Learning to Love Your Traffic Engineer ? Suburbs?
Wednesday, October 16 by JerryFoster
Don?t we live in the suburbs? Wouldn?t it be nice if there were Complete Streets designs that could make suburban living even better – for motorists, cyclists, walkers, runners, children and seniors?
Consider the suburbs from the point of view of the traffic engineer. After all, the invention of the automobile made the suburbs available to so many people over the last half century, so traffic engineers are largely responsible for how we suburbanites live so much of our lives.
As it turns out, traffic engineers don?t see suburbs, sort of like Stephen Colbert doesn?t see race. The traffic engineering world is governed by urban or rural designs only, and what we think of as suburban is by definition urban.
What about our farms, like all along Windsor Road ? rural, right? Sorry, the region?s population, not just the adjacent properties?, determine that all our roads are urban, since we?re in an urban area as defined by the Census Bureau (generally, over 5000 people).
So the first step in learning to love your traffic engineer is to see West Windsor from their big picture point of view – urban.
Stay tuned for our next installment of Learning to Love Your Traffic Engineer ? Collect Local Arterials.
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