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It's entirely impractical to expect NY to build collision barriers at every spot where pedestrians get near cars within the city. Unless you want to have raised

It's entirely impractical to expect NY to build collision barriers at every spot where pedestrians get near cars within the city. Unless you want to have raised / underground pedestrian crossings everywhere (which have generally not been found to work very well, and are ugly as hell too), the reality is you're going to have traffic and pedestrians intermixed within the city. "The goal of improving roads is to increase the throughput of traffic" - that is considered an outdated goal by most planners these days. For one thing, if you increase the capacity of roads, you simply encourage more driving, and things end up congested anyway. In many cases urban planners now actively seek to decrease the throughput of traffic on mixed-use streets in urban areas.

logfromblammo 12y ago
It is far more impractical to employ live humans to enforce speed limits and jaywalking ordinances in the name of safety. We don't see the solutions that best improve safety because there are many other considerations in play. As I mentioned before, the urban planners who are adding resistance to the system are not helping the overall efficiency. Intentionally decreasing the capacity of urban infrastructure is almost criminally stupid. It approaches the level of solving an overpopulation problem by conducting a decimation lottery every time the number of people approaches some upper limit. Some planners are shutting down some roads to increase throughput, by encouraging greater use of more improved roads. Others are altering roads, or installing traffic circles, or adding stop signs and speed bumps, just to make vehicle traffic gratuitously more difficult. Those people are the assholes. Congestion results from insufficient infrastructure to meet public demand. If your sidewalk is too narrow for the foot traffic, and people get jammed up and spill out onto the street, you cannot solve the problem by making it narrower and throwing caltrops onto it. And that doesn't work with cars on roads, either.

logfromblammo 12y ago

It is far more impractical to employ live humans to enforce speed limits and jaywalking ordinances in the name of safety. We don't see the solutions that best improve safety because there are many other considerations in play. As I mentioned before, the urban planners who are adding resistance to the system are not helping the overall efficiency. Intentionally decreasing the capacity of urban infrastructure is almost criminally stupid. It approaches the level of solving an overpopulation problem by conducting a decimation lottery every time the number of people approaches some upper limit. Some planners are shutting down some roads to increase throughput, by encouraging greater use of more improved roads. Others are altering roads, or installing traffic circles, or adding stop signs and speed bumps, just to make vehicle traffic gratuitously more difficult. Those people are the assholes. Congestion results from insufficient infrastructure to meet public demand. If your sidewalk is too narrow for the foot traffic, and people get jammed up and spill out onto the street, you cannot solve the problem by making it narrower and throwing caltrops onto it. And that doesn't work with cars on roads, either.