151–160 of 345 posts
US infrastructure is focused around cars. People don't walk much because cities are spread out for wide roads meant for cars, highways, and parking lots. That makes the distances less walkable. Bikes don't have safe dedicated lanes in many places. Many cities eschew trains because they would rather put another lane on a road because of traffic jams. However, because of induced demand, and the infrastructure forcing e…
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Indeed. It's a very strange argument - sidewalks require significantly less to sustain. For a start, the build quality can be a lot lower - a sidewalk doesn't need to support lorries with 13t loads. As for maintenance, the damage to them is far less, and repairing a sidewalk would usually be a small diversion rather than the drama of a road closure. I'm not quite sure why anyone would think sidewalks are an unthinkab…
$350k per mile length of a 6 foot wide sidewalk. That's what people don't want to spend money on.
Here's Virginia's cost guidelines for roadway[1] (2000, so the numbers are surely higher now). Even at $350k/mile, sidewalk is 2/3 the cost of a paved suburban road.
1 - https://www.virginiadot.org/business/resources/gasb-roadway_...
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> it would be nice if we had more sidewalks, but they are financially unsustainable "No way of preventing this, says person in only country where "this" happens."
Do you have evidence of this? If I'm reading the comments right, the person you're responding to called out rural areas. I believe many rural areas around the world do not have sidewalks (assuming you mean the paved kind) where there are miles between houses.
That said -- I was born, raised, and have spent most of my life in rural UK and it would be absolutely preposterous if those areas didn't have pavements.
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> it would be nice if we had more sidewalks, but they are financially unsustainable I call bullshit. The smallest 50 people village in the Netherlands has sidewalks. It’s not that it’s unsustainable, it’s that nobody wants to pay for it. Or that americans build too friggin big.
In Netherlands, if you throw a stone, you will hit a house in neighboring village. Not so in US. (European here; but I've spent some time in US. You seriously underestimate the distances in US).
There's no good reason these suburbs can't be more walkable, it's mostly adding sidewalks that link to other places. And possibly smaller schools (and the 4000+ pupil high schools we get are a whole different problem).
Here in the UK they have just changed the Highway Code (the rules that given all road users, including pedestrians) so that pedestrians have ultimate right of way in almost all cases. It’s the opposite of the situation in the US, a pedestrian in the UK can cross the road anywhere and I believe cars have to stop and make way. It’s going to be interesting to see how it effects accident numbers, I’m worry it may actuall…
It varies by city/state, as some other comments noted. In any case, in a few smaller towns I've been to in the UK, there are numerous crossings that seem incredibly unsafe to me from both a US and western European perspective. In much of the latter regions, marked crossings that aren't full-on zebra crossings with pedestrian-priority are incredibly rare, while these crossings (in which pedestrians yield to vehicles in a marked path) seem the norm here. With neither a pedestrian signal nor a priority marking, I find them rather alarming and pointlessly confusing given that vehicles sometimes have a signal for these same intersection, leaving pedestrians to just... guess?
I've slowly grown accustomed to accepting the priority of vehicles over pedestrians here compared to in the US and continental European cities I lived in, but London seemed far more pedestrian-friendly and there are certainly US cities that are even worse than the above.
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I forget where this was, but I recall seeing video of police crossing on a crosswalk undercover and whenever a vehicle would fail to yield a cruiser would appear and pull the offender over. I would like to see a lot more of this. In Chicago, people have always blown red lights at speed right in front of parked police cars because they know police won’t do anything (and I’m not even sure if the police are allowed to d…
I think you're describing the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tf6dFhH-nA
Here in the UK they have just changed the Highway Code (the rules that given all road users, including pedestrians) so that pedestrians have ultimate right of way in almost all cases. It’s the opposite of the situation in the US, a pedestrian in the UK can cross the road anywhere and I believe cars have to stop and make way. It’s going to be interesting to see how it effects accident numbers, I’m worry it may actuall…
BTW I'm not saying whether those laws are right or wrong either way. Just clarifying what the status quo actually is.
Here's kind of a weird hypothesis worth at least considering: Record pricing for used cars suggests that there's a car shortage. Ironically, less cars and less driving could lead to 1. Faster driving because of clearer roads, and 2. More walking. Combine those and it wouldn't be surprising to get more auto-pedestrian accidents. One test would be to compare changes to car accidents with changes to pedestrian accidents…
The point being, when possible, you should walk facing into traffic. I see people, often enough, walking in the road with traffic. Experienced walkers tend to know this.
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The small US city I live in made such a change, it we had several pedestrians get hit in the first year or so because drivers aren't used to it, can't see people very well, and pedestrians just figured everyone would now just stop. We changed the laws to restrict it to only crosswalks and added in a ton of new crosswalks. Even then, it was still a problem because pedestrians don't realize when someone can see them. I…
In the US you aren't allowed to cross the road wherever you wish as a pedestrian? That seems bizarre to me, in the UK it's completely normal for pedestrians to cross the road wherever they want to. > and I guarantee you'll see a spike of pedestrians getting hit for a while. I guarantee the UK has a lower incidence of traffic collisions than the US, per capita or per miles driven.
Can't imagine getting a ticket for jaywalking in New York although the city has cracked down on cyclists running lights from time to time.