How drivers make route decisions…
A driver is really a financial analyst, instead of money, they are gambling time. A driver looks at the road ahead and estimates the duration of time to travel the distance of that road. If a driver knows an alternate route, then the driver will compare that time to the known alternate routes. Then, the driver chooses the quickest route.
The road bottlenecks of Homewood are intersections and traffic lights. Below, I’ve highlighted all the traffic lights on Oxmoor through Edgewood and the business district:
The purpose of these traffic lights is to create intersections that allow for cross traffic on Oxmoor. Because of the driver decision making process, each of these traffic lights creates an incentive for a driver to get away from Oxmoor. Below, I’ve highlighted all the cut-throughs of the area:
Everyone (including me) has driven eastbound on Oxmoor, seen the traffic ahead, decided to leave Oxmoor, and cut onto Manhattan and over to Central Avenue. The driver sees an faster trip down a road with a few stop signs. Bing-bang-boom, I’m around those 3 traffic lights.
But, how the driver sees the action is not how the neighborhood sees the action. There is collateral damage from the driver’s decision.
Collateral Damage
I have a quirky little saying that all drivers are narcissistic psychopaths.
narcissist: a person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves
psychopath: a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior.
It’s important to say this because automobile drivers aren’t thinking of anything except themselves. Empathy doesn’t extend beyond the windshield. Drivers are more prone to aggressive behavior than a typical person in a typical situation. Thus, drivers exhibit the behaviors of selfish, violent people. Once a driver recognizes this about himself, he’ll start to see the collateral damage. Until a driver recognizes this, the collateral damage is unseen.
What is the collateral damage? The damage of being a cut-through street is having cars aggressively driven down the street. These 6,000 lb machines are moving too fast with too little regard to respond to typical neighborhood events: bikes and kids.
Changing the formula
- Punish drivers who use neighborhoods as through-streets (like Manhattan) — these streets should have a maximum speed of 15 mph.
- Design intra-city roads (like Oxmoor) to be used at a designed 25 mph.
- Increase the speeds of intercity roads like Highway 31 / Lakeshore / Greensprings so drivers can have a sustained 40 mph on those roads
See what I did there? I’m saying we make slow streets slow and fast streets fast. A significant part of improving the driving of neighborhoods is improving the expected speed of the intended through-roads.
What do you mean punish drivers? In order to tame drivers, roads and traffic systems must be designed to force drivers to behave — dead ends to remove short-cuts, roads constrained to only one car at at time, or other infrastructure designs. Ultimately we need a system that chooses to purposefully optimize the needs of the the residents of Homewood and the customers of Homewood businesses. That same system should purposefully look to de-optimize Homewood neighborhoods used as cut-through traffics.
Why will this work? Fortunately, Homewood is centrally located. Homewood residents enjoy the shortest commutes. Homewood businesses have many customers who travel directly to the business in the city. Unlike a city perched Route 66, Homewood does not need through traffic purchasing gasoline, staying at hotels, and consuming services to stay alive. Homewood is thriving because it has neighborhoods mixed with commercial, parks, walkability, and great businesses.
Through-traffic is not a customer of Homewood — it’s a parasite.
Why not traffic enforcement with police?
Traffic is a system. Traffic is like ants — kill one route — they find another — kill the next route — they find another. In the Birmingham region, traffic in one city can be affected by enforcement in another city. Enforcement by Vestavia police officers may encourage traffic to seek another route — temporarily, or a severe accident on Highway 31 will have a backpressure affect that pushes drivers all over the city of Homewood starting at Red Mountain Expressway. The Waze traffic app notifies drivers of road blocks, thus reducing the effectiveness of police. Police officers monitoring one road creates overflow to other roads. Police cannot be omnipresent. Police cannot both cover the accident on Highway 31, and the speeders through Homewood neighborhoods.
Well designed streets are omnipresent. The infrastructure that forces drivers to behave are omnipresent. A road designed to be driving at 15mph because it is constricted is never going to be an easy choice for a through-driver. A driver cannot create a short-cut out of a dead-end. I hear you saying “isn’t 15mph excessively slow?” The difference between 25mph and 15mph over a half-mile of road is 72 seconds versus 120 seconds. That’s only 48 seconds difference over a half-mile of road. Given Homewood is less than 5 miles long…it seems a reasonable tradeoff.
What’s next?
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be using this blog to document some of my ideas of implementing the above improvements in Homewood.
