TomOver said:
Where applicable, how about adapting parts of the freeway system to 'multi-modal' transit ? Those belts of concrete and other materials would work well for bicycles, tricycles, and quadracycles
Doing this might involve shifting heavy cargo transit away from freeways and toward rail, and reducing to 25pmh the speed limit for passenger automobile traffic. Sammy Hagar can't drive 55 because of the psychology (and even the safety issues) that come into play when almost everybody else is going that fast.
The relatively high-speeds that freeways currently enable (and often require) serves no individual need or public good. Exceptions can be made for emergency vehicles as is already the case on low speed routes.
All else being equal, if speeds were drastically reduced, automobile-based transit would involve less injuries and fatalities; consume less oil; and make it safer for pedestrians, cyclists, rollerbladers, skateboarders, wheel-chairists, and people trotting down the pavement via prolonged hand-stands, or somersaulting down an exit ramp.
And slower speeds would take away at least some of the rationale for a mom and two kids to go to soccer practice in what resembles a military assault vehicle.
I know I'm gonna regret bumping this...
Freeways weren't designed to support multi-modal transportation, they were engineered to support high speed and high weight transportation. Unless multi-modal transports are prepared to start paying transportation taxes around and above current gas tax levels, it would be more wasteful to commandeer use of them for transportation they were never designed to support and what won't ever support the financial outlays required for upkeep than it is to tear down underused ones.
Heavy amounts of inter-city goods already travel by rail. You're not going to transition all cargo to rail, which would require nearly as much more rail as there are highways.
I'm not sure why you pick on speeds at all. It fairly widely accepted knowledge (go read Car & Driver studies from the 90s) that highway speeds themselves have no correlation to the number traffic accidents. If you have a hard time believing this, look at German highways. Traffic accidents have far more to do with individual driver issues like sleep deprivation, distractions, and the breaking of traffic laws than they'll ever have to with the speed at which cars travel. Hence progressive states that figured this out in the early/mid-nineties and raised/adjusted their speed limits on freeways accordingly.
Oil consumption doesn't generally fluctuate widely with highway speeds until you get to a range the automobile engine wasn't tuned for. I get nearly the same consumption rate going 85mph, as going 25mph. None of those classes of freeway-goers you imagine were ever allowed on freeways in the first place, so changing freeway speeds changes their relative safety ratio not one iota.
The suggestions on highways are ill-thought and gloss over much of the science of road design all to try to affect an outcome of not having a mom buy some overpriced, under-tuned, heavily marketed, piece of auto-garbage, that frankly could describe a lot of poorly american-engineered cars of any size/make/model (there wasn't a real rationale for buying the H3 ever, was there). If you don't want garbage engineering marketed to the masses as protective, then you want better regulation, not slower speeds. False rationales have been around since the beginning of the human race, so taking away one isn't going to make one bit of difference. They can simply create another one on the fly, that's why they're called false.
Putting aside the problems with old freeways cutting historical neighborhoods in two aside (and that's a legitimate issue for discussion), how do you suppose those of less fortunate circumstance improve their economic options when you so restrict their potential economic area they might as well be serfs to those of us who are better off, who can afford toll roads, afford to take a plane mostly whenever/wherever, and thus reap the economic rewards of that access to a wider economic sphere?
You can't build a society based on nonsensical restrictions on mankind's obvious penchant for travel and communication. All you end up with is the Eastern Soviet Bloc and we know what happened there.
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