What is a street and what is a road?
The purpose of a road is for motorised traffic to move from one place to another. Streets, on the other hand, have many uses and are based on people walking or even just standing or sitting.
The trouble is that there is not a clear boundary between a street and a road. A motorway is clearly a road, but sometimes a street, which should be a place of safety, has demands on it to become a road.
Streets are for people and as such the speed should be low enough for people to communicate with each other by eye – even between drivers. The speed limit for streets should be 20mph. This is because research has shown that we find it next to impossible to make contact at higher speeds. Streets should not feel like a road. So no road markings (there might be a need for parking restrictions or parking bays. These should all be in yellow). No hatching or lane markings – no cycle paths, no footways – just places connecting homes and workplaces, parks and schools. I believe the default position for all towns should be that they only contain streets. However once you leave the town (unless you are wandering down a lane) you will enter the traffic domain of the road network. The speed limit is higher and the roadway is separate from the cycleway and footway. Here there are traffic lights, road markings, larger directional signs. Movements is by rules and codes. You should have no need to leave the road network until you reach your destination. Network traffic should not need to pass down streets.
To make this concept work drivers need to know, by the very look of a street that they are in, that they are in an area to which they have been invited but are not the hosts. They are there almost on sufferance. A driver also needs to know that these low speeds will not last long and that very soon the driver will pass on to a road with a higher speed limit.
Previous article: Greenball Rally (Tuesday, 17th June, 2008)
Comments
You make the mistake of
You make the mistake of thinking that drivers follow rules. Drivers do what they can get away with. I suggest you drive to a motorway, go to the third, the fastest lane and then try to not break the speed limit.
This will give you a sense of what the real world is like outside your little town centric box.
Why would I drive in the second overtaking lane?
It is inappropriate to drive in the second overtaking lane unless one is overtaking. I would not do it and no safety conscious driver would do it either.
Generally speaking, the reason the speed limit is not enforced on motorways is because there would be too much pressure to increase the limit.
When we go metric on the roads the speed limit might well be increased to 120kph - the European standard.
Private Road/Street
A road/street near where I live is currently private (i.e. not maintained by the council). As a result it is severley potholed and through-traffic does not use it, just the residents.
The local council (Glasgow) have decided to introduce a system of permit holder parking for which they will charge between £50 and £135 per year for a residents permit to park in marked bays. It is their intention to mark bays on this private street/road - apparently they are able to do this as it falls under the legal definition of a "road" in Scotland.
Apart from the civil liberties argument as regards charging the residents for parking on their own privately maintained street/road, there is the problem that residents of neighbouring streets (such as mine) will be legally entitled to park in the bays if we display a resdients' permit. This will surely increase the traffic in their street?
My own road/street is currently very quiet and the traffic is slow flowing as there is a bend with a high hedge at the roadside blcking the view. It is the council's intention to make it a one-way street (surely it's currently a 2 way street, this will make it a 1 way road). My objection is that this will increase the speed of traffic in our street/road.
Glasgow City Council have a stated policy that they wish to reduce the speed of traffic in residential areas - to this end thay have put up "20s Plenty" signs which have absolutely no disceranble effect! This is the 2nd time they have tried to make my road/street one-way. Last time the consultation document gave the reason that it would "improve the flow of traffic"! What was that policy again?
Roads are for people too
This seems a very urban-centric utopia, where once a driver gets out of the town "streets", onto a "road", he never has to look out for people anymore until he reaches the "streets" of his ultimate destination. If by "road" you mean motorway, that's fair enough, but we would have to build an awful lot more motorways to link every place that has "streets" to every other such place.
In between motorways and urban streets there's a whole spectrum of roads with people living, working, shopping and playing alongside all of them. Admittedly not the same density of people as do all those things on urban "streets", but they are still people, with just as much right to use the road ouside their house in safety as the town dweller - who may at that moment be speeding past in his car!
Andrew mentions only one of those other sorts of road and only in passing: "unless you are wondering down a lane". Or does he mean wandering? I'm wondering if by exempting such lanes from "the traffic domain of the road network" where "the speed limit is higher", he means to imply that rural lanes are like urban streets: places where speeds are also slow, where people and animal-power has precedence over motors. It seems logical. In reality however, the default speed limit on most country lanes is 60mph: a stupidly high speed for this type of road, but one that some stupid people nevertheless insist upon attaining!
And then there's all those rural main roads: busy B and A and A-trunk roads that slice rural communities in half and provide the only access to countless farms, garden centres and other places of rural work and recreation. Some of these roads are dual carriageways, with the same speed traffic as a motorway and yet even those invariably lack the separate cycleways and even the footways of Andrews imagination. Ironically, an actual motorway would at least have a hard shoulder!
Do we need 20mph for urban streets? Sure, lets have it. But only after every other road has either a 30mph limit or a separate footway and cycleway built to proper standards.
road speeds
60mph: a stupidly high speed for this type of road, but one that some stupid people nevertheless insist upon attaining!
I think you mean exceeding. It IS a stupidly high speed for most roads, it's far more stupid when people ignore it.
Any fool can drive fast - and usually does.
Mary
Shared Space
As a rehabilitation worker for people with sight loss, I wonder how I can teach safe independent mobility. especially to people who are totally blind. Open spaces are a nightmare for many blind people, whether using a long cane or guide dog. Paul Venables-Birmingham
Mobility
It may be that blind people will be able to drive robotic cars, a bit like sat-nav, only the car does the driving too, but as sat nav still seems a bit of a problem with its directions, it may not be recommended at present. It could have automatic gears, but there could be sensory things on the steering wheel and maybe the pedals, so you knew when danger was lurking. I don't know the answer. I always envisaged moving pavements and we have them now. So maybe something else I evisaged was cars moving above houses on a sort of invisible magnetic field, so they would never crash.
Shared space and partially sighted
So what do partially sighted people need in a shared space street, (or would they prefer a road)?
It is not just the blind that do not see electric vehicles and buses coming. Most people cross with their ears, step out then look. Duh! it is the major cause of conflict with cycles who likelwise make no noise (bicycle bells just seem to be ignored or alarm people). The problem with electric vehicles & buses is that they are almost silent at the front as most now have rear mounted engines. Buses in pedestrian areas such as Queen Street Oxford really are a problem. In the USA 4x4s are often fitted with moose whistles (available on ebay) and road washing trucks in China play "happy birthday" as they wash the pavements to scare people away. not answers / solutions, just observations!
The silence of electric cars
There have been moves to add noise to quiet or silent electric cars. This is dreadful, there is far too much noise in our cities, towns and even villages and dwellings already.
Surely pedestrians must be responsible for their own safety, isn't the Highway Code taught any more?
Taking this idea to the extreme would be to add noise to pedestrians, pedal cycles, wheelchairs, mobility scooters ... We cyclists used to be obliged to have 'an audible method of warning' (it wasn't necessary a bell). I once screamed as though in fright when someone stepped out in font of me, he leapt back and was amused but I like to think he learned a lesson.
An artificial engine noise? No thanks. I'll look after my own life.
Freiburg
You might know that many cities have what the ETA calls "streets" - places where all users can use all the space equally. I appreciate that these can present problems for blind people. However, there is a city in Germany called Freiburg which not only has these wide open spaces but have little borderless streams running through them. When I was there I thought it might be dangerous but the planners tell me that although there is an issue for the partially sighted it is manageable and the consensus is that it does work.
Visually Impaired
The subject of the visually impaired regularly come up when shared space is brought up. But with vehicles travelling at only 20mph, drivers are more able to view people and stop, and the reduced noise and PM10 has added benefits for all...
I did see that a quiet electric car was having speakers place under the bonnet for the sake of the blind, yet this type of noise is responsible for the deaths and reduced environmental standards of many more people than those effected by lack of sight?
What is a road and what is a street?
Interesting to read the comment that on a road outside a town the roadway and cycleway are seperate .
I live in a rural area and cycle in rural and urban areas and virtually always share space with motor vehicles including HGVs
Roads and streets
I live in what is definitely a residential 20mph street but which has an office block (Leeds 'Healthcare') opposite our house. The office workers almost all exceed that limit, most residents and those from neighbouring streets are even worse. This extends to daily deliveries by several large vehicles, occasionally HGVs, which have difficulty driving into and out of the gates and often hold up other traffic.
Hurrah!.
Idle people who can't be bothered to use their drives so park on the pavement make it worse for pedestrians who are forced to walk on the road, often with children. In icy conditions it's even more dangers (we're on a hill). Wheelchair users have no option but to use the road.
And all the 'authorities' agree that it's wrong yet nobody does anything about any of these problems, the speed limit is not enforced and cars aren't moved from the pavement.
Mary