A. To have fewer of them
B. To have the ones that are there go slower
Unfortunately, A and B conflict, since when there are fewer cars, the ones that are there tend to be able to go faster.
But as recent studies show, there are ways to slow the cars down without just putting more of them on the roads.
1. Narrow the Streets
Now, of course, there is such a thing as a street that is too narrow for its needed use. But generally, our streets are usually too wide for the speeds that cars should safely be traveling in urban environments.
How many lanes do we need to move this many cars, Chicago? How many?
Wide streets, like Brady and Harrison here in the Quad Cities, which are four lanes one way, encourage speeding. They encourage treating a city street like a highway (and yes, those two streets are officially US highways, but they are also urban streets). They create an ease of fast travel that makes the posted speed limit basically meaningless.
Narrower streets, like this one in Haarlem, make cars go slower. Some of that is traffic: you can see the cars piling up behind this postal vehicle as it makes its stops. But a lot of it is also the fact that the psychology of driving in a narrow lane is fundamentally different from a wide lane, let alone four of them next to each other. You have to control the vehicle more, which means slower speed and more cautious driving.
In other words, narrower streets mean slower cars.
2. Change the Texture
Now, I'm not advocating for dirt roads everywhere, but if you want to slow cars down and make them drive more safely, changing from pure smooth highway-grade asphalt to something else can make a big difference.
This Parisian street is narrow, but it's also lightly cobblestoned. Without needing a speed hump (a blunt instrument indeed), it creates the constant reminder to the driver of speed through its rumble (both auditory and tactile). You can't drive fast on this street without realizing it, which undoes a lot of the danger of drivers becoming velocitized.
3. Avoid Long Straightaways
I've been playing a lot of Formula D, a boardgame based on F1 racing. And in that game, which is literally about racing cars, the best thing to see in front of you is a long straight stretch where you can gear up and get going as fast as possible.
This is, to be blunt, a thing we should avoid when designing our streets, which are not racetracks even if F1 sometimes takes over city streets for some races.
Even on a grid street pattern like Toronto, we can avoid the appearance of a long straightaway by putting in things on the streetscape so that the drivers' eyes aren't fixed on a long, bare stretch of asphalt.
Or, like this part of Toronto, you can lean into it and put a literal highway above a parallel street that might as well be one.
I know which version of this I prefer.
Boston buries is straightaways, which is an improvement as it avoids conflict with pedestrians or bikes, but does mean that the cars down there are going, as they say, wicked fast.
Well, unless there's traffic backup. But that's a different story.
When we're building our street environment, it matters how we do it--and making it as easy for cars to go fast in a single line as we can is not optimal if you want them to actually be safe for others to be around.
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