Traffic Flow, Personal Flow, and the Built Environment

Part 2 of a multi-part series

How does this relate to architecture, urban planning, and landscape design? What does knowledge of pressure/volume pulses in the urban landscape do for the planner/designer? What can we learn from urban experiences in traffic flow and our emotional responses while driving? If we know how individuals generally react, how do we go about planning for this? Does it have to do with good urban design, compensation, or surrender to the sense that things are beyond our control?

Around my current residence, just Northwest of the central business district of downtown Salt Lake City, several issues slow down the pace of traffic, for me most noticeable in the evenings between 4:00 p.m. and 7 p.m. Traffic lights are paced in a way that seems always to go against the flow. I idle at each and every light. Even the usual well timed lights are paced in a way to impede continuous flow. One option for leaving the neighborhood I don’t usually use is Northwest, because the grocery stores to the East are closer and more familiar. There is no walkable grocery in this Northwest residential section between City Creek Canyon, which enters the city from the North and passes by the East side of the state capital, and I-15. The nearest grocery is 4-6 blocks West of the freeway.

Several aspects really impede flow. At dinnertime, just like in Park City, an international tourist destination town, everyone wants to go at the same time to the restaurants and grocery stores, and everybody shows up with the same hungry, impatient impulse. I enter this slow down with my own rising need to eat or shop for groceries, and get pinched by City Creek—which prevents flow East to the plurality of groceries 6 blocks in that direction—and all the downtown traffic emptying into the streets outbound through the various arteries north and west. Eastbound traffic is almost as bad, though if you drive far enough South, you will hit a moderately flowing Eastbound route.

Trax is but 2 blocks away, but this option means about an hour turnaround time to the most convenient supermarket and back. One might wonder why I am compelled to be on this schedule of having emotional or biological needs like hunger or the need to burn energy at about 5 p.m., when the immediate world around me is full of people in traffic, creating a potential for resonant stress through traffic, crowding and the like. My own impulses are naturally timed like most everyone else, and my schedule regularly coincides with the mass exodus from downtown.