9 ms·

The road that killed Legend Jenkins was working as designed

121 points by h14h 1y ago

shadowgovt 1y ago
Road design in towns and cities is probably the biggest example of the POSIWID principle that people interact with daily. In some cases, we know from historical record that the disruption created to communities was actually intentional (highways in many major cities were built through minority communities because they were less politically distasteful to displace or destroy). But even when it wasn't, many American cities have been carved up by arterial roads that have converted livable areas to ghost towns; when a highway cuts you off from the grocery store, you suddenly need a car to buy food where you didn't before, and that forces people from their homes. Now that we recognize these effects, we can start addressing them.
- hathawsh 1y ago
  In case anyone else has never heard of POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
LorenPechtel 1y ago
I'm not seeing what's supposed to be so horrible about the spot. I fairly regularly cross worse near home, it's something that demands caution and is completely impossible during rush hour, but the only part of it that worries me is the central median is simply painted, no physical reality and thus does not preclude danger from bad left turners. (Now, if your vision is flawed it becomes quite another matter. Figuring out how much time you have before that oncoming car gets there requires decent vision--but a driver must make a pretty similar judgement every time they make an unprotected left turn.)
- com2kid 1y ago
  Have you ever spent time in a city designed for people first? Lanes are narrow, forcing cars to go slowly. Side walks are large[1], stop signs, roundabouts, or even curves in the road, exist to force drivers to pay attention to their surroundings and not just speed straight ahead. > it's something that demands caution and is completely impossible during rush hour, Cities should be safe for people all day and night. "Can't go out now, too many cars" shouldn't ever be a thing. My city (Seattle) is working hard on ensuring 0 pedestrian deaths (they were doing good on this goal up until this year), and a driver it is super annoying. As soon as I get out of my car I appreciate the changes that are being made to the city. [1] I actually saw some exceptions to this in Spain where the side walks were level with the road and there was just so much foot traffic that cars obviously came second in importance to people. I've seen similar design principles in China as well. Really narrow one way streets with only a few feet of set back from the road, lots of foot traffic and the occasional slow moving car.
  - LorenPechtel 1y ago
    Yeah, the cars just speed ahead. I assume they aren't going to see me, I wait until there's a gap where I can cross without requiring the drivers to stop.
- deepsun 1y ago
  Let me exaggerate for comparison. We don't allow dangerous playgrounds with sharp edges, even though "no one designed them to kill children". We force designers to make them safe (or build a fence around dangerous places, so they cannot go to a store through it).
user214412412 1y ago
"why don't kids go outside anymore? all they do is sit around and play video games and play on their phones!"
- Qem 1y ago
  I wonder how much are cars contributing to the current fertility crash. The multi-ton metal projectiles that clog the streets and we call cars make the urban landscape hostile to children. They can't be raised "free-range", demanding constant micromanagement from parents indoors.
  - endemic 1y ago
    There's a major intersection about a mile from where I live, which unfortunately is next to public schools/local library/etc. The other day I was in my car waiting for the light when I saw a young girl on a scooter push into the crosswalk. She had the right of way, but I inwardly cringed and hovered my hand over my horn button, just anticipating that a vehicle was going to turn without seeing her. Fortunately she made it through OK.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    As a parent my biggest fear is drivers. Bodies of water are a distant second.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      My daughter has her learning permit and it is rather nerve racking. It's by far the most dangerous thing most people do in life. It's like carrying around a loaded gun all while interacting with thousands of other people with loaded guns.
wmeredith 1y ago
"Legend’s death was not a fluke. It was the expected outcome of a system working exactly as designed." I find this to be a very disingenuous take. No one "exactly designed" this road to kill children. There were clearly tradeoffs made for vehicle vs pedestrian usefulness and it's worth examining those if we want the space to be used differently, but this is exploitive rage bait.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  America cares more about cars than pedestrians. The system is working as designed. Maybe there should be some rage? Traffic deaths are a public health crisis in the U.S. - https://harvardpublichealth.org/policy-practice/car-accidents-with-pedestrians-cyclists-are-too-common-in-u-s/ https://harvardpublichealth.org/policy-practice/car-accident... - December 13th, 2023 The car is king in the US – and pedestrian deaths are rising. Where is the outrage? - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/27/car-road-deaths-rising-pedestrians-cyclists https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/27/car-ro... - June 27th, 2023 US pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36490283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36490283 (92 comments) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480122 - June 2023 (607 comments) Counterpoint: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736025 - July 2025 (651 comments) Hoboken Hasn’t Had a Traffic Death in Four Years. What’s It Doing Right? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31799733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31799733 - June 2022 (15 comments) Oslo got pedestrian and cyclist deaths down to zero. Here’s how - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197102 - November 2020 (109 comments) New York’s success provides road map for others taking aim at pedestrian deaths - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17710199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17710199 - August 2018 (149 comments) HN Search: pedestrian deaths - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=pedestrian%20deaths&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... traffic deaths - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=traffic%20deaths&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - deleted 1y ago
nluken 1y ago
I know what the author is getting at but he frames the article like he agrees with the State charging the parents with involuntary manslaughter, which, barring some detail not included in the linked NYT piece, seems ridiculous to me. The death of a 7 year old is a tragedy. Why do we then need to feel the need to hit bereaved parents with a manslaughter charge? Either there's something missing from the story or we're blaming a systemic issue on individual negligence.
- noah_buddy 1y ago
  I don’t think that’s a reasonable takeaway considering the follow through to the end of the article where he states that the environment is the culprit. If anything, I think his supposition is that any one of innumerable actors are just as a guilty as the parents but that our system must reduce scope to find a specific culprit and charge them with something. I don’t think the author would agree with charging the parents with manslaughter, but I think the implication is that they were in some sense negligent considering the environment in which they live.
  - tantalor 1y ago
    > they were in some sense negligent considering the environment in which they live Criminal negligence involves a "gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the same situation". Given the 7-year-old was escorted by a 10-year-old, I think that alone demonstrates a reasonable level of care was taken to protect the younger child. If the streets are too dangerous for a 10-year-old to cross safely, then you need to look a lot deeper for the true source of the risk.
    - karmakaze 1y ago
      Yes, this is what caught my eye: > West Hudson Boulevard is a high-speed arterial road with narrow sidewalks, a tiny median, and no truly safe crossings. Even a healthy, alert adult is taking their life in their hands by walking to that store. For a child, it’s playing the worst kind of roulette. The fact that it did have a sidewalk, even a narrow one means that it's meant for walking. If it's unsafe then the existence of the sidewalk is only asking for trouble. It either has a sidewalk and is safe, or it isn't safe and shouldn't have a sidewalk. Having a sidewalk and being unsafe is the fault of the city/construction not the user. Claiming a child was playing with roulette amounts to it also implying that lethal roulette games for kids is something that should be legal.
silisili 1y ago
As a kid, I remember at least in the area I grew up in(USA, kinda poor) there were a lot of pedestrian bridges and underroad tunnels. I realized it's something I rarely if ever see as an adult in pretty much everything built since. Did they just stop making them?
- pasc1878 1y ago
  In the UK at least subways under roads have gone out of fashion I think mainly as they get used by homeless as shelters and urinals. SO we get more road level light operated crossings. as for footbridges they were uncommon in towns at least.
- mapt 1y ago
  I was always warned away from them because who knows who might be inside. There were some legitimate issues with the lack of any eyes on these spaces permitting mildly antisocial behavior, and some illegitimate issues with every other made-for-TV crime movie featuring a rape or murder in them; The "back alleys" of suburbia.
- dddddaviddddd 1y ago
  Better to design a street that can generally be crossed safely, than to make a road so dangerous that pedestrians have to use tunnels and bridges. People should be able to cross a street safely anywhere.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    I mean, not exactly with the cities that already exist. I mean, we could do what you say, but you'd get voted out of office and hung on a cross for the immediate economic crisis you'd create in most major cities. You simply can't have 1 to 2 vehicles per household as exists in our suburbs now with all the places those cars go miles away. It will cost places like the US tens to hundreds of trillions over decades to 'fix' this issue.
- pixl97 1y ago
  The answer mostly is about when they built them. My guess is this was from the 50's or 60's on a lot of this stuff, when the amount of suburbs was still low which limited the costs of infrastructure spending on maintenance. Now we can't afford that because we have zillions of miles of roads that have to be paved and kept up for low tax providing single family homes. The density of these houses is too low to justify tunnels/bridges all the places we need them. Then add in modern cost disease on top of it and it starts making sense.
jjulius 1y ago
So... the article provides a Google Maps link to the area where this happened. According to the piece, the kids visited the Food Lion and Subway, and then re-crossed Hudson Boulevard. There's a related NYT piece that also says an older woman was hit "a few weeks ago" trying to "cross via the same median". I see the wide-laned Hudson Boulevard on Google Maps. I see the median. I see why it might be tempting to cross there. But I also see that ~345 feet to the west is a crosswalk. I'm a parent. I get the impulse to protect your kids and ensure that they grow up with a healthy level of independence and freedom and the ability to be their own person and know how to operate in a world by themselves. But I struggle, as a parent, to understand how, if I were on the phone with them, I would've let them cross via the median rather than insisting they walk themselves a little ways down to the crosswalk. I'm not attempting to blame the parents, and am sorry for their loss. But I'm generally stumped as to why they would've allowed that and, further, why there's outrage about an "unsafe median" when people have a crosswalk ~300 feet away.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- noqc 1y ago
  This is America, you can just call 345 feet a football field.
- noah_buddy 1y ago
  Why do people litter if there is a trash can simply 400ft away? Convenience.
- QuercusMax 1y ago
  300 feet is a LONG WAY to walk to cross a road. Do you not get that? You're asking people to walk 700 feet out of their way - you have to walk both directions, remember.
  - mindslight 1y ago
    345 feet isn't even 7 seconds out of your way at 75 mph (</s>). Talking about crosswalks misses that this is probably a common crossing spot for lots of people. The parents thought nothing of the kids crossing the road here, so this is likely where they always cross. So in the "crosswalk paradigm" it should have had a crosswalk built. Personally I live on a fast road and I've taken to only mowing the frontage and clearing snow with a 2000lb tractor. About half of drivers simply give zero fucks about soft fleshy blobs outside of steel cages, regardless of right of way or other legal considerations. It's only when you add something that might scratch their car that they magically become considerate.
neuroelectron 1y ago
Who lets a 7 year old cross 5 lanes of traffic?
- dddddaviddddd 1y ago
  Who builds five lanes of high-speed traffic where people live and would want to cross the street? The problem is the design that puts danger where people want to be.
  - neuroelectron 1y ago
    Did the street just show up out of nowhere? What ridiculous anti-logic.
    - michaelsshaw 1y ago
      No. It was purposefully put there, with crosswalks, designed to make lip service to pedestrians while maximizing their chances of dying.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        The street was almost certainly there a long time before it was turned, to the detriment of other aspects, into the current lane high speed boulevard it currently is.
- Bjartr 1y ago
  To the article's point, why did we put five lanes of traffic in a place a seven year old could reasonably want to cross? It didn't have to be that way.
  - neuroelectron 1y ago
    There would be no place the kid wanted to go without that street there. That's why.
permo-w 1y ago
[flagged]
rimbo789 1y ago
Everything about American cities makes more sense when you realize they are designed entirely for cars to go fast. That is the sole metric and everything is optimized to sure cars can go as fast as possible no matter the cost, both literal and less tangible.
- hn_throw_250811 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - TrainedMonkey 1y ago
    I think we can do both. We can have core of cities optimized for walkability and traffic arteries optimized for speed.
- SirFatty 1y ago
  A very broad generalization that just isn't true. Certainly not for residential areas.
  - foxyv 1y ago
    Have you seen how wide residential streets are in America? They are also very straight and cleared of obstructions. In other countries you will see traffic calming measures such as chicanes and road narrowing. In my own neighborhood people won't park on the street because people driving 40+mph will crash into their cars randomly.
    - SirFatty 1y ago
      As a person that lives on a residential street, and have my whole life, they are not straight and cleared of obstructions. At least in the Chicagoland area. Often curved, with a center berm and trees, etc. Sure the major streets are a different issue, but then those aren't residential streets.
      - 1y ago
michalpleban 1y ago
> this is not a fixable situation, not in any meaningful sense. You can’t slap in a crosswalk, a flashing beacon, or a strip of sidewalk What about an overpass?
dddddaviddddd 1y ago
I'd be happy if whoever built the road (municipality, state, etc) had civil liability for deaths and injuries, in cases where it could be shown that an inadequate effort was made to protect pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists (nearly all roads in Canada/US, unfortunately). Maybe that could be a positive incentive for safer design from the people with the power to change the situation.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  Inevitably you'll have to grandfather in existing infrastructure because a lot of it is from ancient times and all you'll do is make it impossible to have a Chinatown, or a NY brownstone. So what you'll get is that almost nothing new gets developed because the cost structure makes it impossible. Everyone always thinks "why don't we make it harder to make things and that way they'll be nice" but they can't connect the dots to "but to do that we have to grandfather in the existing stuff" and from that to "nothing new will happen and all the old things will stay that way". Thing of the obvious effects, man. Come on.
  - shortrounddev2 1y ago
    > Inevitably you'll have to grandfather in existing infrastructure because a lot of it is from ancient times and all you'll do is make it impossible to have a Chinatown, or a NY brownstone. So what you'll get is that almost nothing new gets developed because the cost structure makes it impossible. I don't see how that's true - if you create cities or neighborhoods which are more walkable, such as New York's Chinatown, then you'll have less civil liability than suburban car-centric infrastructure. I would think that NY style neighborhoods would be MORE incentivized
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    Why couldn’t you have a China town or brownstone? If the infrastructure is unsafe for cars, don’t allow cars there.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      I mean, seems like a smart idea until you realize at least the US is a democracy (well hopefully still) and the moment you tell people they can't drive their car home they will vote you out or lynch you. So there's that. Unfortunately the answer isn't going to be telling people they can't do something. We already don't give a damn about the number of deaths we cause, so the actual answer is probably somewhere closer to attempting to educate people so eventually we won't want it.
hathawsh 1y ago
I really hope the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel takes a look at this. I love the analysis they do there.
- bullfightonmars 1y ago
  It would be a very angry rant, after living in NL for a few years and absorbing how good infrastructure can be, he can barely stand this stuff.
  - hathawsh 1y ago
    Good point. I suppose he has addressed this stuff already. I wish every city planner would watch his videos.
barbazoo 1y ago
That picture of nothing but concrete, cars and stores. That's what it's all about. Humans are secondary, and so is their need to be able to walk to a store. What a sad way to live for so many.
bobchadwick 1y ago
The only issue I have with this article is the assertion that we demonize drivers in cases like this. More often than not, we let the driver off the hook and call it an accident.
dmoy 1y ago
> If this were a neighborhood where people regularly fired guns in the air, we would warn parents to keep their kids inside. A stray bullet may not be intentional, but it’s a predictable outcome of such an environment. On West Hudson Boulevard, the stray bullets are motor vehicles, and the result is the same: occasional, random, but entirely foreseeable deaths. Maybe that analogy is a little off. 1. The cases where parents are charged with negligence in the context of guns is extremely rare, and like.... kid is a mass shooter or something like that. Or kid shoots someone (or themselves accidentally, and often parents are not charged in that case). The analog here - charging the parent of a kid who is accidentally shot by a total stranger, never happens. 2. It's also wrong order of magnitude on numbers? Accidental stray bullet shootings of kids do happen, but they are extremely rare compared to kid-accidentally-shooting-self-or-friend or car-on-pedestrian-kid. Stray bullet hitting you is not predictable at all. You're talking like <40 per year across all ages <10 per year for just kids. A closer analogy would be accidental self shootings or shot-by-friend (~50 child deaths per year?). An even closer analogy would be swimming pools (hundreds per year for both kids drowning in swimming pools and kids hit by cars). All that said, it's worth pointing out that kids getting hit by cars has declined a ton in the last 3 decades: https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/children https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta... Some of that is due to better road design, some of that is due to better car safety, but a lot of it is... due to kids not being outside as much (30-40% decrease compared to previous generation).
- CalRobert 1y ago
  But why do you suppose the kids are outside less?
  - dmoy 1y ago
    The general move to the suburbs probably doesn't help. Screens probably don't help. People calling CPS on innocuous stuff that wouldn't have raised any concern 30-40 years ago doesn't help for sure. Crime is like wayyyy down in the last 30-40 years so that's not it.
    - 1y ago
setgree 1y ago
Well said. This is a subject where I’ve become radicalized as an adult (veganism is the other). Even Brooklyn, where I live, has a million little choices which prioritize cars over pedestrians, and any effort to reclaim space — maybe the avenues bordering prospect park should not have free parking? — creates huge backlash. Culture problems are hard.
- omnicognate 1y ago
  > raising the sanity waterline Is a marvellous phrase. Public opinion can be changed, and it's good to see people doing the hard work to bring that about. It often seems these days that the only people willing to put that long-term effort in have the worst goals in mind.
  - setgree 1y ago
    It seems to be a Yudkowsky coinage: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-th...
wonder_er 1y ago
I live in Denver - it's got the Standard American Design on every junction (every junction is a SAD junction) There's a house near here that was written about in an article - it's at the end of a long straight road, and then there's a curve, and often-enough people go way too fast on the road, don't catch the curve, bounce through a bunch of grassy median and end up HITTING THIS HOUSE! It's been hit so many times. so, I really like bollards (https://josh.works/bollards https://josh.works/bollards) and I went to his house to see about adding some. He'd already had large rocks (1000lbs) placed in his yard, and after the most recent car hit them (and bounced one of them into his house) he added some 3000 lb rocks. It's still not a full layer of protection, but it's better. Anyway, the real danger is the junction, not him having good enough or not good enough bollards. So, there was a meeting at his house the next day with city traffic engineering staff, police, city council, lots of neighbors... and I'm popularizing a fix that I'm calling 'the traffic bean' - it's a shared-space junction, that is as effective as the existing junction, and much, much safer: https://josh.works/traffic-bean https://josh.works/traffic-bean The director of Denver's DOTI has been looking it over, as a city council person has been pushing for it to get approved, and it might get approved! This would be basically the first real improvement in how american junctions are designed in decades. It's currently just my side-project wish. All I want is to live near and use a road network that doesn't deal death constantly to others. i fear for my kid's life, the same way these kids lives were affected. American road networks are horrific, I cannot take seriously anyone who takes them seriously.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  Is that effectively a double roundabout/traffic circle? I'm not sure I intuitively understand how to navigate the bit of the "bean" that's round but doesn't have a central circle to flow around? [I'm totally fine with UK-style traffic circles, single, double, multi-lane, etc]
  - wonder_er 1y ago
    the junction in it's current form is like a wild, light-controlled, two-or-three lane hybrid between a roundabout and a standard junction. If you can do UK-style traffic circles, you'd be fine on this junction. My proposal to to shape down all inbound lanes of traffic to a single lane, then connect them all to the inner circulating channel - it's a little lumpy, thus 'bean shaped' instead of 'circle shaped'. But as far as using it, from the POV of the driver of a vehicle, it's identical to a roundabout.
Kim_Bruning 1y ago
I wanted to link to "stop de kindermoord" (stop the child murder), but seems like WP doesn't have a proper article about it atm. :-( * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_de_Kindermoord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_de_Kindermoord (redirected)
KevinMS 1y ago
My car died last year and I've been trying to get by with walking and occasional ubers. I had no idea how hard walking around the suburbs is. I'd often find myself on unwelcoming "islands", walking through tall grass and underbrush on the sides of roads with no sidewalks, thwarted by fences, and just sometimes unable to get someplace I could see because it would turn into a game of life or death frogger.
dakial1 1y ago
I live outside the US in a country that is pretty much pedestrian friendly everywhere. Everytime I visit the US, it astonishes me that some places in the US are totally aggressive towards pedestrians, specially in US suburbs, with paths without any sidewalk, no protected pedestrian crossing. If you have to walk around is pretty much like american ninja warrior course. Is there any history on why cities are planned ignoring pedestrian needs?

121 points by h14h 1y ago

Road design in towns and cities is probably the biggest example of the POSIWID principle that people interact with daily. In some cases, we know from historical record that the disruption created to communities was actually intentional (highways in many major cities were built through minority communities because they were less politically distasteful to displace or destroy). But even when it wasn't, many American cities have been carved up by arterial roads that have converted livable areas to ghost towns; when a highway cuts you off from the grocery store, you suddenly need a car to buy food where you didn't before, and that forces people from their homes. Now that we recognize these effects, we can start addressing them.

hathawsh 1y ago
In case anyone else has never heard of POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

LorenPechtel 1y ago

I'm not seeing what's supposed to be so horrible about the spot. I fairly regularly cross worse near home, it's something that demands caution and is completely impossible during rush hour, but the only part of it that worries me is the central median is simply painted, no physical reality and thus does not preclude danger from bad left turners. (Now, if your vision is flawed it becomes quite another matter. Figuring out how much time you have before that oncoming car gets there requires decent vision--but a driver must make a pretty similar judgement every time they make an unprotected left turn.)

com2kid 1y ago
Have you ever spent time in a city designed for people first? Lanes are narrow, forcing cars to go slowly. Side walks are large[1], stop signs, roundabouts, or even curves in the road, exist to force drivers to pay attention to their surroundings and not just speed straight ahead. > it's something that demands caution and is completely impossible during rush hour, Cities should be safe for people all day and night. "Can't go out now, too many cars" shouldn't ever be a thing. My city (Seattle) is working hard on ensuring 0 pedestrian deaths (they were doing good on this goal up until this year), and a driver it is super annoying. As soon as I get out of my car I appreciate the changes that are being made to the city. [1] I actually saw some exceptions to this in Spain where the side walks were level with the road and there was just so much foot traffic that cars obviously came second in importance to people. I've seen similar design principles in China as well. Really narrow one way streets with only a few feet of set back from the road, lots of foot traffic and the occasional slow moving car.
- LorenPechtel 1y ago
  Yeah, the cars just speed ahead. I assume they aren't going to see me, I wait until there's a gap where I can cross without requiring the drivers to stop.
deepsun 1y ago
Let me exaggerate for comparison. We don't allow dangerous playgrounds with sharp edges, even though "no one designed them to kill children". We force designers to make them safe (or build a fence around dangerous places, so they cannot go to a store through it).

user214412412 1y ago

"why don't kids go outside anymore? all they do is sit around and play video games and play on their phones!"

Qem 1y ago
I wonder how much are cars contributing to the current fertility crash. The multi-ton metal projectiles that clog the streets and we call cars make the urban landscape hostile to children. They can't be raised "free-range", demanding constant micromanagement from parents indoors.
- endemic 1y ago
  There's a major intersection about a mile from where I live, which unfortunately is next to public schools/local library/etc. The other day I was in my car waiting for the light when I saw a young girl on a scooter push into the crosswalk. She had the right of way, but I inwardly cringed and hovered my hand over my horn button, just anticipating that a vehicle was going to turn without seeing her. Fortunately she made it through OK.
- CalRobert 1y ago
  As a parent my biggest fear is drivers. Bodies of water are a distant second.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    My daughter has her learning permit and it is rather nerve racking. It's by far the most dangerous thing most people do in life. It's like carrying around a loaded gun all while interacting with thousands of other people with loaded guns.

wmeredith 1y ago

"Legend’s death was not a fluke. It was the expected outcome of a system working exactly as designed." I find this to be a very disingenuous take. No one "exactly designed" this road to kill children. There were clearly tradeoffs made for vehicle vs pedestrian usefulness and it's worth examining those if we want the space to be used differently, but this is exploitive rage bait.

toomuchtodo 1y ago
America cares more about cars than pedestrians. The system is working as designed. Maybe there should be some rage? Traffic deaths are a public health crisis in the U.S. - https://harvardpublichealth.org/policy-practice/car-accidents-with-pedestrians-cyclists-are-too-common-in-u-s/ https://harvardpublichealth.org/policy-practice/car-accident... - December 13th, 2023 The car is king in the US – and pedestrian deaths are rising. Where is the outrage? - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/27/car-road-deaths-rising-pedestrians-cyclists https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/27/car-ro... - June 27th, 2023 US pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36490283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36490283 (92 comments) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480122 - June 2023 (607 comments) Counterpoint: Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736025 - July 2025 (651 comments) Hoboken Hasn’t Had a Traffic Death in Four Years. What’s It Doing Right? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31799733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31799733 - June 2022 (15 comments) Oslo got pedestrian and cyclist deaths down to zero. Here’s how - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197102 - November 2020 (109 comments) New York’s success provides road map for others taking aim at pedestrian deaths - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17710199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17710199 - August 2018 (149 comments) HN Search: pedestrian deaths - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=pedestrian%20deaths&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... traffic deaths - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=traffic%20deaths&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- deleted 1y ago

nluken 1y ago

I know what the author is getting at but he frames the article like he agrees with the State charging the parents with involuntary manslaughter, which, barring some detail not included in the linked NYT piece, seems ridiculous to me. The death of a 7 year old is a tragedy. Why do we then need to feel the need to hit bereaved parents with a manslaughter charge? Either there's something missing from the story or we're blaming a systemic issue on individual negligence.

noah_buddy 1y ago
I don’t think that’s a reasonable takeaway considering the follow through to the end of the article where he states that the environment is the culprit. If anything, I think his supposition is that any one of innumerable actors are just as a guilty as the parents but that our system must reduce scope to find a specific culprit and charge them with something. I don’t think the author would agree with charging the parents with manslaughter, but I think the implication is that they were in some sense negligent considering the environment in which they live.
- tantalor 1y ago
  > they were in some sense negligent considering the environment in which they live Criminal negligence involves a "gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the same situation". Given the 7-year-old was escorted by a 10-year-old, I think that alone demonstrates a reasonable level of care was taken to protect the younger child. If the streets are too dangerous for a 10-year-old to cross safely, then you need to look a lot deeper for the true source of the risk.
  - karmakaze 1y ago
    Yes, this is what caught my eye: > West Hudson Boulevard is a high-speed arterial road with narrow sidewalks, a tiny median, and no truly safe crossings. Even a healthy, alert adult is taking their life in their hands by walking to that store. For a child, it’s playing the worst kind of roulette. The fact that it did have a sidewalk, even a narrow one means that it's meant for walking. If it's unsafe then the existence of the sidewalk is only asking for trouble. It either has a sidewalk and is safe, or it isn't safe and shouldn't have a sidewalk. Having a sidewalk and being unsafe is the fault of the city/construction not the user. Claiming a child was playing with roulette amounts to it also implying that lethal roulette games for kids is something that should be legal.

silisili 1y ago

As a kid, I remember at least in the area I grew up in(USA, kinda poor) there were a lot of pedestrian bridges and underroad tunnels. I realized it's something I rarely if ever see as an adult in pretty much everything built since. Did they just stop making them?

pasc1878 1y ago
In the UK at least subways under roads have gone out of fashion I think mainly as they get used by homeless as shelters and urinals. SO we get more road level light operated crossings. as for footbridges they were uncommon in towns at least.
mapt 1y ago
I was always warned away from them because who knows who might be inside. There were some legitimate issues with the lack of any eyes on these spaces permitting mildly antisocial behavior, and some illegitimate issues with every other made-for-TV crime movie featuring a rape or murder in them; The "back alleys" of suburbia.
dddddaviddddd 1y ago
Better to design a street that can generally be crossed safely, than to make a road so dangerous that pedestrians have to use tunnels and bridges. People should be able to cross a street safely anywhere.
- pixl97 1y ago
  I mean, not exactly with the cities that already exist. I mean, we could do what you say, but you'd get voted out of office and hung on a cross for the immediate economic crisis you'd create in most major cities. You simply can't have 1 to 2 vehicles per household as exists in our suburbs now with all the places those cars go miles away. It will cost places like the US tens to hundreds of trillions over decades to 'fix' this issue.
pixl97 1y ago
The answer mostly is about when they built them. My guess is this was from the 50's or 60's on a lot of this stuff, when the amount of suburbs was still low which limited the costs of infrastructure spending on maintenance. Now we can't afford that because we have zillions of miles of roads that have to be paved and kept up for low tax providing single family homes. The density of these houses is too low to justify tunnels/bridges all the places we need them. Then add in modern cost disease on top of it and it starts making sense.

jjulius 1y ago

So... the article provides a Google Maps link to the area where this happened. According to the piece, the kids visited the Food Lion and Subway, and then re-crossed Hudson Boulevard. There's a related NYT piece that also says an older woman was hit "a few weeks ago" trying to "cross via the same median". I see the wide-laned Hudson Boulevard on Google Maps. I see the median. I see why it might be tempting to cross there. But I also see that ~345 feet to the west is a crosswalk. I'm a parent. I get the impulse to protect your kids and ensure that they grow up with a healthy level of independence and freedom and the ability to be their own person and know how to operate in a world by themselves. But I struggle, as a parent, to understand how, if I were on the phone with them, I would've let them cross via the median rather than insisting they walk themselves a little ways down to the crosswalk. I'm not attempting to blame the parents, and am sorry for their loss. But I'm generally stumped as to why they would've allowed that and, further, why there's outrage about an "unsafe median" when people have a crosswalk ~300 feet away.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
noqc 1y ago
This is America, you can just call 345 feet a football field.
noah_buddy 1y ago
Why do people litter if there is a trash can simply 400ft away? Convenience.
QuercusMax 1y ago
300 feet is a LONG WAY to walk to cross a road. Do you not get that? You're asking people to walk 700 feet out of their way - you have to walk both directions, remember.
- mindslight 1y ago
  345 feet isn't even 7 seconds out of your way at 75 mph (</s>). Talking about crosswalks misses that this is probably a common crossing spot for lots of people. The parents thought nothing of the kids crossing the road here, so this is likely where they always cross. So in the "crosswalk paradigm" it should have had a crosswalk built. Personally I live on a fast road and I've taken to only mowing the frontage and clearing snow with a 2000lb tractor. About half of drivers simply give zero fucks about soft fleshy blobs outside of steel cages, regardless of right of way or other legal considerations. It's only when you add something that might scratch their car that they magically become considerate.

neuroelectron 1y ago

Who lets a 7 year old cross 5 lanes of traffic?

dddddaviddddd 1y ago
Who builds five lanes of high-speed traffic where people live and would want to cross the street? The problem is the design that puts danger where people want to be.
- neuroelectron 1y ago
  Did the street just show up out of nowhere? What ridiculous anti-logic.
  - michaelsshaw 1y ago
    No. It was purposefully put there, with crosswalks, designed to make lip service to pedestrians while maximizing their chances of dying.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      The street was almost certainly there a long time before it was turned, to the detriment of other aspects, into the current lane high speed boulevard it currently is.
Bjartr 1y ago
To the article's point, why did we put five lanes of traffic in a place a seven year old could reasonably want to cross? It didn't have to be that way.
- neuroelectron 1y ago
  There would be no place the kid wanted to go without that street there. That's why.

permo-w 1y ago

[flagged]

rimbo789 1y ago

Everything about American cities makes more sense when you realize they are designed entirely for cars to go fast. That is the sole metric and everything is optimized to sure cars can go as fast as possible no matter the cost, both literal and less tangible.

hn_throw_250811 1y ago
[flagged]
- TrainedMonkey 1y ago
  I think we can do both. We can have core of cities optimized for walkability and traffic arteries optimized for speed.
SirFatty 1y ago
A very broad generalization that just isn't true. Certainly not for residential areas.
- foxyv 1y ago
  Have you seen how wide residential streets are in America? They are also very straight and cleared of obstructions. In other countries you will see traffic calming measures such as chicanes and road narrowing. In my own neighborhood people won't park on the street because people driving 40+mph will crash into their cars randomly.
  - SirFatty 1y ago
    As a person that lives on a residential street, and have my whole life, they are not straight and cleared of obstructions. At least in the Chicagoland area. Often curved, with a center berm and trees, etc. Sure the major streets are a different issue, but then those aren't residential streets.
    - 1y ago

michalpleban 1y ago

> this is not a fixable situation, not in any meaningful sense. You can’t slap in a crosswalk, a flashing beacon, or a strip of sidewalk What about an overpass?

dddddaviddddd 1y ago

I'd be happy if whoever built the road (municipality, state, etc) had civil liability for deaths and injuries, in cases where it could be shown that an inadequate effort was made to protect pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists (nearly all roads in Canada/US, unfortunately). Maybe that could be a positive incentive for safer design from the people with the power to change the situation.

renewiltord 1y ago
Inevitably you'll have to grandfather in existing infrastructure because a lot of it is from ancient times and all you'll do is make it impossible to have a Chinatown, or a NY brownstone. So what you'll get is that almost nothing new gets developed because the cost structure makes it impossible. Everyone always thinks "why don't we make it harder to make things and that way they'll be nice" but they can't connect the dots to "but to do that we have to grandfather in the existing stuff" and from that to "nothing new will happen and all the old things will stay that way". Thing of the obvious effects, man. Come on.
- shortrounddev2 1y ago
  > Inevitably you'll have to grandfather in existing infrastructure because a lot of it is from ancient times and all you'll do is make it impossible to have a Chinatown, or a NY brownstone. So what you'll get is that almost nothing new gets developed because the cost structure makes it impossible. I don't see how that's true - if you create cities or neighborhoods which are more walkable, such as New York's Chinatown, then you'll have less civil liability than suburban car-centric infrastructure. I would think that NY style neighborhoods would be MORE incentivized
- CalRobert 1y ago
  Why couldn’t you have a China town or brownstone? If the infrastructure is unsafe for cars, don’t allow cars there.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    I mean, seems like a smart idea until you realize at least the US is a democracy (well hopefully still) and the moment you tell people they can't drive their car home they will vote you out or lynch you. So there's that. Unfortunately the answer isn't going to be telling people they can't do something. We already don't give a damn about the number of deaths we cause, so the actual answer is probably somewhere closer to attempting to educate people so eventually we won't want it.

hathawsh 1y ago

I really hope the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel takes a look at this. I love the analysis they do there.

bullfightonmars 1y ago
It would be a very angry rant, after living in NL for a few years and absorbing how good infrastructure can be, he can barely stand this stuff.
- hathawsh 1y ago
  Good point. I suppose he has addressed this stuff already. I wish every city planner would watch his videos.

barbazoo 1y ago

That picture of nothing but concrete, cars and stores. That's what it's all about. Humans are secondary, and so is their need to be able to walk to a store. What a sad way to live for so many.

bobchadwick 1y ago

The only issue I have with this article is the assertion that we demonize drivers in cases like this. More often than not, we let the driver off the hook and call it an accident.

dmoy 1y ago

> If this were a neighborhood where people regularly fired guns in the air, we would warn parents to keep their kids inside. A stray bullet may not be intentional, but it’s a predictable outcome of such an environment. On West Hudson Boulevard, the stray bullets are motor vehicles, and the result is the same: occasional, random, but entirely foreseeable deaths. Maybe that analogy is a little off. 1. The cases where parents are charged with negligence in the context of guns is extremely rare, and like.... kid is a mass shooter or something like that. Or kid shoots someone (or themselves accidentally, and often parents are not charged in that case). The analog here - charging the parent of a kid who is accidentally shot by a total stranger, never happens. 2. It's also wrong order of magnitude on numbers? Accidental stray bullet shootings of kids do happen, but they are extremely rare compared to kid-accidentally-shooting-self-or-friend or car-on-pedestrian-kid. Stray bullet hitting you is not predictable at all. You're talking like <40 per year across all ages <10 per year for just kids. A closer analogy would be accidental self shootings or shot-by-friend (~50 child deaths per year?). An even closer analogy would be swimming pools (hundreds per year for both kids drowning in swimming pools and kids hit by cars). All that said, it's worth pointing out that kids getting hit by cars has declined a ton in the last 3 decades: https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/children https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta... Some of that is due to better road design, some of that is due to better car safety, but a lot of it is... due to kids not being outside as much (30-40% decrease compared to previous generation).

CalRobert 1y ago
But why do you suppose the kids are outside less?
- dmoy 1y ago
  The general move to the suburbs probably doesn't help. Screens probably don't help. People calling CPS on innocuous stuff that wouldn't have raised any concern 30-40 years ago doesn't help for sure. Crime is like wayyyy down in the last 30-40 years so that's not it.
  - 1y ago

setgree 1y ago

Well said. This is a subject where I’ve become radicalized as an adult (veganism is the other). Even Brooklyn, where I live, has a million little choices which prioritize cars over pedestrians, and any effort to reclaim space — maybe the avenues bordering prospect park should not have free parking? — creates huge backlash. Culture problems are hard.

omnicognate 1y ago
> raising the sanity waterline Is a marvellous phrase. Public opinion can be changed, and it's good to see people doing the hard work to bring that about. It often seems these days that the only people willing to put that long-term effort in have the worst goals in mind.
- setgree 1y ago
  It seems to be a Yudkowsky coinage: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-th...

wonder_er 1y ago

I live in Denver - it's got the Standard American Design on every junction (every junction is a SAD junction) There's a house near here that was written about in an article - it's at the end of a long straight road, and then there's a curve, and often-enough people go way too fast on the road, don't catch the curve, bounce through a bunch of grassy median and end up HITTING THIS HOUSE! It's been hit so many times. so, I really like bollards (https://josh.works/bollards https://josh.works/bollards) and I went to his house to see about adding some. He'd already had large rocks (1000lbs) placed in his yard, and after the most recent car hit them (and bounced one of them into his house) he added some 3000 lb rocks. It's still not a full layer of protection, but it's better. Anyway, the real danger is the junction, not him having good enough or not good enough bollards. So, there was a meeting at his house the next day with city traffic engineering staff, police, city council, lots of neighbors... and I'm popularizing a fix that I'm calling 'the traffic bean' - it's a shared-space junction, that is as effective as the existing junction, and much, much safer: https://josh.works/traffic-bean https://josh.works/traffic-bean The director of Denver's DOTI has been looking it over, as a city council person has been pushing for it to get approved, and it might get approved! This would be basically the first real improvement in how american junctions are designed in decades. It's currently just my side-project wish. All I want is to live near and use a road network that doesn't deal death constantly to others. i fear for my kid's life, the same way these kids lives were affected. American road networks are horrific, I cannot take seriously anyone who takes them seriously.

alistairSH 1y ago
Is that effectively a double roundabout/traffic circle? I'm not sure I intuitively understand how to navigate the bit of the "bean" that's round but doesn't have a central circle to flow around? [I'm totally fine with UK-style traffic circles, single, double, multi-lane, etc]
- wonder_er 1y ago
  the junction in it's current form is like a wild, light-controlled, two-or-three lane hybrid between a roundabout and a standard junction. If you can do UK-style traffic circles, you'd be fine on this junction. My proposal to to shape down all inbound lanes of traffic to a single lane, then connect them all to the inner circulating channel - it's a little lumpy, thus 'bean shaped' instead of 'circle shaped'. But as far as using it, from the POV of the driver of a vehicle, it's identical to a roundabout.

Kim_Bruning 1y ago

I wanted to link to "stop de kindermoord" (stop the child murder), but seems like WP doesn't have a proper article about it atm. :-( * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_de_Kindermoord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_de_Kindermoord (redirected)

KevinMS 1y ago

My car died last year and I've been trying to get by with walking and occasional ubers. I had no idea how hard walking around the suburbs is. I'd often find myself on unwelcoming "islands", walking through tall grass and underbrush on the sides of roads with no sidewalks, thwarted by fences, and just sometimes unable to get someplace I could see because it would turn into a game of life or death frogger.

dakial1 1y ago

I live outside the US in a country that is pretty much pedestrian friendly everywhere. Everytime I visit the US, it astonishes me that some places in the US are totally aggressive towards pedestrians, specially in US suburbs, with paths without any sidewalk, no protected pedestrian crossing. If you have to walk around is pretty much like american ninja warrior course. Is there any history on why cities are planned ignoring pedestrian needs?