Not Just Bikes: Crossing the Street Shouldn't Be Deadly (But It Is)
If you’ve been reading Strong Towns for a while, you almost certainly know that busy urban streets in North America are dangerous and frightening places to be on foot. (They are far deadlier, in fact, than their counterparts in many other parts of the world.)
Heck, scratch that: If you walk on any sort of regular basis in the U.S. or Canada, you know this from firsthand experience.
Actually, while we’re at it: If you are alive in the U.S. or Canada, you know it from firsthand experience.
What you may not know is the full range of surprisingly subtle design choices that contribute to this problem, or just how differently we could do things if we had the political will to make the safety of people who walk a priority.
For this, Jason Slaughter, host of the popular Not Just Bikes video series, has you covered. Slaughter’s latest video, titled “Crossing the Street Shouldn’t Be Deadly (But It Is),” contrasts the experience of navigating on foot around traffic in the U.S. and Canada with what it’s like to do the same in the Netherlands, where he lives. Using lots of first-person footage, Slaughter makes obvious the direct consequences of engineering decisions that prioritize the convenience and speed of people driving over the lives of people walking. Not going to lie: I felt my heart rate quicken from the stress of merely watching many of his American examples.
Slaughter demystifies deadly street design even beyond the obvious bad decisions, like building ultra-wide stroads with multiple turn lanes and lots of driveway curb cuts. Slaughter also explores many more subtle features of the streetscape, such as the placement of stoplights, the way walk signals are coordinated, and even whether the sidewalk dips at intersections to meet the street or the street rises to cross the sidewalk.
I learned things I never knew from watching this video, and I have a degree in urban planning. What is obvious by the end of it is that Dutch engineers apply the same creativity to coming up with designs that improve the experience of pedestrians that American engineers reserve for clever (and breathtakingly expensive) ways of moving slightly more cars through the same space.
What is also obvious is that the Dutch focus on pedestrian safety didn’t just happen. It was a political choice, made after a lot of determined advocacy and protest moved the needle. A country that didn’t want to face a numbing succession of tragic headlines anymore started to build streets that anyone can navigate without fear. We can choose to do the same.
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Americans are suckers for the idea of a moonshot, of taking a big, challenging risk and earning a huge payoff. The problem is, these moonshots usually fail, especially when they're trying to fix complex, chronic problems like traffic safety. There's a better way.