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Comment by jdblair | Hacker News Reader

The City of Berkeley, CA, fixed this problem a long time ago, before Waze or even widespread GPS. Every few blocks they block side streets to all vehicles except bicycles. The effect is to be forced to take right or left turns that guide you back to the main through street.

Streets parallel to the through streets that are now impassible to cars are marked as "bicycle boulevards" and provide safer routes for cyclists. Residents still have easy access to the main roads.

It sounds like the residents of this Maryland neighborhood could adopt this practice and solve their traffic issue.

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It's an interesting story about Berkeley. The barriers they use were deemed illegal in a court case, but Berkeley didn't remove them.

The truth about the barriers in Berkeley: they increase the values of some homes at the expense of others. If you live on a street with barriers that restrict traffic, then your house is worth more than one on the "approved" through streets.

Is it true that this increased the value of some homes at the expense of others? At least in Portland, where similar measures (though less widespread) have diverted auto traffic away from certain streets, they haven't diverted auto traffic away from one neighborhood street onto another--rather, the goal is to push auto traffic onto particular streets designed to carry high traffic volumes. People don't rent an apartment on a commercial street to avoid traffic, so I doubt that affects property values there very much--plus, since these are higher volume roads to begin with, it's a relatively small increase in traffic.

Not to mention that proximity to these streets is a valuable amenity, even if you don't live directly on them--after all, if you'd like to ride or walk around town with your kids, it will be very nice to have a bike/pedestrian-friendly street nearby.

Is it true that this increased the value of some homes at the expense of others?

Yes, it did. When the barriers were put up, they made some streets more desirable and some less. More desirable == worth more. Less desirable == worth less.

You see, before barriers, all streets were mostly equal. Clearly some streets, like College Ave, Telegraph, etc. were not. But streets like Dwight and Haste (on the hill side) became much worse after the barriers went up.

Maryland has snow. Berkeley does not. Bikes only reduce traffic when people can ride them. Applying a Berkeley solution to a Maryland problem could only worsen congestion and quality of life.

You misunderstand - its not the bikes that are reducing traffic, the bike access is a side-effect of the traffic calming barriers. The same barriers with no bike pass-through would be just as effective at stopping through traffic in a neighborhood. The point is to block routes through a neighborhood and force car traffic back to the main roads, stopping through traffic in a residential neighborhood.

It'd probably make plowing a lot worse though as the plows had to cut in and out.

Depending on the road layout, the plows could just be making Us through the side streets from the main avenues. Leave main, go to mandatory right/left turn, go to mandatory right/left turn, return to main.

The problem with this is that east coast cities are typically not laid out on nice grids like most cities west of the Mississippi.

True but those non-grid layouts can also help with traffic issues as they're sub-optimal to cut through. I live in the Boston area, i'm pretty well versed with crappy layed out streets

Fwiw many newer residential developments (from roughly the 1990s) are built like this in the first place, which is why there are so many back-to-back cul-de-sacs, and rarely through streets that go more than a few blocks. It's mainly older neighborhoods that have the traffic cut-through problem, because they were built before developers started laying out neighborhood streets with the explicit goal of preventing through traffic.

The Berkeley solution has the advantage that it doesn't hurt the utility of walking and cycling.

But it does negatively affect some home prices while positively affecting other home prices.

It's much more difficult to change streets into cul de sacs after the fact, but I can't imagine that forcing through-traffic to take certain streets doesn't reduce the value of homes on those streets, regardless of the method you use to do so.

Cul-de-sacs could easily be built with connecting bike/pedestrian pathways if that was something the developers actually cared about.

That's pretty common. I lived in a suburban neighborhood in Houston for years and the back-to-back cul-de-sacs always had sidewalks connecting them, so it was only with a car you'd have to go around the long way. As a result it was actually a lot nicer to travel through subdivisions if you were going somewhere by bike/foot, rather than going on the busy main roads.

Yes. For an extreme example, see Houton, NL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.03...

But a "bicycle" boulevard with no bicycles still solves the problem: you can use non-major streets for local car traffic, but not for through traffic. A bicycle boulevard isn't closed to cars; it just has a barricade every couple of blocks. You can still reach everywhere you want to reach by car.

Contrary to the stereotype there are plenty of Berkeley residents who don't own bikes.

In this kind of solution bicycles are not the solution. Its about blocking residential roads to vehicles and forcing these vehicles to use planned routes, around or through. Sure, bicycles can go through them but its really about forcing cars to use engineered paths. Hopefully they did proper traffic studies for these paths but thats another issue.

Oulu, Finland has eight months of winter, yet they have a bike mode share triple that of Portland. Snow is not a barrier if a city actually cares about cycling: https://wintercyclingblog.org/2014/10/17/oulu-finland-winter...

European cities are also extremely dense compared to American sprawl.

1. Bikes don't really depend on high density the way transit does. They don't do well in rural/exurban sprawl, true, but standard American suburbs are usually dense enough to make a good number of bike trips practical (the infrastructure is another matter entirely though).

2. Wikipedia says Oulu's urban density is 2300/sq mi, which is really not very dense at all.

3. In fact, apparently the suburb in the article (Takoma Park) has a density of 8000/sq mi, so more than triple that of Oulu.

The problem is people live 30 miles from work and come and go at the same time.

> people live 30 miles from work

Agreed, sprawl is an issue.

> come and go at the same time.

Yes, but at the same time, there are good reasons for why most people have roughly in sync schedules: it makes any kind of socialization much, much easier. Yeah, you can dodge traffic by leaving for work a few hours later than everyone else, but then hanging out with any of your friends or family will be painful or outright impossible. And it's particularly important for anyone with kids to have a schedule that roughly matches them being in school.

The average American commute by car is about 12 miles. In the Washington DC area mentioned in the article, it's 9.1 miles.

As this particular moment, a bike ride from Takoma Park to downtown DC is 41 minutes, versus 35 minutes by car.

This is true. I live on the other side of the river from Maryland and well outside the Beltway. The parts of the suburbs that are configured for cycling-as-transport get used year-round.

The only problem is the parts that are cycle-friendly aren't consistent. So, some neighborhoods are linked to commercial areas and others are not. I can easily ride the 11 miles to work without getting on any non-residential streets. But, there are areas 3 miles away that would require driving because of busy roads.

I love this solution so much. I wish SF would do something similar in outer richmond, one of my biggest concerns is driving down Fulton towards Ocean Beach and having cars pull out from residential stop signs, turning the opposite direction.

If I was dictator I would force all traffic to enter and exit the residential areas at the red lights and block the majority of other roads. I am sure it would be next to impossible though as the houses on those roads with lights would block it.

I still see lots of people who are willing to disregard these signs, though. For example on Channing at Roosevelt I see people cut through daily.

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8647438,-122.2756017,3a,75y,...

Good lord that looks awful. I would cut that every day, too, instead of having to circle around four blocks just to move ten feet.

The mean detour caused by this break for non-contrived trips is 1 block, which in this case is about 450 ft. You can't stand to go an extra 450 ft in a car?

In Chicago they solve that problem neatly by installing planters across the street at these points, thereby making it impossible for cars to disregard. There are a lot fewer of these, though - usually just in the immediate proximity of schools.

Clever use of one-way streets and stop signs also helps, and effectively reduces the load of cars moving through the neighborhood at high speed to just the white ones with blue lights on top.

I am sure you are right, but as a long time resident, I think this is the trees not the forest -- I would estimate these barriers reduce 95-99% of the car traffic through them, even if someone cutting through is indeed a daily occurrence. Most are quite intimidating, many are totally impassable or require significant ground clearance.

SUVs and crossovers are becoming more popular by the day, so this might be more of a problem than people imagine. I wonder if there is a way to discourage cars with high ground clearance--a rollover hazard, perhaps?

> Residents still have easy access to the main roads.

Except that we don't. It's annoying to have to "go around the long way" every day. That being said, I still think it's the right solution.

St. Louis did a similar thing, basically as a crime prevention measure, but a side effect is that it's nearly impossible to use side streets to cut through many neighborhoods in the city.

Barcelona is planing somthing similar. Some streets will allow through traffic while most only local traffic + through biking and walking. http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-re...

This "fix", of course, just resulted in through traffic shifting to the nearest residential through street. I have a friend who lives on a street next to a blocked street, and it has solid through traffic for the morning commute.

They totally did! I don't count the times I forgot about this while I was stuck on the eastbound traffic on university ave, attempting to outsmart the traffic by cutting through the blocks on the south side. Most of those blocks are barricaded nimby style, and you end up having to drive several extra miles, worsening your carbon footprint!

"I was trying to outsmart traffic and ended up outsmarting myself, what injustice!"

Carbon footprint. Interesting. The Bay Area has worsened one of its externalities.

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