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.
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 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.)
This isn't an issue with traffic, but city planning, not allowing pedestrians to actually have the right of way, and poor policing of laws.
You can build tunnels and overpasses for pedestrians. Button-operated lights for walkways. Strict laws requiring vehicles stop for pedestrians. Planned speed bumps. You can route traffic away from paths kids would likely walk. Do things so that it is more reasonable that kids will be safe in neighborhoods, even if they are playing in the road (at elementary ages, of course, when they are old enough to be aware). You can also have more public green spaces within a child's walking distance where they can play outside with others and make sure school grounds are open for play when school is not in session instead of calling the police for trespassing.
Fair enough, though I do think I appreciate the problem. I've ended up in contact with vehicles twice this year through no fault of my own walking in my downtown area.
I was sort of imagining a neighborhood and school near me that does actually have great sidewalks with a single conflict-producing crossing that is managed by a guard in the mornings. I admit this is totally our of the ordinary though, especially for a public school in the SE USA.
> 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.
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.
You are victim-blaming, stop it. Telling people to just act in the "correct" way 100% of the time does not work, it's just a way for engineers and designers to deflect responsibility for design failure. The existing crossing is too far away to be useful, hence why so many people take the shortcut. This has been known for years:
In the last few years, the residential street where I live had multiple accidents caused by inattentive or plain racing drivers. One child ended up in hospital for weeks after being run over by a speeding car, a woman ended up dead after being run over by a lorry, and from my window I can see dangerous behavior from motorists alllll the time. Not good if you have three schools, (at least) two kindergartens and a sports area used by all of them.
The problem is, the street is fucking wide - it used to be the supply road for a beer factory and only got developed into pure residential and schools zoning two decades ago, and that seems to invite people to not give a fuck.
The fault is to some degree the design of the road.
It's fine to have highways that convey people in cars quickly from one place to another at high speed. But these should have few exits, and pedestrians and cyclists should not be anywhere near them.
Streets in cities should be slow and safe for all road users.
Here's an article about a known deadly street. There's been a push to redesign it to be safer, but some people place a higher value on the convenience of carrying more car traffic.
Plus, pedestrian deaths are most likely at night, presumably due to the decreased visibility. The statistics also show the lowest death rate amongst children, and the highest amongst the elderly (with middle–aged adults barely overtaking the elderly in this race in the last couple of years). School children thus seem to be the least at risk, though I don’t know why; it could be because they no longer walk to and from school, or it could be because they are more likely to survive an accident than the elderly are, but neither of those explain the much larger drop in deaths amongst the elderly pedestrians. And of course national averages tell us nothing about the specific location in question.
Still, I agree that the pedestrian accident rate really ought to be lower. A lot lower! I also think that the pedestrian accident rate is just not high enough to declare that areas like this are unsafe to walk in. Especially with a dedicated pedestrian bridge that allows people to avoid the car traffic at the busy service interchanges to the east and west.
No, when people talk about the “walkability” of an area, they are almost always talking about the sheer density of businesses in the area not about safety. How they can walk to the grocery store, and their dentist, and their favorite bar, and also three different art galleries. How everything they need is never more than a 15–minute walk away. How each parking lot represents a wasted opportunity, because there are no services there, and nobody lives there either.
But when this bridge was built they clearly were willing to walk further to access vital services like the school, past any number of parking lots. People are just a lot pickier today than they were in the past.
putting in crosswalks on a road like that will slow down drivers and get people killed, it is an inherently unsafe place to be.
the other reason that this is bad is this section of development is unprofitable for the city. The amount of resources it uses (road maintenance, electricity, sewage, emergency services) is far greater than the amount of taxes it brings in. This is why its mentioned at the end of the article that a place like this will inherently wither away and die.
As I've understood it, one reason they will refuse to do anything about those cases is because they can't really differentiate between "this is dangerous" and NIMBYs who don't want traffic down their quiet suburban street.
But also, if people are actively complaining about it, maybe that's a good indicator the street shouldn't be used as a thoroughfare in directions. Being a little bit faster isn't a good justification, and back road shortcuts aren't something that should be widely advertised to tourists and visitors.
Amen. I'll just add that sometimes part of the blame should also go to the planners who set up intersections with odd angles and obstructed sight lines so that drivers can't see anything until they're already intruding into the roadway.
Related phenomenon: pedestrian crossings and cutouts placed twenty feet down a side street. Yeah, it might be further from the busier street, but it makes it much harder for either party to see each other or recognize each others' intentions. Ultimately quite bad for safety, even for regular pedestrians but especially for runners. No thanks. I'll stay out where I can see them and they can see me and there's no ambiguity about which direction I'm going, even if that means hopping on and off curbs.
>One of the problems with the street layouts described here is that pedestrians have to follow the same winding routes that the cars do.
Why do they have to? I don't see why you couldn't build a more natural walking path away from the street traffic that would be less objectionable to homeowners since there wouldn't be the automotive noise and danger to children.
Surrounding my child's school are blind s-curves and streets barely wide enough for 2-way traffic. All densely lined with parked cars. And yet I people speed through these areas on most days during pick-up time, and often they looking at their phones (or whatever else they might be up to behind blackout-tinted windows).
The only thing narrow streets and turns do is make it harder for parents to check for oncoming traffic before crossing. No amount of "traffic calming" will protect us from these rotten drivers. We need at least a modicum of enforcement.
The increase in traffic in some areas can be a safety issue. Close to where I live is a lower school. During rush hour, many drivers choose to drive down the parallel side street for about 5 or 6 blocks to bypass a minute of traffic. Often, these drivers speed and ignore pedestrians, stop signs and cross walks. Just recently, a child was hit by one of these drivers in front of the school and suffered major injury.
The community has organized with the city to add in more stop signs and is attempting to get speed bumps put in place that would control the speed of the traffic. Everyone understands that they cannot legally stop someone from driving down the street but they can add in traffic controls to lower the risk to those who live in the area and make it less appealing to leave the main road designed for higher traffic.
In our case, it isn't about owning the streets, but rather is a matter of safety.
Lots of vitriol and stories. The bottom line is, pedestrians and cars don't belong on the same piece of road. The difference in speeds is too great to be safe.
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.
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