Let’s face it: urban planners hate automobiles. They probably don’t hate their own car — many of them drive as much as anyone else. But they believe that Americans drive too much.
Their solution is to increase traffic congestion. But the question has always been, how do they sell that idea to a public that relies on cars for more than 80 percent of their travel? The answer is to come up with some fluffy phrase that sounds nice.
Traffic calming is one such term. Who could object to calm? Originally, traffic calming was applied to neighborhood streets. Then cities like Portland proposed to do arterial traffic calming. This meant converting, say, a four-lane street into a two- or three-lane street with bike lanes and wider sidewalks.
