The city of Vancouver has turned one lane of traffic on the busy Burrard Bridge into a bicycle route. Critics predicted chaos, but the first day of the experiment found traffic moving smoothly. This seems to be in line with recent studies suggesting that road closures actually lead to fewer traffic jams. [%comments]
Reducing Traffic by Closing Roads
TAGS: traffic
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I’m not exactly certain of the rationale, but I believe New York has done something similar recently by closing parts of Broadway near Times Square.
And if you close all the roads there will be zero traffic jams. Genius!
David: The traffic jam was on the first day. That is expected. The important question is: was the traffic jam as big a week or two later?
Traffic is a fluid dynamics problem. Seriously. Cars are an incompressible fluid. From there it’s all about flow rates and bottlenecks. If you have an alternate pipe with sufficient capacity, this works fine…if not, you’ve only succeeded in reducing your flow rate overall.
I’d like to see M street in Georgetown turned into a pedestrian promenade.
The partial Burrard Street bridge closure is ridiculous. The move is not surprising. Vancouver is full of poseur, pretend environmentalists.
The cost of building or replacing the Burrard Street bridge could not be justified for bicycle traffic.
There are of course alternate routes for the cars (or the bicycles for that matter).
As is mentioned above, there is an alternative for drivers in this scenario–just a few blocks away is Granville St. Bridge that Vancouver city staff identified as having excess capacity. This bridge is slightly more inconvenient for drivers that use the Burrard Bridge, but with the increased lineups for the other bridge, some of the Burrard Bridge drivers will undoubtedly shift over.
As well, another side-effect of this move might be a reduced number of ER trips for cyclists. A University of BC study showed that before the lane closure, a Burrard Bridge cyclist visited the ER every 19-20 days.
Looks like another potential example of Braess’s Paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%E2%80%99_paradox