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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

That’s my daily hell. I walk to work and there’s a 6 lane road to cross. The signal works as designed, but that means cars are turning right in green while I’m crossing. And with big wide corners, they’re going around the bend at 35+ mph.

It would be so much safer to do a pedestrian scramble. There aren’t a lot of pedestrians at this intersection, maybe one every 4-5 cycles, so it’s not going to slow traffic much if at all to have a 30-45second dedicated time where we can walk all the way across.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/11/27/a-pedestrian-...

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"Scramble" is a funny term for that. I guess it kind of looks like the pedestrians are "scrambling" to an outsider but hopefully most of them know where they're going and aren't scrambling.

I think that author likes to make up words, like "Stroad".

"Stroad" seems like a funny term at first, but watching the video about Stroads is almost as radicalizing as trying to push a stroller anywhere (or, frankly, taking a young child anywhere at all without a car).

Strollers have their uses, but are radically overused to the detriment of families who become over-reliant on them. They keep the kids dependent, detached from the world, and physically weak. Typical infants can be wrapped on an adult's chest, can be mostly riding on shoulders by 9 months old, and kids can be walking independently most of the time by age 2 or 2.5 and participating in conversation with accompanying adults. By age 4 or so typical kids can continuously walk several miles at decent speed without any issue.

I regularly see 4+ year-olds sitting in a stroller playing phone games or just looking bored and disengaged, while the adult pushing the stroller otherwise completely ignores them, and it always makes me cringe.

> kids can be walking independently most of the time by age 2 or 2.5

One thing I've noticed, they don't walk very well while taking a nap. And you just get so much more out of a day when you don't have to return home in the middle.

With my kids it was never a problem to just let them sleep wherever we happened to be sitting (restaurant chairs, museum benches, bus seats, a patch of grass, my lap, ...). Occasionally I was stuck carrying a sleeping kid around for a while, but that was also typically fine. A stroller might be mildly more convenient on rare occasions, but it was never a big deal, and the kids becoming self-sufficient much earlier and more completely (with respect to mobility) than most of their peers was more than worth any trouble. YMMV.

A 2 year old walks far too slow to keep up with older people, and is especially a concern while crossing a road. They also get distracted and do not necessarily follow instructions.

There is a pretty big difference between using a stroller to help get a toddler (less than 5 years old) around and using it to pacify a 5 year old. In my experience, somewhere between 4 and 5 is when I expect them to be able to walk at a sufficient pace and distance to never need strollers.

A 2-year-old can be very easily carried on an adult's shoulders if you're in a huge hurry, but much of the time it's better to just slow down to the kid's speed. If kids get substantial practice walking every day, their speed and stamina improves quite quickly. By age ~3 they are quite able to keep up with a moderate adult pace, and by 4 they'll be running all around faster than you probably want to walk.

Not sure about “scramble” in this context, but “stroad” is an established term to describe certain thoroughfares.

You're right but Strong Towns did make it up.

Not Just Bikes popularized it (I think) https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM

Turns out you don't need a lot of people to popularise a new word if it fills a need.

> Not sure about “scramble” in this context

It is a well accepted phrase too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble

There are many references since the 2010s, but i also found references to it in a 1955 traffic engineering book: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Sqh-alGvdoYC&q=%22pedest...

In Shibuya in Tokyo, there's a famous "scramble intersection" スクランブル交差点, and I assume the "scramble" part came from somewhere in the English speaking world.

I bet you most words are made up.

> hopefully most of them know where they're going and aren't scrambling

I don’t get the sense from “scramble” that the pedestrians would not know where they are going. Scramble can mean a sudden act of motion, like “they scrambled the jets” or “once we have stopped we all scrambled off the coach”.

There is an alternative meaning where it is used to signify that something is intentionally mixed up or even encrypted, such as “scrambled egg” or “can’t intercept their plans anymore, they scrambled the signal”. Maybe that is the meaning you are thinking about?

Stroad is a word that has increasingly come into popular use and is well defined.

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

You can ignore new terms if you wish, but it is useful for describing a common street pattern in North America. The term is increasingly being used by urban planners.

We already had a term for that, a four lane, and "street" and "road" are synonymous so combining them doesn't produce new meaning

The only people who use that word are insufferable choads who want me to give up my car and live in a tiny apartment because of their misguided belief that if everyone lived like they do in Manhattan global warming would end and the world would be a Utopia

"Stroad" is a shibboleth that tells me you're someone with an opinion that is not worthwhile

They’re not exactly synonymous though, at least most dictionary definitions differ.

Street example[1]: a road in a city or town that has buildings that are usually close together along one or both sides

Road example[2]: a long, hard surface built for vehicles to travel along

A street in this case is a type of road. A stroad is another type of road (where buildings are not “close together”, f.ex.)

1: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/street

2: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/road

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