The United States Department of Transportation proposed to eliminate a mandate for replacing traffic signs based on the potential costs related to ‘menu costs‘.

The Washington Post reports:

Although the order came from Washington, the burden of paying for hundreds of thousands of new signs — at costs ranging from $30 to $110 — would have fallen to state and local governments. Fairfax County estimated that it would cost $1.75 million, New York City pegged it a $27.6 million, and officials in small towns felt particularly burdened by the expense.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation dropped the deadline, saying instead that bigger, brighter street signs should be installed whenever current signs need to be replaced.

“A specific deadline for replacing street signs makes no sense and would have cost communities across America millions of dollars in unnecessary expenses,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said. “After speaking with local and state officials across the country, we are proposing to eliminate these burdensome regulations. It’s just plain common sense.”

The original mandate was churned out by George W. Bush administration regulators in 2003 as part of a routine update of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, an 816-page guide for traffic signs, signals and the like that seeks to set common standards nationwide.

Image: dot.gov

Tom Vanderbilt’s latest Slate column discuss Diverging Diamond intersections that we have discussed before here and here at the Hub.

There is, however, a cheaper, less disruptive approach, one that promises its own safety and efficiency gains, that has become recently popular in the United States: the diverging diamond interchange. There’s just one catch: You briefly have to drive the wrong way… The DDI is the brainchild of Gilbert Chlewicki, who first theorized what he called the “criss-cross interchange” as an engineering student at the University of Maryland in 2000. (He eventually changed the name for fear of potential confusion with the singer of “Sailing.”)…

The DDI is the sort of thing that is easier to visualize than describe (this simulation may help), but here, roughly, is how a DDI built under a highway overpass works: As the eastbound driver approaches the highway interchange (whose lanes run north-south), traffic lanes “criss cross” at a traffic signal. The driver will now find himself on the “left” side of the road, where he can either make an unimpeded left turn onto the highway ramp, or cross over again to the right once he has gone under the highway overpass.

Photo credit: Slate.com

The book Nudge brought new attention to subtle changes that can improve everyday life. One such traffic-related nudge can be found in Chicago.

The curve at Lake Shore Drive and Oak Street in Chicago is a favorite nudge. The tight turn makes it one of the city’s most dangerous curves. To try and limit wrecks, in September 2006 the city painted a series of white lines perpendicular to traveling cars. The lines get progressively narrower as drivers approach the sharpest point of the curve, giving them the illusion of speeding up, and nudging them to tap their brakes.

What are the results?

To see if it could make the road even safer, the city installed a series of overhead flashing beacons, yellow and black chevron alignment signs, and warning signs posting the reduced advisory speed limit. Again, accidents fell – 47 percent over a 6-month period (March 2007 – August 2007 and March 2006 – August 2006). Keep in mind that the post-six-month period effect included both the signs and the lines.

Photo credit

The mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, Arturos Zuorokas, has taken parking problems into his own hands using a tank to enforce parking rules. This humorous YouTube video highlights the man, the problem, and the tank.

H/T Fast Company

Now that ‘Carmageddon’ is over in Southern California, how bad was the traffic? Freakonomics blogger Eric A. Morris weighs in on the results.

In fact, Carmageddon saw stunningly low traffic levels, with many who did venture out reporting they had never driven at such speeds in LA in their lifetimes. Moreover, fears that the project (which involved demolishing half of a bridge over the highway) would drag on into Monday’s rush hour proved totally unfounded, as the work was completed and the freeway reopened on Sunday afternoon, many hours ahead of schedule.

Had people attempted to drive as normal there undoubtedly would have been a traffic fiasco, but continual and shrill media warnings worked better than most dreamed, and the city stayed home for the weekend.

If they are to be taken at their word, the pundits have been proven to be extremely poor judges of human nature. One would think that at the very least the politicians, who create campaign ads, would be familiar with the fact that if you repeat something often enough in the media, you can get many people to believe it, no matter how outlandish it is.

But there’s another possibility. I wonder if many of the pundits were more astute than they let on and didn’t actually believe their own hype. Belief that heavy traffic would fail to materialize would raise an interesting moral dilemma. Suppose you believe, as I did, that Carmageddon would be a wet firecracker. Do you dare take to the airwaves, newspaper pages and blogs with that opinion? If not, you join the herd by propagating dire horror stories, you are a bit of a fibber, and, if you work for government, probably a soon-to-be-unemployed fibber.

Photo credit

The New York Times looks at the extensive highway work project expected to cause major disruptions this week.

You would think that Los Angeles, of all places, would know how to handle a catastrophe. But in just over a week, 11 miles of Interstate 405 — the north-south spine of the West Side of Los Angeles, which carries 500,000 cars every weekend over the Sepulveda Pass into the San Fernando Valley — is going to shut down for 53 hours, from late Friday night to early Monday morning. No cars, trucks or motorcycles will be allowed, to make way for the latest phase in a $1 billion widening project for a highway that serves as an unhappy second home for commuters during rush hours.

And they are calling it Carmageddon.

Photo credit

Los Angeles is considering pulling the plug on their red light cameras (RLC’s). Freakonomics blogger Eric A. Morris weighs in:

Do we need RLCs? First off, yes, there is a problem. Intersections are dangerous places. The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that red-light running caused 676 deaths and 113,000 injuries in 2009 alone. Even more troubling, nearly two-thirds of the fatalities were innocent drivers, passengers, and pedestrians.

Moreover, there is an enforcement issue. Catching a driver who runs a red light often means the cop must himself run the red to chase the law-breaker from behind, with considerable danger to both cop and motorists on the cross street.

Next question: do RLCs work? The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety has estimated that RLCs in the 14 largest cities saved 159 lives between 2004 and 2008. In a recent study comparing cities that added RLCs between 1996 and 2004 with those that did not, the Institute found the RLC cities had crash rates that were 35 percent lower in the mid-2000s than in the early 90s. Cities that did not install RLCs also saw a drop, but of only 14 percent.

Not only are lives saved at RLC intersections, but there may be a “spillover” effect where drivers are more cautious at other intersections as well. The bottom line is that the Institute calculates that if all 99 cities with populations over 200,000 had installed RLCs, between 2004 and 2008 a total of 815 deaths could have been avoided.

Photo credit: Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times

Just outside my first apartment was a ‘Slow Children At Play’ sign and every time I walked past I would think about the ‘slow children’ in my neighborhood and hoped for punctuation that would call out to passing motorists to reduce their speed instead of judging these children.

Over at Slate.com, Tom Vanderbilt writes about these “Little. Yellow. Dangerous.” signs:

Despite the continued preponderance of “Children at Play” on streets across the land, it is no secret in the world of traffic engineering that “Children at Play” signs—termed, with subtle condescension, “advisory signs”—have been proven neither to change driver behavior nor to do anything to improve the safety of children in a traffic setting. The National Cooperative Highway Research Program, in its “Synthesis of Highway Practice No. 139,” sternly advises that “non-uniform signs such as “CAUTION—CHILDREN AT PLAY,” “SLOW—CHILDREN,” or similar legends should not be permitted on any roadway at any time.” Moreover, it warns that “the removal of any nonstandard signs should carry a high priority.”

Or the below photograph from the Cayman Islands.

Photo credit

Tom Vanderbilt writes at length about merging philosophy in his book, Traffic. It seems that the Illinois Department of Transportation is now experimenting with some new ideas in merging.

The Quad-City Times writes about the new Illinois DOT signage:

There’s a new sign in town, and it may just change everything.

The Illinois DOT has placed a message board on Interstate 74 in Moline, approaching the lane closure for work on the bridge. It states: “Use both lanes. Take turns at merge.”

That’s crazy talk, right? Everybody knows the proper way to handle a lane closure is to merge into the good lane as soon as humanly possible.

Evidently not.

We’re so inadequate at navigating lane closures, the DOT is now spelling it out for us on large lighted signs: “Use both lanes.” It might as well say, “Use both lanes, Dummies.”

But that’s cool. We can take instruction.

Jan Amyette, of Bettendorf, is a retired Moline business owner who has had more experience with lane closures on the I-74 bridge than she cares to count.

“I’ve battled that bridge for 26 years,” she said. “It’s so exasperating. I remember feeling angry at those people using the empty lane. Even though I would love to sneak over into the other lane, I feel guilty.”

Aha! Therein lies our problem: We are too polite. We would rather spend an extra half hour in a single line, cursing the passers, than risk the crooked eye from a stranger in another car. The fix for this is fairness: If everybody takes a tooth in the so-called “Zipper” system, everyone (supposedly) wins.

“This is something I’ve seen done in Pennsylvania on a project, and we’ve talked about it over the years,” explained John Wegmeyer, project implementation engineer for Illinois DOT. “We’re trying to eliminate long backups and trucks and other vehicles trying to straddle the lanes.”

Photo credit: Kevin E. Schmidt/QUAD-CITY TIMES

Humorist P.J. O’Rourke takes aim at bicycles:

The bicycle is a parody of a wheeled vehicle—a donkey cart without the cart, where you do the work of the donkey. Although the technology necessary to build a bicycle has been around since ancient Egypt, bikes didn’t appear until the 19th century. The reason it took mankind 5,000 years to get the idea for the bicycle is that it was a bad idea.

Photo credit: Getty Images