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How to Double Road Capacity

Traffic, Moscow-style. Keep an eye out for the intrepid pedestrian.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under Traffic Culture, Traffic Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “How to Double Road Capacity”

  1. Fritz Says:
    June 3rd, 2009 at 3:24 pm

    Looks like about 6 lanes merging into 2 with lots of late mergers?

  2. Rich Wilson Says:
    June 3rd, 2009 at 3:44 pm

    I’ve seen Babushkas (little old ladies) literally sprinting for their lives to avoid being mowed down by traffic. Cars don’t stop for anybody there.

    I also had a very interesting ride in ‘private taxi’ along one of the ring roads. It was 3 lanes each direction. We were going clockwise, so in the inner 3 lanes. Oncoming traffic was much heaver, and drivers started to use our outermost lane as a passing lane. As more did it, they essentially ‘took over’ our outermost lane to give themselves a inner 4th lane. No signals or signeage, it was a grassroots critical mass kind of thing. After perhaps half a minute, we got our lane back again. It freaked me out, but my driver took it in stride and didn’t seem to think anything of it.

  3. Nate Briggs Says:
    June 4th, 2009 at 11:26 am

    Similar to Manila, in the Philippines - where it is not uncommon to see 6 cars abreast on an arterial striped for 4 lanes.

    This works passably well when traffic is moving - but intersections become completely overstuffed and anarchic - generating a common sight in the Far East: intersection traffic so snarled that vendors come off the sidewalk and into the street to sell things like newspapers and drinks.

    There’s no risk to the vendors. None of the cars is going anywhere.

    Traffic would move much faster if everyone just stayed where they were supposed to be, but that idea seems too radical for those drivers to grasp.

  4. Dale Says:
    June 9th, 2009 at 6:18 am

    It also looks like Cancun, MX.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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