Thursday, December 23, 2010

Letter to Mall Designers

Dear Civil/Traffic Engineers working with Malls,

Please stop sucking at your job.

I could talk prolifically about the Palisades, the wonder (of fail) of Woodbury, and seriously write a thesis myself on GSP.  But this post is devoted to Riverside Square Mall.

Design of the mall itself? Ehhh.
Design of the traffic around it? Death.

Let me give you some background.  When coming from home, I am normally traveling Southbound on local roads.  For our purposes, imagine I am the white car traveling South in circle #1 below.



Now for some labels  the mistakes.
  1. Combination exit to Route 4 W, U-turn, and entrance to Mall.  Contains the ever-so-popular one must-turn lane and one I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing lane.  n00bs stay in the rightmost lane to turn into the mall or conversely, stay in the middle/left exit lane to get onto the highway.
  2. Lines disappear. Cars can do whatever they want, and that includes cutting off everyone.
  3. lolz. Just look at it for a second.  Isn't that funny looking?  For the record, there is a light there dictating when circles #3 and #5 have a green light.  The right lane is supposed to go into a righter lane of traffic or into circle #4.  The left lane is supposed to go into a lefter lane, but normally just ends up cutting the right lane off.
  4. Combination exit to Route 4 W (from Northbound on the same road), U-turn and entrance to mall.  You'll notice the northbound side already has a more intuitive entrance to the mall before the intersection, and thus, is normally not used by the Northbound side.
  5. Entrance to Route 4 W, U-turn lanes
  6. (Imaginary) All the cars trying to get onto Route 4. Three (sometimes four!) lanes of traffic merging into one.
OK.  That's that.

The seasoned driver knows how crappy this set-up is before entering it.

The unseasoned driver makes an illegal right turn out of #5 the same time a driver from #3 tries to enter the mall.

So you see this problem?

I sure did. When I almost t-boned the unseasoned driver's car.



Traffic engineer. In a perfect world, this might work. But people are stupid. And so are you.