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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

If you want to make pedestrians safer, you can do that without having to make driving miserable, by building elevated pedestrian walkways.

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Elevated pedestrian walkways are miserable for people walking. You seem pretty deeply carbrained.

How so? I've used them before and didn't see a problem with them.

How are they for a grandparents pushing a stroller?

Would you say they encourage a vibrant street culture of cafes and shops?

The ones I've seen, especially in Berlin and İzmir, are loud and a hassle to cross. That's because walkways and bikeways over multi-lane roads are car infrastructure. They are there to prioritize high-speed automobile traffic with few interruptions. I'm happy for the one going up at my gym, but I know it's there to ensure bike/ped political forces can't endanger the trunk road underneath. True pedestrian infrastructure there would involve a major speed and size downgrade to the road, which is unacceptable, thus the political defensive move to pay out the nose for something car advocates would never normally fund.

Elevated/buried pedestrian walkways make walking harder for a lot of people. A wheelchair-accessible ramp that goes up 12 feet is going to add at least 100 feet more distance up and down - and still be painful for a lot of people with otherwise manageable foot/joint issues.

Pushing a stroller for the last few years, plus spraining my ankle a few weeks ago has given me a little taste of what trying to use sidewalks is like for people with even tighter mobility constraints, and this in an area that is relatively accessible without a car.

Or reclaim street space from cars at infinitely cheaper initial cost, time, and effort.

And how do I walk in to a shop from this walkway?

By walking back down the ramp from it to the regular sidewalk. I just meant I want to add elevated walkways to cross streets with, not for them to replace sidewalks entirely.

I assume you mean for crossing busy roads and highways, not city streets? Certainly there are places for that, like Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. They're expensive and take a lot of space themselves, though, especially to meet accessibility requirements, and they can add considerable distance to the pedestrian's route.

Otherwise, what you're describing sounds like someone looked at this well-circulated cartoon and said "hey that's a great idea! Just raise the planks by 15 feet!" https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestria...

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