The site has lots of recommendations, but doesn't seem to give much engineering behind the recommendations or mention any testing, just a handful of random stats. They don't seem to acknowledge the tradeoffs in some goals, either, e.g. between making roadways slower and climate goals, never mind that idling cars are quite wasteful and that people need to travel.
I can believe that we can do better, and it seems to me there should be crosswalks wherever there's significant pedestrian traffic without requiring anyone to die, but a lot of their other recommendations appear about as dubious as Brazil's choice to do things like putting unmarked speed bumps in the absolute middle of nowhere.
Especially the part that's anti driverless cars. For one, most things that would help that would also help human drivers (ambiguous road markings are nobody's friends), and two, the actual vehicles, which I encounter regularly, are much better than the human drivers. In theory, someday they could enable people to get rides on demand when they need from robotic taxis and get rid of the need for massive areas devoted to parking by helping the same number of people with fewer cars. This would also be good for the climate.
The fact that they're advocating against that which undercuts their stated goals calls their reasoning into question for me.
I didn't link to it for any of those, just to show the problem existed.
> between making roadways slower and climate goals
No tradeoff there for two reasons.
1. cars use more fuel when they go faster, whereas idling cars can be optimized by turning the engine off.
2. making driving worse and more expensive is an important part of shifting travel to other modes like ebikes/mass transit. Although people don't like when you put it that way.
It's hard to turn off your car in a traffic jam, efficiency is getting cars off the road. And those transit options are often horrible for the disabled. The fight against self-driving cars is especially shortsighted.
But yeah, wanting to make things worse for everyone tends to get a lot of push-back.
I can believe that we can do better, and it seems to me there should be crosswalks wherever there's significant pedestrian traffic without requiring anyone to die, but a lot of their other recommendations appear about as dubious as Brazil's choice to do things like putting unmarked speed bumps in the absolute middle of nowhere.
Especially the part that's anti driverless cars. For one, most things that would help that would also help human drivers (ambiguous road markings are nobody's friends), and two, the actual vehicles, which I encounter regularly, are much better than the human drivers. In theory, someday they could enable people to get rides on demand when they need from robotic taxis and get rid of the need for massive areas devoted to parking by helping the same number of people with fewer cars. This would also be good for the climate.
The fact that they're advocating against that which undercuts their stated goals calls their reasoning into question for me.