North American street infrastructure characteristically prioritizes automobile traffic throughput over the safety and comfort of pedestrians. This is bad. Pedestrians are considered "Vulnerable...
Exemplary
North American street infrastructure characteristically prioritizes automobile traffic throughput over the safety and comfort of pedestrians. This is bad.
Pedestrians are considered "Vulnerable Road Users" (VRUs) because they are at risk of death in a collision with an automobile (the driver of the automobile has relatively much less risk). Due to intentionally car-centric and pedestrian-unfriendly infrastructure design of many roadways, high speed limits and a lack of traffic calming measures, and the increasing weight of modern vehicles, automobile-induced killing of pedestrians has increased steadily for the last decade. The majority of pedestrian deaths happen at intersections, where cars are most likely to come into contact with VRUs.
The solution to this safety issue is manifold but ultimately not that complicated:
Slow down cars anywhere pedestrians are expected to be (traffic calming)
Add protective barriers (bollards) to keep drivers out of crosswalks and bike lanes
Reduce pedestrian crossing distances at intersections (curb bumpouts, central islands)
Reduce pedestrian wait time in light cycles to discourage unsafe crossings
Increase visibility on corners (daylighting; no parking near intersections)
Reduce posted speed limits and enforce them strictly
Discourage heavy vehicle use in general
Offer fast and reliable public transportation to get the worst drivers off the road
These solutions are good. They address the issue close to its cause: that is, the people and infrastructure who are inducing VRU killings. Obviously few drivers are trying to kill pedestrians, but the status quo enables them to do it all the same. Infrastructure can change that.
However, old-fashioned transportation engineers have a different idea: do not spend any time or money whatsoever on infrastructure or transit upgrades. Instead, they prefer to shift the responsibility of safety to pedestrians wherever possible. This is a bad excuse.
The latest attack on pedestrian dignity by the car-centric transport engineers of the continent is an insistence that pedestrians carry brightly colored flags anytime they cross a street, waving to drivers, "Have mercy! Please don't kill me! Spare my poor, pitiful non-driver life!" Further, they insist that pedestrians constantly wear brightly-colored and reflective clothing, especially at night, just so that they aren't killed for going outside. In addition to being insulting, this approach is inefficient and ineffective because it does not address the cause of pedestrian fatalities near its source.
It isn't unreasonable for a pedestrian to choose to wear reflective gear while traveling at night, but transportation officials using this as an excuse not to slow down cars and improve infrastructure is a form of victim-blaming, plain and simple. Their attitude completely misses the point: pedestrians are VRUs and cannot magically prevent their own deaths. They're up against multi-ton hunks of steel. The human body simply cannot win that fight. Few pedestrian deaths are averted by wearing colorful clothes: many drivers are drunk or high; distracted and inattentive; or simply going too fast to physically stop before hitting someone, even if they see them. They have no incentive to drive slowly and their lines of sight are constantly blocked by parked cars. Car headlights are brighter than they've ever been.
Pedestrian deaths remain high because roadways are designed for fast cars specifically at the expense of pedestrian safety. Politicians and engineers make these unsafe design choices every day. We must advocate for safer streets.
The only adequate solutions to roadway deaths involve infrastructure and policy focused on making things safer for VRUs, even if that means drivers have to wait an extra five seconds at an intersection. Ethically and economically, human life has greater value than the ability of a driver to speed down a street containing pedestrians at 45+ mph.
I really wish there were more sidewalks and crosswalks around where I live to make this sort of thing more safe, but also I guarantee you I would consider the risk of walking across a highway in...
I really wish there were more sidewalks and crosswalks around where I live to make this sort of thing more safe, but also I guarantee you I would consider the risk of walking across a highway in all dark clothing at night (ya know, where cars go flying by) and would only cross when and where it is safe 🤷. Maybe it is victim blaming, but sometimes if you do some extremely stupid then you will die. I wish it weren't so.
Yes, focusing on just one very narrow aspect of the comment, I know my parents see tons of people in their neighborhood jogging in the street with the flow of traffic in dark clothes at night....
Yes, focusing on just one very narrow aspect of the comment, I know my parents see tons of people in their neighborhood jogging in the street with the flow of traffic in dark clothes at night. Protective measures can only go so far.
If an engineer feels they have truly done everything in their power to make infrastructure safe to use, and people choose not to use it, then there are three possibilities: The engineer is...
If an engineer feels they have truly done everything in their power to make infrastructure safe to use, and people choose not to use it, then there are three possibilities:
The engineer is completely detached from reality and needs to touch grass, because just because they think they've designed something well doesn't mean it actually serves the needs of constituents. For example, engineers routinely build unprotected, barely painted bike lanes along arterials that periodically merge with car turning lanes... and then wonder why people bike in traffic lanes or on the sidewalk. Technically, the cyclists are misbehaving... but it's because the engineering decisions were not aligned with real safety needs.
Good engineering decisions have generally been made, but something about the usage is not signed properly or requires educational messaging. This frequently comes up when engineers come up with their latest absurd interchange idea. The diverging diamond interchanges you see popping up here and there are one case: they are unfamiliar to drivers and driver error is therefore predictable if signage is not good and no one knows what to expect. Roundabouts, in the US, are another; people just don't understand them because they are not taught how to interact with them in road tests. Ever.
People are stupid. And you can't really do much about that. Engineers have to do their best to stop stupid people from doing stupid things, but it's impossible to be perfect. People do have agency and if they are knowingly making an unsafe decision when they have a safe alternative, that's their fault.
As for your example: it's obviously a case of #3, but there's a bit of #2 in there, and I'm going to argue some of #1. Obviously, people are just stupid. I assume in your area a sidewalk was available; thus jogging at night, in dark clothes, in the road, with traffic is combining four different risk factors when there is a comparatively safe option. That is irresponsible. But people aren't really taught how to walk in the road. When I grew up, my mother always taught me to walk on the left so that I could see oncoming traffic. But most people I knew, and most people I've met in life, do not know that. They were simply never taught it. This is because, when I was growing up and indeed today, people are not expected to be pedestrians in lots of places in the US. This is irrational, because a reasonable observer can see that pedestrians will be there, but it just doesn't get hammered in like some other things do.
And for my controversial remark: as a now-former jogger, I understand the desire to be in the road. It's because asphalt is a lot easier on your knees than concrete. I used to have a wonderfully light gait, gliding on air, running on my forefoot. I could run on anything and feel no pain. (I can't anymore, but that's beside the point.) Lots of people don't have that ability and every impact is really felt. So, irrationally but perhaps predictably, they sometimes make the decision to run in the road. As that becomes a habit, they may sometimes end up on the wrong side; or they may not (as I mentioned) ever have been taught what the "correct" side is. A particularly clever engineer would observe this and remark, "Hmm, people really like to run on this particular stretch of road, even though there's a sidewalk. But hey, there's this nice patch of woods right here, parallel to the street. Maybe we could make a wooded trail for people to run on instead..." or "Maybe we can make the sidewalk out of something better to run on in sections where we really don't want pedestrians in the street..." Just an example.
Philosophically, you can find an infrastructure solution to basically any problem. At a certain point it may begin to conflict with people's ideas of "freedom" and you will hear terms like "nanny state" get thrown around. And it's not like I'm immune -- there's a particular intersection in this one town in Scotland I used to spend a lot of time in which has an annoying roundabout, kind of busy, with fencing at all the points you'd want to cross for the specific reason of stopping you from crossing there, and instead walk ten metres to the light. For safety!!!! Grrr.... our authoritarian city planners have increased my travel time by a few seconds! Down with the government!
Of course it is important to take a step back in these situations and remember that safety is worth a bit of inconvenience sometimes. And it behooves us to support policies that make us safer, even if they make life just a tiny bit less convenient. Whether or not we voluntarily choose to break the rules, we should constantly be striving for extremely safe infrastructure.
D) it's unreasonable to think you can over come 80 years of pedestrian and cyclist unfriendly design in a short amount of time. IIRC the Dutch investment in walkable and cyclavle design took 20...
D) it's unreasonable to think you can over come 80 years of pedestrian and cyclist unfriendly design in a short amount of time. IIRC the Dutch investment in walkable and cyclavle design took 20 years to see dividends. It's very likely that'll be our grandchildren that reap the benefits.
As I said, it's reasonable to try to increase your own visibility as a pedestrian for personal safety. It is also reasonable to educate pedestrians on how to navigate environments that aren't...
As I said, it's reasonable to try to increase your own visibility as a pedestrian for personal safety. It is also reasonable to educate pedestrians on how to navigate environments that aren't optimally designed.
But from an engineering perspective, it is negligent and unethical to suggest that pedestrians do these things in lieu of engineers designing streets to be fundamentally safe: such as building more sidewalks and providing reasonable crossing infrastructure so that pedestrians don't come into contact with literal highways.
Many local politicians and engineers choose to neglect pedestrian infrastructure. They choose not to expand sidewalk networks. They choose not to place crosswalks at reasonable locations. They choose not to time light cycles in ways that give pedestrians opportunities to safely cross. They choose to add dangerous slip lanes on arterials. They choose to allow high-speed, high-access, stroad infrastructure to dominate their municipalities. All of these things are decisions. They will whine and whine about how this or that isn't in the budget... and then spend $35 million on a new highway interchange that didn't actually need to be replaced. I wish I were joking.
You're overestimating how easy it is to access disabled public transit (required more documentation than my employer required for my partner's housing accommodations) or how much it costs to get a...
You're overestimating how easy it is to access disabled public transit (required more documentation than my employer required for my partner's housing accommodations) or how much it costs to get a ride in a wheelchair van - 35 bucks minimum for a one way trip.
In my college town, bike trail having city there are plenty of sidewalks. And then there are plenty of roads without any crosswalks for miles, with minimal or no sidewalks, where all the restaurants and stores and things are (Walmart, Target, actual mall, strip malls, hardware stores and Best Buy, all those things). The speed limit is 45mph and the roads have six lanes plus turn lanes. If someone has to take the bus and then walk, or just walk to work, the store, or just to grab a burger, they're in a really unsafe situation.
Yeah downtown is walkable and traffic goes 20mph but there's no way to cross that six lane road for huge chunks at a time..leading to far too frequent deaths there, sometimes because someone is "jaywalking" and cars don't see them, sometimes very much the victim did nothing wrong. Cars are just super dangerous to pedestrians in those situations.
The specific goal of a traffic engineer is not to maim pedestrians. But every time they design a streetscape which features significant numbers of pedestrians to maximize what I am referring to as...
The specific goal of a traffic engineer is not to maim pedestrians. But every time they design a streetscape which features significant numbers of pedestrians to maximize what I am referring to as "automobile throughput," which an engineer would call "a high level of service," they are voluntarily making an engineering decision that a rational observer can observe to be dangerous to pedestrians for all practical purposes.
I suggest you read some of Strong Towns' material (like this). They have hundreds of articles detailing fatally dangerous infrastructure decisions all over the country. They talk about strategies to mitigate it in a variety of contexts, though they have a particular focus on smallish towns.
There are so many problems with current American infrastructure I don't even know where to begin. Automobile speeds are a big one: pedestrians have a 90% chance of death if struck by a vehicle traveling about 40mph or higher, yet those speeds are routinely permitted along arterials in population centers. By contrast, speeds under about 20 mph are considered relatively safe for pedestrians.
Various studies (too many to count) have demonstrated that current roadway designs, which intentionally make very wide lanes and very wide roads, actually encourage speeding and therefore kill more people. For decades, every engineering manual in America has argued that all roads should be very wide to give drivers "room for error"; unfortunately, a lack of "enclosure" in a street universally increases average driver speed. By contrast, narrow streets slow cars down. Johns Hopkins recently released a very good study on the problems with excessive lane width in particular.
Innumerable specific placements of concrete and paint also contribute to a lack of walkability and pedestrian safety. There are literally hundreds of problems. I think you should really read up on urban form. Strong Towns is a fine start. I have some other resources in my account biography.
basically everywhere else in the US, roads are pretty safely walkable for any able-bodied person
You cannot possibly be serious. Is this a troll? I mean this as respectfully as I can... where are you from where you can say, with all faith and honesty, that the United States' transportation infrastructure is universally or even mostly "safely walkable for any able-bodied person"? And I must remind you, respectfully, that not everyone in the US is an able-bodied person!!!!! It is completely and utterly unacceptable to design infrastructure that is dangerous to able-bodied people, and even more unacceptable to design it in a way that's dangerous to children, seniors, sight-impaired, and mobility-impaired people.
The number of pedestrians who die every year from automobile accidents is in the thousands. This is a known statistic which you can easily verify. The number of pedestrians who die is going up every year. This has been reported thoroughly by hundreds of media outlets and studied extensively in literature. Quite a lot of these deaths are on poorly-designed arterial roadways and other places where pedestrians are present, pedestrian infrastructure is lacking, and automobile infrastructure is prioritized. Jason Slaughter made a video a few years ago on some of the design problems with most American "stroads," problems which are reflected in the literature.
An objectively safely designed streetscape, which is compatible with pedestrian activity, resembles Hoboken, NJ, one of the only cities in the entire country which has been successful in reaching Vision Zero. There are a number of specific traffic engineering decisions they have made, most of which I mentioned in my original comment. These include very low speed limits (20 mph or below wherever possible), careful intersection design, and a number of specific measures to improve transit, walkability, and bikability.
It’s fairly well known that 20th century suburban development intentionally designed to encourage cars to the detriment all other transit. Some examples are extremely egregious, such as the cross...
It’s fairly well known that 20th century suburban development intentionally designed to encourage cars to the detriment all other transit. Some examples are extremely egregious, such as the cross bronx expressway.
Can you summarize the point you’re trying to make? I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but your message is so long I don’t quite understand what you’re advocating for
Can you summarize the point you’re trying to make?
I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but your message is so long I don’t quite understand what you’re advocating for
The reasoning, in short: Axiom: pedestrians are vulnerable on streets Therefore, government and engineers should design streets to be safe for pedestrians Unfortunately, they choose not to design...
The reasoning, in short:
Axiom: pedestrians are vulnerable on streets
Therefore, government and engineers should design streets to be safe for pedestrians
Unfortunately, they choose not to design safe streets in the US because they would rather make cars go fast (vroom vroom)
Instead, they blame pedestrians for being careless and suggest pointless fixes
This doesn’t solve the problem, and is insulting to pedestrians
Real solution: build safer streets, and stop victim-blaming pedestrians.
Some of the specific solutions I propose are in the list in my first comment.
The problem is, drivers outnumber pedestrians by a wide margin throughout most of the country. Drivers aren't going to vote for leaders and policies that promise to make their commutes take...
The problem is, drivers outnumber pedestrians by a wide margin throughout most of the country. Drivers aren't going to vote for leaders and policies that promise to make their commutes take longer.
We shot ourselves in the foot by neglecting mass transit infrastructure in favor of automotive infrastructure over the last 70 years.
That is not correct, but it's important to frame these discussions as safety issues more than "anti-car" concerns in order to assuage reactionary individuals all the same. I will provide three...
That is not correct, but it's important to frame these discussions as safety issues more than "anti-car" concerns in order to assuage reactionary individuals all the same.
I will provide three benefits to multi-modal improvements that are palatable to drivers:
Most driving trips include a pedestrian component. Drivers are therefore also pedestrians. The majority of driving trips, especially in urban or downtown areas, involve street crossings by foot to get to the final destination. This is why sensible cities adopt an explicitly pedestrian-first attitude.
Improving transit and bike access universally improves commute times for drivers. Every person who chooses to get on a bike or bus is one fewer person in a car. The inherent space-inefficiency of cars means that every car off the road has an outsized improvement on traffic congestion. Additionally, some of the drivers most likely to switch to transit first are those who least want to drive; usually the least skilled and worst-performing drivers. This reduces erratic behavior and therefore reduces slowdowns, in addition to improving safety for other drivers.
Many road diets that take away lanes to improve safety actually also improve throughput and commute times. The math that goes into the analysis is pretty complicated, but sometimes the erratic driving behavior that results from having too many lanes (or lanes that are too wide) creates traffic. Additionally, a road diet is often coupled with a dedicated bus lane or something similar, so travel time improves in two ways.
It isn't really zero-sum. Lots of municipalities voluntarily adopt safety measures that improve pedestrian safety while also making transportation better for drivers.
I agree that more investment in public transportation in the last 75 years would have been beneficial to society, but I strongly recommend against apathy or nihilism. It is not useful to settle into a "well, it'll never happen" mindset. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) of 2021 is an example of legislation that is radically improving transportation all around the country right now.
I understand why drivers should care about this, but I'm explaining why they don't, and that unfortunately translates to voting at the polls, particularly in local elections where it's easy to...
I understand why drivers should care about this, but I'm explaining why they don't, and that unfortunately translates to voting at the polls, particularly in local elections where it's easy to blame someone for making your commute 15 minutes longer.
I think you make good points, but I disagree with this one:
Most driving trips include a pedestrian component.
Where I live, the walking component attached to most driving trips consists of walking through a parking lot, not along sidewalks or across intersections where most of these pedestrian safety measures are targeted. And I suspect it is suburban areas like mine where pedestrians are often the most at risk, since we are the most guilty of having high speed limits, driving big SUVs and trucks, and building wide comfy streets that are easy to zone out while driving on.
I don't mean to come off as apathetic, I just think driver opposition is something that needs to be factored into the messaging. Most people have a pretty hard time really caring about things that only impact experiences that happen outside their bubble, and are not so understanding when remedies for those problems have knock on effects within that bubble.
As an activist seeking to garner community support for an infrastructure change, the initial public conversation can generally focus on routes that children are likely to be on, such as near...
As an activist seeking to garner community support for an infrastructure change, the initial public conversation can generally focus on routes that children are likely to be on, such as near schools and parks, as well as in downtown areas. Anywhere near a senior center or hospital is also prime.
It is also relatively easy to convince parents to support traffic calming measures on neighborhood streets when framed around children playing safely, as well as noise reductions. It is not difficult to get petition signatures to pass onto the local government, or whatever registered community organization is interfacing with you.
In general, it is helpful to have established relationships with neighbors so that you can canvass as a group and in a way that is recognized by other neighbors as community-oriented as opposed to "doing something with a political agenda." People are easily biased by acquaintanceships, to whom they extent more accommodation.
Opposition to safety infrastructure may exist, but it is typically not very socially acceptable to argue against "safety for the children." It's not like it doesn't happen, but strategies rooted in safety and community cohesiveness are generally an effective mechanism for suburbia, whose primary occupants are parents and grandparents. When you are in a situation where someone is hostile, basic affirming and mirroring negotiation techniques are effective. Door-to-door discussions have less to do with convincing and more to do with understanding, which you can use to inform your guidance of the conversation toward something constructive.
But when you are canvassing as an activist, you will generally find that the people who are broadly opposed to ostensibly minor infrastructure change prefer to be uninvolved with the public conversation; their opposition is mostly outweighed by their apathy, especially if it's framed in a non-inflammatory way. They will just say, "Sorry, I'm not interested in this." Then they will shut the door and you will go to the next house.
It is generally not strategically sound for a candidate for local office to run on a platform of making hyper-specific infrastructure improvements, like "we will make this intersection run on a two-phase light cycle." This is because changes that seem obvious to laypeople may not always be feasible once studied. They can run on a platform of (among other things) "safety for the children and the elderly" and "offering multiple transportation options for our community," which is both accurate and palatable.
I feel like this cannot be true, because there are 350 million Americans, and fewer car driving Americans. It can only be true if a significant number of Americans never ever walk anywhere at all....
The problem is, drivers outnumber pedestrians by a wide margin throughout most of the country.
I feel like this cannot be true, because there are 350 million Americans, and fewer car driving Americans. It can only be true if a significant number of Americans never ever walk anywhere at all.
But looking at it another way, it becomes self-fulfilling. "There are lots of cars here, let's build more car infrastructure. And there aren't many pedestrians here, so we don't need to worry about crossings so much"
In the UK we used to have a method to decide whether to build a pedestrian crossing. Someone would stand at a place and count the number of cars, and the number of pedestrians, and do a bit of arithmetic and if they got above a certain number a crossing would be built. The obvious flaw is that pedestrians don't want to try to cross a dangerous road because it's a dangerous road but these are the places that need pedestrian crossings. https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2021/12/invitation-to-cross.html?m=1
There are an estimated 283 million passenger vehicles in use in the US. If you live in the suburbs, it's entirely reasonable to almost never walk anywhere outside your immediate neighborhood. In...
I feel like this cannot be true, because there are 350 million Americans, and fewer car driving Americans. It can only be true if a significant number of Americans never ever walk anywhere at all.
There are an estimated 283 million passenger vehicles in use in the US. If you live in the suburbs, it's entirely reasonable to almost never walk anywhere outside your immediate neighborhood. In the last 12 months, 100% of the crosswalks I've used were in Manhattan during a 4 day trip I took in April. Where I live, everything is too far apart and mass transit is too crappy. When I go somewhere, I go to my car in my garage and don't get out until I reach the parking lot at my destination.
But looking at it another way, it becomes self-fulfilling. "There are lots of cars here, let's build more car infrastructure. And there aren't many pedestrians here, so we don't need to worry about crossings so much"
That's more or less how we got here. Automakers sold policymakers on this idea that cars were the future, and pushed things like wider streets with bad research suggesting it was safer.
I understand, and agree, with your points, and your suggestions, but I'm a bit wary of focusing the presentation of it on cars going too fast. That is an important problem, but I've unfortunately...
I understand, and agree, with your points, and your suggestions, but I'm a bit wary of focusing the presentation of it on cars going too fast.
That is an important problem, but I've unfortunately seen it, and Vision Zero more generally, be used maliciously by city governments to argue against pedestrian-friendly design, insisting instead that vehicle speed is the only important factor in pedestrian safety. I actually had a city transportation commissioner once directly state that improving crosswalk design (eg, most of your suggestions) was inconsistent with Vision Zero principles, and that Vision Zero was only about reducing pedestrian deaths by reducing the severity of collisions.
It's not just going fast that often takes priority over pedestrians: they're rather far down a list. There's the matter of vehicle throughput more widely: controlled crosswalks and reduced pedestrian waiting times might reduce vehicle throughput and increase vehicle travel times regardless of speed limit, for example; protective barriers and islands can take up space that could be used for more lanes. Daylighting takes up space that could be used to squeeze in a few more parking spaces, just to protect some pedestrians who for some reason aren't in cars... and so on.
Whoever you were talking to was, as disrespectfully as I can put it, a complete moron. Vision Zero is not that narrow and anyone who claims it is is not genuinely interested in safety, but rather...
I actually had a city transportation commissioner once directly state that improving crosswalk design (eg, most of your suggestions) was inconsistent with Vision Zero principles, and that Vision Zero was only about reducing pedestrian deaths by reducing the severity of collisions.
Whoever you were talking to was, as disrespectfully as I can put it, a complete moron. Vision Zero is not that narrow and anyone who claims it is is not genuinely interested in safety, but rather bureaucracy. Vision Zero is the numerical representation of safety-first urban planning policy.
The city official you were talking to is an example of someone who I was targeting with my first comment. Such people do not understand the psychology of pedestrianism nor do they care to look outside their design manuals to see how their decisions have actual impacts on the world.
It's not just going fast that often takes priority over pedestrians: they're rather far down a list.
Yes, the tradeoffs you mention are part of "car-centric infrastructure" more broadly. When I'm asked to give a summary of the choices engineers make, "vehicle speed" is the easiest one for people to intuit. More specifically, "actual speed traveled" is the most important metric because "actual speed" during a collision is largely what determines pedestrian survivability. Road diets, posted speed limits, bollards, speed humps, street trees creating enclosure, 20mph-light timing (with signage), etc. are all things that change "actual speed traveled," though they have direct benefits for pedestrians too.
Transportation engineers technically use language based on levels of service, i.e. how "free-flowing" a roadway is (like a fluid), but that is a very technical term. LOS is really the metric to criticize, and it's determined by the overall character, shape, width, and layout of the road. Posted speed limits and traffic calming measures affect LOS, but so does congestion from other vehicles, which may be specifically modified by parking lanes, bus lanes, bike lanes, lane width, curves, light signal timing, etc.
In general, there is no reason for car speed, throughput, or reliability (collectively, the "level of service" of a roadway for a driver) to be significantly prioritized above pedestrian safety. Whenever pedestrians are significantly at risk of death or serious injury from automobiles, some design must be changed. That is the bottom line.
North American street infrastructure characteristically prioritizes automobile traffic throughput over the safety and comfort of pedestrians. This is bad.
Pedestrians are considered "Vulnerable Road Users" (VRUs) because they are at risk of death in a collision with an automobile (the driver of the automobile has relatively much less risk). Due to intentionally car-centric and pedestrian-unfriendly infrastructure design of many roadways, high speed limits and a lack of traffic calming measures, and the increasing weight of modern vehicles, automobile-induced killing of pedestrians has increased steadily for the last decade. The majority of pedestrian deaths happen at intersections, where cars are most likely to come into contact with VRUs.
The solution to this safety issue is manifold but ultimately not that complicated:
These solutions are good. They address the issue close to its cause: that is, the people and infrastructure who are inducing VRU killings. Obviously few drivers are trying to kill pedestrians, but the status quo enables them to do it all the same. Infrastructure can change that.
However, old-fashioned transportation engineers have a different idea: do not spend any time or money whatsoever on infrastructure or transit upgrades. Instead, they prefer to shift the responsibility of safety to pedestrians wherever possible. This is a bad excuse.
The latest attack on pedestrian dignity by the car-centric transport engineers of the continent is an insistence that pedestrians carry brightly colored flags anytime they cross a street, waving to drivers, "Have mercy! Please don't kill me! Spare my poor, pitiful non-driver life!" Further, they insist that pedestrians constantly wear brightly-colored and reflective clothing, especially at night, just so that they aren't killed for going outside. In addition to being insulting, this approach is inefficient and ineffective because it does not address the cause of pedestrian fatalities near its source.
It isn't unreasonable for a pedestrian to choose to wear reflective gear while traveling at night, but transportation officials using this as an excuse not to slow down cars and improve infrastructure is a form of victim-blaming, plain and simple. Their attitude completely misses the point: pedestrians are VRUs and cannot magically prevent their own deaths. They're up against multi-ton hunks of steel. The human body simply cannot win that fight. Few pedestrian deaths are averted by wearing colorful clothes: many drivers are drunk or high; distracted and inattentive; or simply going too fast to physically stop before hitting someone, even if they see them. They have no incentive to drive slowly and their lines of sight are constantly blocked by parked cars. Car headlights are brighter than they've ever been.
Pedestrian deaths remain high because roadways are designed for fast cars specifically at the expense of pedestrian safety. Politicians and engineers make these unsafe design choices every day. We must advocate for safer streets.
The only adequate solutions to roadway deaths involve infrastructure and policy focused on making things safer for VRUs, even if that means drivers have to wait an extra five seconds at an intersection. Ethically and economically, human life has greater value than the ability of a driver to speed down a street containing pedestrians at 45+ mph.
I really wish there were more sidewalks and crosswalks around where I live to make this sort of thing more safe, but also I guarantee you I would consider the risk of walking across a highway in all dark clothing at night (ya know, where cars go flying by) and would only cross when and where it is safe 🤷. Maybe it is victim blaming, but sometimes if you do some extremely stupid then you will die. I wish it weren't so.
Yes, focusing on just one very narrow aspect of the comment, I know my parents see tons of people in their neighborhood jogging in the street with the flow of traffic in dark clothes at night. Protective measures can only go so far.
If an engineer feels they have truly done everything in their power to make infrastructure safe to use, and people choose not to use it, then there are three possibilities:
As for your example: it's obviously a case of #3, but there's a bit of #2 in there, and I'm going to argue some of #1. Obviously, people are just stupid. I assume in your area a sidewalk was available; thus jogging at night, in dark clothes, in the road, with traffic is combining four different risk factors when there is a comparatively safe option. That is irresponsible. But people aren't really taught how to walk in the road. When I grew up, my mother always taught me to walk on the left so that I could see oncoming traffic. But most people I knew, and most people I've met in life, do not know that. They were simply never taught it. This is because, when I was growing up and indeed today, people are not expected to be pedestrians in lots of places in the US. This is irrational, because a reasonable observer can see that pedestrians will be there, but it just doesn't get hammered in like some other things do.
And for my controversial remark: as a now-former jogger, I understand the desire to be in the road. It's because asphalt is a lot easier on your knees than concrete. I used to have a wonderfully light gait, gliding on air, running on my forefoot. I could run on anything and feel no pain. (I can't anymore, but that's beside the point.) Lots of people don't have that ability and every impact is really felt. So, irrationally but perhaps predictably, they sometimes make the decision to run in the road. As that becomes a habit, they may sometimes end up on the wrong side; or they may not (as I mentioned) ever have been taught what the "correct" side is. A particularly clever engineer would observe this and remark, "Hmm, people really like to run on this particular stretch of road, even though there's a sidewalk. But hey, there's this nice patch of woods right here, parallel to the street. Maybe we could make a wooded trail for people to run on instead..." or "Maybe we can make the sidewalk out of something better to run on in sections where we really don't want pedestrians in the street..." Just an example.
Philosophically, you can find an infrastructure solution to basically any problem. At a certain point it may begin to conflict with people's ideas of "freedom" and you will hear terms like "nanny state" get thrown around. And it's not like I'm immune -- there's a particular intersection in this one town in Scotland I used to spend a lot of time in which has an annoying roundabout, kind of busy, with fencing at all the points you'd want to cross for the specific reason of stopping you from crossing there, and instead walk ten metres to the light. For safety!!!! Grrr.... our authoritarian city planners have increased my travel time by a few seconds! Down with the government!
Of course it is important to take a step back in these situations and remember that safety is worth a bit of inconvenience sometimes. And it behooves us to support policies that make us safer, even if they make life just a tiny bit less convenient. Whether or not we voluntarily choose to break the rules, we should constantly be striving for extremely safe infrastructure.
D) it's unreasonable to think you can over come 80 years of pedestrian and cyclist unfriendly design in a short amount of time. IIRC the Dutch investment in walkable and cyclavle design took 20 years to see dividends. It's very likely that'll be our grandchildren that reap the benefits.
As I said, it's reasonable to try to increase your own visibility as a pedestrian for personal safety. It is also reasonable to educate pedestrians on how to navigate environments that aren't optimally designed.
But from an engineering perspective, it is negligent and unethical to suggest that pedestrians do these things in lieu of engineers designing streets to be fundamentally safe: such as building more sidewalks and providing reasonable crossing infrastructure so that pedestrians don't come into contact with literal highways.
Many local politicians and engineers choose to neglect pedestrian infrastructure. They choose not to expand sidewalk networks. They choose not to place crosswalks at reasonable locations. They choose not to time light cycles in ways that give pedestrians opportunities to safely cross. They choose to add dangerous slip lanes on arterials. They choose to allow high-speed, high-access, stroad infrastructure to dominate their municipalities. All of these things are decisions. They will whine and whine about how this or that isn't in the budget... and then spend $35 million on a new highway interchange that didn't actually need to be replaced. I wish I were joking.
You're overestimating how easy it is to access disabled public transit (required more documentation than my employer required for my partner's housing accommodations) or how much it costs to get a ride in a wheelchair van - 35 bucks minimum for a one way trip.
In my college town, bike trail having city there are plenty of sidewalks. And then there are plenty of roads without any crosswalks for miles, with minimal or no sidewalks, where all the restaurants and stores and things are (Walmart, Target, actual mall, strip malls, hardware stores and Best Buy, all those things). The speed limit is 45mph and the roads have six lanes plus turn lanes. If someone has to take the bus and then walk, or just walk to work, the store, or just to grab a burger, they're in a really unsafe situation.
Yeah downtown is walkable and traffic goes 20mph but there's no way to cross that six lane road for huge chunks at a time..leading to far too frequent deaths there, sometimes because someone is "jaywalking" and cars don't see them, sometimes very much the victim did nothing wrong. Cars are just super dangerous to pedestrians in those situations.
The specific goal of a traffic engineer is not to maim pedestrians. But every time they design a streetscape which features significant numbers of pedestrians to maximize what I am referring to as "automobile throughput," which an engineer would call "a high level of service," they are voluntarily making an engineering decision that a rational observer can observe to be dangerous to pedestrians for all practical purposes.
I suggest you read some of Strong Towns' material (like this). They have hundreds of articles detailing fatally dangerous infrastructure decisions all over the country. They talk about strategies to mitigate it in a variety of contexts, though they have a particular focus on smallish towns.
There are so many problems with current American infrastructure I don't even know where to begin. Automobile speeds are a big one: pedestrians have a 90% chance of death if struck by a vehicle traveling about 40mph or higher, yet those speeds are routinely permitted along arterials in population centers. By contrast, speeds under about 20 mph are considered relatively safe for pedestrians.
Various studies (too many to count) have demonstrated that current roadway designs, which intentionally make very wide lanes and very wide roads, actually encourage speeding and therefore kill more people. For decades, every engineering manual in America has argued that all roads should be very wide to give drivers "room for error"; unfortunately, a lack of "enclosure" in a street universally increases average driver speed. By contrast, narrow streets slow cars down. Johns Hopkins recently released a very good study on the problems with excessive lane width in particular.
Innumerable specific placements of concrete and paint also contribute to a lack of walkability and pedestrian safety. There are literally hundreds of problems. I think you should really read up on urban form. Strong Towns is a fine start. I have some other resources in my account biography.
You cannot possibly be serious. Is this a troll? I mean this as respectfully as I can... where are you from where you can say, with all faith and honesty, that the United States' transportation infrastructure is universally or even mostly "safely walkable for any able-bodied person"? And I must remind you, respectfully, that not everyone in the US is an able-bodied person!!!!! It is completely and utterly unacceptable to design infrastructure that is dangerous to able-bodied people, and even more unacceptable to design it in a way that's dangerous to children, seniors, sight-impaired, and mobility-impaired people.
The number of pedestrians who die every year from automobile accidents is in the thousands. This is a known statistic which you can easily verify. The number of pedestrians who die is going up every year. This has been reported thoroughly by hundreds of media outlets and studied extensively in literature. Quite a lot of these deaths are on poorly-designed arterial roadways and other places where pedestrians are present, pedestrian infrastructure is lacking, and automobile infrastructure is prioritized. Jason Slaughter made a video a few years ago on some of the design problems with most American "stroads," problems which are reflected in the literature.
An objectively safely designed streetscape, which is compatible with pedestrian activity, resembles Hoboken, NJ, one of the only cities in the entire country which has been successful in reaching Vision Zero. There are a number of specific traffic engineering decisions they have made, most of which I mentioned in my original comment. These include very low speed limits (20 mph or below wherever possible), careful intersection design, and a number of specific measures to improve transit, walkability, and bikability.
It’s fairly well known that 20th century suburban development intentionally designed to encourage cars to the detriment all other transit. Some examples are extremely egregious, such as the cross bronx expressway.
Can you summarize the point you’re trying to make?
I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but your message is so long I don’t quite understand what you’re advocating for
Again, don't mean to be disrespectful, but the comment above yours don't even register as particularly long for Tildes' standards...
The reasoning, in short:
Some of the specific solutions I propose are in the list in my first comment.
The problem is, drivers outnumber pedestrians by a wide margin throughout most of the country. Drivers aren't going to vote for leaders and policies that promise to make their commutes take longer.
We shot ourselves in the foot by neglecting mass transit infrastructure in favor of automotive infrastructure over the last 70 years.
That is not correct, but it's important to frame these discussions as safety issues more than "anti-car" concerns in order to assuage reactionary individuals all the same.
I will provide three benefits to multi-modal improvements that are palatable to drivers:
It isn't really zero-sum. Lots of municipalities voluntarily adopt safety measures that improve pedestrian safety while also making transportation better for drivers.
I agree that more investment in public transportation in the last 75 years would have been beneficial to society, but I strongly recommend against apathy or nihilism. It is not useful to settle into a "well, it'll never happen" mindset. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) of 2021 is an example of legislation that is radically improving transportation all around the country right now.
I understand why drivers should care about this, but I'm explaining why they don't, and that unfortunately translates to voting at the polls, particularly in local elections where it's easy to blame someone for making your commute 15 minutes longer.
I think you make good points, but I disagree with this one:
Where I live, the walking component attached to most driving trips consists of walking through a parking lot, not along sidewalks or across intersections where most of these pedestrian safety measures are targeted. And I suspect it is suburban areas like mine where pedestrians are often the most at risk, since we are the most guilty of having high speed limits, driving big SUVs and trucks, and building wide comfy streets that are easy to zone out while driving on.
I don't mean to come off as apathetic, I just think driver opposition is something that needs to be factored into the messaging. Most people have a pretty hard time really caring about things that only impact experiences that happen outside their bubble, and are not so understanding when remedies for those problems have knock on effects within that bubble.
As an activist seeking to garner community support for an infrastructure change, the initial public conversation can generally focus on routes that children are likely to be on, such as near schools and parks, as well as in downtown areas. Anywhere near a senior center or hospital is also prime.
It is also relatively easy to convince parents to support traffic calming measures on neighborhood streets when framed around children playing safely, as well as noise reductions. It is not difficult to get petition signatures to pass onto the local government, or whatever registered community organization is interfacing with you.
In general, it is helpful to have established relationships with neighbors so that you can canvass as a group and in a way that is recognized by other neighbors as community-oriented as opposed to "doing something with a political agenda." People are easily biased by acquaintanceships, to whom they extent more accommodation.
Opposition to safety infrastructure may exist, but it is typically not very socially acceptable to argue against "safety for the children." It's not like it doesn't happen, but strategies rooted in safety and community cohesiveness are generally an effective mechanism for suburbia, whose primary occupants are parents and grandparents. When you are in a situation where someone is hostile, basic affirming and mirroring negotiation techniques are effective. Door-to-door discussions have less to do with convincing and more to do with understanding, which you can use to inform your guidance of the conversation toward something constructive.
But when you are canvassing as an activist, you will generally find that the people who are broadly opposed to ostensibly minor infrastructure change prefer to be uninvolved with the public conversation; their opposition is mostly outweighed by their apathy, especially if it's framed in a non-inflammatory way. They will just say, "Sorry, I'm not interested in this." Then they will shut the door and you will go to the next house.
It is generally not strategically sound for a candidate for local office to run on a platform of making hyper-specific infrastructure improvements, like "we will make this intersection run on a two-phase light cycle." This is because changes that seem obvious to laypeople may not always be feasible once studied. They can run on a platform of (among other things) "safety for the children and the elderly" and "offering multiple transportation options for our community," which is both accurate and palatable.
I feel like this cannot be true, because there are 350 million Americans, and fewer car driving Americans. It can only be true if a significant number of Americans never ever walk anywhere at all.
But looking at it another way, it becomes self-fulfilling. "There are lots of cars here, let's build more car infrastructure. And there aren't many pedestrians here, so we don't need to worry about crossings so much"
In the UK we used to have a method to decide whether to build a pedestrian crossing. Someone would stand at a place and count the number of cars, and the number of pedestrians, and do a bit of arithmetic and if they got above a certain number a crossing would be built. The obvious flaw is that pedestrians don't want to try to cross a dangerous road because it's a dangerous road but these are the places that need pedestrian crossings. https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2021/12/invitation-to-cross.html?m=1
There are an estimated 283 million passenger vehicles in use in the US. If you live in the suburbs, it's entirely reasonable to almost never walk anywhere outside your immediate neighborhood. In the last 12 months, 100% of the crosswalks I've used were in Manhattan during a 4 day trip I took in April. Where I live, everything is too far apart and mass transit is too crappy. When I go somewhere, I go to my car in my garage and don't get out until I reach the parking lot at my destination.
That's more or less how we got here. Automakers sold policymakers on this idea that cars were the future, and pushed things like wider streets with bad research suggesting it was safer.
I understand, and agree, with your points, and your suggestions, but I'm a bit wary of focusing the presentation of it on cars going too fast.
That is an important problem, but I've unfortunately seen it, and Vision Zero more generally, be used maliciously by city governments to argue against pedestrian-friendly design, insisting instead that vehicle speed is the only important factor in pedestrian safety. I actually had a city transportation commissioner once directly state that improving crosswalk design (eg, most of your suggestions) was inconsistent with Vision Zero principles, and that Vision Zero was only about reducing pedestrian deaths by reducing the severity of collisions.
It's not just going fast that often takes priority over pedestrians: they're rather far down a list. There's the matter of vehicle throughput more widely: controlled crosswalks and reduced pedestrian waiting times might reduce vehicle throughput and increase vehicle travel times regardless of speed limit, for example; protective barriers and islands can take up space that could be used for more lanes. Daylighting takes up space that could be used to squeeze in a few more parking spaces, just to protect some pedestrians who for some reason aren't in cars... and so on.
Whoever you were talking to was, as disrespectfully as I can put it, a complete moron. Vision Zero is not that narrow and anyone who claims it is is not genuinely interested in safety, but rather bureaucracy. Vision Zero is the numerical representation of safety-first urban planning policy.
The city official you were talking to is an example of someone who I was targeting with my first comment. Such people do not understand the psychology of pedestrianism nor do they care to look outside their design manuals to see how their decisions have actual impacts on the world.
Yes, the tradeoffs you mention are part of "car-centric infrastructure" more broadly. When I'm asked to give a summary of the choices engineers make, "vehicle speed" is the easiest one for people to intuit. More specifically, "actual speed traveled" is the most important metric because "actual speed" during a collision is largely what determines pedestrian survivability. Road diets, posted speed limits, bollards, speed humps, street trees creating enclosure, 20mph-light timing (with signage), etc. are all things that change "actual speed traveled," though they have direct benefits for pedestrians too.
Transportation engineers technically use language based on levels of service, i.e. how "free-flowing" a roadway is (like a fluid), but that is a very technical term. LOS is really the metric to criticize, and it's determined by the overall character, shape, width, and layout of the road. Posted speed limits and traffic calming measures affect LOS, but so does congestion from other vehicles, which may be specifically modified by parking lanes, bus lanes, bike lanes, lane width, curves, light signal timing, etc.
In general, there is no reason for car speed, throughput, or reliability (collectively, the "level of service" of a roadway for a driver) to be significantly prioritized above pedestrian safety. Whenever pedestrians are significantly at risk of death or serious injury from automobiles, some design must be changed. That is the bottom line.