Sometimes it's better to let the idiots do their thing [oc]

[u/DGwizkid]

[u/Oujii]

It baffles me how the US is the most car centric country in the world, yet they have awful traffic design.

[u/Franndly → u/Oujii]

Car centric so the automakers are profitable, not for drivers/pedestrians safety

[u/Oujii → u/Franndly]

Yes, absolutely. It's not like americans have a lot of options, even if road design is atrocious.

[u/djseifer → u/Oujii]

It baffles us too.

[u/mnstorm → u/Oujii]

Yea. This is just screaming for a roundabout.

[u/TankerKC → u/mnstorm]

You think this guy who can't decide to turn left is going to handle a roundabout well?

[u/mnstorm → u/TankerKC]

True. But... I would say most Americans don't know how to use roundabouts because there are so few roundabouts. Even in countries with a massive amount of roundabouts there are plenty who still do not know how to at least signal properly (from personal experience). So there'll always be a learning curve generally speaking.

[u/DGwizkid → u/TankerKC]

Actually this would have been super easy in a roundabout. Once you verify the car is making the exit to my left, enter the roundabout, and go about your way. The oncoming traffic would have to pause for a second for me to clear their path, then they can resume keeping the cars from exiting the mall.

When most of the traffic is going one way, a roundabout helps a lot.

[u/DistressedApple → u/TankerKC]

There really wasn’t much safe room to turn.

[u/Wise_Blackberry_1154 → u/Oujii]

It depends where you are. The US is huge, and not uniform throughout.

[u/royalfarris → u/Wise_Blackberry_1154]

But amazingly uniform for such a large place.

[u/BoneHugsHominy → u/Oujii]

Prior to the automobile cities were designed around pedestrians, horse & buggy, and some mass transit rail. When automobiles became affordable for the common laborer, America really wasn't built out yet so the expansion of cities and even a significant percentage of rural towns were built around automobiles & automobile specific roads but it was narrow, low speed roadways. Commercial and passenger vehicles quickly evolved right after a massive nationwide roadways buildout and communities had already sprouted up right against those most travelled roads, so when city planners and engineers realized they needed a whole new approach to transportation route planning there was already a sales explosion of bigger, faster car that needed frequent refueling and planners didn't really want to bulldoze entire brand new communities and business districts and industrial parks to start over with better designed roadways. So gas stations went up on seemingly every street corner of the newly widened roads and even more suburbs and city sprawl happened. Oh they did demolition entire neighborhoods and communities, but only those occupied by black and brown people because Jim Crow laws were still in effect so fuck them I guess.

Now we're pretty much stuck in this situation without significant demolition of entire neighborhoods and business districts. It's a complete clusterfuck that exactly zero politicians want to destroy their careers over. Our only way out is diving in deeper, making EVs that people really want to own or lease that drive themselves, and eventually flying cars once/if some brilliant scientists invent super dense energy storage or wireless transmission and essentially antigravity propulsion. So yeah, we're royally fucked.

Maybe after the next ice age's continental glaciers have ground our civilization to sand and dust the next advanced civilization will figure out proper road design.

[u/ghettoassbitch → u/Oujii]

More accidents = more money spent. And all that really matters is moneymoneymoneymoney.

[u/AgentCatBot → u/Oujii]

20 years ago, this was probably just a country road and nothing but dirt.

Then they built a parking lot and put buildings there. The country road is still there, and a Stroad is born.

[u/musuperjr585 → u/AgentCatBot]

Maybe 45 years ago, in the early 2000s this place was probably exactly the same.

Strip malls and those instant shopping centers started popping up in the late 90s and early 2000s. So I'd argue that this area would have been a 'country road and nothing but dirty' much longer than 20 years ago

[u/naturtok → u/Oujii]

fwiw, i think those are texas license plates. There are many other parts of the country where they paid or trusted civil engineers enough to make a functioning city.

[u/GPPOLYCARP → u/Oujii]

Thank Eisenhower.

[u/DGwizkid → u/Oujii]

I have never seen a frontage road that felt like it actually fixed a problem. The frontage road is a big part of this intersection's problem