Disengorging Rural Roads With Wider Motorways

When I was walking in Neuchatel I noticed something striking. I didn’t see a single advert in favour of expanding the motorways. I expected that the Right Wing friends of Global Warming would push for the expansion of the motorways in Switzerland. That wasn’t the case.

In Switzerland, at the moment, they want to expand the A1 motorway between Geneva and Nyon and I suspect that the Gravière in Eysins was expanded to store all the soil that will be needed to widen the motorway.

The paradox of this road expansion is that during the pandemic the motorway was empty of traffic for weeks in a row and it was lovely to be able to walk near it without being deafened by the sound of tyres.

Through my rural walks I noticed how little infrastructure there is for cycling and walking. You see signs that say “Sentier pedestre for the Via that goes from St Cergue to Nyon but the “path” is roads where cars don’t slow down when passing pedestrians despite being narrow.

In some villages there is no infrastructure to walk between villages. It is assumed that people will take cars. The Right wing is saying “If we widen the motorway it will disengorge the motorways but what they fail to mention is that to get to the motorway you need to use the roads between villages and towns. We don’t sublimate from our parking to the motorway. We need to drive along choke points, until we get to the motorway.

Speed and Logic

According to several comments on Threads yesterday slow drivers in the left lane are blocking traffic but I would flip it around. Fast cars are the behaviour that leads to congestion. The logic is simple. If you drive at the same speed as everyone around you then you flow efficiently. There is no need to accelerate or slow down because everyone is matching everyone else.

On the left lane, the fast lane, in dense traffic, you will still get people driving at 120-140 kilometres per hour, if not more, from one slow down to another, and they create traffic jams. Very often, for several years now, I find that if I go into the slow lane I need to wait for convoys of fast drivers to pass before I can overtake a slow car. It’s that convoy of fast cars that forces me to go from 80-120 and then back down to the slow speed car when I have overtaken.

Those that drive at the speed limit or above it, for people like me to remain stuck in the right lane. If those in the left lane matched traffic conditions they would not accelerate and slow down as often, which means less congestion, and less need for three or more motorway lanes.

Instead of spend billions on adding a third lane to an over-saturated motorway for 20 kilometres it makes more sense to get people to slow down when traffic is heavy.

It also makes sense to triple or sextuple bus frequency. As I write this one bus an hour serves most villages that rely on Nyon for trains. This means that in each of these villages people may prioritise using a car rather than public transport. With a bus every ten minutes rather than every hour, or bike sharing, or convenient walking and cycling paths those car drivers become pedestrians and cyclists, negating the need for hundreds of commuter driven cars.

This isn’t theoretical. We saw this during lockdowns.

And Finally

Years ago I really wanted three lanes between Nyon and Geneva, but now I think it would be a waste of money, given that cars already have adaptive cruise control and the roads are saturated an hour or two a day. With a small change in driver behaviour roads could be more fluid than they are today.

I also believe that the real shift has to come from better bus coverage from some villages and towns, and more bike sharing options to get from villages to towns with good train services and vice versa. Geneva and Nyon don’t want us to use cars. Neither does Lausanne or other towns.

Increasing motorways from two to three lanes wouldn’t disengorge villages and towns. Better bus and train coverage would. Bike sharing too.