> But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement.
i don't know how true this is. residents care about the speed of cars. the trend in government is more holistic public land allocation (ie street design) in almost all growing communities.
Transportation land area is something like 98% for automobiles, it's not like you could trend more to cars.
Here's things our traffic engineer told me:
1. It doesn't matter how fast the fastest cars are going or how many cars go by a certain point, only the 85pct is used in deciding whether to intervene "and that's the same as Shoreline, and Bothell, and Bellevue, and..."
2. A bunch of people will get pissed and raise hell if you dare take away some street parking to make it safer for people actually using the road. (I saw this around 35th Ave NE in Seattle) And they tend to get their way.
3. The whole city's budget for traffic safety is $10k.
4. In the last four years, the traffic safety program has resulted in a new stop sign.
5. Public roads are for everyone who drives and the people in the neighborhood get no say in it until the 85pct speed is more than 5 over the speed limit.
My biggest problem with number one is obviously 250 extra cars driving past my kid walking to school is 25x more dangerous than 10 cars, but because of 5 the city will do nothing to reduce people from all across the district driving through my little neighborhood to take a shortcut. Expect they'll spend some of that $10k buying signs for our yard which say "kids live here". Wow, thanks.