[gregmac]

Europe has a lot more roads with a lower design speed. Curves, narrow lanes, on-street parking, trees/poles/etc close to the road. These things cause people to drive slower, because it doesn't feel safe to go fast.

In North America, roads are usually built in the complete opposite way, with long straight roads and wide lanes, so the design speed is actually quite high -- even if that wasn't the intent. People go fast, because it feels safe to go that speed, but isn't, because there are pedestrians and turns. We then "fix" that shit road design by having low speed limits.

This video is all I think of when this discussion comes up now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc

[AnthonyMouse]

The problem we keep having is that you have a highway that goes through a town, and it should be a highway. Its purpose is to connect the larger cities on either end of the highway at high speed. And it's perfectly simple to do that, you just make it a limited access road and then the town has other roads with lower speeds for local people.

But the local residents don't want that, because they want the traffic from the road to come into the little town and patronize local businesses. So they put the businesses along the main road and put pedestrians where the traffic is, and then complain about the speed limit on the road whose purpose was supposed to be high speed travel.

[Vinnl]

Why should something that goes through a town be a highway? Highways should be between and around towns. A town itself is for living in, and anyone coming into town should do so in a way that respects that (i.e. not at high speed). That also makes it far more attractive to actually stop and patronise local businesses.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Why should something that goes through a town be a highway?

Because the town wants to be as close to the highway as possible, which in practice means the town gets built on either side of it and the highway ends up going straight through the town.

If you moved the highway outside of the town then the town would just move over there because the businesses next to the highway get more business.

[Vinnl]

I'm not sure if that's true. In my country, most towns don't have a highway that run through them, and there are no calls to change that. People like easy access to the highways, but that means easily getting out of town to get to the highway.

Nobody actually moves next to the highway - it's mostly workplaces that are next to the highway so that employees can easily get to it. Businesses that have regular people visit as customers, however, are where those customers are, which is where they live and walk around.

[AnthonyMouse]

You've getting to the root of the problem in the US: The zoning doesn't allow businesses where a lot of people live because it's zoned exclusively for single-family homes. The "town" is mainly businesses, and they want to be near the highway.

[Vinnl]

Yeah exactly, if you allow mixed-use zoning, you don't need a highway through town.