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> I live in Manhattan, the USA's most crowded place in terms of bikes and pedestrians. Yet, we are not anywhere near capacity for bikes and pedestrians, anywher

• galdosdi 10y ago
  That's unfairly using a different standard of congestion for pedestrians as for motorists. The kind of congestion midtown manhattan experiences for pedestrians is comparable to stop-and-go-but-moving car traffic. A bit unpleasant but there is still capacity. There's wasted capacity in the streets right now so pedestrians will overflow there, yeah, but if there was a fence, we could still increase the pedestrian density a good bit before reaching capacity. In other words, it's more comparable to stop-and-go averaging 15mph car traffic - uncomfortable, but still plenty of capacity left. It's not comparable to what we actually observe in car traffic at rush hour often -- mostly stopped, barely inching occasionally, averaging well under 5mph. When an event like a protest happens, THEN you actually see what true full-to-capacity looks like, and you realize that the day-to-day, while crowded and uncomfortable, has a long way to go before getting to capacity. Outside of an event like a protest, I've NEVER been walking through midtown and felt unable to make any progress at all. Compare that to driving. Or to put it another way, even at the worst of pedestrian congestion, the pedestrian is still faster than the car, so there is obviously still room left to make it even slower.