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Jersey Jughandles, Michigan Lefts, Diverging Diamonds

My latest Slate column.

“Every highway intersection is obsolete,” thundered Norman Bel Geddes—the designer and showman perhaps most noted for the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair—in his 1940 tract Magic Motorways. “The intersection is the chief stumbling block for highway designers and the chief headache for the traffic police,” he noted. “Why should the crossroads most heavily traveled today be the ones that are least adapted to the safe flow of the vehicles that use them?”

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2011 at 8:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.

2 Responses to “Jersey Jughandles, Michigan Lefts, Diverging Diamonds”

  1. Kevin Love Says:
    August 2nd, 2011 at 6:54 pm

    From the article: “While the intersections are avowedly built with access for pedestrians and cyclists in mind…”

    Kevin’s comment: Nonsense. Or, perhaps, incompetence if that really is a goal. If you want an intersection built for people, not cars, it has to look like this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlApbxLz6pA&feature=player_embedded

  2. Bobbie Bees Says:
    August 3rd, 2011 at 9:22 pm

    What a waste of money. Why encourage car drivers? If anything we need to start making it more difficult for car drivers and much easier for cyclists and pedestrians.

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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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