Traffic Calming On Busy Roads

Ticked off over "traffic calming"

They smack their heads at the weirdly squiggled double yellow center line (called a "chicane") on a stretch of Penns Trail North, a main drag through their neighborhood. The chicane also comes with a crop of delineator poles, each pole bearing a garish reflective surface.

"At night, they light up in the headlights. I tell my husband it's like we're a 747 coming in for a landing at Philadelphia International Airport," said Jen Dix, who has lived in Wiltshire Walk for seven years.

Newtown Township approved the project last year. It spent $6,000 to calm traffic on Penns Trail North, which divides Wiltshire Walk from surrounding residential neighborhoods.

The posted speed limit is 25 mph, but it is not uncommon to see cars traveling 40 mph. Kids cross the swift-moving roadway to get to a school bus stop.

"Speeding is a problem, but it didn't warrant this mess," said JoAnne Wiegand, who stood on the front porch of her Hartfeld Court home on Wednesday.

She looked at the road-narrowing delineator poles, which are supposed to slow traffic turning onto her street from Penns Trail. She said nobody in the neighborhood would have chosen this way to slow lead-footed drivers who roar through.

"Speed bumps. Signs. How about (police) patrolling it and writing tickets? You hit people in their wallets, and they would slow down," she said.

That's old school. The new way of slowing speeders is "traffic calming," and this is Newtown's taste of the future.

"Traffic calming" comes from the "smart growth" movement of American environmentalism, which takes its inspiration from the Greens of Europe.

I have attended enough "smart growth" meetings over the last 20 years to know that the aim of "traffic calming" is to obstruct and then deconstruct American highways to make driving so laborious that you will give up your automobile and hop on mass transit.

In Bucks County, transportation "activists" and the county planning commission have targeted 11 miles of busy Route 13 between the Levittown Parkway in Tullytown to Borough Street in Bensalem as a "smart growth" Frankenstein experiment.

The "Route 13 Revitalization Plan" was floated in 2004. It calls for reducing or narrowing the number of Route 13's lanes, and to allow "on street parking."

On-street parking for Route 13? It's a tractor-trailer route. That's nuts. But that's the way forward for smart-growthers. One day, all of us will become familiar with the traffic jamming jargon of the "smart growth" set: "serpentines" and "chokers" and "chicanes." Ah — and the crown jewel of traffic calmers: the "woonerf.

Bicycle vs. Car - an Argument With Myself

I've been becoming more vocal lately about pretty much everything.  I'll go right back to what I told you last year - I'm a smart guy, but I'm wrong about half the time.  We count on it - that's the basic fundamental principle of democracy:  The majority of us will probably have the right answer most of the time.  It's not foolproof, but it's as good of a starting point as we've found.

So I've made a big shift from being a fair weather, pathway cyclist to year-round, "confident" cyclist who chooses a bicycle as my primary choice for a daily commute.  I've always been good on a bike and I've always enjoyed riding, but I grew up in Small Town, Alberta where traffic wasn't anywhere near the big deal it is in Calgary.  In the city, it's a whole different deal.  The pathways aren't bad when they aren't busy, but they can get extremely congested downtown.  Roads in the city are just scary to ride on.

Where the conflict develops is that I'm not just a cyclist -- I'm a driver too.  I'd like to think I'm above average in both categories - I secretly fear I'm not much different than anybody else out there.  It's not a fair argument.  We already know who's going to win.

Driver Mark:  All this crap about making Calgary bicycle friendly is starting to make me sick.  We have more than enough problems with traffic in Calgary.  We have too much sprawl and not enough roads and interchanges.  It takes far too long to get in from the suburbs to downtown.  Most of the people in this city drive cars.  We need better roads, we need more parking, we need better ways to move people back and forth.

Cyclist Mark:  We have a better way.  We've sunk untold millions into automobile infrastructure.  We can't continue this.  We don't have the space for more roads, we don't have capacity to move more cars through the inner city, we can't afford to keep building more neighbourhoods further and further from city centre and still move people back and forth every day the way we have.  The better way is alternative transportation.  Transit, bicycles, and walking can all relieve our biggest obstacles.

Driver Mark:  Yeah, yeah, more of this cycling crap.  One percent of Calgarians are going to ride bikes for three months in the summer and we're talking about sinking $28 million for a handful of people.  It's a joke, we need to put the money where people are really using it now.

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