"...Statutes generally set penalties to reinforce common law obligations and discourage negligent acts. Right-of-way rules do the opposite. They diminish the main-street driver’s responsibility and place an extra burden on those who want to cross. Every day people are killed or injured because the law encourages the motorist to defy the most elementary safety rules and travel at high speed on urban arterial roads and intersections without looking for other traffic..Advertised as a panacea for all traffic ills in its early days, the traffic signal turned out to be one of those medicines that cures one disease and gives you another. It has been known since the late 1920s that signals reduce right-angle accidents at the cost of causing more rear-end and left-turn collisions. They first compress an hour's traffic into half an hour of green time and thereby halve all headways. They then make drivers go fast and keep close to the vehicle in front for fear of missing the green light, with their eyes up in the air rather than on the road. The combination of high speed, tailgating, diverted attention and sudden stops causes rear-end crashes..."
[more]
http://www.bikewalk.org/pdfs/trafficcontrol_backtobasics.pdf
Kenneth Todd is a retired engineer in Washington DC.
His work is referenced in:
[more]
http://www.bikewalk.org/pdfs/trafficcontrol_backtobasics.pdf
Kenneth Todd is a retired engineer in Washington DC.
His work is referenced in:
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