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.
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.)
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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).
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.
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) 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:
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.
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.
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?
21 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadNow that we recognize these effects, we can start addressing them.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
What about an overpass?
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/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).
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) 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
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_de_Kindermoord (redirected)
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?