The built environment and the determination of fault in urban pedestrian crashes | Hacker News Reader

The built environment and the determination of fault in urban pedestrian crashes

jtlu.org

78 pointsluu121 comments

A possible tie-in to this topic is this 1968 interview with Ralph Nader, discussing Unsafe at Any Speed, by Studs Terkel:

<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...> (Audio, 32:31).

Direct audio link: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3).

Nader covers a number of topics, including auto safety. Among the key points he makes is that (as of 1968), the contribution of the automobile itself to accidents was simply not legible, in the James C. Scott sense (Seeing Like a State), to the point that police accident report forms had no options for noting the contribution of the vehicle to the accident.

Built environment and highway design are another factor, of course, but the Nader interview came immediately to mind. I've listened to it several times, and it bears a few more listens as well.

(The Studs Terkel Archive itself is a true gem and recommended for those who enjoy podcasts.)

> Studs Terkel Archive

I had never heard of this, but I've read his Working, which was an impressive tome. I'll be checking it out.

Unusually enough, I found out about it while reading a book I had bought at City Lights Bookstore (Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge), which cited it as a major inspiration.

The interview archive is immense and diverse. It spans 45 years, from 1952--1997, ran 1 hour each weekday, and the interview guests range from the highly famous to street and school interviews. I've hit on a few gems in particular.

The AWS back-end could be browsed or downloaded directly via AWS tools a ways back, and was about 600 GB last I'd checked. You'll have to sort out your own directory of content, however. Much of what's in there still isn't included in the official directory, again, at last check, though that includes numerous fragments and partial-tape interviews.

<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/>

I strongly suspect that Working leveraged Studs's interviews, though all but certainly went beyond them as well.

Thank you very much for informing me of this.

It's also excellently curated. The transcripts are a plus that is often missing and the cross-linkage between transcript and audio is a wonderful gift to the listener.

Something that stood out to me in the Discussion:

> Yet notably, speeding as a behavior surprisingly did not show any effect on fault outcomes in our models. The only effects related to driver behavior to decrease the likelihood of a pedestrian being found at fault were driver distraction and vehicle turning.

In other words: speeding by drivers is normalized to the extent that it doesn't appear to factor into the likelihood of being found at fault for an accident.

This is a distressing finding, but not a surprising one given the urban environment surveyed (pictures in Figure 2): wide, straight streets with ample spacing between lights mean that drivers drive at an "intuitive safe" speed, not the speed that is actually marked (much less the speed that is actually safe for pedestrians moving through crosswalks).

I’ve observed time and again how street width affects walkability and safety.

You’d think a wider street means more leeway to notice a pedestrian, but it also works the other way: drivers assume that pedestrians will see them earlier, and assume priority. (Compare to narrow streets in a dense city, where busy pedestrian can suddenly quickly cross from around a corner, requiring awareness.)

More often, though, stroads with many lanes that take a while to cross get traffic lights, and intuitively drivers consider traffic lights “enough”, so unless there is a speed camera & automated ticketing then between traffic lights anything goes speed-wise, especially on lanes further away from the sidewalk, and on straight roads that “anything” is sometimes a drag race, and once you’re going fast it’s so frustrating to stop so red lights are being violated frequently, etc.

It’s amazing how a strategic mess of narrower, often one-way streets can result in similar overall throughput to support denser population, require less car traffic due to better use of public transport and foot traffic, while being more safe and satisfying to navigate.

I have two additional thoughts. The first is blindspots. Car manufacturers must be held responsible for blindspots built into cars that keep drivers from seeing pedestrians, and cities must be held accountable for not creating crosswalks with enough clear sightlines appropriate to the vehicle speed of that road. The faster the road, the more space is required around the crosswalk.

My second thought is lighting. Nighttime lighting can create blindspots via veiling glare. It is frightening when a pedestrian pops into view as they move out of a glare spot or a glare-induced shadow. Some of the worst offenders of glare are unregulated "security" lighting.

I know I'm an unusual driver, but I'll take being accused of driving like an old man and avoiding cities over putting others at risk.

> The faster the road, the more space is required around the crosswalk.

Which further increases the distance for a pedestrian to walk, even if it’s literally next door… Small things, but they add up and together make driving more appealing as the dominant way of transportation, meaning more congestion.

> I'll take being accused of driving like an old man

As mostly a pedestrian, I appreciate what you do. When I do drive or am getting somewhere by car, I don’t mind the same…

> Which further increases the distance for a pedestrian to walk, even if it’s literally next door

Rotate your thoughts 90 degrees. As you rightfully point out, there is no need to lengthen the crosswalk nore is there any need to increase the distance between sidewalks, which would be counterproductive. Increasing the width of the entrance and exit points of the crosswalk increases the visibility of cars and pedestrians to each other. This space prevents pedestrians from popping out from behind cars. This widening usually means removing 3-4 parking spaces "upstream" from the crosswalk.

> As mostly a pedestrian, I appreciate what you do.

As a favor to this drives-like-an-old-man, could you set an example for others and use something that makes you more visible at night? A black hoodie with black pants on a black road at night makes it hard to see you at enough distance to give you safe clearance.

True story: I was traveling at 11 p.m. on 89, a few miles south of Burlington, Vermont, when I saw a faint flicker of white in the distance. My lizard brain started slow braking until I could see the white flicker was a doe standing in the right lane. Then I braked hard. It was a happy ending for all as the deer stood still as I slowly passed it.

If I hadn't seen the white, it could have been disastrous for all.

The street belongs to people, not cars. The rest follows.

the simpler explanation is that speeding just isn’t as dangerous to pedestrians as distracted driving and sketchy intersections are, which certainly tracks with my experience as a pedestrian.

cars traveling in a straight line at any speed are pretty safe as long as they stop when they are supposed to.

edit: my second paragraph above is sort of stupid and makes the wrong point. my point, which i think is in line with this paper, is that it’s important to differentiate between “speeding” and “speed”. drivers are responsible for the former, DOTs are responsible for the latter, and the latter has more of an impact on pedestrian safety.

In Hungary, almost all of serious accidents are caused by speeding on some level. But you can’t see this in official statistics, because the national statistics office gathers data after one month of the accidents, at which time it usually isn’t decided officially the cause, so it defaults to “speeding is not involved”.

Another interesting info is that almost 100% of fatalities of car passengers are people who don’t use seatbelts. There were years when all of the fatalities were cases just like that.

> In other words: speeding by drivers is normalized to the extent that it doesn't appear to factor into the likelihood of being found at fault for an accident.

How much does it affect the likelihood of there being an accident?

I suggest that the likelihood of accidents is connected to the ability to see hazards hidden by blind spots caused by obstructed sight lines and nighttime lighting glare.

After several near death experiences in daylight crossing with a green light in a crosswalk from left turning cars and a city bus across four lane arterial roads, I now have a high intensity blinking flashlight that I aim at the driver.

I suspect that these drivers are NOT looking across the entire crosswalk and are focusing their attention on oncoming traffic.

In the case of North American city buses, the low mounted side mirrors block view of pedestrians and pedestrian fatalities are frequent because of this. In Europe the side mirrors are mounted from the roof allowing visibility of pedestrians.

Blinding oncoming traffic endangers everyone around you. That is not ok.

Large vehicles endanger everyone around you, but here we are.

So what are your suggestions for staying alive when you are about to be hit?

> The conclusion argues that the designation of individual responsibility for crashes preempts collective responsibility, preventing wider adoption of design interventions as well as systemic changes to the processes that determine the built environment of US roadways.

I don't quite understand (based only on the abstract): Are they suggesting that we alter the data (re: who is responsible) to achieve a certain outcome? Do they want to 'prevent wider adoption of design interventions'?

I expect the answer to those questions is 'no', of course, but I don't understand their argument or conclusion.

@luu: as submitter, what did you see in this paper?

Here’s how I read it: in pedestrian conflicts with cars, we tend to over-assign responsibility to the individual pedestrian (“they should have been more careful”) and under-weight larger-scale cultural issues, like building unwalkable suburbs.

A long time ago, we decided that the city is for cars, not people.

It makes sense that it's the pedestrian's fault when the city is for the car, not the person.

Until the thinking changes, nothing else will.

It's working as intended.

Also, changing that will require major cultural and infrastructure changes. Cities need to be gutted and rebuilt to the urban ideal of walkable space.

Socially, you will need to convince people to swap their 2000 sq ft on a 5000+ sq ft lot for a 1200 sq ft flat with no land, backyard, gardens, or privacy.

Urbanites must accept that many of us truly detest cities and want to live semi-independently. Urban and non-urban people can't be genuinely independent of each other, but we need to respect each other's choices of how we want to live.

> Cities need to be gutted and rebuilt to the urban ideal of walkable space.

That's not going to happen. They might be slowly reshaped over 50 years.

There's a reason London never evolved to look like Los Angeles, and that's the same reason Houston is unlikely to ever resemble Paris.

The intended outcome of so-called "road safety" campaigns, always addressing the victims instead of drivers

If the situation is that a car skidded down an icy hill and killed a pedestrian at the bottom, what are the contributing factors?

- the driver's skill

- the driver's decision to go out in that weather

- the driver's sobriety

- the car's maintenance state

- the car's tire traction on ice

- the weather conditions (normal? extreme? unexpected?)

- public notice about the weather conditions

- the treatment of the road surface by public works to increase traction

- the maintenance of the road surface (neglected or perfect)

- the decision of the city to build a road on that hill

- the general design of the city that requires people to have and use cars

- the pedestrian's decision to cross the road at that time

- the pedestrian's decision to be outside that day

- the design and availability of public transport encouraging the pedestrian to cross that road

and so on and so forth. If you ignore all of that in order to apportion blame in some percentage between only the driver and the pedestrian, you are not gathering evidence on all of the other factors.

Fixing the other factors would be "design interventions" and "systemic changes to the built environment".

Thanks. I know about all the factors, but I didn't quite grasp their argument. I see what you mean.

For the history in the US of how streets when from being 'mixed use' pre-automobiles to being basically only about automobiles see Fighting Traffic by Peter D. Norton:

> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2924825

* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/

What’s disheartening is how ingrained car prioritization has become in the U.S. Our communities are largely un walkable and consist of large underused concrete parking lots. Everything is spread out. It is abnormal to see kids playing in the streets now and most people seem to be O.K. with this. We’ve become a people who rarely go outside other than to drive from one building to another. And when we do go outside we end having to drive to a place where one can be in a location away from cars.

I stayed at a place in the US a few years ago where I should have been able to walk the half mile to the grocery store but there was no path through the neighborhood to the strip mall where it was located, and there was no sidewalk on my side of the highway that was the other option.

In much of the U.S. this is totally normal. Most people aren't even aware that situations like this exist, as they never walk anywhere themselves.

My home is like that right now. There's a grocery store maybe 10 minutes walk from here, but we always drive because the final leg of the trip goes over a busy thoroughfare that includes a roundabout, and people in my area are dangerous as shit at roundabouts. I've been nearly hit there almost every time I dare to make the trek.

I live about a mile from a grocery store. But it's a mile on a busy country road with no sidewalk and through an interstate interchange. It would be taking your life in your hands to walk.

I also remember one time I was staying at a hotel and could see the mall and restaurants across the street but I think it was a 6 lane road with literally no way to cross.

And, yeah, roundabouts are often dangerous for pedestrians. There's a lot going on and often no good controlled pedestrian crossings.

> people in my area are dangerous as shit at roundabouts

That's cause roundabouts are terrible. The design goal is for cars to merge into the circular lane without stopping. In order to do that, drivers need to be looking in the direction the circular lane traffic comes from. But there may be pedestrians crossing from the other side, which most likely won't be seen until it's too late.

You can make the pedestrian crossing safer by moving it away from the circle, but then you've added inconvenience if pedestrians want to travel straight along a road, or want to travel to the corner properties; and pedestrians will likely not follow inconvenient paths (statement of fact, not a judgement). You can build up fences and what not, but that's a lot of expense and people are going to circumvent those too.

A signalled intersection, with responsive pedestrian buttons, and reasonable car detection would probably have better outcomes for everyone in less space.

>Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large.

This is not true and there are numerous counter-examples.

City streets have always been dangerous for pedestrians and notable illustrations of this are the separate gates at city entrances for vehicles (pulled by beasts of burden of course) and pedestrians and the construction of sidewalks and crosswalks one example of which I've seen in person is the civil engineering of Pompeii where pedestrians were segregated from road traffic over two thousand years ago. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pedestrian_crossing_...

Another example is the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. Completed in the early 1600s it was built with wide sidewalks to keep pedestrians out of the road. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/P1140241...

Oldest photograph of London: https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/oldest-phot...

Amsterdam, 1891: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old-Amsterdam_1891-stre...

What do you see? Sidewalks.

In various paintings and engravings of city scenes from the 1600s and 1700s a common theme emerges: every area that could afford them built sidewalks and pedestrians were segregated from road traffic. Raucous examples of people teeming in the streets in similar works seem to be trying to depict scenes of anarchy or poor slums.

Another is the fact that numerous Roman emperors banned carriages from city streets during daylight (both for safety and noise pollution reasons) with varying degrees of success. That was much easier when you had an army of slaves to carry goods into the city.

One glaring expression of the dangers of pre-automobile urban streets is the fact that in New York City fatalities due to horse-pedestrian collisions greatly surpass the rate of fatalities of automobile collisions. In both "Herald Square, 1896" and "A Trip Down Market Street, 1906" you can see pedestrians travelling with the road along sidewalks and crossing the road at any point. This indeed used to be common, before the invention of traffic signals and crosswalk and is the primary reason for the increase in fatality rates due to collisions.

The fatality rate for deaths due to horses in Chicago was seven times the present rate of pedestrian fatalities and in New York City is was double.

From Horse Power to Horsepower: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sm968t2

Herald Square: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRf5z75-GbU

Market Street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q5Nur642BU

Children didn't play in city streets because it was a death sentence.

Pedestrians DID cross from sidewalk to sidewalk at any location because crosswalks didn't exist (in most places) yet.

Regardless of all of that, in positive news more and more cities all over the US and the world are pedestrianizing their streets. Not because "users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large" but because mixing pedestrians and ANY vehicle to include pre-automobile vehicles is dangerous and pedestrians should either stay out of the street or have it dedicated solely to their use.

Is it certain that those stones in Pompeii are a crosswalk? I was taught that they were a traffic-calming measure.

Looks like both to me, a proto raised intersection crossing. Sends a pretty clear message that this is space for people to walk.

(I'm not taking a side in this argument, just trying to imagine what it would be like to use that crossing)

Yes, I heard it was also in part because the road was often muddy so it allowed pedestrians to stay out of the mud.

Also anything with different speed will have a bad time sharing any road. Even for bikes it'll be better for them to be segregated from any crowded pedestrian road. Non segregated road can only work if we want to bring all people to crawling speed, which actually already happens in any rural roads I know.

Could you make an article in a blog somewhere about this? I'd like to cite this everytime someone say something like that again.

Sorry, but “ Children didn't play in city streets because it was a death sentence.” is just wrong. Perhaps not on the major downtown arterials you describe, but there’s ample historical record of kids playing stickball and similar games on urban streets.

I was waiting for Chinese food and watched as a Left-Turn light went green for cars at the same time the Pedestrian crossing light turned "OK to cross".

The waiting car sped up, made it's left turn right into the crossing pedestrian. Pedestrian died in the hospital and I never ate my Chinese food.

How can that sequence of traffic lights even happen? For the pedestrian to get the OK, she must have hit the crossing button - system knows a person is there, why give cars the OK to turn right into her, leaving the responsibility on the driver to see and yield?

That is extremely common at city intersections. The pedestrian has priority but the car also has a green light for a turn. I don't know about the exact timing of the sequence but there are many intersections where the pedestrian has a right to cross and a car has a right to turn (but must yield).

The same city (like many places) also has pedestrian crosswalks that aren't light controlled at all.

The cars need to watch for pedestrians. Lights don't necessarily means that cars obeying the lights never ever have to watch for pedestrians also crossing with the lights.

The problem is that people tend to interpret a green light to mean "you can go" rather than "this specific light isn't telling you to stop". Hence all those signs that say something to the effect "turning cars yield to oncoming traffic on green" as a reminder. And the effect is likely worse for a green arrow, which implies having the right of way.

IME, the pedestrian has a Don't Walk sign if the car has a green left turn arrow.

If the car has a plain green light and is turning left, then they need to watch for pedestrians and for oncoming traffic.

There’s an intersection like this down the street from my house. The left arrow is barely long enough for three cars to go and it’s often backed up. Drivers are habituated to take the turn as fast as possible because the green arrow is so short. I’ve seen people almost get hit pretty often. I’ve seen drivers who yield get raged on because the green arrow expires before any cars get a chance to go.

Yeah, left turn on green always scares me as I have twice come close to hitting pedestrians that I just didn't see (at first) because my line of sight to them was blocked by the driver side pillar. Notably, both of these streets were three or more lanes in each direction, not sure if that adds a risk factor.

Huh? I've never seen this. If the drivers get a green turn arrow the pedestrians get a don't-walk. However, I see (and have been one) pedestrians who understand the light going anyway across the part of the road that's facing a red, treating it as two separate crossings. While this is not a problem I have also seen pedestrians going the other way start to cross when the oncoming pedestrians start--and they may be crossing against the green arrow. Same as you sometimes see drivers go because the lane next to them went but it was actually on a different traffic control.

As for the pedestrian hitting the button--I have never seen the button alter the sequence of the lights. The button does two things: Cause the light to cycle (in case it's sensor controlled and won't cycle if nobody comes along) and ensuring the cycle time is long enough for a pedestrian to cross. I've also seen hitting the button causing the button to indicate the status of the light (for the blind.)

There's a lot of ways to signal this.

With a left turn arrow, that should never be green when the turn conflicts with a pedestrian crossing that's on Walk. An arrow is an indicationn of a protected turn, where there should not be any conflicts.

But many intersections allow for an unprotected left turn, if safe, on a green ball in the forward direction. Sometimes there's a green and yellow arrow next to a green and yellow ball, with red on top in the middle of the two: you can usually make an unprotected left, if safe, if the green ball is showing, and if you have a green arrow, it's a protected left. I've also seen similar with a flashing yellow arrow indicating an unprotected left is permitted, if safe.

Of course, it's possible that the intersection was miswired or misconfigured. If the direction with the green arrow also had a green ball for forward, it may have been that the right side of that direction was supposed to have a Walk, but the signals were tragically misconfigured. I have experienced a case where wires were mixed up, but in the case I'm aware of, a bike button was configured as a left turn occupancy detector for another approach; inconvenient, but not dangerous.

In my city, the signal controller registers when a pedestrian pushes a button for the walk signal on a crossing that conflicts with a protected left turn. If it is fully protected, with a green arrow followed by red ball, then pedestrians are not given walk signals during that turning phase but prior during the through phase in their direction. If it is protected-permissive, when motorists see a green arrow followed by a green ball, then the pedestrian gets their walk signal ahead of the turning traffic, so they can clear before the left turning vehicles intersect their crosswalk. The collision you saw is the same issue that happens with right turn on red. The pedestrian has a walk, the car behind them turns into the pedestrian, even though they have a better view than a left turning vehicle of the nearby person. One alternative is to give separate phases to each traffic movement, such as the pedestrian scramble where all directions of pedestrians go with all vehicles stopped. The issue with delaying the left turn while the pedestrians go first is it increases cycle time or gives a greater percentage of cycle time to lower volume side road traffic, which tends to reduce the service level for most motorists waiting at conflicting red signals for these movements to complete. Lower service levels lead to more complaints, especially when there are thousands of vehicles per day vs. 100 pedestrian crossings, but Traffic Engineers have to fight for those pedestrians using what is often a difficult compromise.

Private automobiles do not belong in cities. They are guests there. But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.

It's disturbing how common it is for people's default assumption to be that it's the pedestrian/person on the bike/scooter/what have you 's fault that they got hit by a car. Rarely the driver's fault, and NEVER the urban designer's fault.

Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them.

We know drivers speed, we know they text while driving, we know signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc. The ONLY conclusion is it's the built environment that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place.

Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.

Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars. But don't think there wouldn't be economic impact if far fewer people commute in, come in for the evening, or decide to move out because visiting the suburbs or the mountains is too much hassle. But maybe it's a worthwhile experiment.

The misunderstanding here is that cars are the primary way people commute into the city. This might be true in some places, but for most cities PT and residents make up the bulk of commercial traffic in a city - it makes sense when you consider that most roads only let a few dozen cars a minute through, vs a few hundred people per train (and way more during peak hours).

However, you look at the built environment in a city and the pedestrians often only get 20% of the road area between buildings, while cars get 80%.

I can't speak to averages but I'll say car traffic into Boston is at least as bad as ever and commuter rail is still way down relative to pre-pandemic. So, yes, people take train but a huge number of people drive. (I try to take train the rare times I go into the office although it takes about the same 2 hours as driving.) And the commuter rail is totally impractical to use for an evening event.

Hah, I was about to respond roughly the same thing: Taking the rail into Boston is so impractical that it's easier to drive.

FWIW: The T/Commuter Rail (apologies for blending the two) has more than 90% of US rail accidents. I noticed a ton of maintenance problems the last time I rode it (in 2021) and I don't know if/when I'll try it again.

I know there have been efforts to improve things but service was also cut back during the pandemic. (There are some express trains again.) I'll still take it preferentially for 9-5ish situations like one I'll have next week but it's not actually any faster in general (though I can sort of relax for most of the trip) and is totally unusable for going in for an evening play.

And that's almost certainly a pretty good commuter rail system by large urban US standards. (Not as good as NYC of course.)

So, to my original point, saying "don't drive" is essentially equivalent to saying stay out of the city in general.

Car skeptics are not saying “don’t drive”

They’re saying “allow viable alternatives to driving”

You wrote "Private automobiles do not belong in cities." I'm not sure what's ambiguous about that. Certainly if you tell me I don't belong someplace, I would take that literally.

> pretty good commuter rail system by large urban US standards

I used to take the Caltrain from Palo Alto to San Francisco. The line from Kingston to Boston doesn't even compare.

Caltrain: Tinted windows, comfortable seats. I'm comfortable using a laptop to check email while I ride to work.

MA Commuter Rail: No tint on the windows, seats so bad I'm uncomfortable using a laptop.

I wouldn't call MA commuter rail "Good" by US standards. It's treating MA residents like a captive audience, and then the politicians and leaders scratch their heads and wonder why we'd rather clog the freeway with luxury cars instead of taking the train.

Why makes it impractical for an evening event?

I've seen in other cities that, bizarrely to me, the rail shuts down before the end of sporting events, concerts, and other things that would attract people to the city.

Maybe they don't want drunks?

There are very few nighttime trains and it would take me a good extra hour to get home even once I caught one of the sparse trains. If I had to take the train in for a play I'd simply pass.

Out of curiosity, how hard would it be to take a rideshare home? Too expensive?

Yes. Probably close to $100. (I'm about 45 miles outside.) And probably hard to get a driver later at night. I do book a private car to and from the airport but I'm not going to do that for a random evening out. (The small theater I have a subscription to also has a free parking deal at a nearby garage so that doesn't even factor in.)

Meanwhile in Tokyo 40 million people virtually all take the train, and those who do drive never experience traffic or gridlock

I like to think of PT as placing an "upper bound" on how bad traffic can get. If PT is faster than sitting in a car, people will take PT instead, alleviating congestion. This more or less results in traffic getting worse until it reaches the speed of PT, at which point people start switching transport modes and it stops getting worse.

If the train took the same amount of time as driving I'd take the train every time - driving sucks, whereas I can read or watch videos on the train.

This works because (grade-separated) PT can (at least relative to roads) take on an effectively unlimited amount of extra commuters without getting slower, as pretty much all of its costs and transport times are fixed, whereas roads just continually get slower with additional traffic. This is part of the problem with busses and the like - they get caught up in traffic, so unless they get their own dedicated lanes you won't get the same traffic-reducing benefits as you would with heavy rail and the like.

When I was an undergrad there was I think one bus route I took in 4 years because it was marginally quicker than walking an extra 15 minutes to catch the subway depending on where I was.

My preference within the city when I'm there these days is subway or walk. But the connection to the subway really only works on a commuting timetable and, if I'm going to park on the outskirts anyway to catch the subway I'll mostly just drive in.

It's very, very possible for public transport to be overloaded to the point where people have to wait for another train because there's just no room left. Some NYC subway lines are like that routinely during rush hour.

Yeah, that's why I specified "relative to roads" :P. There are capacity limitations, they are just much more generous than the alternatives.

> you look at the built environment in a city and the pedestrians often only get 20% of the road area between buildings, while cars get 80%.

How is that significant? I very rarely have run out of room on the sidewalk. Cars are larger than I am, they need more space.

I agree with the general consideration that cars waste real estate, but sidewalk width hasn't been a problem that I've seen.

Uh, I encounter that everywhere from San Jose to NYC to Miami

You run out of room on the sidewalk? Like a traffic jam? Maybe we're talking about different things. I rarely have to stop moving on a sidewalk, or if I do it's not for more than a moment, and I'm talking about the most dense cities.

Maybe NYC in the theater district when some plays are letting out ...

Times Square can get pretty bad. But, yes, that's unusual.

My more conventional frustration is wide roads with shitty traffic signalling that hold up a crowd of pedestrians while 10-15 cars crawl through the intersection. That being said, at peak times some areas definitely get extremely busy with pedestrian traffic.

Realistically you do need vehicles in cities for logistical reasons etc, so it's not really a sensible line of thought - but it's still annoying :). It's probably worse in other cities, as Melbourne has plenty of street-level trams with separated rights of way as well as many roads being single-laned both ways, so it's honestly not that bad here.

>> for most cities PT and residents make up the bulk of commercial traffic

"According to the American Community Survey (ACS), public transportation commuters constituted about 5 percent of all workers in the United States in 2019. Though public transportation (transit) was a relatively uncommon method of traveling to work in the United States as a whole, it played a prominent role in certain places, like the cities of New York, where over 2 million people commuted by public transportation, and San Francisco, where over one third of workers did so."

-- https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

So even pre-pandemic when public transportation was in higher usage, there was maybe one city in the US that meets your criteria. For the other 19,494 of the 19,495 cities in the US, private transportation was a large majority.

5% of commuter trips in the US are by public transportation. Under 3% are walking. 85% are car, truck, or van, either alone or carpooled. If cars only get 80%, sounds like they are being cheated. They should get 85% instead.

So your observation is US cities don’t have transit, therefore we should invest more in car infrastructure?

It will depend on your definition of "city". I live in Melbourne, AU, and realistically only the inner couple of km around the CBD are "proper" city area where space is truly at a premium.

In the CBD and surrounding area you'd have to be insane to drive - there's simply not enough space. However, in the "metro area" which sprawls for many km in all directions, I would expect a lot of commuting is done by car, due to poorer PT service coverage and frequency, along with lesser traffic congestion.

> The misunderstanding here is that cars are the primary way people commute into the city

The number of cities this is true for in the US is extremely small.

On the contrary, building cities to be nicer places to be a pedestrian in means you can design them more around people without cars. Look up statistics on how much land we dedicate to parking. You end up with far more effective use of land, higher overall productivity, and a larger tax base which helps support the infrastructure investment in a virtuous cycle.

Park and rides in suburbs so commuters don't have to take up disproportionate space in the more valuable city environment are just a part of this, but the root of the issue is providing viable alternatives to driving. Housing policy and public transit policy are deeply linked with this.

> Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars.

This is inaccurate - for liability purposes, most road design in the US conforms to the MUTCD (and other design standards), which have very car-centric requirements. For example, the minimum lane width it allows is 11 feet (3.3m). If you design and install a 10 foot lane, you're not supported by that standard, and will likely get sued for damages if someone sideswipes someone, etc. The same applies for many other features that can improve pedestrian safety. It's one of the fundamental reasons north American built environment looks so much different (even compared with a car-centric design in other countries)

Yes, but cities can presumably limit parking, make it very expensive, perhaps implement congestion charges. They have lots of levers to keep cars out if they want to without not complying with design standards.

> cities can presumably limit parking, make it very expensive, perhaps implement congestion charges

These are three very difficult to implement changes (due to complaints), and also very ineffective at increasing safety (fewer vehicles = more speeding = no improvement in accident rates).

> have lots of levers to keep cars out

It's not about keeping cars out, it's making them behave safely. You can put a 20mph limit at an elementary school, but if your lanes are limited to 11 foot width, you'll still have cars driving 40, you still have long crossing distances, you still have all these factors reducing safety. If your corner radius has to be designed for a transport truck turning at 15 mph, you'll have cars turning at 40, failing to yield at crosswalks, etc.

> without not complying with design standards.

It's not about "not complying with design standards" - it's about the standards being too car-focused and having unintended consequences for others.

> But don't think there wouldn't be economic impact if far fewer people commute in, come in for the evening, or decide to move out because visiting the suburbs or the mountains is too much hassle.

Maybe more people would commute in, parking outside the city and taking public transit, and enjoying all the benefits of a low-traffic, pedestrian city: No parking problems or costs, no traffic, no fuel costs, highly available transit, things built for pedestrian and transit travel. Maybe they'd move in.

Outside of some big commuter lots, I'm skeptical a lot of people are going to do a lot of multi-mode transport into a city outside of regular commuting. I certainly don't do it. And more pedestrian friendliness wouldn't tempt me to move into a city either.

So you don’t even live in the city, you don’t find pedestrian or bike friendliness attractive, yet you demand that cities bend over backwards in a never ending attempt to accommodate more cars, faster bigger roads, parking lots etc etc

Glad we have that on the record

I never wrote anything like that. I said that cities should make choices about what their residents (and businesses) want to accommodate or not. Personally, I don't care much.. If I'm traveling I'm mostly not driving (so I do prefer pedestrian-friendly cities with good transit). And I rarely feel like dealing with the hassle of driving into the only nearby large city for the evening--so I mostly don't do it, which I'm perfectly fine with. I'm not demanding anything.

> Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars.

https://youtu.be/VWDFgzAjr1k?si=IQbceOTAEhmJ6nmw&t=537

"The real problem is that we couldn’t build another place like this if we wanted to. It’s not allowed. It’s literally illegal in Canada, to build something like this today."

There are islands in the US that may or may not be literally car-free but certainly have very few cars, e.g. the Cranberry Islands in Maine, Isle au Haut, etc. Probably around the San Juans in Washington State. Of course, taking a boat to go to the grocery store may not be what you have in mind. But there are certainly at least almost car-free options if you're willing to live with the tradeoffs. Of course, they're not cities.

I've never been to Maine, but we have many small islands in BC with very few cars as well. However, despite the small quantity of cars, they're as car-dependent as anywhere; it's very dangerous for pedestrians to walk across them, because the roads have high speed limits, no sidewalks or shoulders, blind turns, and no lighting, so you're in danger of being hit by one of the (very few) cars screaming by at a high speed. Just like most rural areas in North America, and nothing like the neighbourhood described in the linked video. But maybe it's better in Maine.

Plenty of small islands off Maine have essentially no car traffic, even if they have roads, and are very safe to walk; I've done it plenty of times. Of course, others are essentially just rural communities with no sidewalks and traffic on country roads.

That said, I'm guessing most people envisioning car-free cities aren't thinking in terms of a once a month trip to the mainland to buy groceries.

It’s so strange when motorists talk and act like there aren’t countless cities around the world where people do just that - live life with zero need for or benefit from a car. They buy groceries, take the kids to soccer practice and visit grandma too you know.

I find single lane one-way streets to feel much safer to walk through as I can generally manage to anticipate the actions of one driver at a time.

Agreed; my thought is that it greatly reduces variables for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists.

More specifically, I'd specify road width rather number of lanes. Roads where drivers feel they have room to squeeze by pedestrians and cyclists seem to increase risk.

Road width is tricky. If you make it too narrow, the road is hard to use. If you make it feel like there is a lot of room to get by pedestrians and cyclists, drivers will go fast. The trick is to make it feel like there isn't enough room to easily get by, while actually having enough room to do it safely.

But it's also important to position yourself on the road properly. When driving on narrow roads, I drive over the middle, so opposing drivers will slow, and then get back to my side, so we can squeeze by carefully. When cycling or walking on narrow roads, I position myself where a car's tire would tend to be, not at the edge of the road; this helps a driver see that they need to avoid me, although I'll make room as they get near (yes, somewhat out of self preservation).

> Private automobiles do not belong in cities. They are guests there. But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.

You seem to be ignoring what actually happened. A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles. That's why governments taxed people to pay for the roads for those cars.

I think I agree with the rest of your post.

https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/

Um... somebody wrote a book, and here's an ad for it? OK, so?

I mean, it does have a catchy title, but no, I'm not going to go order the book, and read all 170,000 words it boasts of, in order to try to figure out how you think that refutes my statement. If you've got an argument, make it.

I for one would like a system where I could simply cast FHQWGADZ as a combination of tokens that each support my stance on complex matters.

It can be tiresome to have to repeat facts and opinions. It seems that grandparent has read a book, and found its contents convincing enough to share it here. A bit terse, but still relevant, no?

No, not relevant. They read a book. They could have summarized the relevant points of the book... but they didn't. They could have given the gist of the argument of the book... but they didn't. They gave a link to a 170,000 word long book - and nothing more.

Seriously, how many people are going to go read it? Very few. How many are going to read it in time to say anything relevant to the discussion here? Zero.

So dropping a link to a book that size functions as an end-of-conversation move. It says "you can't argue with my unstated position until you've read this" (whether or not that was the post writer's intent). That doesn't make for a healthy conversation. For that reason, I call it out when I see it.

[Editing to add: It's even worse if you think in terms of time. How long would it take the poster to give a summary? Ten minutes? Well, how long would it take me to read the book? But it's worse, because more than one person read the post. How long would it take, total, for all of them to read the book? So it's really, really, really wasteful of peoples' time to just drop a link instead of writing the summary.]

That is not how it works. What people want is a function of the choices available.

When the government builds a ton of car roads, people want cars. When they build great rail, bike lanes and walkable streets, people want cars much less.

> What people want is a function of the choices available.

> When the government builds a ton of car roads, people want cars. When they build great rail, bike lanes and walkable streets, people want cars much less.

Is there evidence of that? I haven't seen an American city where bike lanes are utilized more than sparsely, even when an extensive network is built.

Everyone from kids to phd urban planners and traffic engineers know that viable alternatives to driving lead to people switching modes. This isn’t controversial.

I'm not claiming it's controversial. Do you happen to know where I can track down the factual basis?

My many but anecdotal observations of bike lanes do not support it (I wish it did).

You see more bikes in Cambridge MA than you did before a lot of the bike lane work (probably intermixed with some changes in attitudes/preferences). But still a tiny fraction of both pedestrians and cars.

Bikes need a network, not just lanes. Also many bike lanes just randomly end, aren't protected/separated properly, etc.

I agree, but I'm talking about bike lanes in places with networks.

I'd like to be wrong: Where have you seen medium or high utilization of bike lanes, in the US?

does us even have a network of protected and optimized bike lanes+comfortable parking for them ? If you can't let a child drive alone in that lane, it's not safe. The point of bike infra in NL is that it's generally safe, many shades for hot summers, semaphores autoswitch when bikes approach to give them green, there are lot of bike parkings and bike routes are shorter compared to car ones, as result you'll get to dest same or faster compared to cars. As result, ppl prefer to use a bike even if car ownership in NL is pretty big(cars are mostly for long trips for routes where pub transport is not that good). Does US have anywhere same lvl of bike infra(or even close to it) any any existing city?

there's not a single city in the US that has a real bicycle network

despite all the improvements even cities like NYC still doesn't have this

imagine a city that's made up of a neighborhoods with high quality roads inside them but unconnected and separated by patches of sand dunes or dirt fields with between them

would you look at that and conclude "nobody drives here, these people must hate cars, we shouldn't invest in roads then, roads and cars are a useless technology, hiking on foot or riding a camel or donkey is superior!"

of course you wouldn't

but that's exactly what it's like being on a bike in ALL cities in the US - islands of a few (mostly unsafe) bikeways here and there, but not a complete, safe network to connect them in a meaningful way, so it's little wonder they're not as used as they could be (although despite that, esp in nyc, bikeways ARE heavily used)

if you wouldn't ride in them, they're not safe

if you wouldn't let your kids or nephew johnny ride in them, they're not safe

meanwhile in the Netherlands, Valencia, Seville, Barcelona, Paris and a bunch of other places in the world, they HAVE started to build meaningful, safe bikeway networks, and what do you know, then, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of people (including families and kids) end up using them daily

taking cars off the road and freeing up space for ardent motorists who always complain about traffic

it's a win win but most motorists are too blind to see it

I do think driving is less dominant in New York, for example.

Bike lanes in Vancouver and Montreal are pretty heavily utilized. But bikes are quiet and take up so little space compared to cars that it's easy to not notice.

New York City, for one. Heavily used transit, and in recent years much improved bike lanes, and a v successful bikeshare scheme. I highly recommend reading about Janette Sadik-Khan's great efforts to make NYC more walkable and bikeable and reduce car dominance (she has a good book called Street Fight).

But how heavily are those bike lanes used? Pretty sparsely IME.

From wikipedia:

> Cycling is increasingly popular in New York City; in 2018 there were approximately 510,000 daily bike trips, compared with 170,000 daily bike trips in 2005.[2][3]

Might depend on the city. I've personally been on pretty dogshit bike lanes, and it really only takes one or two particularly dangerous spots to lead you to re-route.

Might also depend on what you consider and observe for 'bike lanes'. I've known very pleasant walk/bike paved paths that you wouldn't necessarily see from a car.

Have you ridden any of the bike lanes you've observed? My hunch is that they don't adequately serve the need due to a combo of dangerous intersections/car exposure and poor road conditions (potholes, construction, rails or grates sufficiently wide to trap a wheel).

EDIT: you might try looking for a counter example in Portland, OR? Purely anecdotal but my recollection is that I and many people I knew primarily biked around the city, probably had something to do with the infrastructure (roads felt safe, car exposure felt manageable, etc).

> A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles. That's why governments taxed people to pay for the roads for those cars.

What is the basis of that? Perhaps, having the option of roads; and being led, to a degree by leaders' belief in roads, they wanted cars. Seeing public transit and seeing leaders' belief it it, they might have used that.

Akshully it’s you who need to read up on first thing about the history of the invasion of cities by the automobile. Complete, total regulatory capture of the government by the automobile and oil industry, purchase of transit only to rip it to shreds etc etc.

The funny thing is, traffic in general and life for ardent motorists in particular would be better the better alternatives to driving are. Instead, they shoot themselves in the foot by shutting down anything other than adding more and more traffic, making things worse and worse for themselves.

I know about the purchase of transit lines. Where did they get the money to do that? By selling cars, that's where. Who was buying the cars? People who wanted them, not just people who had no choice. (Because the money to buy the transit lines was there before the choice disappeared.)

Why did people want cars instead of transit, or bicycles, or walking? The alternatives work great... until it's a blizzard or 10 below. Then people don't actually want to wait at a trolley stop or ride a bike. (Yes, I know, you can dress for it. They still don't want to.)

So akkkkshully, people weren't the helpless sheep being run over by the invading automobiles that you claim they were. Autos are not an invasive species, overheated rhetoric notwithstanding. People brought those cars to the cities, and built the roads, and paid for them, and not just because the evil auto companies forced them to.

Did early autos even work in inclement weather? I'm under the impression that cold weather fuels and oils are relatively modern and I wouldnt be surprised if pre-heating systems came years after the vehicles first gained traction.

Not many places - and really not many big places in the US - need engine block heaters. Cold weather doesn't need special gasoline, although diesel fuel does have to be formulated differently (modern winter gasolines are formulated to meet various states' emissions requirements, not because it gels in the cold).

I'm from the South, so I've never had a car with a block heater, but I've driven in temps down to 0 F/-17 C without a problem. They had been that low persistently for about 4-5 days. Perhaps I did untold damage to the car by not having low-viscosity oil, but it worked well for the four years I drove it and the two after that when my sister did (until she wrecked it), and it was seven years old when it became mine. 13 years for a mid-eighties GM car was pretty good.

Given that the auto industry in the US and Canada was basically founded around the Great Lakes, I can't imagine that they wanted to sell things that wouldn't work in the cold weather of that region.

> Akshully it’s you who need to read up on first thing about the history of the invasion of cities by the automobile. Complete, total regulatory capture of the government by the automobile and oil industry, purchase of transit only to rip it to shreds etc etc.

Actually, you've got the timeline wrong. It was the automobile becoming so common in cities that made the automobile industry powerful enough to later do those other things.

What got cars common in cities was that they were safer than horses and didn't shit and piss all over the streets.

> A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles.

No. A huge number of people wanted an easy way to get from point A to B. Many people don't really care about cars, but when you design a city to accommodate only them with no viable alternatives, they will flock to the automobile. Case in point: Tokyo has a car ownership rate of 0.32 cars per household. Why? Because you can take the subway/bus/bike to anywhere in the city, it's clean, it's safe, it's invested in.

> But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.

Cars are material objects. People take them where they want them. People want them in the cities. There was no great propaganda wave that "tricked" people into doing this. Cars were better. People went with what was better for them, personally.

> Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them.

Most fatalities involve alcohol or drugs. Perhaps we just shouldn't allow the sale of alcohol in cities? At least to me, that would be very welcome, and is a necessary part of any honest "vision zero."

> We know drivers speed, we know they text while driving, we know signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc.

Yet we know they can also drive millions of miles this way before causing a single incident.

> that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place.

You can have that. You're just going to have to sacrifice nearly every other modern convenience that people move into cities to experience in the first place.

> Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.

And that's the end of your federal road money. As long as your community can afford all of this on it's own, you can do it, if you can't, you must find a compromise.

This idea that the compromise _must_ be thrown away because a few people can't see any other way forward is ridiculous. Particularly on "hacker news."

"And that's the end of your federal road money." - actually "Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces" are cheaper longterm(sometimes shortterm) for federal money, esp combined with the fact that in pedestrian friendly streets there are more businesses and more customers and as result more taxed money.

cars shouldn't be banned in cities, but env should be heavily redesigned to change priorities, like: pedestrian>bike>pub transp>taxis>personal cars. This is the compromise that works - cars are not banned, just less convenient compared to other methods and because of that car trips are faster compared to car priority, bc there are less cars on the road and less congestion, so ppl that actually need and can afford cars(and all related taxes) will have a more pleasant drive

Considering the topic of the paper it would have been nice if the authors provided a less useless Abstract.

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