This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 4th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

Road diets are aimed at narrowing streets to accommodate more bicycle and transit traffic,

what are the effects and why is the federal government looking at providing incentives to cities

to narrow their roads?

And what should we make of new data about a high level of

pedestrian deaths in the last year? Cato's Randall O'Toole comments.

Road diets are plans to take four lane roads or six lane roads or

arterials and reduce them by at least two lanes and turn those two lanes

into bicycle lanes or possibly bus lanes.

And the result is that there are fewer lanes of traffic for general

automobiles and trucks and so there's more congestion.

Traffic has to slow down.

Oftentimes the road diets are specifically designed to slow down traffic

by making lanes narrower and supposedly

that's to make the streets safer for bicyclists and pedestrians although that

hasn't worked what it really is for is to try to discourage people

from driving by making driving less competitive than it is compared with

transit and

if you're reducing the number of lanes going both directions on a road you would think that that would increase congestion Absolutely and if you talk to the advocates of road diets a lot of them will admit

that that's really their purpose for example the CEO of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Agency says it's too easy to drive in Los Angeles.

We need to make it harder to drive to get people on transit and the way to do that is to convert lanes of

traffic in various arterials to exclusive bus lanes.

...