Hi mappers,
Is the following a traffic_calming=choker, a traffic_calming=choked_island or something else? Two cars can still pass at the same time.
The situation before this street redesign:
(Not the exact same intersection, but all of them along this road were re-done in the same way.)
Looks a lot like just being indentations for street_side parking before and after the crossing.
While deliberate, the design clearly is, to me, that the side spaces were extracted from the regular road i.e. one still drives in a straight line on a narrower road where before there may have been parking:both=lane and now parking:both=street_side or it was a narrow 2x2 road.
PS, right top in first pic there is appears to be a parked car, none in the second.
I inspected a few more in the U.S., see below.
To me these all look like you could still drive “through” them in a straight line, even two cars from opposite directions. The wiki defines a choker as “a narrowed point along a road, generally reducing traffic to a single lane, deliberately designed to slow down or discourage motor vehicle traffic”, which does not exclude these examples or the one in my original question.
I got curious and looked up the definition given by the FHWA:
A curb extension is a horizontal extension of the curb into the street resulting in a narrower roadway section. This device may be used at either corner or midblock. A curb extension located midblock is called a choker. A curb extension located at an intersection is called a corner extension or bulbout.
So this is not in fact a choker but a “bulbout” or “corner extension”. They give the following diagram:
traffic_calming?
In Austria and many parts of Europe those curb extensions are quite common. I dont see them primarily as traffic calming of the highway, but as property of the crossing.
When there are cars parked on the lane, the curb extension helps pedestrians to get a better view before stepping onto the carriageway.
