...One pet peeve of mine; you are on the main street of anytown and as the traffic light you are sitting at turns green you see the next one turn yellow. Every block requires you to stop at another traffic light. Think of all of the fuel and time which could be saved if the lights were synchronised, so that instead of stopping at every one you only had to stop at a few. Bracket racers say that the way to lose a pound is to shave an ounce 16 times...the same can be applied to reducing pollution.
We just went through dealing with some of this in South Bend. When I was a kid, back in the 60's, the streets were 2-way, there was traffic stopped at all the lights, people walking around shopping at all the stores.
Eventually they made the streets one-way and timed all the lights. One effect of that is that it made it extremely un-pedestrian friendly, and, it made it hard to park as traffic was always moving so fast that you'd have a tough time parallel parking because people were riding up on your rear. Parking on the left side of the street posed a different hazard, as it's really hard to see traffic coming at you on your right side when trying to park or leave.
The last few years they've initiated the "smart street" program. They turned all the 3 lane one-way streets back into 2 lane two-way streets again. The lights are not timed so that you can zip through town anymore. It slows traffic down considerably. Sounds horrible at first, and can be quite frustrating to impatient people like myself.
However, now that traffic has to stop, and, it's easier to park on either side of the street, and, it's pedestrian friendly, the town is undergoing quite the revival. Small shops and tons of restaurants have opened since this happened. Apartments and town homes are all rented/leased. New construction is happening for the first time in 30 years in downtown.
What's trying to be promoted is that if you want to zip through town, go around it. If you want to live and work downtown, it's now possible. You won't mind the traffic jams because you can walk everywhere you need to walk.
So you have this back and forth between people wanting to zip through town as fast as possible VS people that want to live in town and don't want them zipping through at all.
It's an interesting dynamic. Personally, I like seeing downtown come back to life. It did add about 4 minutes to my 7 minute commute, so 11 minutes isn't bad in the big picture. But when you add up the numbers, about 40,000 cars go through town each day. If they used to spend an average of 10 minutes, and now it's 12 minutes, that's a 20% increase in car-hours. And, that's at lower speeds and idling, where cars are most inefficient. So I'd guess an increase of 20-25% in air pollution and fuel consumption from cars in the downtown area due to this much nicer downtown. No one has addressed those numbers here as of yet.
