The 3-way street

By On June 9, 2011 · 20 Comments

Update June 12, 2011: Added a link to and excerpt from commentary by David Hembrow, a British blogger in the Netherlands.

How does a 3-way street work? Easy, just watch the video.

I like the term “aggressive yield” to describe the situation when a motorist does yield to pedestrians crossing the street, but in a way where they inch forward continually, slowly pushing, with a buffer or air, the people out of the way.

I really like the comment from Tuesday by Anthony Ball:

those red markers are just showing the limits of tolerable risk as established by years of system development. If the collision speeds were higher, those red circles would be far few – it’s simply a system finding its own point of stability.

If you really want to wreak havoc – try to control that system without corrective feedback (eg more rules, lights, controls, etc) and you’ll see the system kill people while it tries to find new stable relationships.

don’t forget that rules, signs, lights, etc have no direct impact on the system – they only work through the interpretation of the users.

What did David Hembrow have to say? David lives in the Netherlands and disagrees with the common sentiment that these conflicts are caused by selfish users.

I don’t see the behaviour at this junction as being about “bad habits”. What I see is simply a very badly designed junction which almost invites people to behave in the way that they do.

Dutch road junctions don’t look like and work like this – they are different for a reason: it removes the conflicts and improves safety. A long-standing theme of Dutch road design is the concept of Sustainable Safety. The concept is to remove conflict so that collisions are rare and the consequences of those which remain are relatively small. Roads are made self-explanatory so that bad behaviour is reduced and the way people behave is changed.

Reading this reminds me of the work of the students in George Aye’s class at SAIC, “Living in a Smart City.” The students attempted, through an intersection redesign, to reduce the stresses that lead to crashes.

Where are the 3-way streets in your city? Grand/Halsted/Milwaukee in Chicago comes to my mind easily. Also a lot of streets in the Loop. Oh yeah, and The Crotch, at Milwaukee/North/Damen.

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  • SC

    while we see careless disregard by all manner of people, only among bicyclists is careless disregard to be considered a virtue rather than a fault:

    “”What the driving public needs to understand is that speed is what we
    are paid for and floating is the skill that makes our work competitive.
    We can twist Madison Avenue into a runway and penetrate a crowd like it
    was a puff of smoke. There is no fear. These kinds of stunts come
    directly from our experience, and that experience should be trusted. An
    intersection burnt by a courier should herald cheers from cops,
    motorists and pedestrians alike. It is the clearest expression of a
    messenger’s technique.”"

    • http://www.stevevance.net/planning Steven Vance

      That seems like a quote from Travis Culley’s weird book, The Immortal Class.

      Am I right?

      • SC

        yes, correct.

  • http://twitter.com/JoshuaKoonce Josh K

    At first I found this video sort of uninspired and not too exciting.  I regularly navigate intersections in all three modes of transportation and I’ve studied this stuff and worked in the field, it all seems a little obvious.  The video really doesn’t “say” anything, or propose anything.  It just illustrates. 

    Then the video spread around the internet like wildfire and I received it via email from 6 or 7 people who normally don’t think too much about interactions in intersections.  So if an illustration like this gets people talking and thinking, I’m on board with that. 

    • http://www.stevevance.net/planning Steven Vance

      I updated the post to include a comment from David Hembrow, a British commentator living in The Netherlands. He says while others blame the wildness on the people, he faults the design. 

  • Drew

    Aren’t your examples 6-way streets, since they are three 2-way streets intersecting? The 3-way street featured in the video is a 2-way street intersecting with a 1-way. This is more of a Washington and Halsted than a “Crotch shot.” :)

    • http://www.stevevance.net/planning Steven Vance

      I didn’t understand it like that. To me, it meant that there’s two traditional directions (this way, and the opposite way). The third way is the unexpected direction. The randomness, or the anomaly. And it has nothing to do with how many ways an intersecting street has. 

  • http://dannyman.toldme.com/ Daniel Howard

    So, how would the Dutch do it better? :)

    • http://www.stevevance.net/planning Steven Vance

      They would segregate the modes from each other, onto separate facilities. 
      They would create signals that apply to only 1 or 2 modes at a time, and not all three. 

      They might do other things, or neither of these. I haven’t studied all of the options they’ve made for their roads, the safest in the world. 

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