#Pedestrian safety

[thebreakfastgod]

America's Roads: Dangerous by Design

[jakegardiner]

Obsessed with Vision Zero Vancouver’s energy

[winterthebeau]

american auto industry be like

[atlurbanist]

I bet there are newer residents of Atlanta who are unaware of what a huge win we got with our pedestrian scrambles -- intersections with a signal phase just for peds. Here's the one at 5th and Spring, with a 'before' showing how cars used to plow into peds prior to the scramble.

[threadatl]

This is an excellent article on a sad topic: pedestrian deaths are rising.

QUOTE:

"Nationwide, the suburbanization of poverty in the 21st century has meant that more lower-income Americans who rely on shift work or public transit have moved to communities built around the deadliest kinds of roads: those with multiple lanes and higher speed limits but few crosswalks or sidewalks. The rise in pedestrian fatalities has been most pronounced on these arterials, which can combine highway speeds with the cross traffic of more local roads."

In the suburbs of Atlanta (and other metros) and in the city, these wide arterial roads are deadly for walking. Meanwhile, the most walkable places in the city are increasingly unaffordable.

It's obvious that we need a massive shift on a huge scale when it comes to the walkability of our built environments, and in the equitability of access to pedestrian safety.

It will take many steps, big and small, in our policies and investments in order to get there. Some of those small steps will need to happen on your street, and in your neighborhood. Please support them and please speak up when others don't.

[ceilidhtransing]

I've been thinking about urbanism and about how some people (I'm particularly thinking folks like “the vocal minority of business owners that go absolutely apeshit any time there's a proposal to remove some space from cars in favour of a bike lane, a tram line, a pedestrianised area, etc”) don't seem to really consider anyone outside a car to be a person.

*a city plans to remove some parking spaces to make room for a protected bike lane*

“But how is anyone supposed to get here?!”

*looks at bustling street filled with pedestrians, cyclists, and people riding a tram*

Like, it genuinely doesn't seem to occur to some people that all of those people moving around outside of cars are people. That's how “anyone is supposed to get here”: by way of all of the non-car options, especially those that are actively made safer and easier by the removal or limiting of space for cars. And I don't know what's going on here - whether it's something like classism (only those wealthy enough to drive everywhere matter as people) or simply that car dependency is perhaps so entrenched and unquestioned for some folk that it genuinely doesn't occur to them that getting to a place without a car is (or at least should be) an entirely valid and possible thing to do. It's probably a bit of both. But my god does it drive me nuts when people respond to a new proposal that will dramatically increase the capacity and footfall of an urban space by shifting from emphasising cars to emphasising walking, cycling and public transport with “but how will anyone get here?!”

[atlantathecity]

I'm glad to see leading pedestrian intervals at some intersections, where the walk signal gives pedestrians a head start. But I wish they were everywhere. I get this experience too often, being in a crosswalk while a car zips through as a driver makes a turn.

[This experience was, in fact, my entry into the urbanism rabbit hole -- specifically, crossing Ponce to get groceries while pushing my son in a baby stroller and watching drivers zip inches past us.]

Related: am I getting grumpier or is driver behavior getting worse? A little of both probably. We spotted multiple drivers brazenly run red lights yesterday while we were walking around.

It's also possible that my expectations of street safety have risen to the point where bad behavior is more glaring now that it used to be. Which is not a bad thing. We should all have higher expectations of safe streets.

[thelesbianthespianposts]

yeah cool bike you’ve got there yeah fuck cars yeah do you obey traffic rules?

do you know that you as a biker have to abide by the same rules cars do in order to keep pedestrians safe?

do you know that you have to stop at stop signs and red lights?

do you know that you have to go the same way as cars do on one way streets?

do you know that you can’t bike on the sidewalk?

do you know that you as a biker are no more a pedestrian than a car?

[forthepleasureofmylife]

Downtown Manhattan

Photo: Dieter Krehbiel

[allthecanadianpolitics]

More than 1.5 million views on a road safety video might be considered good, if they weren't accompanied by comments such as "delete this," "shame on you" and "this is brutal."

Richmond RCMP posted a public service announcement video Friday morning on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that received such a response. 

[...]

But advocates and many commenters on X argue the video unhelpfully focuses on pedestrian behaviour when drivers and road design ought to be the focus of safety efforts.

"Every year we get public safety campaigns that effectively victim blame. They put blame on vulnerable road users — outside cars," said Lucy Maloney with Vision Zero, a group which aims to stop traffic deaths.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[the-city-in-mind]

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) just announced new rules to help rein in the runaway supersizing of trucks and SUVs, to improve pedestrian safety.

[kaapstadmk]

The anti-cybertruck. I love it!

Functional design at its finest (and quirkiest)

[chaptertwo-thepacnw]

suspense, lois weber |1913|

[atlurbanist]

Stop the press-release journalism & start talking about street safety

by Darin Givens | Oct. 9, 2024

I watched a video today where an Atlanta reporter (11 Alive) praised a new affordable housing development on MLK Drive for being close to Hamilton Holmes MARTA Station; but he made no mention of the *obviously* unpleasant walk residents have to take to the nearest crosswalk in order to get there.

It's press-release journalism. People are just repeating the PR materials that were pushed out by the city and the developer. Stop it.

Two things can be true, and they need to be talked about at the same time. Adding rentals for households earning 50-60% of the area median income is good. That's what this new development (at 2576 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) does with its 52 units. Yes, praise that.

But the pedestrian situation is bad. We should all be saying this in the same breath -- especially our news media and local leaders.

Combining affordability with safe walkability should be our target. We can't hit the target if our eyes are closed to the barriers.

Mayor Dickens and Council member Andrea Boone were at the media event for these new apartments this week. You can't help but wonder if they, or any of their staff, noticed the problems as they approached in their cars.

Did they see the people walking on this GDOT road -- part of Atlanta's documented High Injury Network -- with no space between their bodies and the cars?

[threadatl]

The legacy of the abandoned Peachtree Shared Space program: a pedestrian's death

by Darin Givens, March 4, 2025

A pedestrian was recently killed on Peachtree Street when he tried to use the faded remains of a crosswalk built for the abandoned Peachtree Shared Street project in Downtown. This image is from prior to the gutting of the program in 2022.

Here's some background on how maddeningly preventable this death was:

Mayor Dickens wrongly pulled the plug on this good Shared Street program three years ago this month after being pressured to do so by a moneyed Downtown property owner, named Richard Bowers, who wanted the lanes of car traffic to remain unchanged.

Pictured here (this is from late 2021) is the first phase of the program, with two vehicular lanes removed and a bold crosswalk in the street. Various traffic calming devices are out of view, and more pedestrian-friendly goodness was on the way in subsequent phases.

But all of it was removed at Dickens' command, though the crosswalk was left to dangerously fade away.

And as if Dickens' office didn't handle this situation badly enough...after the pedestrian death their only action was to finally erase the crosswalk. This was an infuriating response.

That crosswalk at Peachtree Center was born from its common use as a sort of "desire path" with people running across Peachtree at that spot for many years. Getting rid of a desire path instead of embracing it with safe infrastructure isn't going to end the desire itself.

The correct response would have been to establish a safe crossing for pedestrian here.

Thanks to Councilmembers Amir Farokhi, Jason Dozier, and Matt Westmoreland for doing the right thing this week and formally requesting that the mayor install a pedestrian crosswalk at 225 Peachtree St., NE "by no later than May 31, 2025."

That needs to happen. Actually, it needed to happen three years ago. We'd say "better late than never" but even that seems inappropriate in the wake of a preventable death.