How does a road diet make driving safer?
As mentioned above, road diets provide a center turn lane so that left turns are simpler. A driver crosses only one lane of traffic at a time (resulting in fewer blind spots). With an undivided 4-lane road, a driver must find a gap in two or three lanes of traffic at once to make a left turn. An argument against the safety factor is that it’s because traffic is diverted to other streets that results in fewer crashes. This has been found to be a false assumption. In reality, road diets have been found to maintain (and enhance) traffic flow while reducing crashes up to 90%.
