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Galway roundabouts set for upgrades
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Tell me you reported that idiot.
The truck driver or the person that appears to have abandoned a baby
The minute you control a roundabout with lights you destroy the argument for having a roundabout. Has anyone ever noticed that when the lights fail, as they have at Taylors Hill several times, there is less traffic & no accidents.
There is increasing evidence that the more you reduce controls & make road users think for themselves, the less accidents you get. That truck should not of mounted the pavement but if you were one of the cars stuck behind it you could be criticising it for not doing so. If a little of the huge pavement on the other side was utilised & a small roundabout installed the junction would be better & safer.
By the way a Pelican crossing will only stop the traffic when a pedestrian needs to cross whereas lights stop everyone regardless.0 -
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The truck driver or the person that appears to have abandoned a baby
The minute you control a roundabout with lights you destroy the argument for having a roundabout. Has anyone ever noticed that when the lights fail, as they have at Taylors Hill several times, there is less traffic & no accidents.
There is increasing evidence that the more you reduce controls & make road users think for themselves, the less accidents you get. That truck should not of mounted the pavement but if you were one of the cars stuck behind it you could be criticising it for not doing so. If a little of the huge pavement on the other side was utilised & a small roundabout installed the junction would be better & safer.
By the way a Pelican crossing will only stop the traffic when a pedestrian needs to cross whereas lights stop everyone regardless.
Oh dear.
How do failing lights make traffic disappear?
"Increasing evidence"? Really? Please cite the authoritative references here.
What "huge pavement" on the other side? There's a bus stop and a pedestrian crossing.
Anyone who criticises a motorist for NOT mounting the footpath is an imbecile and deserves to have their driving licence loosely rolled up and shoved where the sun don't shine.0 -
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Because drivers have to think & use initiative. It happens everywhere when lights fail. People work it out & the result is often less jams. It doesn't make the traffic disappear but it does make it move more easily.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article1295120.ece
If you make people think before they act it can make things safer.
But your views are so hardened that nothing is likely to convince you.
There are enough junctions, including roundabouts, where there are no signals. Therefore people have to work out what to do in such situations.
That doesn't stop traffic jams occurring, nor does it make life easier for pedestrians and cyclists. Roundabouts are riskier for cyclists, and when traffic lights are switched off or overridden by Garda traffic control at busy junctions (to facilitate motorised traffic during special events for example) pedestrians may be just sidelined.
You needn't make any assumptions about my views being hardened on these issues. I'm always willing to be convinced by evidence.
The link above appears to be broken, but I would hazard a guess that the Times article mentions Hans Monderman and/or his UK disciple Ben Hamilton-Baillie.
I'm aware of, and interested in, the work of both. Monderman, before his death in 2008 at the age of 62, was generating a lot of attention with his Shared Space (Naked Streets) concept. As it happens, I posted a YouTube video of one of his projects in another forum only recently: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=72683334&postcount=16
Hamilton-Baillie is continuing with the same concepts in the UK, and according to his website he was also commissioned by Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Council to do some design work in Monkstown.
I remember reading an article about Monderman in the New York Times some years ago. This bit stuck in my mind: "Who has the right of way?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains."
Monderman's concepts and designs have a certain minimalist appeal, and his faith in the power of civilised human interaction is inspiring. But let's not forget the social, cultural, political and legal context in which he developed and implemented his ideas. Here's a post in another thread which neatly sums up why Dutch engineering ideas may not be so easly transferable to the Irish setting. The key part is in the last paragraph.
Hamilton-Baillie rejects things like traffic signals as being "expensive and disfiguring". However, not all of his projects have been cheap and cheerful:
Rethink by Herefordshire Council on Widemarsh Street pavement as shoppers take tumble
Engineers’ tape could draw line under pavement gripes in Widemarsh Street
Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry on Hamilton-Baillie includes a link to an article about alleged "shared spaces" in the Chinese city of Suzhou, as if their experience validates the concept. It's not quite that simple though. The spaces might be shared but the experiences aren't:
Why don't we do it in the road?
Surviving Suzhou's traffic
FedEx, Safe Kids Team Up to Launch “Walk This Way” in Suzhou
So how might such concepts work in Ireland? I'm not against shared spaces, but I think a fair bit of groundwork would need to be done in advance.
Dutch cyclists, for example, are a protected species in a way that has never happened and may never happen here. 30 kph or even 20 kph speed limits are commonplace in built-up areas all over the Netherlands (and throughout much of Europe). Here there was a massive backlash against the 30 kph zone in Dublin city centre, and AFAIK it's routinely ignored on some key streets. The Netherlands has a road safety policy called Sustainable Safety which tries to use a systems approach to protecting vulnerable road users. Some years ago Fred Wegman of SWOV, the Dutch Institute for Road Safety Research, reviewed the Irish road safety strategy and concluded that Dutch motorists were five times more likely to be caught if they were speeding than Irish motorists. Just look at the contempt and cynicism towards the current speed/safety camera programme, as repeatedly shown in this Motors thread.
Here's an example of how innovative high-level design concepts fare in the Irish context.
The Essex Design Initiative is a high profile campaign launched by Essex County Council intended to provide guidance on how to plan, build and maintain sustainable urban developments. It's not light years away from the Home Zone concept, which Hamilton-Baillie favoured.
Since a core emphasis of the EDI is sustainability, the Design Guide makes recommendations regarding the layout and location of housing developments so that public transport, services, employment and/or amenities are in reasonably close proximity, which "encourages walking and cycling instead of car use for local trips".
The EDI design guide also strongly emphasises visual character, and one of its core concepts is the "enclosure of space". In the urban environment, spaces enclosed by buildings "are more 'comfortable' at the pedestrian scale".
In order to enclose spaces and create continuous pedestrian routes, "as much continuity of built frontage as possible should be achieved". For this reason, the EDI Design Guides includes particular recommendations on the provision of car parking:In order to enclose space effectively, buildings will normally be sited at the back edge of the public footway. This will require car-parking to be sited between houses, beneath upper storey structures or within garages to the rear. This has the advantage of reducing the visual impact of on-site parked cars. It also has the advantage of increasing the amount of site area for private rear gardens.
On-street parking is typically limited to a few spaces, and most of the spaces are kept away from the front of the houses. "A continuous row of parked cars in front of a terrace of houses is unacceptable", the EDI says.
While the Essex Design has reportedly worked well in England, I am aware of only one housing development in Ireland that was planned using the concept. That was in Portlaoise, and AFAIK it failed in some key aspects. It had to be redesigned or re-engineered, with the addition of one-way street systems, because the residents would not or could survive without parking their cars right outside the door, even if that meant parking illegally and blocking footpaths as well as impeding traffic.
Here's a couple of screen-grabs from StreetView of the Essex Design as experienced in Ireland. The first photo shows the "parking courts" typical of EDI, and the second photo (of the street immediately adjacent) shows what the residents really think of the concept, of parking laws and of notions like the "pedestrian scale". By the way, I have no evidence that the concept works better in the UK (where parking on footpaths is actually legal in many areas). However, in my experience, the Dutch woonerf system works better, as cars are physically excluded from living spaces.
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