american traffic design is almost explicitly hostile towards literally everyone except the rich people who profit from it, nothing about it is in any way beneficial to any user of the infrastructure, in any way whatsoever.
It sounds like hyperbole but seriously, it’s INSANE to have massive highways with traffic at a standstill, there’s no fucking excuse for it.
I like to say that the nordics historically is what it looks like when you truly build car-centric infrastructure: We recognize that a lot of people cannot and should not drive, and that cars on roads fundamentally can only support a certain amount of people; thus we spend just enough money on non-car infrastructure that the roads don’t get clogged and that people who can’t or shouldn’t drive can baseline get by.
Then when we build the actually interesting car infrastructure we do a magical thing called “thinking about the design”, so generally every feature of a road, including where it’s placed and how it connects to other roads, has a reason for being designed that way. This means we’re not pissing away money on objectively useless or even actively detrimental infrastructure, and can instead spend it on making it easier to drive.
american traffic design is almost explicitly hostile towards literally everyone except the rich people who profit from it, nothing about it is in any way beneficial to any user of the infrastructure, in any way whatsoever.
It sounds like hyperbole but seriously, it’s INSANE to have massive highways with traffic at a standstill, there’s no fucking excuse for it.
I like to say that the nordics historically is what it looks like when you truly build car-centric infrastructure: We recognize that a lot of people cannot and should not drive, and that cars on roads fundamentally can only support a certain amount of people; thus we spend just enough money on non-car infrastructure that the roads don’t get clogged and that people who can’t or shouldn’t drive can baseline get by.
Then when we build the actually interesting car infrastructure we do a magical thing called “thinking about the design”, so generally every feature of a road, including where it’s placed and how it connects to other roads, has a reason for being designed that way. This means we’re not pissing away money on objectively useless or even actively detrimental infrastructure, and can instead spend it on making it easier to drive.