Transforming OpenStreetMap into thick roads and intersections
a-b-street.github.io
a-b-street.github.io
Keep up the work, this is an awesome tool and I hope it can get to the point where it can easily help inform people about traffic design and simulation.
I'm not very good at nor patient for trying to do neighborhood people organization and go around in circles with City Hall for 5 years (as has been the case with other neighborhood things like park use etc. that I have previously been involved in). But I am tried of losing about 5-6 hours a year to excess wait times at intersections despite trying to avoid the slowest crossings.
If you want to make a difference, making comments (about ongoing projects, particularly) will tend to have more impact. For something more systemic (like light cycles deprioritizing pedestrians), I found the best solution was to move to a better city.
If that's not a solution for you :) then another option you might want to consider is having a meeting with your municipal (or even higher) level elected representative - invite them for a walkthrough of a more problematic space, and try to explain the issues and possible solutions as calmly/rationally as possible. And without attacking car culture directly, as that tends to get people defensive.
TL;DR is that "we" won't prioritize any road user except the automobile.
[1] https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop08024/chapter4....
I don't know if this would translate well to other cities — SF has a very pedestrian-friendly layout with narrow, slow streets , small blocks, and short light cycles — but it works well enough here that it might be worth trying elsewhere.
Instead of squares, their streets intersect in diamonds, where the (largely one-way) streets come out of the corners. They're a bit larger than a square intersection-- it's like you took the square, and then filled in four right triangles at each of the corners.
The main effect is that crosswalks are significantly pushed back from the intersection center. As a pedestrian, there's far less ambiguity about where the cars are going (regardless of whether they use their signal). Same for drivers: you never have to wonder which way a pedestrian is gong to cross when they're standing at a corner where two crosswalks meet, because there are no such corners.
Of course, this also makes intersections much bigger. This is offset by having parking spaces along the edges of intersections.
But let me tell you, it can be infuriating if you're walking to actually get somewhere. The city I live in has been replacing 2-way and 4-way stops with roundabouts, which has a similar effect of moving the crosswalks away from the intersection. Now it takes much longer to walk anywhere because you keep having to detour out of your way to cross the street.
From talking to planners, reaching for these tools is a huge time and money commitment, even assuming they have a license and somebody trained to use it. Some ideas don't even get off the ground, and some projects take community feedback after spending months building the initial models. I think there's a huge missing space for rapid prototyping. The fact that I see planning agencies regularly include graphics from streetmix.net is evidence of this -- it's a quick way to communicate, so often how a conversation starts. I'd simply like to expand that space.
It's insane to see the levels of depth still to plunge - this is incredible documentation and a very cool project
PS - I'd upvote twice if I could for incorporate of cthulhu mythos!
Totally awesome and inspiring nonetheless though.
Regardless, the design choices and color scheme are something I would love to adapt.
Do not expect however mainstream data consumers to support it ;)
More and more corporations are putting significant amounts of energy towards improving openstreetmap as well, drastically improving overall quality.
It's hard to say which is better here, to be honest. A giant blob of gray is less helpful than showing some lanes, but the original version is much closer to the actual shape: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6564275,-122.3223112,203m/da...
Though apparently even google can't handle this intersection. Where did the middle layer of road go, google? https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6556467,-122.3191587,69a,35y...