General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

Always amazes me that those that don't drive cars are experts on road design! This is not Europe where everyone drives small cars. We need to be able to accommodate larger vehicles including transport/delivery as well as buses, fire and ambulance. A lot of drivers have trouble staying within the lanes we have now!

I never claimed to be an "expert"...and while I'm not sure how serious Canard was in his suggestion, my lack of real credentials is probably the biggest real impediment to actually working in the field.  When I returned to school, I did consider planning, but alas, it was not the path I chose.

In any case, I am still capable of reading material on the subject.  I has been studied extensively in the US, and it has been found that 12 foot lanes are less safe, and result in more speeding than 11 foot lanes.  And 11 foot lanes are found to be similar to 10 foot lanes in safety.

This is all in spite of the fact that one of the explicit goals for using wider lanes was better safety.

As for your comment on vehicle sizes, I'm not sure how big you think your car is, but Europe has trucks and buses, same as we do, and they fit down 3 meter wide lanes just fine.  And in fact, the buses and trucks here fit down the few narrow 3 meter wide lanes we do have, all our GRT buses are 2.6 meters wide, and the widest trucks on the road are still under 3 meters wide (not including mirrors).

In fact, the biggest limiting factor on large vehicles traversing roads is usually turning radii, which is another issue all together.

It is very apparent in the winter how unnecessarily wide our lanes are and how unnecessarily large the turning radii are, given the substantial amount of snow that sits near the curb without ever being disturbed by wheels.