CityNerd's latest video takes a look at the Transit Cooperative Research Program and National Cooperative Highway Research Program's scintillating document on "Improving Pedestrian Safety at...
CityNerd's latest video takes a look at the Transit Cooperative Research Program and National Cooperative Highway Research Program's scintillating document on "Improving Pedestrian Safety at Unsignalized Crossings." The report uses some complex and "Byzantine" mathematics, in Delahanty's words, to effectively recommend unsafe and car-oriented pedestrian infrastructure everywhere in the United States. With pedestrian deaths at a 40-year high, this is unacceptable.
The document clearly prefers that automobile traffic throughput be absolutely maximized, with ensuing pedestrian fatalities as a bit of an afterthought. (It also has no problem with an average pedestrian wait time of... 707 seconds to cross a single road. That's 12 minutes.) There is evidently little consideration of the fact that pedestrian death and injury constitute a bigger social problem than cars slowing down for five seconds. Indeed, most American municipalities disregard the concept of pedestrian safety altogether and simply do not add reasonable pedestrian crossings to their streets, perhaps under the questionable assumption that doing so will introduce liability concerns. That is: "We'd better make things unsafe, and unmarked, than kinda safe and marked. What's that? You want clearly marked and actually safe pedestrian infrastructure? HAHAHA! Get out of here!"
Delahanty, an experienced urban planner, makes the following remark which is similar to something I frequently say to acquaintances:
So, here's a question: is there any reason any city in the US needs any street that has seven lanes, anywhere? I guarantee you I can come out here at any time of the day and there will be nowhere near enough traffic to justify having seven lanes, usually not even five. And I know how this happens: if you project compound annual traffic growth of, like, 1.5% over the next 30 years—which is a requirement I've seen in some cities' traffic analysis guidelines—well, then yeah, you'd better just build your roads as wide as possible. Don't worry: induced traffic isn't real.
The sarcasm bites. I'm not even going deep into get into the cost of building and maintaining useless car-oriented infrastructure in and of itself. The status quo of pointlessly wide arterial roads is inherently a financial burden on municipal budgets and by extension taxpayers: never say that public transit is "too expensive" because "we already have all these roads." Yeah: and you sure do pay for them. But the important part of this video is not really the unsustainability of roadway maintenance in the US, something covered extensively by Strong Towns, but rather safety. If we're going to spend all this money making infrastructure, and it's designed in a way that kills thousands of people every year... what are we even doing?
I've been a planner for a lot of my adult life, and I know it's a difficult job. Sometimes you have to balance competing interests, like the need for someone to be able to drive somewhere and have it take five minutes instead of five minutes and twenty seconds; versus the need for someone to be able to walk to a bus stop without getting maimed.
It's important that traffic engineers stop prioritizing automobile dominance at the expense of human safety and well-being. Cities can make any number of infrastructure improvements to do this, such as widening sidewalks, reducing traffic lanes (a "road diet"), reducing speed limits, adding "traffic calming" measures like speed bumps near crosswalks, raising crosswalks at intersections to the sidewalk level to literally force drivers to slow down (no, this does not make drainage impossible), extending curbs on streets with parking to increase visibility and reduce crossing distances, painting real crosswalks, adding real stoplights to allow pedestrians to cross safely, massively increasing traffic violation fines and sentences, and much more. All of this is completely possible, reasonable, and affordable. City planners have to advocate for it: and so do everyday constituents. Talk to your local government about your city's terrible pedestrian infrastructure and maybe they'll do something about it.
CityNerd's latest video takes a look at the Transit Cooperative Research Program and National Cooperative Highway Research Program's scintillating document on "Improving Pedestrian Safety at Unsignalized Crossings." The report uses some complex and "Byzantine" mathematics, in Delahanty's words, to effectively recommend unsafe and car-oriented pedestrian infrastructure everywhere in the United States. With pedestrian deaths at a 40-year high, this is unacceptable.
The document clearly prefers that automobile traffic throughput be absolutely maximized, with ensuing pedestrian fatalities as a bit of an afterthought. (It also has no problem with an average pedestrian wait time of... 707 seconds to cross a single road. That's 12 minutes.) There is evidently little consideration of the fact that pedestrian death and injury constitute a bigger social problem than cars slowing down for five seconds. Indeed, most American municipalities disregard the concept of pedestrian safety altogether and simply do not add reasonable pedestrian crossings to their streets, perhaps under the questionable assumption that doing so will introduce liability concerns. That is: "We'd better make things unsafe, and unmarked, than kinda safe and marked. What's that? You want clearly marked and actually safe pedestrian infrastructure? HAHAHA! Get out of here!"
Delahanty, an experienced urban planner, makes the following remark which is similar to something I frequently say to acquaintances:
The sarcasm bites. I'm not even going deep into get into the cost of building and maintaining useless car-oriented infrastructure in and of itself. The status quo of pointlessly wide arterial roads is inherently a financial burden on municipal budgets and by extension taxpayers: never say that public transit is "too expensive" because "we already have all these roads." Yeah: and you sure do pay for them. But the important part of this video is not really the unsustainability of roadway maintenance in the US, something covered extensively by Strong Towns, but rather safety. If we're going to spend all this money making infrastructure, and it's designed in a way that kills thousands of people every year... what are we even doing?
It's important that traffic engineers stop prioritizing automobile dominance at the expense of human safety and well-being. Cities can make any number of infrastructure improvements to do this, such as widening sidewalks, reducing traffic lanes (a "road diet"), reducing speed limits, adding "traffic calming" measures like speed bumps near crosswalks, raising crosswalks at intersections to the sidewalk level to literally force drivers to slow down (no, this does not make drainage impossible), extending curbs on streets with parking to increase visibility and reduce crossing distances, painting real crosswalks, adding real stoplights to allow pedestrians to cross safely, massively increasing traffic violation fines and sentences, and much more. All of this is completely possible, reasonable, and affordable. City planners have to advocate for it: and so do everyday constituents. Talk to your local government about your city's terrible pedestrian infrastructure and maybe they'll do something about it.