Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety and Must Be Replaced Now

This is an article by Jeff Speck, click title for link, about the need for 10 ft. wide lanes in urban and neighborhood settings, where traffic speed should be slower. He argues that 12 ft. lanes encourage motorists to speed at the peril of bicyclists and pedestrians. He is also the person that the West Palm Beach Downtown Development Authority hired to address the "walkability" of downtown West Palm. Here is a bit from the article:

In some cases, a state or county controls only a small number of downtown streets. In other cases, they control them all. In a typical city, like Cedar Rapids or Fort Lauderdale, the most important street or streets downtown are owned by the state. In Boise, every single downtown street is owned by the Ada County Highway District, an organization that, if it won't relinquish its streets to the city, should at least feel obliged to change its name. And states and counties almost always apply a 12-foot standard.
Why do they do this? Because they believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong. Or, to be more accurate, they are wrong, and thousands of Americans are dead. [emphasis added]
They are wrong because of a fundamental error that underlies the practice of traffic engineering—and many other disciplines—an outright refusal to acknowledge that human behavior is impacted by its environment. This error applies to traffic planning, as state DOTs widen highways to reduce congestion, in complete ignorance of all the data proving that new lanes will be clogged by the new drivers that they invite. And it applies to safety planning, as traffic engineers, designing for the drunk who's texting at midnight, widen our city streets so that the things that drivers might hit are further away.

Mr. Speck was also guest on an episode of High Noon in Lake Worth. Below you can view his presentation to the West Palm Beach City Commission from late May of this year.