Compelling article, but marred by the click-baity title. It would be more respectful of the bereaved to reserve "Epic Fail" for things less tragic than the loss of a child. "Tragic Failure" might be more appropriate.
It seems like it couldn't hurt (even if cars drove 20 mph) for the crosswalk to be about 10 times more visible as well. There's a small sign, but people don't always notice those, nor do they often think to look for them on a stretch of road not near an intersection.
And in fact, based on Google Street View imagery, it appears they are in the process of doing exactly that:
My city has some crosswalks with big, obvious flashing lights similar to this, and they really catch your attention more. Some of them have button that immediately turns the flashing lights on so you don't really have to wait for lights to cycle like you do at a normal intersection, which probably makes them more effective.
The four lane street (San Antonio south of El Camino) near where I live used to just have painted crosswalks but after two pedestrians were killed in a short span of time they added the flashing lights in the crosswalk to the ones close to El Camino and Foothill, no one has been killed crossing the street in the ten years since even though traffic anecdotally seems to have gone up a lot (knock on wood).
Every time I travel to the USA on business I am aghast by how poorly the cities are designed for use by human beings, and how evident it is that the free mobility of automobiles is the primary consideration of urban design.
Just look at those pictures. How can anyone live in that area and not think that they live in an environment and society that is openly hostile to pedestrians (school children)?
In this kind of place, humans receive cars two years before they receive personhood (16 to drive vs. 18 to be the sole signer on a bank account). Thinking of drivers and people in general as separate categories is nonsensical. If a place isn't easy to drive to and park at, then it isn't designed for the human beings who live in American suburbia.
Mainstream American culture holds that it is apartment buildings and street life which are the true menaces to children. From the Street View, this place would be considered ideal to raise a family, because there's plenty of room for huge houses and huge yards/open nature areas between them.
That children can't transport themselves beyond the closed-world snow-globe of your immediate subdivision is considered a feature, as it limits the trouble they can get into. The most they should be doing without your accompaniment (in this mindset) is playing with other neighborhood kids in parks or in each other's houses.
Your first sentence here is most interesting to me. This is an aspect of car culture that's sometimes overlooked, but what it does is infantilize adolescents and provide an arbitrary blocker to normal human behavior (e.g. shopping, visiting cafes alone, etc) until the child is old enough to drive to those places. A kid in Manhattan is in society and has access to everything his parents do. A kid in the suburbs is outside society, in some very meaningful sense. His access to the broader culture is mediated through television, perhaps, but he's not actually there. He visits society when his parents feel like driving him there. [0]
Who is surprised, then, that the car represents freedom to so many of these kids? Where I grew up, a car was needed for everything, which meant that I had almost no access to the normal world at age 15 and almost unlimited access on my 16th birthday.
Like a fish who doesn't know what water is, most Americans don't even realize that car culture is all around them. And an appreciation for the status quo is baked in very early. The car is simply how you get places. How could it be any other way?
[0] I think this is actually really important. A twelve-year-old should be able to pick up some groceries, mail a letter, grab a bite to eat at a lunch counter, and so on, but these basic acts of socialization are completely alien to suburban kids.
Not just kids, but also the poor, the disabled, the injured, the elderly (hence the ironclad requirement that elderly people move to assisted living facilities), etc.
> A twelve-year-old should be able to pick up some groceries, mail a letter, grab a bite to eat at a lunch counter, and so on, but these basic acts of socialization are completely alien to suburban kids.
Compare Japan via this adorable TV show about childrens' first errants. They are as young as 2 or 3 years:
As somebody who has bad knees, 11 acres, horses, a goat, a dog, and some cats, I really do love car culture. It might be unpopular to say it, but I personally think big wide streets with lots of parking that make point-to-point personal transport possible are simply awesome. I lived downtown in my area for a while - yes, I could walk to a lot of places and I didn't drive my car as much, but I also absolutely hated it. My next move was to skip right past the suburbs and into the fringe of farmland, and I now commute ~17 minutes and ~16 miles to work every day (80% 80mph freeway), and I love it. I get to have my tractor and my software engineering job. God Bless 'Murica :-D.
I think your situation is great! The problem arises when you have a million or so people who all want that same experience in the same small area. It just doesn't work very well.
We still have enough land that living in a rural setting is an option for many people. That's a good thing. What is not good is the many urban and dense suburban areas designed according to the interests of people who visit in cars, rather than those of people who live there.
I really hope that you walk your 11 acres rather than driving around in one of those militarized-golf-cart abominations. Your knees will just get worse if you never walk around.
And the idea of raising children in Manhattan is sacrilege. A family there that’s expecting or has young kids will be asked when they plan to buy a house in the suburbs in the same way that a childless couple of will be asked when they plan to have kids. Suburbia isn’t just how we grew up - there’s a strongly held community/cultural consensus that it’s the only right and proper way to grow up.
Um, what isn't being pointed out is that there is a freakin' WalMart Supercenter right around the corner. That road is a thoroughfare--this isn't the "middle of nowhere" like the picture makes it look.
I have lots of questions: Why isn't there a pedestrian bridge? Why are the schools on opposite sides of the road when there is obviously land on the same side? Why is there a major thoroughfare in front of a school?
I know the answer: nobody is willing to sign off with money until the outcry is large enough. It seems like the traffic engineers know that there is a problem (15 accidents in the last 5 years and a traffic light plan already in flight), but you can tell from the article that all their solutions are cheap.
Signals that you don't really care about people walking or people with disabilities and want them to drive.
Ok, that was flippant, I realize, but the only time I've seen anyone use prefer overpasses and such is the Vegas strip and that's because it is outright hostile to walk next to or across.
> Why is there a major thoroughfare in front of a school?
Everybody is driven to school. Look at the land use around the school.
Pedestrian bridges, or tunnels which would probably be more appropriate here, are perfectly accessible to the handicapped. They even go so far as to encourage walking because its now easier to cross the road.
We have such a tunnel in my hometown for the local elementary school and it works pretty okay.
There are tons of pedestrian bridges in Hong Kong, for instance [0]. This is over a complicated intersection with a large street that has a lot of bus traffic, so it makes more sense for people to go up and over to cross the street rather than for there to be ground-level crossings with confusing traffic patterns. Hong Kong is very pedestrian friendly.
How about actual civil engineering and commute design?
DO NOT have public schools and other such facilities RIGHT NEXT to the high speed corridors.
Those belong in the middle of residential areas.
Design it for the safety of the pedestrians too. Some nice unclimbable walls that clearly show no other path across than the crosswalk (with as another reply stated, should be BRIGHT and VISIBLE).
Yes, there should be safety space between the road and that wall; but it should deny reward for skipping the crosswalk.
Traffic engineers didn't decide to put two different school across from one another. Perhaps they could have built the elementary school and high school on the same side of the street? Like say, in the giant empty field right there next to the school (pictured in the article).
Traffic engineers didn't decide to put the school on a busy arterial State-Designated Highway. Syracuse Utah has just 6 main arterial roads, and over 50+ small slow neighborhood streets. 90% of the roads in this town are already slow side streets safe for children (the exact ones StrongTowns advocates for), why did they build the schools exclusively on the 5% of roads designated to handle actual traffic needs?
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Ironically, we have a safer way to build streets like this. It's called a freeway, and it's great because it keeps nearly 100% grade-separation between people driving and people walking, while still handling massive transit requirements at high speeds. But we can't have those in cities, because StrongTowns hates them. They are too safe, promote affordable housing too much, and let people get to too many places too quickly.
StrongTowns gets the luxury of claiming every street should be impossible to drive on, and can prattle on about how cheap it is to destroy a street (it costs nothing!). Because StrongTowns does not do any actual engineering or design, they are simply a political campaign against cars.
Real traffic engineers have to actually handle transportation needs of real citizens everyday. Real traffic engineers don't get the luxury of just wishing away peoples lives, or jobs, or homes. So while I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, I don't see anything wrong with traffic engineers work here.
I see a school system that decided building two schools on opposite sides of a "State Highway 108" was a great idea, and is now suffering terrible consequences because of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_State_Route_108
You haven't even established the timeline here. In any case, it doesn't matter, someone decided to put a crosswalk across a four-lane 40 mph road. There is no world where this is acceptable design backed by evidence.
And in any case, if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars" I'm sure where an engineers opinion will fall. But traffic engineers aren't all that.
Where are the bold road markings, excessive signage, radar based speed display signs, photo radar, etc?
Rarely are these things difficult to mostly solve, but it requires at least some minimal effort. Sadly, that is too much to ask of most people in North America.
> if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars"
It never was. The suggestion is "don't put kids in the few areas of the city specifically marked as dangerous".
It's like building a school inside of a river, watching kids drown, and suggesting the water is at fault and should get out of the way. Or building a school on an airport runway and complaining the noise scares the children and suggesting the airplanes are at fault and should land elsewhere.
I think there are plenty of people who can shoulder this blame, the city planners that put two schools on what is basically a highway come to mind.
Look, the schools are already there, no sense tearing them down now and traffic calming is a fine solution but it shouldn't have been like this in the first place. There are plenty of areas marked as too dangerous for pedestrians when it comes to zoning decisions and this should have been one of them.
You don't don't seem to be reading what the OP is writing. They are clearly laying the blame at the feet of the people who decided to build 2 schools on opposite sides of a dangerous street. Where are you getting "it's no ones fault"
Nobody cares there are schools there. It has no bearing on the safety of street design. There are sidewalks, the infamous crosswalk over 40 mph lanes: clearly it's a residential area.
To blame the school placement (likely decided by the very same governmental body doing the street design) is the epitome of the problem here: "what are the pedestrians doing on my street".
I agree. The anti-car rhetoric in the US is simply ridiculous. The US is simply not built for any other lifestyle. Maybe Manhattan and certain very tiny parts of other cities that are already unaffordable to the middle class, let alone the poor. We don't have public transportation and we don't have the proper legislation in place to do anything else. We don't build enough and we don't build densely enough.
These problems are widely known and currently, they have no solutions in sight. Most people want to keep the status quo, but even if there was a mass movement to change this situation, I doubt the money would be allocated. The money most certainly exists, but much of it is currently wasted (defense, bailouts, tax breaks for the rich, weapons, more weapons, etc.), at least at the federal level. I don't think any state currently has the budget to even begin to make a dent in car culture. Hell, we can't even replace hundred year old critical infrastructure bridges, yet anti-car people want a whole new infrastructure (either that, or they're delusionally thinking that everyone can cram into downtown somehow). Car culture is here to stay. That's what the market dictates in the US, anyway.
> I agree. The anti-car rhetoric in the US is simply ridiculous. The US is simply not built for any other lifestyle.
Er...yes. That's the reason there's anti-car rhetoric.
But you're also overstating the problem, which I wouldn't have thought was possible. Car culture is pervasive, but plenty of major American cities have decent-ish public transit.
Your whole argument is weird. It seems like you're saying "This problem is real, massive, and pervasive, therefore we need to stop trying to fix it and ignore it completely."
This got down voted so much I could barely read it... But it has an actual argument that's not even being contested, that's a horrible way to down vote.
I replied to the argument. mnm1 agrees that car culture is a problem, so we're on the same page there, but they conclude that the problem is impossible to fix so we should all just stop trying and embrace it, which makes no sense to me.
And, living near Seattle as I currently do, the notion that we'd need to completely rebuild everything for public transit to work at all is not accurate. Plenty of major cities have decent public transit already. There may be a few cities that are beyond saving, and it wouldn't work in small towns, but that's true anywhere; no one in rural Germany is taking the bus to work, no matter how great it is in Frankfurt.
Take a quick look at Google Maps and you'll see I-15 is a very short distance away. It's not like they decided to go full San Francisco and run major six-lane highway routes at surface level. The people using this sort of route are probably all locals. All of the through traffic is already on the freeway.
Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use (then again, it looks like they already made that decision with a bunch of single-family house subdivisions). Notice nearby that the stuff you can access from I-15 is a bunch of big roads, malls, car dealerships, and an Air Force base. Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise.
Plus, as we see in any majorly dense area, the freeways turn into buffers for inadequate local traffic capacity as they very quickly turn into parking lots. Low volume exits onto slow surface streets with tons of intersections jams everything up.
> Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use
Neither of these are necessarily true. Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times.
Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people. That encouragement doesn't guarantee high density will happen, builders preferences and peoples budgets will still dictate cheap single family houses most of the time regardless. But that's not something the freeway itself influences. (In the same way that a train station encourages high density, but many are still in suburban areas anyway).
The only real drawback is price. Ugly, space-wasting rural freeways at ground level are much cheaper. But they are worse for drivers and pedestrians, every bit as bad as what we see here for everyone.
> Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise.
The air pollution and noise is mostly unchanged (same exact cars making the same trips). And Electric Cars already fully solved both of these problems anyway, it's just a matter of time as gasoline vehicles get phased out.
It looks like their current solution to the crosswalk is to add a stoplight to it. Which ironically will actually increase air pollution, as previously-traveling cars will now often sit idling, right next to two schools...
> Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times.
Can you show an example? 280 in San Francisco comes to mind. The division is the underpass or the overpass, and the frontage roads required to support it. Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use. It's not limited to freeways, either -- you can achieve a similar effect with grade-separated railways.
Here's an simple / cheap example from my small hometown - https://goo.gl/maps/e6N42cBBH582 (Google Street View is out of date, there are mid-rises on both sides of the freeway now).
It's green, it's safe, it's pedestrian / bike friendly and they are always at grade, so it's accessible. Cars only go 10mph (the distance is so short, they couldn't go much faster anyway). The freeway takes up almost no land -- it's just a single 1 minute walk to either side. Plant bollards at both ends to block the cars, and it's now 100% safety for everyone at all times.
> Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use
I don't think that's inherently true, it's just the cheap way to do it. Freeways can be high density and pedestrian friendly too. They just usually aren't, for the same reasons buildings aren't -- it costs money.
Your hometown and its metro area are almost entirely car dominated. >80% of workers commute to work alone in cars, >10% carpool to work, most of those with 2 people per car. About 4% work from home, 2% walk, <1% take a bus, and 0.3% ride a bike. (Data from the Census Bureau.)
I can’t easily figure out what proportion of other trips happen by bike/walking, what proportion of students walk/bike to school, etc., but I would be surprised if they match cities like NYC or Boston or most parts of Europe.
I don’t know what your neighborhood is like in person: how well trafficked is that underpass by pedestrians and cyclists in practice? Having some freeway underpasses near low-traffic streets be “pedestrian and bike friendly” doesn’t really help anyone if nobody walks or bikes anyway because there is nothing nearby to walk to because nearby places are extremely spread out and largely designed with the expectation that people will visit them by car, e.g surrounded by giant parking lots, with inconvenient road plans, etc.
The Southern CA town I grew up was similar low-density suburban with freeways passing through, and there were various ostensibly pedestrian-friendly freeway crossings here and there, but in practice few people ever walked anywhere except in the small downtown area or maybe exercising their dogs or going to one or another park (a decent number of kids <16 rode bikes around though). One of the nicest low-density suburban places I know of, but life for kids without cars was necessarily highly structured and relatively isolating.
You picked a spot right near the downtown between a low-density residential neighborhood and a commercial area, but looking at a satellite view and map search most of the residential areas in the city and surrounds seem to be relatively far from shops, restaurants, grocery stores, schools, ..., (at least compared to denser cities) so in practice many trips probably require a car. I’ve never been there so I can’t tell you what it’s like in practice.
But anyway, with that said, as low-density suburban development goes, Grand Rapids looks pretty nice, just judging from satellite view. Not my personal cup of tea, but definitely better than lots of places in the US.
I was definitely not a fan of Grand Rapids for the 2 weeks I spent there. Walking around the block (despite there being decent sidewalks) was basically unheard of, and crossing the street was akin to running across a freeway.
The worst part though was getting off work late and tring to go for a nice walk, only to find the sidewalks and half the street flooded from the heavy irrigation! I get that rain storms there flood things, but this was a consistent "lets flood a lane on either side of the street watering our lawn".
Thanks for posting the examples. The one from your hometown still looks like it cuts the neighbourhood apart, though. (But it probably counts as a good solution by American standards.)
I5 through downtown Seattle is absolutely a division between downtown and Capitol Hill, and it's a 10 minute walk from the convention center exit to the next pedestrian building entry. That's a terrible example for your point.
You seem to define 'pedestrian friendly' as 'not totally impassible by pedestrians'. A dark, unlit cave that requires a pedestrian to potentially walk several blocks out of their way (e.g. from a house on North Avenue to the McDonalds) is not 'pedestrian friendly' in my book.
And this is the best-case scenario, where the highway is relatively permeable because it's next to downtown.
What Strong Towns is about is prioritizing cheap, maintainable infrastructure that supports walking and biking— and freeways are not remotely cheap, especially when designed to be anything but an awful experience for those not in a car.
Electric cars don’t solve the noise problem. A substantial proportion of car noise at highway speeds comes from the tires. They improve it quite a bit but it’s far from fully solved.
Wide roads do cut neighborhoods in half and make them so much less walkable. We don't need freeways everywhere. While I like driving fast, there are other concerns than speed and even safety. I recommend strongtowns.org's article on "stroads": https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/3/4/the-stroad.html
I have a similar straight road with a school near my house. To make matters worse it's a main artery to the freeway. However, the city solved this much better. As suggested in the article the road is fairly narrow and there are physical separators in the middle of the road in the area where the school is. You can still easily go the speed limit, yet from my anecdotal experience of driving the road at least twice a day I'm pretty much the only person going slightly over the speed limit. I would argue that the road very much works as intended to transport cars efficiently and children safely.
> Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people.
High speed transportation of people is the exact opposite of what encourages high density land use. If you can live 30 miles from work, and get to work in 30 minutes by freeway-driving, that's acceptable. If that same trip would take two hours, perhaps you'd consider living closer to work.
> Perhaps they could have built the elementary school and high school on the same side of the street?
Given how politically acerbic your comment is towards StrongTowns and their efforts to save lives, your argument is incredibly badly reasoned. These are separate schools with separate facilities serving separate age groups. It is unlikely the reason this young junior high student was crossing the street at 8:30pm[1] was to visit the elementary school.
There are not that many schools along typical commuter routes. It seems unlikely that calming traffic along this one would seriously impact the "transportation needs of real [sic] citizens everyday."
It seems dangerous to isolate a discipline from all other externalities in this way. Transport infrastructure cannot just exist in isolation to other factors. It can have wide reaching effects beyond just transport.
This seems like a weird abdication of responsibility. Sure, the schools probably shouldn't have been built there. Let's accept the premise that was the main error. That still doesn't excuse the traffic engineers - fault is not indivisible.
You say they can't with away the people's lives. True, but they can't wish away the bad decisions made by others either. They still have a choice to make, between allowing a dangerous situation for children or a worse traffic circulation. And it's valid to judge that decision.
I used to live there. I hadn't heard about this loss, but if it's the schools I'm thinking, the open fields are either active farms, or used to have a church when those schools were built. The speed limits are reduced to 20 during school crossing hours. The schools were both built when Syracuse had fewer than 5000 residents and no need for major arteries.
I don't get it, how does your post rebut the article? It talks neither about the fields nor the school construction (that was the parent poster), and it specifically says that posting a speed limit is not enough as a deterrent.
It's not meant as a direct rebuttal because the article is so far off it isn't even wrong, due to a lack of context around the town's history, and it completely ignores the schooltime 20mph speed limit posted with big flashing signs and enforced by city police. Those schools were both built years or decades before the city even had its first stoplight, long before the other 90% of safe neighborhood streets even existed. There were only farms on a one-mile grid system in most of the city.
Then over time developers built neighborhoods and the population exploded, so as the population grew the roads had to be expanded. Traffic planners had to move people somewhere, and they compensated for the wide streets with 20mph school speed limits, volunteer crossing guards, extensive education of children and drivers, and regular active enforcement of the school speed.
So the article comes across as clueless, seemingly almost deliberately so to exploit a tragedy.
I don't understand the relevance of the town's history. Either the crossing is safe, or it isn't. The history may explain why it's unsafe, but it can never be a justification. That there's some reason behind the configuration is not something that must be pointed out - it's obvious that nobody chooses the locations of streets and schools by throwing darts at a panel. What the author is saying is that the situation is not acceptable - however it may have originated.
As for the 20mph speed limit - besides the fact that he specifically says they are irrelevant, since drivers don't respect them -, how would that have helped, considering it was 8:30pm when the accident happened? And I'm betting the "volunteer crossing guards" weren't around either. Apparently kids sometimes leave schools outside "schooltime" - who'd a thunk it.
Finally, if we're talking about what he left out - maybe you should add the other detail he didn't mention: that there had been already 15 accidents in the crosswalk in question in the last five years. So maybe it should have been clear by now that the methods weren't working.
(By the way, "the population exploded and the streets had to be expanded" is false. Governments have tools to control the growth of the population, like permits and zoning.)
It seems like the existence (and requirement for) freeways and fast, pedestrian hostile roads is a self fulfilling prophecy.
If we didn’t have them, people would live closer, we would have better public transport, better walking and cycling infrastructure, and we wouldn’t have a wasteful, excessive driving culture. And to many people steeped in the toxic car culture, riding a bike either means you got a DUI or you are crazy and deserve to die.
A highway cuts through my city, largely because it used to be very poor and it was politically expedient to prioritize interstate traffic at the expense of city dwellers (there's measurably higher rates of asthma near highways).
Its not just "StrongTowns hates them", it's that a lot of cities have gotten the shit end of the stick, transportation-wise, and people who actually live in the city don't want to live next to a fucking highway for the convenience of suburbanites. It's not a conspiracy, there's political support for these policies in cities.
Just use park and ride, cut throughs can go fuck themselves, you sound entitled as hell. It's not your God given right to shit up other peoples' home with your car.
This is bullshit. A street designer has one job, to make the street good for driving. It is pedestrians responsibility to look and cross safely. It is driver's responsibility to not hit people who may have strayed onto the street. It is the car's responsibility to detect a human and apply the brakes automatically. It seems only the street designer did his job properly.
I’d love to agree with you, but unfortunately as humans we are not infallible. We cannot rely on people to look in every direction and see every hazard constantly. The driver may have been distracted, for example by sun strike, and the pedestrian may have not seen the car due to its colour.
Roads need to be designed for their purpose, and their purpose also includes allowing pedestrians to cross safely even if the pedestrian and the driver suffer from a momentary distraction.
> This is bullshit. A street designer has one job, to make the street good for driving.
The field you're referring to is called "highway engineering" or "traffic engineering", depending on specifics, and safety is absolutely a critical component either way.
A side note but something that this article relates to. Here in Pacific Beach California, the traffic engineers have created a perfect storm of pedestrian danger. See, they've installed these lighted flashing crosswalk signs activated by a button on a pole. Awesome idea, as a pedestrian I can hit a button and think that drivers are alerted to my crossing.. as a driver I no longer have to search the shadows on sidewalks for pedestrians because of the lights. Now as a pedestrian and a driver I'm conditioned to depend on the lights.. but now that they've been in place for months the lights are failing and public works doesn't replace them regularly. We now depend on the lights to keep peds safe, and their unreliability is an accedent waiting to happen.
Beijing is the opposite: red lights are merely advisory for drivers. Cars just cross the pedestrian crossings. That has trained pedestrians to be very attentive.
Sloat Ave in San Francisco installed new cross-walk lights after a student was killed.
However, the lights themselves are ridiculous and will probably get someone killed as well. I've never seen something like this before. Normally, crosswalk lights are yellow, and they flash yellow when someone is crossing the road. Other times I've seen flashing lights on the crosswalk itself to show that someone is crossing. These are great.
The ones installed on Sloat are flashing red lights, but they don't look like a traffic signal. I don't know why they chose this, but it's very confusing and I don't know what a flashing red light means in a non-traffic light context. It's stupid and overengineered, and they should have stuck with something much more conventional, like flashing yellow lights.
This all seem bizzare to me. Whenever they install pedestrian lights (often button operated) in my city (not in US) it's always red and green and it's always with red, yellow and green lights for cars.
As in, pedestrians unquestionably have the right of way, but since our cities are so overtly auto-oriented, we make the pedestrians beg for their rights by pushing a button. These are emblematic of the spectacular failures of urban design that happened in the USA in the last 80 or so years.
That's really strange...here in n Boulder we have a lot of flashing pedestrian crosswalks and I'll have never seen a failed light. I suspect the lights should have a lifetime of years and not months.
Why is the math wrong if this is a "traffic engineer"?
> A quick physics lesson: The force of impact from a car increases quadratically with speed. This means that doubling the speed quadruples the force of the impact.
It's not? I'm not a mathematician, but Wikipedia says "In mathematics, a function or sequence is said to exhibit quadratic growth when its values are proportional to the square of the function argument or sequence position."
If you look, on page 9, you can see the plots of impact speed vs risk of death.
They are clearly non-linear, and they you can also read that they tried various fitting methods for missing data (and quadratic best fit things).
I'm just guessing that you are confused because it does not appear the constant for the x^2 term is >1.
Quadratic relationship is between the speed and force of impact.
If you want to accelerate pedestrian to certain speed you have to pump kinetic energy into him. You do that by applying a force over some distance (distance is how much pedestrian will squish during impact before it starts moving with the car) so to acellerate to double speed, you need to pump in quadruple energy, you need to quadruple the force since squishing distance is the same (until you reach speeds that pulverize pedestrian bones).
Sometimes car drivers have to slow down. Maybe on a big, straight street. Maybe on a state highway. Maybe on the main street in town. Even in those situations, if there is a crosswalk in regular use for most of the day, they've got to slow down. If they don't, the street must be changed until they do. That is the most important task a traffic engineer in small-town Utah has. It shouldn't take 15 crashes in 5 years to prompt that action. It shouldn't take an additional fatal crash with a child victim to prompt it.
Anyone who doesn't understand any part of this should never drive on public roads.
You can put all the speed limit signs you want on that street, but it doesn't change the fact that the road is too wide and straight and people will go the speed they feel comfortable at, regardless of the signs.
That street needs to be narrowed, have parked cars on the side, have speed tables, a boulevard, dynamic feedback signs, or other traffic calming measures. Physical objects and changes to the environment are what cause drivers to slow down in urban environments, not flimsy metal signs.
There have been numerous studies and research projects on this. Here's one by the Federal Highway Administration showing the effects of various traffic calming techniques in situations just like this one:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/08067/
You're preaching to the choir. All of that stuff is what I meant when I said "If they don't [slow down], the street must be changed until they do." I assumed there were already signs in place.
My condolences to the family. I hope this can learn to valuable learning from this loss of life.
Really interested in what data analysis is done in the states regarding (KSI - Killed and Serious Injured). In the UK we hold good data and can related designs and design improvement to the KSI.
I strongly agree with the article, we should aim for zero-killed. The balance can be vehicle congestion vs. space vs. cost vs. time. Because our modelling is very good we can tell the impact of a new school and the behaviour of the pedestrians. I could talk about the hierarchy of roads, but Traffic Engineers need to start influencing the politicians that make some of the decisions. How ? - By clear data and model that show with this design you will have this KSIs.
> The street separating these two schools in Syracuse was designed for speed, which means it was designed to kill.
This is hyperbole. The street is designed to efficiently move car traffic. The design error here is in creating a situation where a large number of children will walk across it. The author's goal appears to be to design streets so that they make getting hit by a car less deadly, which strikes me as perverse.
It's certainly possible to make the street better for walking across by making it worse at efficiently moving car traffic, but it's also possible to replace the crosswalk with a pedestrian overpass and eliminate the conflict entirely.
Any street that doesn't seriously consider the safety of people needing to cross it is functionally a wall or a hazard, whatever the uses surrounding it. If you create a conflict and don't try to make it less deadly, how do you describe that?
Pedestrian overpasses require those who cross to physically climb over traffic. Better than a wall, but let's acknowledge the cost of that. They're also enormous and expensive, whether you design them terribly or well.[1]
The calming proposals include: narrower lanes, a raised median, and a traffic light to explicitly priortize and protect pedestrians when crossing. What about those makes them an imposition?
Requiring people to climb over traffic doesn't seem like an unreasonable imposition in most cases. That sort of physical activity is even a health benefit for most people. I'm sure there are exceptions.
All of the calming proposals create an imposition. The whole point of traffic calming is to impede the flow of traffic so as to reduce its speed. Without effective alternatives, reducing the speed of this road reduces its capacity to get people from one part of town to another, and it appears that state road 108 is, in fact a major road. It provides access to a number of businesses including a Walmart supercenter, churches, four public schools and city hall.
The obvious alternative to driving is a public bus service, which also uses the road. It stops near the two schools hourly most times of day.
So to make the interaction of the road and the schools safer, the city could redesign the road and make traffic worse, more substantially redesign the whole transportation infrastructure, or add a pedestrian overpass. The latter is not an insignificant project, but it usually costs less than the examples you linked.
It’s a blog about city planning that is espousing a contrarian view. It isn’t limited to cars, but it does take a strong point that designing cities around cars has significant consequences.
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