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by millcoo 3597 days ago
Most residential streets in Pittsburgh, as in a great deal of the rest of the world, do not have lane markings, though many are two-way and have parked cars on one or both sides of the road. Pittsburgh provides an additional difficulty, that many of these roads are too narrow for what is asked of them.

Here's a typical example, rather on the roomy side: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9...

One of the tricks of driving in an older city with on-street parking is weaving in and out of unused spots to make way for oncoming vehicles that have no means to move over themselves—or won't, for fear of clipping a side-view mirror, or because they can't bring themselves to care about how little space they've left for others. Sometimes you have to stop and wait for one car to make its way through a tight stretch before going through yourself, rather like pulling up to a one-lane bridge that has been generated at runtime.

The trouble is that the lanes have to be imagined with respect to the current conditions, bearing in mind what other drivers are likely to expect of you; knowledge of the road is not enough.

This is a social problem as well as a technical one, and I will be interested to see the solutions.