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If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

streets.mn

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Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#631

Post by Karrot_Kream »

grecy wrote: post #310
tvaughan wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often find myself trying to explain to people back home just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here. Same. I’ve lived in Los Ángeles and Amsterdam, and it is impossible to explain to my friends and family just how awful the quality of life is in LA precisely because of the difference in attitudes and priorities over cars. Perhaps some have “nicer” (aka bigger) houses in LA than they…

Every time a politician anywhere in the world suggests adding more freeways or more lanes to freeways, I think they should be forced to live in LA for a year and do a ~1 hour commute each way in traffic. They need to see first hand what happens when you just add more freeways and more lanes. It's not good.

The reason LA doesn't have bike lanes is that LA City Councilmembers have fought back bike lanes for years. It's zero sum thinking. The Councilmembers think that making driving worse for cyclists hurts the dominant mode so hurts the most people, even though many of the arterials in LA just cannot be expanded because of existing businesses, homes, and ROWs.

Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#632

Post by whispersnow »

cheschire wrote: post #25
whispersnow wrote: post #12

Agree and disagree with the article. Was an intern at a local governance, Americans with disabilities act (ADA) office for a year. It was a city with history, and not a very good city planning at the start. Yes, need to compliance, reality is, it is very hard. Like you built everything on top of a single MySQL and then facing the scalability challenge so you will need to re-shard every other 6 months - and worse, as…

It sounds like you actually don't disagree with the article at all.

The disagree part is the complexity for compliance is under stated. Implementation is way more complicated than what the author has described even at the end there is a good sentence one there is a long way to go. IMHO, it is too ideal, still.

Some problems is not solvable, at all. After a year taking note and consolidate notes of the public hearings, there are items that's leaving there forever. No progress. No solution. Not possible by design. And it is not something like, you can migrate from MySQL to CRDB. How to do that to a historical city?

Anyway, hope this make it more clear :-)

Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#633

Post by pclmulqdq »

esoterica wrote: post #618
pclmulqdq wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more time: The number of people killed by each does not matter to me. What matters is the chance of getting hit at all. I still have not seen a credible study about causes of accidents involving an injured pedestrian.

Did you read the comment you replied to? I will say it again: there were 300 pedestrian injuries caused by bikes and 10,000 caused by cars in NYC in 2017. Click on the link.

I did read it. To spell it out for you: Looking at the official records (which the NYT did - I did read the thing you cited) will severely underreport bike-pedestrian collisions and the resulting injuries because almost all of them are not handled through official accident reporting channels, so they don't get counted.

Like I said again, I have yet to see a credible study counting non-fatal injuries from bikes in the city. Someone could do this, for example, by randomly sampling ER patients to see how many were involved in bicycle-pedestrian crashes, but nobody has.

Also, that NYT article is almost a pro-bike op-ed in its tone, and I would suggest finding sources that at least sound a little more neutral on your issues of choice.

Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#634

Post by johnnyanmac »

maxbond wrote: post #609
johnnyanmac wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>eople on the right have their own infuriating comments they make, I would hazard a guess you may not notice them because they aren't directed at you. Based purely on forum internet discourse: when talking about "micro discussions" (a kind term for "flame war between 2-3 people that go on for dozens of comments), the most negative Left-leaning language tends to be "personal", while the most negative Right-leaning lan…

Again, it would be fun if I never had to deal with people implying my views implied I was actually a bad person, but it's not the case. I also see this in lots of conversations that aren't political, so I think it's more of an online discourse thing. People get nasty to each other online. > This can mean that a right leaning person at worst can feel like a prick. But a left leaning person can feel like a nag. What I'…

>This brush is just too darn broad.If you're gunnuh judge by flame wars, everyone is gunnuh come out smelling like poo.

I did warn beforhand. I agree judging an entire political paradigm based on its worst actors is pretty much the worst way to approach said paradigms. But at the same time that is unfortunately becoming more and more commonplace.

I'd need much more than 2 paragraphs if we want to fully dive into the psychology of the internet, anonymity, negativity bias, and modern discourse. Everyone does indeed smell like poo here, but the kinds of comments that lead to flame wars are rarely the perfectly civil technical answers.

>I also see this in lots of conversations that aren't political, so I think it's more of an online discourse thing. People get nasty to each other online.

It can certainly happen in places like media, yes. But oftentimes it comes from applying some political topic to what seems tame on the outside. That's how we got here, since talking about Walkability lead to talking about environmentalism. And next thing we know we have a person talking about slashing tires because a single commenter mentioned how they would have preferred using a car to carry groceries after their walk.

Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#635

Post by aeternum »

ttymck wrote: post #100
aeternum wrote: post #81

I don't like the word dignity for this. I think a clearer term would be priority. We want to encourage people to be pedestrians so pedestrians should have priority over cars. In some countries, pressing a walk button actually triggers the stoplight to cycle to yellow then red for cars. Why not implement that more frequently? Also favor putting cars/roadways through tunnels rather than pedestrians. Surface can be nice…

What don't you like about the word dignity in this context?

It is imprecise and unmeasurable.

Do intersections that implement pedestrian scramble somehow increase dignity? I don't know.

They do increase pedestrian safety and pretty clearly give pedestrians priority over vehicles via the exclusive use of the intersection for awhile.

Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#636

Post by throwaway22032 »

sershe wrote: post #396
tvaughan wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often find myself trying to explain to people back home just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here. Same. I’ve lived in Los Ángeles and Amsterdam, and it is impossible to explain to my friends and family just how awful the quality of life is in LA precisely because of the difference in attitudes and priorities over cars. Perhaps some have “nicer” (aka bigger) houses in LA than they…

Subjectively worse, not objectively worse. I think driving is much more convenient and nice for most things I like to do. The only exceptions I can think of are if I were a kid in a car-centric area (strangely, the thinking in the US is usually reversed, kids supposedly need to be in the burbs), or if I was drunk. I don't often get drunk, so I'd prefer to drive for everything from minor groceries to outdoor activitie…

FWIW I agree with this wholeheartedly.

I own a car in London and there are many cases in which it's objectively superior for me to use it purely based on time savings. Generally any journey that's more than about 3-4 miles from the absolute centre of town.

It's also more comfortable, private, has AC, I don't need to wear headphones to listen to music, can carry more, etc.

It's just fundamentally better. If the UK had an equivalent of LA I'd move there in a heartbeat.

The only people I hear who are rabidly anti-car are those who ideologically prefer not to use one. They're generally not people who tried it and found it lacking.

Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#637

Post by johnnyanmac »

sgu999 wrote: post #611
johnnyanmac wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You have observed the problem yet not doing anything about which is just really weird. They observed the problem and simply have a different solution than you. I'm sure there's a number of other factors they didn't mention that make it preferable to simply use their perfectly working car.

> I'm sure there's a number of other factors they didn't mention that make it preferable to simply use their perfectly working car. I'm sorry but when one is willing to put that much effort to try to justify using a car to avoid a 10 mn walk, that's only because one is way too lazy and privileged...

The effort of a 300 word comment on the internet? This isn't Twitter.

>one is way too lazy and privileged...

you are free to think that. It is still a subjective choice in the matter.

Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#638

Post by TulliusCicero »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #507
TulliusCicero wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leaving out the obvious cities (NY, Boston, DC Mall), I can think of half a dozen cities off the top of my head that have great walkability: Denver, Boulder, Portland, OR, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, ME, etc. I have wandered for hours in all those cities. I don't think any of these cities have great walkability. They have acceptable walkability in certain areas, but great? Not even close. A lot of Americans just ha…

I lived in Capitol Hill in Seattle and found it to be a very walkable lifestyle. So much so that I never used my car except to leave the city. I was walking distance to four major grocery stores, dozens of restaurants, buses, trains, etc. I would ride my bike 10ish minutes to SLU to go sailing. It’s also worth noting that Boulder’s main downtown area is dominated by Pearl Street, on which cars are not allowed ever. D…

> My point isn’t that American cities are more walkable, it is that it is silly to say that they all aren’t walkable as a rule as the GP said.

> Is Barcelona a more walkable city than most American ones? Yes. Are there areas in Barcelona that you would be a fool to try and walk in? Also yes.

My experience has been that it's matter of "what is the exception?" In Munich, most areas were (highly) walkable, areas that didn't feel walkable were an infrequent exception.

In Seattle, Capitol Hill is reasonably walkable yes, but areas like that or Belltown are the exception at least in terms of geographic area. Most parts of Seattle aren't really that walkable. They're still better than average for the US for sure, but far from great, or even good.

It's especially damning if you consider urban areas and what's part of the principal city. Munich takes up most of the immediate urbanized area (there are suburbs, of course, but they're mostly separated by farmland from Munich proper), and yet it's still mostly walkable. And even the surburbs do pretty well on walkability.

Seattle, though? Long before you reach the suburbs, you've mostly lost walkability, and the suburbs are mostly really walk-unfriendly except for little strips of downtown.

When I was in Munich I was living on the outskirts, we were less than a five minute bike ride to forests and horse paddocks, and yet I still had a general purpose grocery store in less than ten minutes by foot, and multiple options for that within a ~5 minute bike ride.

Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#639

Post by spost »

sershe wrote: post #626
sgu999 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure there's a number of other factors they didn't mention that make it preferable to simply use their perfectly working car. I'm sorry but when one is willing to put that much effort to try to justify using a car to avoid a 10 mn walk, that's only because one is way too lazy and privileged...

You treat the walk as the default and car as something that needs to be justified. That's BS. I think you are too privileged to live in a safe neighborhood, in good climate, to be healthy enough to walk with load, and to own a good backpack :P To me car is the default solution, it's simply better in every way for most people. Making one's life better doesn't need to be "justified".

> You treat the walk as the default

Is it unreasonable to treat “moving around with your body” as the default vs “moving around in a $x,000-x00,000 device”?

Re: If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity

#640

Post by maxbond »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #634
maxbond wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, it would be fun if I never had to deal with people implying my views implied I was actually a bad person, but it's not the case. I also see this in lots of conversations that aren't political, so I think it's more of an online discourse thing. People get nasty to each other online. > This can mean that a right leaning person at worst can feel like a prick. But a left leaning person can feel like a nag. What I'…

>This brush is just too darn broad.If you're gunnuh judge by flame wars, everyone is gunnuh come out smelling like poo. I did warn beforhand. I agree judging an entire political paradigm based on its worst actors is pretty much the worst way to approach said paradigms. But at the same time that is unfortunately becoming more and more commonplace. I'd need much more than 2 paragraphs if we want to fully dive into the…

> I did warn beforhand. I agree judging an entire political paradigm based on its worst actors is pretty much the worst way to approach said paradigms.

Then don't do that. One person got frustrated and said something about slashing tires (and was immediately corrected by another urbanist). Don't turn that into a mountain.

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