He has a newsletter on beehiiv. So do Codie Sanchez, Jay Shetty, David Begnaud, Colin & Samir, and Joanna Stern.

They could publish just about anywhere. They chose beehiiv to build a direct connection with the people who want to hear from them most. And you can do the same, whether you’re world-famous or just at the start of your plan for world domination.

Get started for free.

What are some things local governments could do to address traffic congestion, but typically won’t, because they will be unpopular with someone? Engineers, utility providers, school boards, fire marshals, developers, and homeowners all take a turn in the barrel. Here are some ideas, grouped by topic. Some of these ideas go straight at congestion; others save money that can be shifted to improvements that do more to relieve it.

Higher speed does not mean more volume. Traffic engineers have studied this since the dawn of the automobile. The number of vehicles a lane can move per hour peaks at a moderate speed, not at the top of the speed range. According to the Highway Capacity Manual, on non-freeway urban arterials that peak is about 30 mph. Let that sink in a bit and think about the typical road improvements you see in your area.

Wider roads don’t always lead to more capacity. In the late 1990s I heard a traffic engineer named Walter Kulash give what remains the most un-traffic-engineer presentation (found similar online)I have ever heard. If I recall correctly, he argued that a 4-lane road at 35 mph can move a comparable amount of traffic as a 6-lane road at 55 mph, at a fraction of the cost and with far better safety. The reason is that capacity on urban arterials is set at the intersections, not the width of the road between them. He also showed a simpler way to look at it: take the same total number of lanes and arrange them as a network of smaller streets rather than a single massive arterial. Think of three 2-lane parallel east-west roads instead of one 6-lane east-west road. More roads allow greater overall capacity, better flow, and redundancy, because they avoid the bottlenecks that come with large, high-volume intersections. The larger the intersection, the less efficient it is at moving traffic.

Let the elected officials pick the design speed. This one is a bit counterintuitive. Before a traffic engineer recommends a capital project, whether resurfacing, restriping, widening, or building a new road, the decision makers should tell the engineer what the design speed should be. Say what? Too often the engineer designs a road with wide lanes and long blocks ending up with a 55-mph design speed and then posts a 35-mph limit once it is built. Instead, the decision makers should state up front that the design speed should be 35 mph, for example, and have the engineer design to that standard. The result is likely a much safer road. This can also be done when a road is resurfaced or restriped. Lower design speeds also allow narrower lanes. Each foot of pavement width removed saves about 0.12 acre per mile of road, which is that much less land to acquire and that much less impervious surface to manage for stormwater. Elected officials should ask the question every time.

Ask for options before committing to a project. When a road is failing from a capacity perspective, typically, a city or county engineer recommends an improvement to a road or intersection (adding lanes, signalization, and so on) citing standard federal, state and local engineering criteria, with the goal of adding more capacity for traffic. However, there may be room for a lesser design that achieves the same or similar standards of safety and added volume. Those options and cross sections should be presented to the elected decision makers for consideration. These options could include adding another access for a business or residential subdivision, or making an intersection improvement instead. Instead of widening a 2-lane road to 4 lanes divided, look at a 3-lane section with a center turn lane, lower speeds, and passive traffic calming measures.

Fix intersections before widening roads. This is called the “wide node – narrow road” strategy and again, I heard about it from Walter Kulash. Typically, intersections are where the road’s capacity is impacted. If efforts are focused on those first, it may save the jurisdiction money instead of tearing up an entire road outside of the intersection areas. Intersection improvements can be signalization, turn-lane improvements, or the installation of a roundabout. It is true that roundabouts take up more right-of-way, but where technically feasible they can postpone the need to widen a road.

This is an “upfront” solution. Proper design and planning. Roads have been built in a grid successfully for thousands of years. The better question is how much of it can be retrofitted today.

Enforce a collector road every ½ or ¼ mile. Require a new collector road at that spacing in both the north-south and east-west directions, with a tighter grid where density is higher.

Require Local Street Stub-Outs. All new neighborhoods should extend some of their roads to the property boundary with the expectation that they will connect to future development or major road. A grid-type design should emerge. Once development of the subdivision begins, local government should require signs, in place before Final Plat approval and remaining afterward, that announce to future residents where these stub-outs will connect.

Add connections. Many neighborhoods lack multiple access points to a collector or arterial road. Adding connections could save the local government money by avoiding an intersection improvement or a road widening. It may mean buying out a house and lot through eminent domain to connect to the adjacent street. The following graphic shows an example of a gated community with limited access points and many options for additional access.

Rethink private, gated streets. Many new subdivisions in Southwest Florida are gated, with private streets. These occurred in the 1990s as well, but they were typically smaller, not the multiple-square-mile gated subdivisions with limited access points we see today. They contribute greatly to the area’s traffic woes because they provide no through-connectivity. New private gated subdivisions above a specific size / block threshold, with requirements proportional to the traffic they generate, should be required to provide perimeter public local streets or thoroughfares with connections at each compass point, at a minimum, to allow proper trip distribution and movement of traffic through the community.

Build infill roads. Instead of widening a road, consider adding a parallel road where none exists yet, if an option. In many agricultural areas, property ownership changes along section, township, and range lines. New roads can be conceptually planned along those lines at a minimum. If space and location are an issue, options include looking at potential corridors adjacent to drainage canals, major power transmission or pipeline corridors. Existing dead-end streets or neighborhoods may also be connected to provide parallel trip movements (remember, this is the “bad ideas” newsletter).

This takes more horsepower and may be beyond a local government’s direct reach. Fire regulations are set at the state and national levels and enforced locally, so change would likely require legislative support at those levels. The issue touches mixed-use development, multi-family housing, and access points. Fire and building codes have come a long way in improving public safety, so much so that structure fires have decreased drastically over the decades and most 911 calls are for medical emergencies, false alarms, and traffic crashes according to the National Fire Protection Association. Yet the codes that force wider traffic lanes, larger off-street parking areas, and bigger circulation areas are based on the fire apparatus used today, which is larger than that used in other developed nations, especially in western Europe, as Fire Apparatus Magazine has noted. A comprehensive look at how these requirements affect crash severity, housing options, and mixed-use development, compared with western European countries, could identify changes that improve both public safety and quality of life.

Add school access points. Look at existing school sites to see whether additional access points can be added to improve circulation and remove choke points. This may conflict with a school’s security plan, but local governments assisting school boards to fund other safety improvements to mitigate any concerns may avoid the cost of a major road widening or intersection improvement. The following graphic shows two adjacent large public schools with large circuitous on-site vehicle stacking and limited access forcing all trips onto one arterial roadway and one local street.

Buy down the size of schools. Many new public schools are massive (250,000 sf) and are located on major arterials, which discourages kids from walking or biking to school. Some new schools have over a mile of on-site vehicle stacking for parent pickup. Local governments could “buy down” the cost of schools to encourage smaller schools (30,000 sf) inside neighborhoods, or at the edge on no more than a collector road instead of spending millions on road improvements. You probably don’t have to look far for examples, just look at your older neighborhoods and their schools within your community.

Flip the school calendar. I cannot take credit for this gem of an idea. It goes to my friend Dan. K-12 students still take their long vacation in the summer, a calendar inherited from another era. In sunbelt states, winter traffic is already inflated by snowbirds, and parents and school buses double it. Shift the long break from summer to the winter months and some of that traffic disappears during the peak season.

This is a tough pill to swallow for a politician or a traffic engineer. Even urban planners – we cannot help ourselves. Traffic congestion is the result of using the wrong tools to fix a problem. Once a road is congested, politicians and design professionals recommend a “fix”. However, the track record of “fixes” is not so good, especially in the sunbelt states. The idea of induced demand goes back at least to Anthony Downs in the 1960s. A 2011 study, The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities, by Duranton and Turner, found that driving on interstates in US metro areas rises roughly in proportion to road capacity, so added lanes fill with new trips and congestion returns. Letting traffic fix itself means we stop widening roads to chase congestion and let people adjust their trips, their schedules, and where they live, which they can do only if the other ideas give them options.

If you are stuck in traffic over an hour every day would you not change something? Move closer to work? Change jobs? However, I must admit, I don’t hear people doing that. One factor in a longer commute may be affordable housing (drive until you qualify for a mortgage).  This was typical in California and now being seen in Southwest Florida.

About 20 years ago, I was getting overweight and out of shape. My doctor recommended some changes but didn’t really focus on what I ate – which today we know is the key to losing weight. Our typical fixes for traffic are like my doctor prescribing me bigger pants instead of eating whole foods and avoiding processed foods and sugar.

None of these ideas I have mentioned are new, and not one of them is hard to understand. Most of them exist and have been used historically in city design. They are hard to adopt or bring back because each one asks someone to give something up or change something, whether a politician, an engineer, a developer, a homeowner, a school board, or a fire marshal. Which may be why traffic keeps getting worse. In this case, going back to what worked can feel like going backwards.

Thanks for reading. If you are interested in more bad ideas related to planning, I am your guy. I will attempt to have another newsletter out to waste your time in another week or so.