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Comment by nickserv | Hacker News Reader

It's not the density that makes urban areas unsafe, it's all the cars.

A downtown pedestrian street is perfectly safe for kids to hang out and play. Neighbors, older kids and shopkeepers keep an eye out without being in helicopter mode.

In the few cities I've been to that have banned vehicular traffic in downtown areas, you do see bunches of kids running around, as done for millennia.

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I think it has nearly zero to do with cars and 100% to do with growing homelessness and grewing drug activity in homeless camps. Nobody who has become weary in Portland claims car traffic. They're all terrified by the growing homelessness and unsafe drug activity in their hood. Needles in your front yard type of thing.

Yes, vehicle traffic would be by far my #1 worry in high density areas.

It's really about planning. Modern Swiss towns mostly consist of high density buildings with parking underground and most of the areas around the buildings are for walking & biking. The really good thing about high density is that it allows for much more efficient public transport which reduces the need for cars.

Just a reminder when talking about the Swiss... they are half the population of New Jersey over twice the area.

Maybe their cities planning ideas might not scale?

Yes, but Geneva and San Jose have the same density. I think it’s worthwhi to see where scaling breaks down with constant density and also worthwhile to not a priori dismiss the idea as non-scaling.

I'm sorry, this is hilarious to me. You see, urbanists constantly get pushback from people who know almost nothing about urban planning, or cities in other countries, who say, "uh, you can't apply lessons from Japan/UK/Germany/France/etc., because the US is so much more spread out, duh."

And now we have someone arguing literally the opposite. Now it's the US that's apparently too dense.

We need a new word for this brand of snowflakey NIH syndrome, where unless you can't prove that [city/country] is exactly the same as [other city/country], there is nothing one could learn from them.

I think you read a lot in my post that wasn't there.

But also sure... I don't know why you would be so naive to think that scaling issues don't work both ways. Perhaps what works for Switzerland and it's one city over 250k people might not work for USA with it's eighty eight over different climates, areas, densities, geological formations. No, surely I'm just being hilarious :D

With respect, you have it exactly backwards. It's the US, with its predominately low density, car-dominant building style that has vastly more traffic fatalities than higher-density Germany or Japan.

It's true that low-density SFH areas often seem more peaceful, but in practice cars there usually travel much faster than they do in higher-density neighborhoods, and it's speed that kills.

Those traffic fatalities are vastly more vehicle-vehicle collisions. I believe the EU even in the last decade legislated car design changes to address the risks of vehicle-pedestrian accidents that are far more prevalent there.

Of course they're more vehicle-vehicle in the US; hardly anyone walks in America. Just look at the stats. Even the walk-iest big city in the US, NYC, only has like 6% walk mode share.

However, controlled for number of trips/distance, being a pedestrian in the US is generally quite dangerous compared to elsewhere.

I see 28% walk share for NYC (pdf warning): http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nycdot-citywide-mo...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share

That link is only considering commutes to/from work. That traffic is very segregated in suburban communities. Notably, its also usually very far from where children hang out.

Fair, though it still indicates that Americans walk much less than Germans if for commuting Germans are using walking so much more.

I'd be interested to see a source about comparative pedestrian safety. I'd be literally shocked if small suburban streets weren't safer than almost any other option.

Here is Scarborough, an eastern suburb (with the suburban neighbourhoods you'd expect) in the City of Toronto.

> Incidents in Scarborough have accounted for more than 46 per cent (or 19 of 41) of pedestrian deaths this year, despite the eastern borough containing just 23 per cent of the city’s population and about 26 per cent of its road kilometrage.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/12/07/toronto-appears-...

This is certainly damning.

However, it seems like all the incidents are happening on the interconnection suburban roads, not the inner neighborhood roads.

Faint praise to be sure; walking and biking as a mode of transportation should be safe and encouraged.

> I'd be literally shocked if small suburban streets weren't safer than almost any other option.

Depends on what you mean by 'small suburban streets' I guess. If you mean in small suburbs, I would find that surprising, if you mean the street itself being very narrow then yeah maybe. But relatively few American suburbs have actually narrow streets. To most Americans, "there's only barely enough room for parked cars on both sides plus 2 lanes of moving traffic to pass each other" means it's narrow.

Random reference I just saw: so far this year Seattle has had 10 traffic fatalities, 4 of them on foot vs 5 with vehicles, despite walking being far less popular than driving in Seattle (which is not nearly as walk-friendly as NYC).

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