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gemini://necronomicon.fr/gemlog/2023-08-02-the-cost-of-doing-the-right-thing.gmi
I'm in the rather priviledged position that I can commute to work using a quick train and a bycicle. Before that, I could just walk to work. With both of those situations, I was able to make a few observations. Whether you're walking or cycling, cars will seldom make space for you at a crosswalk or an intersection if they don't have to. It's been years – things do not change. Bycicle lanes are added to big cities, sidewalks are redone, but nothing changes. If you are not driving a car in a city, your life is in danger, day after day, always.
France I recall being pretty car centric but there were plenty of walkable areas, and often good public transportation options. "The United States is a unique outlier" when it comes to car-slaughter, and public transportation generally ranges from "lol" to "no". Or, let's play granny frogger on that six-lane stroad! How bad varies by location; a tourist from Florida was quite happy that those sitting in cars were not actively trying to murder him on his bicycle; we were chatting at some intersection in Seattle, maybe it was the Elliot and Western mess, in the usual car exhaust with all the usual noise pollution. By night, they add much more light pollution, and maybe a little less noise pollution. Yay?
From what I remember from my graph theory classes: designing roads is hard. Adding side and cross-walks probably makes the endeavor more complicated. I would venture to say that making sure that pedestrians don't die is a good idea, so why do you make this so hard, oh wise city planner? Surely having a red light for a few more seconds would lower the cost of "not killing pedestrians" for the cars, wouldn't it? There are other solutions such as decorelating pedestrian and car lights, adding one more turn in the system, but this is a detail. The core of the solution remains the same: lower the cost of doing the right thing if you want people to do good.
Hmm, well, probably pedestrians should not die needlessly—"thou shalt not kill" given that America is purportedly a Christian nation—though one can probably find stories that the body count needs be about yea high—five, at least?—before an old school American traffic engineer will even deign to have a look at the intersection. Wouldn't want to slow down the cars. Meanwhile the Dutch (who can be quite car centric) did have a "stop the kindermurder" thing back in the 1970s to good effect, and Sweden has a goal of zero traffic deaths. America?
One of these years I may need to get a driver's license. Hopefully not.
I don't have miracle solutions to deeply change the ways of the world. I know that at most my applicable ideas are slights mitigations, but I keep thinking about it.
"Strong Towns" and other such organizations do exist: "The advocacy group points to American post-World War II suburban development as a failure and seeks to improve communities through urban planning concepts such as walkability, mixed-use zoning, and infill development."
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/5/22/engineers-should-not-design-streets