Oct 14, 2009
By: Kevin Buchanan
In many residential areas of Melbourne, Australia, you’ll find a good helping of trees planted in the road between parking spaces and near intersections to help calm traffic. Here are but a few scenes.
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I think this is taking things too far. It appears that the trees and shrubs would actually create a hazard for drivers and pedestrians alike. In my opinion its critical for both parties to have a very good eye of the road and the things around them. Also, maybe it’s just the neighborhoods, but these trees aren’t even visually appealing and many look to have been struck by cars. I’m all for trees, but let’s keep them along the sidewalks and not put them directly on the streets…
These are small local neighborhood streets – the results have been that traffic moves more slowly and cautiously, making things safer for pedestrians and cyclists. It’s likely that the local neighborhood streets there aren’t 30mph (or more) like they are in Texas – this would undoubtedly have be done here in conjunction with dropping neighborhood speed limits, which needs to be done anyway (the narrow local streets in Fort Worth’s urban neighborhoods shouldn’t have 30mph limits as they often do now). Melbourne’s not the only place where this has been tried and found to be successful in creating slower streets, just the example used in the video.
If the cars are moving more slowly, pedestrians will have plenty of ability to see them and be safe. Combine more sane speed limits with calming measures like trees, chicanes, roundabouts, etc. and you’ve got much safer neighborhood streets. Note that these aren’t major streets – these are the sort of narrow, low-speed low-traffic things you’ll see in old central city Fort Worth neighborhoods.
Seattle uses the “mini” roundabout with trees in it’s older ‘hoods. Works great for both cars and cyclists. I would love to have one at my intersection in Fairmount. I’d even water the tree (with harvested rainwater). Is this idea (the landscapted mini roundabouts) being considered by Fort Worth as one of its TC measures? I think another committee is being convened on TC and other mobility elements. Councilmember Zimmerman seems to be the defacto elected official in charge. Kevin – do you know anything about this?
Ya yea have those here in Tacoma Washington aswell and I have seen them in fort worth by white settlement road close to tres joses
i loved the mini roundabouts in eugene, oregon when i lived there. would do well by fairmount. calm things down a bit on the busier streets.