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Road Safety & Vision Zero Plan

^ The plan is drivers will be prevented from driving into them by retractable barriers. People might get confused about how to access the area by car, but that's what Google Maps is for. Which makes me wonder whether Maps is aware of time-restricted road closures...
 
^ That's actually a good example of how you could make the King St corridor better for forcing people to turn right @4:09 in the video.

This is a very low traffic car intersection, it is not realistic to traffic calm King the same way. It is definitely handling a lot of transit, cyclist and pedestrian traffic though and they are all negotiating and flowing pretty freely without long delays.
 
Given the way people drive in this city, those local access zones scare the crap out of me. People are going to drive through them way too fast.

^ The plan is drivers will be prevented from driving into them by retractable barriers. People might get confused about how to access the area by car, but that's what Google Maps is for. Which makes me wonder whether Maps is aware of time-restricted road closures...
It shows the various Active TO closures on weekends so I think there's some capacity for it.
 
Walking Is Increasingly Deadly, and Not Because People Are on Their Phones

A new book on the pedestrian-death crisis busts myths and offers solutions.

From link.

Over the past decade, the number of pedestrian deaths in the U.S. has increased by 50 percent, even as other roadway deaths have decreased. When Angie Schmitt would tell people she was writing a book about the reason why, they’d always claim to know the answer.

“Cell phones,” says Schmitt. “It’s always cell phones.”

That’s why the entire first section of Schmitt’s new book, Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, walks through the potential causes for the dramatic increase one by one. She rigorously myth-busts the “distracted pedestrian” trope: More people walking or using mobility devices are killed at night and while crossing mid-block, where they are unlikely to be obliviously scrolling through Instagram. (Phones — in the hands of drivers — probably do play a role, she says, but do not alone explain it, since smartphone adoption has increased in other countries over the past ten years without a marked increase in deaths.)

Instead, it’s a convergence of trends: Cars are getting bigger, drivers are going faster, roads are getting wider, and more people are moving to transit-lacking suburbs and Sun Belt cities. But as Schmitt, a former editor at Streetsblog, clearly argues, while the flaws of vehicle design, bad roadways, and lack of investment would seemingly fail Americans at equal rates, the pedestrians who die are disproportionately Black, brown, low income, or over 65. “It’s a lot about power,” she says, “and whose needs are being prioritized — the guy who is driving to work or to Walmart to spend money, not the lower-income folks who are waiting for the bus. When their interests come in conflict with the people in power, they won’t be prioritized.”

In 2013, Amy Cohen’s 12-year-old son, Sammy, was killed by a driver in Park Slope, Brooklyn, when his soccer ball rolled into the street. Within a year, New York City had dropped speed limits to 25 mph citywide, and Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to a Vision Zero program meant to eliminate traffic deaths. Cohen went on to co-found a nonprofit, Families for Safe Streets, which now has local chapters across the country telling the stories of victims and pushing for infrastructural and policy changes.

That’s inarguably a good result from a tragic event. But Schmitt compares the story of Cohen, who is white, to that of Raquel Nelson, a Black woman. In 2010, Nelson’s 4-year-old son was killed by a driver as they crossed a wide road in an Atlanta suburb where the nearest light was one-third of a mile away. Even though the driver, who had two prior hit-and-run convictions, admitted to drinking earlier in the day, it was Nelson who was charged with vehicular homicide. She did not even own a car. “Amy was in the right place: She was a person of means, a person who had privilege, and she could put together a semblance of justice for herself,” says Schmitt. “Raquel Nelson faced jail time.” Nelson was eventually cleared but still ordered to pay a $200 jaywalking fine. Even the death of Elaine Herzberg, the woman who was struck and killed in March 2018 by an Uber SUV that was operating semi-autonomously, should have been one of the highest-profile pedestrian deaths in history. Her story was marginalized instead because she was homeless.

There are solutions that might prevent such crashes: better designed crosswalks, median islands where pedestrians can safely pause, and so-called road diets that narrow lanes of traffic. All of these, as Schmitt repeatedly notes, tend to become subjects of heated, yearslong battles between elected officials and local residents who don’t want to lose space for their cars. But infrastructure is only part of the solution. The bigger challenge, Schmitt argues, is addressing the systemic racism built into cities: “a legacy of segregation, housing segregation, and implicit bias” that infiltrates every aspect of transportation planning, from engineering to law enforcement. Just this week, yet another Black man, Dijon Kizzee, was shot and killed in South Los Angeles by sheriff’s deputies, who claimed they stopped Kizzee because he was “riding a bicycle in violation of vehicle codes.” Two days after the shooting, the sheriff’s department still had not said what he was doing on his bike that was supposedly illegal.

Enforcement has become central to the pedestrian safety plans of most large U.S. cities, which have modeled their approach after Sweden’s Vision Zero, a successful data-driven, infrastructure-focused initiative to eliminate traffic deaths. But enforcement isn’t part of Sweden’s Vision Zero, and not because of conflicts with police — it’s because studies have proven that changing the infrastructure works better. “There’s not a lot of evidence that finger-wagging about certain behavior produces differences in how people are behaving,” Daniel Firth, a Stockholm official, tells Schmitt in her book. The American version of Vision Zero enacted in dozens of American cities, by contrast, is awash in police. It is built around enforcement. One investigation in Sacramento, prompted by a horrific police-brutality case, showed that Black residents are issued 50 percent of the city’s jaywalking tickets, even though they only make up 15 percent of the population — all in the name of “safety.”

That’s what makes the data-driven approach to saving lives so problematic, says Charles T. Brown, a senior researcher and professor at the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers, who wrote the book’s foreward and served as Schmitt’s technical adviser. “What is revered or put forth as a best practice or as evidence-based is really just a reflection of the priorities and needs of the dominant society — white America — because the voices, opinions, and lived experiences of racialized minorities are not captured or considered in most planning and research projects,” he told Curbed. “Then we wonder why traffic violence is so rampant in minority communities — it is because those most victimized by traffic violence are excluded from the transportation decision-making processes. Quite frankly, the people closest to the pain should have the most power.”

Decades of transportation decisions have now been made without proper representation from the communities most affected, from local agencies to the government bodies that set the country’s policy agenda. In the chapter “The Ideology of Flow,” exploring how engineers came to prioritize vehicular speed over pedestrian safety, Veronica Davis, a Black civil engineer who runs a consultancy in Washington, D.C., talks to Schmitt about being one of only a handful of people of color in her school’s program. “Engineers aren’t taught about public involvement,” she tells Schmitt. “They’re taught where the road needs to go. They’re not taught about the people part.”

A shift toward designing streets for people will bring about the changes needed on roadways, says Brown, who is Black. “No matter how we advance as a society around the design of our vehicles and the design of our streets, the victims remain the same: They are disproportionately Black, brown, and low income,” says Brown. “How do we make it better? We focus on the people. And we design the city around their needs and then we adapt the technologies to fit their needs. It’s simple: You center people.”

While Brown agrees that sharing stories about victims and their families is important, he offers an idea that might flip the narrative on the crisis: a national, publicly accessible registry of drivers who have killed people. Right now, he says, the reporting and investigation of fatal crashes focuses so heavily on who is killed that it ends up pathologizing the victims’ communities and behavior. “We need profiles of the perpetrators in the same way we have profiles of the victims,” he says. “Who are we protecting by not demanding the race or ethnicity of the drivers involved in crashes with pedestrians?”
 
...
A national registry might also start to track patterns of which types of vehicles are more likely to kill. Schmitt was one of the first writers to connect the uptick in pedestrian deaths to the increase in SUV sales, which has since been proven by multiple investigations. One of the most jaw-dropping statistics in the book is the fact that 50 children are injured or killed each week in the U.S. in “backover” crashes, during which a vehicle is backing up at slow speeds. But since many of these incidents happen in driveways and parking lots, they are not included in municipal or federal crash data. Schmitt argues that these very large and heavy vehicles — which are, in addition to outselling sedans, getting bigger and more dangerous every year — sell to drivers who are oblivious to their bulk and their risk to people on foot. Merely tracking the height of large vehicles is something no federal agency does, so Schmitt took this piece of research upon herself, including photos of her 4-year-old son standing before the imposing grille of a Ford F-250 truck.

It’s not a coincidence that these vehicles are being used as weapons in the violent vehicle attacks — including some by police — that have increased this year during protests. “You have some very angry white men who are using them to intimidate people,” Schmitt says. “The auto industry needs to be shamed for that, for making money off it, and promoting it the way they have.”

Schmitt finished the book in February, just as the novel coronavirus pandemic began to upend society. A short, optimistic prologue addresses it: “At this point we can only hope that the devastation from this illness will be limited and we will emerge with a renewed sense of care for our fellow citizens and their health and well-being,” she writes. But in some ways, Schmitt might have anticipated that COVID-19 would end up killing more than four times as many people as car crashes do in an average year. The U.S.’s apathy toward pedestrian deaths is similar to the way it has approached the pandemic. Just like the pedestrians killed on U.S. streets, COVID-19 victims are disproportionately Black, brown, low-income, and over 65. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic might have been different if the country had already decided, as many other wealthy nations have, that those lives were valued. As Schmitt explains in the book, if the U.S. just matched Canada’s pedestrian safety record, 20,000 American lives could be saved every year.

 
Wow, the author could have saved a lot of words by simply saying that pedestrians are endangered because American society is evil.
 
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I just hope policymakers realize that you can't do it with enforcement alone, no matter how many automated speed cams, red light cams, etc. you put in. The roads need to be changed to make it uncomfortable to speed. Ideally, make people fear scratching their car or hitting another car. Pedestrians are afterthoughts.
 
Op-Ed: Why Most Pedestrian Infrastructure Is Really for Drivers
Big money “pedestrian” projects are often remedial and performative — and their real purpose is to serve faster car traffic.

From link.

TAP-e1433865881926.png

Projects like this pedestrian bridge aren't really about making the world better for walkers, Cortright argues. They're about avoiding any inconvenience for drivers. Photo: ##http://taimages.railstotrails.org/1...-Ped-BridgeSeattle/i-G4fWfCd##Rails-to-Trails Conservancy##

One of the biggest lies in transportation planning is calling something “multi-modal.” When somebody tells you a project is “multi-modal,” you can safely bet that its really for cars and trucks with some decorative frills appended for bikes and pedestrians. A four- or six-lane arterial, posted for 45 miles per hour, and with crossings every half mile or more isn’t pedestrian friendly no matter how wide the sidewalks are on either side of the road.

Much of what is labeled pedestrian infrastructure is in reality car infrastructure. In a place populated entirely by pedestrians and bicycles, for example, there’s no need for wide rights of way, grade separations or traffic signals. In even the most crowded cities, people simply walk or ride around one another. If its just people walking, there aren’t even lane markings. Humans have long had the ability to avoid collisions, using subtle visual cues. Pedestrian friendly places don’t need elaborate infrastructure.

When we build a sidewalk along a busy arterial, or put in a traffic signal or build a pedestrian overpass, we may call it “pedestrian” infrastructure, but the only reason it’s actually needed is because of the presence and primacy of cars. And its purpose is primarily to benefit cars, speeding car travel, by freeing them from the need to pay attention to or yield to pedestrians (or to only have to do so under strictly limited conditions). If a pedestrian crosses outside a sidewalk, or against a light, the law routinely exempts vehicle drivers from any penalties from hitting or killing them.

Most elaborate “pedestrian” infrastructure is really car infrastructure. As an example, lets have a look at Lake Mary, Florida, a suburb of Orlando. Like much of suburban Florida, Lake Mary is a grid of multi-lane arterials. One of the city’s highest crash locations, according to its transportation plan, is the intersection of Lake Mary Boulevard and Country Club Road. Lake Mary Boulevard is 7-lanes wide, with turn-lanes and through traffic lanes, and is a daunting obstacle for pedestrians, so the city has constructed two pedestrian bridges over the highway, with a 153-foot span.

lake_mary_overpass_aerial.jpg

Italian-inspired walkability: Passeggiata, anyone? (DRMP Engineering)

The engineering firm that built the crossing describes it as a “having a Mediterranean/Italian style.” and touts its “highly decorative safety enclosure and decorative cladding walls .” Anyone who has ever walked for five minutes in an Italian city will be hard pressed to find any substantive resemblance. The ramps needed to reach the elevated structure roughly triple the crossing distance for pedestrians, which probably explains while people still use the grade-level crosswalk.

lake_mary_overpass_peds.png


These elaborate and expensive pedestrian bridges are at best a remedial effort to minimize the danger this environment poses to anyone who isn’t in a car. They don’t really make the area any more desirable for walking. The real problem is not the infrastructure, or lack thereof, but a built environment that’s inhospitable to walking and cycling. Even the densest parts of Lake Mary get a Walk Score of 49 “car dependent” and most housing has Walk Scores of 20 or less, meaning that people need a car for almost all of their basic travel. Here’s a heat map, the yellow and red areas have Walk Scores of less than 50 (car-dependent), the gray areas are below 10.

Lake_Mary_WalkScore.png


Here’s another, example, from Port Wentworth, a suburb of Savannah, Georgia. Here, the Georgia Department of Transportation has built a $4 million pedestrian overpass over a four-lane highway, Augusta Road (GA-21). The bridge’s 178-foot span connects a new residential subdivision on one side of the highway with other subdivisions and a local school on the other. The overpass features lengthy serpentine switchbacks on both sides, more than quadrupling the distance one has to walk as opposed to using the highway’s crosswalk.

US21PedBridgegallery.jpg

US 21 pedestrian crossing, Port Wentworth, GA (ICE)

The total population of Port Wentworth (in 2018) was about 8,500 persons, so the $4.1 million cost of the overpass works out to about $500 per capita. Few if any cities in the US spend so much per capita on “walkability.”

But Port Wentworth is anything but walkable. Redfin calculates the city’s overall Walk Score as 20. Of the apartments for rent on either side of Augusta Road, a handful have scores in the low teens; most are under ten, and several have a Walk Score of “1” the lowest possible score. Even with a prodigious investment in “pedestrian” infrastructure, this is not a place for people walking or biking.

Port_Wentworth.png


The irony of course is that Port Wentworth is a suburb of one of America’s most delightfully walkable cities, Savannah. The indelible imprint of its 18th Century town planning with regular squares, tree-shaded streets and a mix of housing, all laid out for walking–no $4 million highway over-crossings to be seen. Hundreds of thousands of tourists come to Savannah each year, mostly just to walk around, in a way that’s impossible nearly anywhere else in North American city, in neighborhoods that are illegal to build in almost every municipality.

“Pedestrian infrastructure” is an oxymoron. In a place that’s hospitable to people and walking pedestrians don’t need separate “infrastructure”—they can use the streets as a place to walk, just as humans have done for the several thousand years in which there were cities but no cars.

Much of what purports to be “pedestrian” infrastructure, is really car infrastructure, and is only necessary in a world that’s dominated by car travel, in places that are laid out to privilege cars. It’s telling that the “level of service” provided to pedestrians (nominally for their safety) would never be tolerated in any freshly built or “improved” highway project: The the ramps to reach overpasses double, triple or quadruple the distance a pedestrian must travel to cross a roadway, and require them to ascend and descend a substantial grade. No highway engineer would build a bypass that doubled or tripled travel times for cars, but they regularly do this for people on foot.

A somewhat better form of pedestrian “infrastructure” if we actually could create such a thing, might look more like raised crosswalks. Sandy James has a nice definition. Raised crosswalks, she writes:
. . . are walkable speed humps that are at the same grade as the sidewalk on either side of the street. The raised crosswalk serve to elevate the pedestrian, and slow vehicular traffic . . .

raised_crosswalk_levinson.jpg

Raised Crosswalk in Sydney (David Levinson)Raised crosswalks make a space more comfortable for pedestrians, and marginally slower for cars. But perhaps most importantly, the raised crosswalks redefine the “ownership” of space; they signal to drivers and pedestrians alike that the walkers have priority: that cars are driving across a sidewalk, rather than pedestrians are walking across a road. Curbs (and curb cuts) signify to everyone that pedestrians are stepping out of “their” space, and into the space “owned” by the driver. But in the US, raised crosswalks are extremely rare. Again, though, raised crosswalks are really only necessary because of cars, so they are actually car infrastructure, not pedestrian infrastructure.
 
Ideally there would be enough room (a vehicle length) between the raised crosswalk and the intersection that a typical vehicle can yield to pedestrians and cross the sidewalk (without blocking it) before turning their attention to crossing vehicle traffic. Also, vehicles turning off the cross street have somewhere to stop and yield to pedestrians after turning. The current situation with no gap encourages drivers to focus on crossing car traffic and gun it when they have an opening, with only a afterthought spared for potential pedestrians or cyclists crossing.

People make mistakes and we should design the infrastructure so the mistakes don't result in death or injury.
 
^I do think there is a little technocratic arrogance, and a lack of respect for the user, in these buttons. If there is no consistency or transparency to what they do, and no real feedback to the user, how are people supposed to own their appropriate use?
There seems to be an assumption that people can be compelled to just follow instructions mindlessly. Push the button and trust that the system is looking out for you and doing what it should do. (Right, HAL?)
There should be no mysteries to pedestrian buttons.

- Paul
 
A lot of people ignore them, and just cross according to the road vehicle lights. I arrived at a cross-ride a couple days ago with a bicycle beg button for the cycle light. There were some cyclists already there when I got there so I assumed they hit the button until the car traffic went green and the bike signal stayed red. They rode across and I advanced to hit the button, immediately making the bike signal green. I have to wonder what the point of it all is.
 

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