General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

Are those not valid problems though? If the intersection is designed too tight, then what?

I think about things like this when waiting on my bike at Francis/Charles - the stop bar has to be soooooo far back because the buses can't make the turn otherwise.

They are valid concerns, but in some cases they can be solved in other ways. For example, fire trucks don’t only come in one size. So instead of saying “every street must be like a suburban thoroughfare in order to allow fire trucks to get through”, you can say “firetrucks must be smaller in order to fit into our downtown streets”. Or you can trade off speed of ambulances getting places against traffic deaths caused by other traffic speeding along the same roads — if the marginal heart attack victim dies because the ambulance takes an extra 30s to get to their location, maybe that is balanced out by the marginal collision victim surviving because they were hit at 30km/h rather than 40km/h.