How City Planners Are Addressing Traffic Issues by Slimming Down City Streets Fat With Extra Lanes

In an arterial report from Vox, multimedia producer Carlos Waters explains in a good amount of detail how city planners are putting roads that are currently fat with extra lanes, on a diet. Essentially, as the automobile grew in popularity, the roads across the United States became wider in an effort address increasing traffic, yet studies have found that these wider roads with extra lanes not only didn’t assuage traffic congestion, but were often deemed unsafe. Armed with new, modern ideas focused on the 21st century, planners are finding that slimmed down roads will safely hinder speeding and accommodate various forms of transportation.

Transportation planners in the 21st century recognized that many of the roads that were overbuilt could be redesigned to calm speeding and add space for newer multimodal transportation options. And thus, the road diet was born.