The City of Sioux Falls is resorting to chicanery to slow traffic on 15th Street:
Chicanes are bump-outs at the side of the road intended to create slight snaky curves that cause drivers to slow down. City traffic operations engineer Heath Hoftiezer says they’ve worked in other cities:
“The idea behind it is simulating two parked cars parked close to each other on the road so that traffic has to basically slow down and negotiate around them, especially if two cars are coming at the same time, the whole idea and main focus is just slowing down traffic,” Heath Hoftiezer, City Traffic Operations Engineer said.
Tom Hanson: And they’ve done this in other cities successfully?
Hoftiezer: Yep, there’s a lot of these in other cities all around the country, and it’s something we’ve been looking to try [Tom Hanson, “Sioux Falls Seeing Mixed Reviews on Installation of Chicanes,” KELO-TV, 2021.08.15].
Cue standard random local who responds to novelty and empirical data with personal conviction that change means disaster:
Roxanne Strang has lived on 15th for 22 years.
…“I think it is ridiculous I don’t think there is any reason for it, I just see a lot of accidents and so forth happening in the future,” Strang said.
Tom Hanson: But don’t you want people to slow down on your street?
Strang: I do, but I don’t think that is necessary, I see accidents happening when people can’t see them even though they are trying to avoid 12th Street and I can foresee a lot of things happening in the winter [Hanson, 2021.08.15].
Hanson’s obligatory “mixed reviews” come from on-the-spot speculation, not science. A quick Googling of traffic science makes clear that speed is a major factor in car crashes. Reducing speed reduces accidents and the damage done by crashes. According to an experiment on Italian streets, chicanes reduce speed and crashes:
On the section where the chicane has been realized the number of fatal and injury accidents decreased by about 36%, the number of people killed—by 100%, and the number of people injured—by 50%.
…Particularly interesting is the result deriving from the study of the chicane. The transverse translation of the road axis has led to a significant reduction in the starting speed due to the effect of the two consecutive steering operations imposed on the user in a reduced space; this has helped to increase the level of attention and reduce the speed of maneuvering [Natalia Distefano and Salvatore Leonardi, “Evaluation of the Benefits of Traffic Calming on Vehicle Speed Reduction,” Civil Engineering and Architecture, 2019].
Korean research finds chicanes are better at calming traffic than speed humps and speed tables. Seattle studied chicanes installed in 1984, 1988, and 1992 and found the chicanes reduced speed and traffic volume.
15th Street neighbors thus shouldn’t foresee “a lot of things happening in the winter,” because thanks to the new chicanes (which will be well-marked with white reflective poles), cars will be going more slowly and will have fewer other cars into which to bump.
KELO-TV’s report on these new chicanes provides a good example of how putting “both sides” of an issue on an equal footing disserves the public. On one side, we have an engineer who says chicanes have worked in lots of cities. KELO-TV chooses to place that professional assessment on the same level as one random, uncredentialed woman on the street who whips up an opinion based on pure speculation. KELO-TV then lumps those responses together as “mixed reviews.” That limp both-sidesism masquerading as journalistic objectivity ignores the greater objective fact that research and experience show the engineer is correct and the woman on the street is mistaken.
Chicanes work. The science says so. So should journalists.
Pretty hard to negotiate these things with a cell phone welded to your ear, one hand on the steering wheel and your attention elsewhere, eh?
Maybe the police should start pulling the talkers over.
I’m sure the snow plow operators will love these stupid things.
Reducing speed is a great, but I’m not sure about chicanes and other “traffic calming” ideas. I think the main idea behind these ideas to to get people to stop driving certain streets. In my town there are “chicanes” built in the 1980s: twisting roads through neighborhoods. It must have been the fad back then, as all these other ideas have become a fad 40 years later. One such chicane has resulted in a death and three cars through a house window. The owner of the house put a huge boulder in the yard so now the cars will wreck before they get to the house. Now that’s a traffic calming devise I could go for. Another idea seen here is to so narrow the road that no traffic can get through. You can’t have speeding and accidents if no one can drive the street.
That happens regularly in winter here, as snow piles up on the sides of streets and road crews can’t plow to the curb. I don’t know where in Italy those researchers studied, but I doubt they studied roads in an area with a snowy winter,
I can see where cars from opposite directions race to see which gets through first, just like on the early 70s slot car tracks at local bowling alley. If the city allowed parking on one side of the street, wouldn’t it serve the same purpose to slow down traffic?
ps can these behemoths be ticketed and towed for piling up snow during snow emergencies?
Want to make town / city streets safer and traffic to flow better. Remove the signs. Create intuitive road design, complete with uncertainty that forces drivers to slow and make road-traffic based decisions.
It’s science.
https://bigthink.com/want-less-car-accidents-get-rid-of-traffic-signals-road-signs
John–I’ve always been amazed of the traffic flows of some of the other countries. That said, I doubt if those people have an American attitude of “I pays taxes, the road mine”. One doesn’t have to drive very far in SD to find people who won’t move to another lane to let one enter the freeway or even crowd you out if it is not possible to move over.”My taxes, my road,”my body, my choice for vaccinations”. Its all,me,me,me,.
You hit KELO in a weak spot… their news coverage. From my viewing it seems that they seldom offer genuine news content, their offerings are more like a news-mercial for some event or most frequently, a Sanford puff piece. Yeah, I love knowing all the corporate ‘news’. Do they no longer have reporters on staff? Is that why they parrot other news sources or repeat the same stories for several days? Even the online news is repeated because they have nothing new to fill the page.
South Dakota Motto:
Change Equals Disaster!!
If slowing down traffic is what they want, why don’t they put in speed bumps. It works in parking lots!
Chicanes achieve the same objective without spilling your groceries.
It seems any traffic calming intervention will hamper snow removal. Solution #1 may be to quit building streets where snow falls. Solution #2 may be to stop plowing streets and encourage folks to get around on skis and snowmobiles.
Seriously, chicanes pose less of an obstacle to snow removal that bumps in the road.
On a related note, SD Rep Ernie Otten and his wife are busy circulating petitions to prevent Lincoln County from building 2 roundabouts on busy county roads. Presented with data based evidence that round a bouts reduce accidents and injuries from THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY – they both scoff at such conclusions, relying instead on their own “people drive too fast around them – it’s like a race track” rhetorical chicanery. Rep. Otten also responded to my fact-based post/response to his petition efforts that it was the “last minute nature, and lack of transparency” on the funding mechanism he was really opposed to. I queried him about getting rid of “hog-house” bills in the legislature as a move toward being more considerable and transparent – an area where he has some DIRECT ability to influence. No response.
John Seten. Snow plow operators will negotiate them at reduced and safer speeds as well.
A few quick observations…
Roundabouts have been in use in other countries (eg., western Europe) for over 20 years and there is solid research to back them up. Both in safety and efficiency. I think it’s just that they’re fairly new and unusual for this area and just like learning how to drive or parallel park the first few times, it takes a while to coordinate the sensory input. Maybe similar to cloverleafs in an urban setting for interstate on/off ramps if you come from a rural area.
I am also aware of other studies that suggest ‘random obstructions/curving streets’ in residential areas result in lower speeds and safer streets. I’m not sure how many of these studies have been done in the US vz other countries.
Another thing is the difference in driver’s education and requirements for licensing between the states and especially between the US and other countries (eg., Germany)
And, I have noticed over the years as Sioux Falls has grown, quite a bit of preference for ‘me first, always’. Everything from apparently driving through unregulated residential intersections without looking to not yielding/ ‘not seeing’ pedestrians to speeding up to intimidate a pedestrian back to the curb to ignoring the polite, ‘my turn. your turn’ at stop signs at one land stretches of roads because of construction closures and casual (higher speed) speeding.
I don’t know how many of you have been stuck at a stop light or stopped at a stop sign with no cross or oncoming traffic and wondered why. But if we can’t all play nice in the sandbox…….,
My .015. YMMV.
Cheers,