Bob Moore HQ

[PhiAlpha]

Excellent idea.



First, welcome to the forum.

The reason you've gotten such a strong response to your post is because a lot of people here subscribe to the idea of "new urbanism". It's an urban design philosophy that focuses on building the best cities we can. The biggest aspect to it is trying to build cities around pedestrians instead of cars. And generally, big wide streets that can handle lots of cars are going to end up being used by lots of cars. Those streets are also less safe for pedestrians who are trying to cross them. If you create a barrier that is dangerous for people to cross, then they normally won't cross it. Since new urbanism focuses on the pedestrian, we want to avoid this.

Wider streets, more lanes, and one-way streets all result in drivers feeling like they can drive faster. This is significantly more dangerous to people on foot.





You'll drive a lot faster on the road in the first pic than you will on the road in the second (even though the second one is a one way street, so the example pic isn't the greatest). As a pedestrian, you'd feel a lot safer crossing the street in the second picture than the one in the first. Like 100 times safer. That would encourage you to walk a lot more places.

The other thing to take into account is something called "induced demand". It basically says that if you build a bigger street, more people will choose to drive on it, and after a while, you lose the benefit of the bigger road. There are a lot of studies that have been done that show that induced demand is a real thing. Expanding the streets doesn't solve the problem. Right now the only time we really have traffic problems downtown is from 5:00 to 5:30. Most of that comes from the fact that ODOT built a very limited number of interstate entrances from downtown. So everybody gets funneled onto the same streets. Adding more lanes doesn't do anything to solve the problem. You'll just have more cars that are trying to cram in to use the same 3 interstate entrances.