trip" want to.
There is a balance needed. We have too many arteries--that's true. We won't be able to effectively transition them until we have network and land use mix to do those trips differently. Look at the east side of Clermont, Florida. There's only one east/west corridor and it sucks. On the west side of US 27, there are 5 parallel pathways. None of them are all that hard to manage. SR 50 is still worse than the others and probably shouldn't be crossed outside of a crosswalk (and maybe not even then), but the rest of it can either be transitioned or doesn't need it. They're working on connecting the network on the east side, but that's going to take a generation--and the best they can hope for at this point is going to be bikeable connectivity. The bad decisions have been made and they're going to be very, very hard to undo.
You can slow a StRoad down enough for a few blocks to keep people from getting killed. We've done it in Orlando on S-OBT. We're at 9 months and no fatalities for the worst mile in the roadway. It took an $8.7 million dollar project to do so. It's still a 6-lane highway, but no more KA crashes since the project finished and we're down to 5 injuries from 20 annually. It worked, but it's not a sustainable model for the entire 40+ miles of OBT or the other 300 miles of this type of roadway throughout the Orlando area. Roads like OBT, SR 50, US 17-92, and a dozen others serve a function in the system. Not every facility can manage a road diet.
If:
-->there is already a network, (redundancy)
-->a tight resolution to the land use mix, (proximity)
and
-->less than 20k/day volume, (scale)
then the curb lines need to be moved in a lane repurposing
-->as soon as the pavement fails. (cash flow timing)
That's a lot of caveats. They can all fall into place within a decade or two, but it will take every bit of that time.
Politicians need to survive long enough to make systemic change. Too much change too fast and you'll set the whole process back a generation or more. Even the Barcelona Superblocks are 15 years in the making--and they had a network to start with. They did one. Then two more, then a few more. Now they're ready to do the whole city, but if they had tried to do that at the beginning they wouldn't have even gotten one done. Paris is moving about as fast as any city has ever even imagined, but even Paris started with a robust network, mixed land use, and well over two decades of incremental changes.
StRoads are a blight but we lean on them. They're awful crutches for a city and they need to go away, but the patient still needs to go to work or they won't be able to afford the next 5 surgeries.