427
Traffic Engineering In a Nutshell
(lemmy.nz)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
427 points (97.8% liked)
Fuck Cars
16853 readers
1300 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
My town has a little shopping centre a ways outside of the town. It's an American style shopping centre (I live in Sweden) so it has a huge parking lot, and a massive building stretching a long span with lots of shops and some fast food restaurants. My previous vet is located there.
To get there, you had to go on a small pedestrian road, without a dedicated bicycle lane, there was a exit ramp from the motorway, and the pedestrian path had no proper crossing. Then there was a bridge over the highway, and a really long swooping path you had to follow to get to the big centre so you could finally cross the perilous parking lot and whatever. There was thankfully a desire path you could take, since they have a tendency to crop up when actual infrastructure fails us.
Enjoy my rubbish illustration of this.
The black bit is the car road, the brown is the pedestrian path. It's obviously simplified, but you get the idea. I'm coming from the roundabout in the bottom, the shopping centre is up the top to the left.
Some years ago my town announced that they'd redo this entire stretch of road. It's a multiple year project. They're adding more roundabouts, and they were going to improve the lane for pedestrians. This lead to pedestrians and cyclists not having direct access anymore, because the path took 1½ years to complete. You had to go around the entire thing.
Anyway, with this improvement, they announced that the pedestrian path would be wider, it'd be placed differently, and it'd go under the road. Hooray, we'll be able to go directly to the centre rather than follow the ridiculously swoopy road. Right? Right?
Enter illustration two. The... purple-ish path is how I envisioned it'd go (imagine that it goes under the road). Instead we got basically the same path, but much wider, and where before it went over the motorway off-ramp, it now goes under it, does a god damn pirouette and resumes right next to the fucking road! They somehow fucking managed to make it longer!
It used to be about a two kilometre stretch. Not so bad, but felt awful to walk by. They've managed to add on an extra ~300 metres for no reason whatsoever. At the very least it is wider, you can comfortably have people walking and cycling on the road, and it is further from the road so it doesn't feel like you're walking among the cars anymore.
shit like this makes me so patriotic, all swedes have a god-given right to 5km of technically functional and "safe" (not actively lethal) pedestrian infrastructure to reach the retail area on the other side of the motorway!
We should change our flag to a 20cm wide sidewalk that was obviously put in 30 years ago and never maintained.
Real talk though: this is why anything even vaguely rural is bleeding population like an open wound, the "big cities" are so hilariously much better in every single way.
I think the funniest part is that this road is a main stretch of road that they continuously keep ripping up and replacing. Sure now they are doing some major restructuring, there is a pretty large project here related to Ostlänken, so I think that’s the incentive.
However, in the four years I’ve lived here, the stretch of this road that passes by the area my flat is has been ripped up and replanted like at least half a dozen times. The same stretch of road, making no changes to it. I’ve genuinely no idea why they keep doing it. It’s like someone at stadshuset has a kink for roadwork.
I think that kink is required to become a public official, same thing in my town.
They particularly love to remove random sections of asphalt, wait a couple weeks before they spray the warning paint so you see the massive fucking cliff that'll kill anyone in a wheelchair, then it spends months or years completely untouched until it's suddenly repaved again.
I'm convinced it's casual corruption to funnel money into construction companies.