I think that it's a reasonable and valid decision for a community to try to restrict through traffic to the main roads such that residential areas can remain quiet/free from exhaust/safe to walk around without all sorts of guardrails and stuff, even if it means less efficiency and more congestion on the main routes.
Why is it okay to push even more of these costs on people around the main route, don't you think that people in all areas should take on their share of these costs.
Also struggling to see how a guardrail could be burdensome.
Guardrails are really ugly, and have been shown to increase traffic speeds -- they make drivers feel safer, since they think they no longer need to look for pedestrians.
I think you might be assuming the aim is to maximize traffic flow, or similar. That's not necessarily the aim of a European city's traffic planners -- they may prioritize pedestrian or cyclist safety, child safety or play space, reducing noise, improving bus/tram speeds, or maintaining a historic appearance. This might be for a single road, a small area, or a whole district.
Several of these can reduce overall traffic. If parents don't think it's safe for their children to walk to school, they might drive them instead -- increasing traffic at the worst time for other children. Similarly for private vehicles obstructing buses and trams.
Road networks often follow a hierarchical design - Freeways fed by major roads, major roads fed by smaller roads, smaller roads fed by residential streets.
The larger roads, obviously, are designed for higher traffic speeds and volumes. Features you might see (depending on how large the road is) include more and wider lanes, restrictions on stopping, fewer curves, better visibility, fewer junctions, pedestrians directed to footbridges or dedicated crossings, better lighting, no buildings opening directly onto the roads, and suchlike.
For example, see [1] blue roads being slower/lower capacity, and orange and red being larger, higher speed roads.
Also struggling to see how a guardrail could
be burdensome.
Consider this narrow road in London [2] which allows you to bypass the traffic lights between Clerkenwell Road and St John St (admittedly at the cost of taking a sharp corner - I've done this on a motorbike). Replacing the bollards with armco barriers would prevent pedestrians from crossing the road.
(IMHO if people don't want a road used as a through road, they should get the road blocked at one end - rather than expecting a legislative solution - and if they don't want the inconvenience of going around, perhaps they should consider that other road users don't either)
Even with an overall hierarchical design, some places still tend to have fairly major roads with houses on both sides, these are the places I'm concerned about, directing more traffic to these major roads from historically less trafficked roads.
I would think having gaps in the barrier, say every five or ten meters would be sufficient?
I like your humble opinion :) that seems like quite a fair solution all around.
Barriers look ugly and don't solve the problem for:
* pet owners (even cats aside, some dogs often escape the house),
* younger kids who don't have the same safety awareness and often just run off,
* older kids who parents would normally trust to cycle to their friends house.
Barriers also create parking problems:
* how do barriers work when you have houses with driveways?
* and if don't have driveways then how do you park on the street now that you've made it harder to get on and off the pavement?
Barriers legitimise speeding down the road which puts cars parks on the street at greater risk of getting damaged (I've seen this happen far to often along rat runs).
Plus there is also the noise polution problem of living next to a rat run. In fact it's worse than along main roads because you end up with car engines revving as they maneuver around parked cars at speed rather than the constant steady drone of cars going past. You have no idea how annoying this is during the summer when you want windows open and the cars are louder than your own bloody TV!
People who move into a main road do so knowingly and are willing to live with the drawbacks it brings. Though often those kind of houses have longer front gardens so the house is set further back from the road and/or hedges or other noise cancelling greenery (sometimes - not always though). But if you move onto a quieter street you do so because you want a safer and quieter environment. Which is why residents protest against their streets being turned into through-roads
Residential roads are usually a destination where kids play in the road or even become good cycle routes as the speed profile of the roads are designed to enable social cohesion. The original purpose of the road has been 'lost' as congestion has increased making the road attractive.
As to guardrails, they create a significant barrier, not only for, say a pedestrian being slammed into them by a car, but also from a neighbourhood community point of view. The problem is not the people walking and cycling, but the people using it as a convenient cut through.
