Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[danbrotherston]

Since it has come up in a few places in the past few days, I made a big explainer/rant on Twitter about why our roundabouts are unsafe.

You can hear me wax poetic about how our engineers get most things right, but fail in the usual way creating very dangerous situations... if you want.

https://twitter.com/danbrotherston/statu...8648717313

But what really struck me as I was writing this was this image below. This is two roundabouts, one about two blocks from my home here in Amersfoort, a completely typical roundabout here (to the point that it is literally numbered one to 16...there are sixteen, they all look like this). It is between a four lane arterial road and a two lane collector road. (Now I'm simplifying a bit here, the "four lane arterial" is actually a six lane road with two general through lanes, two bus lanes, and two service road lanes, but this type of roundabout exists with more typical configurations as well). The image on the right is Ira Needles and Victoria, which is also a four lane arterial intersecting with a two lane collector road.

But the difference between them could not be more stark.

We are simply BAD at engineering. We KNOW what would be safer, we CHOOSE not to build it. There are days I feel embarrassed to work in the software engineering field. But if I was a traffic engineer, I would utterly HATE my field, it is SO regressive.