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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

> Why don’t lights ever sit idle with the pedestrian crossing on and the cars must wait?

The author knows the answer as well as most readers do: because the intersection is being designed with cars in mind, not human beings.

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Usually a crossing will instantly switch when the pedestrian button is pressed, if enough time has passed since the last "walk" cycle. Having a stage where walk is enabled when there's no pedestrians around wouldn't much help pedestrians, and would introduce inefficiency in throughput. And obviously, drivers can't press a button, so it makes more sense for controls to be accessible to the pedestrians.

> Having a stage where walk is enabled when there's no pedestrians around wouldn't much help pedestrians, and would introduce inefficiency in throughput

It forces drivers to reduce speed and come to a full stop; dramatically decreasing the likelihood of collisions with pedestrians they did not notice.

Instantly? You're definitely not in North America. Many intersections around me, if you missed pressing the crossing button before parallel street had a green light, you missed your opportunity to walk for the next minute.

*five minutes.

> designed with cars in mind, not human beings

This is a bad faith framing. The cars are driven by humans. Or in the case of autonomous driving, are driving humans around.

I've come up to plenty of lights that had the pedestrian signal lit even though there were no pedestrians. This happens during the day and at night, and is frustrating. Just happened the other day when I was driving around midnight. Not a pedestrian in sight!

If the designers were truly considering the well-being of the occupants of the vehicles then they would be designing cities to minimize the time spent in vehicles; which means more than saving a few seconds at a stop light, it means getting them out of their cars entirely.

That might fly in temperate parts of California, but it sure doesn't work in places with less pedestrian-friendly weather.

There are plenty of examples of walkable neighbourhoods in places with cold and/or wet weather.

Yes, there are some places that people can walk, nearly everywhere. But GP suggested "getting them out of their cars entirely". That is not a nuanced proposal that acknowledges tradeoffs and seeks to find a balanced approach. It's saying that people should not be in cars. Tell that to a parent with 4 bags of groceries and 3 kids and see what the reaction is.

If we want better cities and towns, zealotry won't get us very far. It will get us laughed at. And I say this as someone who walks all the time and is about to do so right now.

There are also plenty of examples of countries that lack reliable running water. That doesn’t make it a preferable standard of living.

It is working great in New York City: traffic is down 11-60% with just a $9 fee.

Do you think people who previously drove into NYC are now walking from NJ? Or are they working remote? The photos of carless streets I've seen don't seem to be packed with pedestrians.

Minneapolis, Chicago, a lot of less temperate cities have protected walking tunnels, either underground or protected by buildings.

Forcing people into a 19th century standard of living is not good for their well being.

"Walking" is not some outdated concept. Lordy.

To the vast majority of Americans it unfortunately is.

No but living in a world without automobiles absolutely is. I’m sick and tired of this deranged notion that it’s somehow virtuous to deliberately impoverish ourselves by giving up things like cars that, empirically, human beings from every culture rich enough to afford them prefer to use.

Let's not ignore the negative externalities of cars.

Separately: In a small town, it's objectively nicer to have certain areas that are walkable without navigating traffic.

> In a small town, it's objectively nicer to have certain areas that are walkable without navigating traffic.

Sure, I don't have a problem with that.

I'm about 99% sure that was a rhetorical question so you can ask yourself why we put cars before people.

People are in cars too.

I think we should give priority to the people who are no inside multi-ton metal boxes, pollute less, can get on average healthier due to walking etc etc... At least inside our cities.

Drivers are on average richer than pedestrians.

In America, with our current wealth disparity, that leaves their interests wildly over-represented in policy and infrastructure.

More like voters are on average more likely to be drivers than pedestrians, so politicians favor drivers. In my experience this is even more true for poor voters as they generally can’t afford to live in walkable areas.

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