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> A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and

by piva00 2y ago

> A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur. That's a rather odd edge case, and seems to be much more prevalent in the USA than in other developed countries, and probably exactly because everyone depends on a car that you end up having old shitboxes barely functioning because someone is 100% dependent on that shitbox to live their lives. A car rolling down a hill is probably less than 1% of all car-related accidents in your country. > Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road? Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city? Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets, design streets sharing different transport modals so cars slow down. It works everywhere else, why is the USA so special that it won't work in American cities? No one is talking about removing cars altogether, the discussion centers around making streets in cities safer for everyone, no driver wants to kill people, no one on a bike or on foot wants to be killed. There's absolutely no need for cars to go over 30-40km/h in city streets, any need for higher speeds demand infrastructure separating transport modals. Please, spend some time in a nice walkable city (some time = weeks to months). The difference is absurd. I'm originally from São Paulo, a city that follows the exact playbook from American cities, it's fucking hell with traffic, moving to Europe and experiencing how nice cities can be made me a hard advocate for changing, I like cars but they shouldn't have priority over everyone else inside a city...

JoshTriplett 2y ago
The post you're responding to talks about having "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", and your response is saying "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets" and "infrastructure separating transport modals". Both of those are making the same case. > Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city? To get from point A in a city to point B in a city in a timely fashion. That doesn't mean that needs to happen on streets shared with pedestrians, but it needs to exist, and it needs to have some way of reaching the same destinations.
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport not cars. With cars you'll get more traffic and the fast road will become slow. Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing that will act promptly to the button press to switch to green for pedestrians.
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    > Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing The three things I quoted in the post you're replying to were "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets", and "infrastructure separating transport modals". You don't need a pedestrian crossing if you have separated infrastructure. For instance, interstates don't have pedestrian crossings. (Some have raised paths where pedestrians can walk from one side to the other without intersecting with traffic.) > To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport That's a lot less fast when the path from A to B involves walking to C, taking transport to D, walking to E, taking transport to F, then walking to B, and taking twice as much time doing so. Even if transportation were instantly available with no waiting when you arrive at each of those points, that's still substantially more inconvenient. And it's a largely fundamental property of public transport that getting from an arbitrary point to an arbitrary point typically involves multiple transits plus walking. (And unfortunately, often the responses to that are some flavor of "we should make cars slower and less convenient" rather than "we should make public transport faster and more convenient and point-to-point".) It's hard to beat direct door-to-door transportation. It's possible, and we can and should get to a point of having that via public transport, but in the meantime let's not pretend that it's always a win rather than a tradeoff.
    - Moldoteck 2y ago
      Separated crosswalks aka raised paths inside cities are terrible for pedestrians, that's why many cities in eu are either closing them or doubling them with classic crosswalk and finding out that raised/under paths aren't used anymore since it's much more convenient to just directly cross the road Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting. Imagine each bus/tram has own lane and semaphore priority meaning it'll get close to max speed, imagine thereare lot's of pub transports, imagine the paths for pub transport are shorter compared to car paths again to make pub transport more efficient, imagine parking is limited since land is expensive and youll spend lot of time searching for a spot and it wouldn't be cheap since again land is expensive, imagine in either situation you'll end up spending time in traffic, imagine most of pub transport stations would have bike parking so that you could cover last mile on a bike really fast if you need it You can say that it'll cost a lot of money and time to implement this but in reality it's just a matter of political will. Separate bus lanes and priority semaphores and bike lanes and parking is relatively cheap and easy to implement, just like dynamic parking price. The most expensive part is buying more pub transport units.

by piva00 2y ago

JoshTriplett 2y ago

The post you're responding to talks about having "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", and your response is saying "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets" and "infrastructure separating transport modals". Both of those are making the same case. > Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city? To get from point A in a city to point B in a city in a timely fashion. That doesn't mean that needs to happen on streets shared with pedestrians, but it needs to exist, and it needs to have some way of reaching the same destinations.

Moldoteck 2y ago
To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport not cars. With cars you'll get more traffic and the fast road will become slow. Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing that will act promptly to the button press to switch to green for pedestrians.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  > Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing The three things I quoted in the post you're replying to were "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets", and "infrastructure separating transport modals". You don't need a pedestrian crossing if you have separated infrastructure. For instance, interstates don't have pedestrian crossings. (Some have raised paths where pedestrians can walk from one side to the other without intersecting with traffic.) > To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport That's a lot less fast when the path from A to B involves walking to C, taking transport to D, walking to E, taking transport to F, then walking to B, and taking twice as much time doing so. Even if transportation were instantly available with no waiting when you arrive at each of those points, that's still substantially more inconvenient. And it's a largely fundamental property of public transport that getting from an arbitrary point to an arbitrary point typically involves multiple transits plus walking. (And unfortunately, often the responses to that are some flavor of "we should make cars slower and less convenient" rather than "we should make public transport faster and more convenient and point-to-point".) It's hard to beat direct door-to-door transportation. It's possible, and we can and should get to a point of having that via public transport, but in the meantime let's not pretend that it's always a win rather than a tradeoff.
  - Moldoteck 2y ago
    Separated crosswalks aka raised paths inside cities are terrible for pedestrians, that's why many cities in eu are either closing them or doubling them with classic crosswalk and finding out that raised/under paths aren't used anymore since it's much more convenient to just directly cross the road Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting. Imagine each bus/tram has own lane and semaphore priority meaning it'll get close to max speed, imagine thereare lot's of pub transports, imagine the paths for pub transport are shorter compared to car paths again to make pub transport more efficient, imagine parking is limited since land is expensive and youll spend lot of time searching for a spot and it wouldn't be cheap since again land is expensive, imagine in either situation you'll end up spending time in traffic, imagine most of pub transport stations would have bike parking so that you could cover last mile on a bike really fast if you need it You can say that it'll cost a lot of money and time to implement this but in reality it's just a matter of political will. Separate bus lanes and priority semaphores and bike lanes and parking is relatively cheap and easy to implement, just like dynamic parking price. The most expensive part is buying more pub transport units.