Quote:
Originally Posted by ByeByeBaby
The next time a driver is killed when they run into a pedestrian, while the pedestrian doesn't even notice the collision, I'll be as harsh on pedestrians as I am on drivers. Until then... One group of people has the power to kill the other group of people; I remember something from a movie once about how much responsibility comes with great power.
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Agreed.
Controlling ped or driver behaviour through enforcement has never shown any hints of being possible, we must turn to the engineers to save us.
A person cannot be told with a sign to not to cross a road. People will jay-walk wherever they feel comfortable and if the nearest crossing is unreasonably far away. Remember, an unreasonable distance to a pedestrian will often mean anything more than a few metres. You can coax, plead or fine people all you want, but unless you put a police officer at every single undeveloped intersection in the pedestrian areas of the inner city then it will keep happening.
Same with drivers. Unless you put a police officer at every intersection in the inner city to catch speeding / running red-light / failure to yield offenses, it will still happen. Some people will break the rules. People are imperfect.
Also important to remember is that even if everyone follows the rules, plenty of people still get struck and killed at intersections when no speeding or jaywalking is involved. Also important to remember that these people happen to always be pedestrians.
If we want to keep cars and people in the same places there will always be conflicts. We can however, engineer our way out of the worst cases where a pedestrian is killed.
Lowering the speed of cars is the easiest way to reduce collisions. There more time to react to avoid the accident in the first place and less damage in the event you end up hitting someone.
There are plenty of ways to do this:
- reduce lane-width
- add onstreet parking
- add more signals and controlled intersections so cars can't build up speed
- extend curbs so cars cant take them very fast
- Remove unnecessary lanes
Assuming you cannot control behaviour of anyone, you want fewer people to be killed and you want to maintain access everywhere for both cars and peds , cars will have to be physically prevented through design so they are never able to drive fast enough to kill someone, even accidentally or when they are "in the right". There is no alternatives that fit those requirements.
If the plan is to punish the occasional pedestrian for breaking the law (and often even when they don't) with death, keep the current setup.
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