One time, a couple of coworkers were riding single file in the generous shoulder of a wide nearly empty multi-lane road in the early morning when they were both run over from behind in a hit and run. One had to have his spine fused. I still saw the same attitude of contempt, even from coworkers who otherwise liked them.

I switched to mountain biking after that.

Normalisation of dangerous driving is a global phenomenon where car culture reigns.

anyway, there are many ways to calm traffic.

Sinking roads and giving all surface level to pedestrians would be an active improvement, though obviously not a cheap one. The great bit is when you remove the cars you can backfill the dig and forget about it entirely.

This works especially well combined with pedestrian and cycle passthroughs and such, including to avoid “drive-through” neighbourhoods without having to make the neighbourhood entirely impassable and a pain in the ass to residents.

I suspect that Google Maps and the like have worsened the level of driving through residential neighborhoods as they route you through a maze of residential streets to save (in theory) two minutes.

But that’s the point of traffic calming, they make trips take longer in real time so the route becomes less attractive as traffic avoidance, while not being a huge issue for “normal” local traffic.

What if poor US urban planning has led to sedentary lives where walking to places like grocery stores, parks, or transit is unpleasant, inconvenient, or impossible.

So we sit on our butts and drive our cars everywhere, which means more lanes and more parking lots which in return keeps things farther apart and less walkable.

People who are never pedestrians perhaps have reduced empathy for being one, and being in a big metal car vs passing in-person on the street leads to less personable reactions (ie road rage). And car-focused infrastructure decisions lead to more dangerous interactions between fast traffic, pedestrians, and cyclists.

The tiny bit of time I have spent in some dense european-style walkable neighborhoods left me feeling much more a part of the neighborhood and like I would be a much healthier person in general living in such a place long term.

Which I think leads to lax driver training and enforcement. Suspending someone’s license is potentially destroying their livelihood.

Whatever the cause, our driver training, enforcement, penalties, and general respect for piloting a vehicle in a safe manner seem lower than many European countries.

It’s a vicious circle, too. If everyone else has an SUV, you also want an SUV so you’re not crushed by one in a crash.

The most likely candidates (again, in my opinion) are:

changes to driver psychology somehow due to the pandemic (empty roads, then full roads again, greater anxiety or stress related to traveling back and forth to work, or something like that)

changes in enforcement of driving laws (the protests of 2020 caused changes in police budget allocations or how police enforce minor laws like traffic laws OR staffing issues due to the pandemic with law enforcement agencies, or both)

A near universal change in how drivers are certified / licensed (could be due to changes in the pandemic or some other factor?)

OR this is a statistical fluke someone hooked onto and we are all drawing far-reaching conclusions from.

Fwiw, many groups are attempting to build self-driving cars it would be easy to produce cars that drove at sensible speeds as an intermediate step. That this hasn't happened says something about how a society values drivers', and drivers rights to break the law versus those of the innocents they routinely kill or maim as result.

I honestly don't even feel comfortable wearing earphones when I'm walking in the woods much less on a city street.

It really is not just that. The netherlands didn’t fix their traffic by telling people to drive better (in fact they did relatively little of that), but by redesigning the entire driving conditions around the results they wanted.

Properly incentivising, and taking advantage of human psychology for other reasons than exploitation, is much more reliable than scolding people.

Getting stuck on “it’s people!” will be largely ineffective, because it’s not how people work. Though if your only goal is to have something to moan about, carry on, that’ll certainly keep.

In most places in America walking is not a practical mode of transportation because of distance; it’s miles from your house to the grocery store, for instance. If you live in a city this might not be obvious to you but half the country lives in the burbs or rural areas.

Separately, it would be nice if we had more sidewalks, but they are financially unsustainable in low density areas.

Separately, the US does have an obesity problem, and exercise would help, but the biggest issue by far is dietary sugar/carbohydrates.

Which is because we’ve specifically built everything such that there are large distances involved which necessitate cars. You’re taking this as that natural order of things instead of a deliberate decision, which it was. We could have just built towns and cities with the right level of density instead. Even where there aren’t “large distances” involved such as the suburbs where the grocery store and doctor’s office have to be built a half mile or so away everyone has to drive because surprise surprise we’re stupid and made it so that you’re crippled and have to drive to go any distance, not just actual long distances.

> Separately, it would be nice if we had more sidewalks, but they are financially unsustainable in low density areas.

All the roads and highways are unsustainable too, more so, in fact. The difference is the government subsidized these instead of subsidizing sidewalks or more density to create the illusion of progress. Can’t be stagnating as a society if there’s a new road!

I call bullshit.

The smallest 50 people village in the Netherlands has sidewalks. It’s not that it’s unsustainable, it’s that nobody wants to pay for it. Or that americans build too friggin big.

For a start, the build quality can be a lot lower - a sidewalk doesn't need to support lorries with 13t loads.

As for maintenance, the damage to them is far less, and repairing a sidewalk would usually be a small diversion rather than the drama of a road closure.

I'm not quite sure why anyone would think sidewalks are an unthinkable burden.

Here's Virginia's cost guidelines for roadway[1] (2000, so the numbers are surely higher now). Even at $350k/mile, sidewalk is 2/3 the cost of a paved suburban road.

1 - https://www.virginiadot.org/business/resources/gasb-roadway_...

(European here; but I've spent some time in US. You seriously underestimate the distances in US).

There's no good reason these suburbs can't be more walkable, it's mostly adding sidewalks that link to other places. And possibly smaller schools (and the 4000+ pupil high schools we get are a whole different problem).

That is complete nonsense. Sidewalks are not a significant additional expense to the road it’s on, even at a much lower level of build quality / complexity require very little maintenance as the only damage is environmental (pedestrians and cyclists do 6 or 7 orders of magnitude less damage to the surface than sedans do, per unit of distance, add 4 for a loaded truck).

Depends on your definition of significant and sidewalk. It does add cost, so it's not insignificant (you can observe it with confidence). For states that are already struggling with infrastructure costs, it would not be feasible (look at PA and it's bridges).

Most states or municipalities actually have codes that the sidewalk has to follow. So it it's not legally possible to build something low quality. Technically a sidewalk doesn't have to be paved at all. In many places, you have a 3-6 foot right of way on the sides of the roads - aka a sidewalk - that does not have to be paved. This can vary by state and municipality though.

What a bad-faith definition you're using here. By this definition if you reimbursed a road worker for a penny they dropped during their shift building the road it'd be a significant expense.

Do you have any actual data to support the idea that sidewalks for all roads are a feasible goal?

I grew up and lived in rural/suburban Florida (god-awful weather) and I never learned to drive. I walked everywhere (no sidewalks). People whose lives revolve around cars just can’t imagine a person walking longer than the distance from the parking lot to the front door.

Nearly everybody wishes they could drive less but nobody will actually drive less.

- Safer than running on the street (crappy streets, ignorant drivers, etc.)

- I can concentrate on running, not on staying away from getting creamed by cars.

- They've got TV, I could get my garbage news fix (I don't read/watch news regularly)

- They've got bathrooms, running makes me shit sometimes, if I go out in the morning.

Of course, I stopped going to a gym because I do have an erg at home, and I don't really want to go to a large indoor location where people are huffing and puffing right now.

"No way of preventing this, says person in only country where "this" happens."

That said -- I was born, raised, and have spent most of my life in rural UK and it would be absolutely preposterous if those areas didn't have pavements.

What makes sidewalks expensive to maintain, relative to roads?

> the biggest issue by far is dietary sugar/carbohydrates

This is not clear. See this highly fascinating series on the obesity epidemic: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p.... Other suspects are HFCS and seed oils.

Yeah, Somewhere Else is ultimately the same place, but homeowners don't see it as personally flowing out of their own pockets.

Otherwise, what you describe is not normal. The bill would be paid by whoever issued the PO. If it wasn't me, I'm not paying. If it was not on my property, then not my problem, and if it was, you have also trespassing on top.

So the only alternative that occurs to me that you are a part of some community, with common maintenance of shared property and where the bill is footed by members.

These measures are common in urban areas in the US.

Another way of thinking about it is that the notion of "ownership" is limited in a variety of ways. We also don't have mineral rights or control of the airspace above our house.

But having to pay for it directly sounds extremely counter-productive.

And even the first part is dubious really: there should be sidewalks most everywhere including non-residential locations or the like, which the city would almost certainly have to clear alongside the roadway. Surely in that case it’s more efficient and simpler to just clear everything uniformly?

In my town, for the most part the neighborhoods without sidewalks also have extremely little car traffic, and pedestrians walk in the street without issue. The drivers also tend to behave themselves.

Changing anything that requires substantially raising the city budget is hard, because the state makes many of the rules for city budgets and taxes. Adding a large seasonal workforce and equipment for clearing sidewalks would be a tough nut to crack. They do clear the sidewalks around parks, schools, and the like. There's also a matter of the preferences of residents. For instance I don't want a ton of salt poured onto the sidewalks in front of my house, and am happy to keep it clear of snow. Every 3 or 4 houses, somebody has a snowblower that rarely gets used.

In most cities single family neighborhood sidewalks are "owned" by the property owner, not the city. However they are an "easement" which means the property owner has no control over the property, or ability to limit access to the property but assumes all costs in maintaining, and all liabilities for injury or other city ordinances (like snow removal, grass cutting, etc) basically all the downsides of ownership with none of the upside.

for some people this makes sidewalk undesirable

As I’m not American, I don’t know if this is or isn’t how y’all use the word, but I did assume it was just the American term for a public footpath, and those don’t need to be beside a road.

e.g. the north-south paved footpath between 11 and 65 Southbrook Rd: https://goo.gl/maps/JpoTcarePZZ7Neij9 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/50.84552/-0.98156

And if that isn’t what being discussed here, it ought to be, because the value is in being able to get around on foot rather than specifically to duplicate the road network.

(Likewise, I don’t think it would be valid to say “ahh, but each end connects to a road”, because that’s like including the cost of the M25 in the cost of the A111).

My wife and I are a one car household. On a typical day we both alt commute - I run or bike 7 miles to work and she runs/walks 3-4. We walk our daughter to and from daycare - even in the rain. These are choices we are barely able to make because we live in the near burbs of a pedestrian focused US city.

The US built infrastructure isn't just 'cheap' on pedestrian safety it is actively hostile. There are neighrborhoods that resist sidewalks for 'safety' reasons where safety means - only poor people walk and poor people are criminals. When I used to live in Phoenix Arizona, It would take me both hands to count the number of times i was stopped by police while walking because I was 'suspicious'. I would say I have a scary experience at least once a week alt commuting.

My bike lane to work goes from no bike lane to physically separated rails to trail to protected bike path to just suddenly ending and dumping me into traffic. It is ABSURD. I was once physically talked off my bike by a driver because I yelled at them for driving in the bikelane. The police who responded threatened to cite me for disorderly conduct.

I could go on.

I watch the youtube channel Not Just Bikes as a form of catharsis. I thought I had it good until I saw just how good places like the Netherlands have it.

I live in the Netherlands and the cycling and pedestrian infrastructure is indeed better than anywhere else I've been. Apart from maybe Denmark, I doubt there's anywhere that comes close to the Netherlands, so comparing the US to it is pretty useless.

There's still plenty to improve, and plenty is improving, to be fair. In the last few years, I've seen quite a few impressive changes in Amsterdam's cycling infrastructure, which was already amazing. Streets getting redesigned now are taking cycling very seriously.

There's also Bicycle Dutch on a similar note to Not Just Bikes, but less polished.

There seems to be actual thought put into how space for moving people is, should be, and will be used. It doesn't begin with an assumption of building a road and then work from there. That change in planning assumption is enormous. I'm hoping the pandemic does something to shift the US culture of infrastructure building but I am not hopeful.

Which is 100% our own fault. We could build suburbs with walkable shopping and schools, but we don't. Hell, even in my sort-of-walkable suburb (Reston, VA) sidewalks and bike lanes are both a bit of a bodge. It's on in the last year that there's a continuous sidewalk from my house to the school complex <1 mile away (but the neighborhood was built in the early 1970s). And despite that continuous sidewalk with zero major road crossings, there's still public school bus service (which actually takes longer to get kids home than walking because of the way it loops around). But, kids and parents sit patiently at the top of the street instead of walking a few blocks.

Separately, it would be nice if we had more sidewalks, but they are financially unsustainable in low density areas.

They're less expensive than roads by an order of magnitude. The only place they aren't feasible is true rural zones. But, the vast majority of Americans live in cities or suburbs - there's no good excuse for not having sidewalks in these areas.

That is true to an extent, but it is equally true that there are lots of areas that could be quite walkable, but aren't due to lack of infrastructure. My friend lived less than a mile from the mall, but it was impossible to walk there since it was cut off by a 4 lane road with no way for pedestrians to cross. My grandparents lived in a gated community that was literally across the road from a Walmart, but the only way to get there was to drive 1 mile up the road, turn around, and drive back.

That seems like a problem that could be solved through zoning. Solutions that by your definition inherently put people at risk seem an easy thing to re-evaluate.

I am not making a judgement about the desirability of sidewalks. Indeed I said that more would be nice.

To the latter criticism, I say, yes, we did, but it doesn’t change where we are.

To the former, I say that government monopoly on infrastructure (which means that taxes pay maintenance) combined with sprawl have led us in the US to a place where literally in many places the money does not exist to maintain the infrastructure that was already built, much less build new infrastructure.

There are lots of essays on this; here’s one: https://fee.org/articles/the-unbearable-truth-about-infrastr...

Whether that is worth it or not to you is up to you to decide. But you've just found another excuse for driving when walking is possible (not possible for everyone, but possible for some).

Doesn't this actually imply that it's the low density that is financially unsustainable, rather than the sidewalks? I mean if your settlement pattern can't even afford a place for people to walk, what the hell are you doing?

Low density is caused by car culture pushed by car manufacturers and oil companies.

Let's change this to a proactive mode.

How far is too far to walk or cycle?

What would it take for you to increase that distance?

Why? Because do not want to incur the costs of maintaining them, nor the liability that comes with them from either a city stand point, or injury standpoint

If sidewalks where maintained by the city, including snow removal, and repairs, then maybe. but the fact is in most location they are an imposition on the property owner that comes with large costs and liabilities.

The other issue here is that you still pay for the roads, maintenance, police patrols, rest stops, expansion, environmental degradation, snow removal, insurance for cars, gas infrastructure, and all of those things related to roads but since you don’t get a specific bill in the mail with the line item for roads that you don’t think you’re paying for them or a huge cost for them. How much does it cost to have car accidents as the leading cause of death of teenagers? Who knows. But it’s gotta be more expensive than shoveling your sidewalk off.

OK And? I fully admit I am anti-social.

>>The other issue here is that you still pay for the roads, maintenance, police patrols, rest stops, expansion, environmental degradation, snow removal, insurance for cars, gas infrastructure, and all of those things related to roads but since you don’t get a specific bill in the mail with the line item for roads that you don’t think you’re paying for them or a huge cost for them.

The cost is not the problem for me, and I would prefer to get a bill for every single one of those items. Honestly if city employed people to remove the snow from the sidewalks and sent me a bill like they do trash collection I would have less of a problem with them. That is not what they do though...

>How much does it cost to have car accidents as the leading cause of death of teenagers?

Solve that problem by getting teens off the road.

I'm not kidding - the other day some kids walked by and asked if they could shovel my sidewalk and driveway before I got the chance to do it myself and I just paid them to do it. How cool is that? Why do you need the city to solve your problem here? If money isn't the issue... I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

> Solve that problem by getting teens off the road.

How can you do that when they have to drive everywhere? Do you not see how circular this is? Once they grow up they become adults, and then they die on the road too as yet another leading cause of death.

The last home I had with sidewalks the city would fine you if they were not cleared in 24 hours, contractors would come 3-5 days later

>How can you do that when they have to drive everywhere?

never said it would not create other problems, I solve the teens dying problem the same way everyone solved the COVID problem, just lock down. it "worked" then right ;)

I bet since I oppose Vaccine Mandates I am also an "anti-vaxxer" as well right? even though I am vaccinated from every illness for which there is a vaccine I am eligible to get including COVID.

If you do not support authoritarian government you must be anti-science, this is an amazing timeline..

I would like to see a lot more of this. In Chicago, people have always blown red lights at speed right in front of parked police cars because they know police won’t do anything (and I’m not even sure if the police are allowed to do anything—allegedly they can’t chase suspects unless they believe they are a threat to society, and I’m not sure that includes “reckless driving”).

The article didn’t mention it, but I also wonder if this (like the surge in violent crime) is driven in part by changes in policing following the BLM protests (e.g., police make fewer traffic stops for fear of finding themselves in an incriminating situation).

The problem is, it doesn't scale, especially in a city as big and violent as Chicago. It only works so long as police keep their foot on the gas (so to speak); they minute they let up on traffic enforcement (because of competing priorities) things will get worse again.

If one person speeds, that person is an idiot. But if everyone speeds, the road engineer is an idiot. A systemic problem like this is a result of poor road design, not individual deviant drivers. Police should not be burdened with the responsibility of ensuring safety in a system that is unsafe by design. The roads need to be redesigned so that drivers naturally feel unsafe at high speed.

> A systemic problem like this is a result of poor road design, not individual deviant drivers.

In many cases, I agree that there is a systemic problem at play, but these cases tend to be highways (i.e., no pedestrians) and the issue is politicians setting speed limits which traffic engineers understand to be unsafely low for the road’s design (the safest speed being that which 85% of drivers would naturally drive if unencumbered). And it hardly matters how engineers design the road because politicians will always respond to a vocal minority who argue that the limits should be lower.

However with respect to streets (i.e., places where pedestrians belong) rather than highways, the issue is only systemic with respect to enforcement—many other parts of the country (or even the same places with different enforcement) have similar streets but drivers are better behaved. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t room for improvement everywhere, but only that the issue isn’t “Chicago has stupid street engineers”.

Why would you need active policing to enforce traffic lights and pedestrian crosswalks?

I don't like them either, but traffic camera work.

It's got nothing to do with obesity. The personal auto is the US government-dictated and subsidized default transportation method. Anyone not using a personal auto is "less than". In other words, if you're walking, you're a subhuman.

The only thing that will slow drivers down is when they feel unsafe themselves, or have a risk to their vehicle.

Adding signs or automatic fines doesn't do anything. You need narrower streets utilizing actual traffic calling techniques. It's such a sad sight to see signs with a "traffic calming zone" sign, but absolutely zero traffic calming done. It'll be a wide open street, we'll paved, no trees right against the road or bollards in the middle or speed bumps.

Watching this video feels like an alternative reality that never happened and it seems great.

https://youtu.be/bAxRYrpbnuA

Raised crossings[1] or deliberate narrowing [2] forces people to pay attention and slow down.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raised_Crossing_In_P...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5376862,-0.1105682,3a,75y,19...

In my experience the mentality that drives this is "the road is for cars, you should not be here at all". You see this not just in the US where the infrastructure is extremely car-centric, but also in e.g. New Zealand.

With smaller roads people seem to instinctively understand that it needs to be shared, but with larger roads this understanding seems to go away.

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7878268,-117.8588114,3a,75y,...

Here is an example comparable to yours: a 4-lane major road intersecting perpendicularly with a 2-lane minor road. Pedestrians have controlled crossings across the major part, and protected islands so they never have to cross more than two lanes in one go:

https://goo.gl/maps/MYbcyPgQZD1PMAL69

This design is standard everywhere. And it isn't even optimal (it doesn't accommodate cyclists very well).

*If you searched high and low across the country you might find a counterexample or two, but the fact remains that this kind of junction is thoroughly alien to the British built environment.

As a fat person and I think I can take the liberty to speak on behalf of other fat people, you are absolutely correct.

So be sure to please get out of the way and stay out of the way.

Another good option is to go to the city council and have them rope off areas of the town for pedestrians only, if you want to be safe.

No matter how many concessions are made, most people are just unable to get over the lack of inertia and start cycling. Even if we allow for a hypothetical safety utopia, comments here will cite sweating as a deal breaker.

I understand and empathize with beginners who are not acclimatized to cycling on a busy road. However it doesn't change the fact that you have to start somewhere and build your comfort levels. Pragmatically, this is the more important self-fulfilling dynamic. If you don't start building your skills and instead blame drivers...

There are hostile drivers out there. After decades of riding (sometimes wildly irresponsibly) I can only count on one hand motorists who were actively trying to run me over. In those cases the sentiment was mutual and we had already exchanged words or otherwise escalated. Would have been easy to avoid. Contrast this to the cultural/class rhetoric against pickup-truck drivers.

As a self-appointed expert in the domain, this doesn't ring true for me. It fits better with the theme of Internet hyperbole and media alarmism.

In turn, this makes it "necessary" to wear special cycling garb, change, and shower when you arrive at work. Vanishingly few workplaces provide a convenient place to shower and change.

But I ride my bike to work year-round in a city that gets (for instance) about 10 degrees hotter than Amsterdam, and I manage it.

I don't see how this is a good thing? I've been riding my bike since I was a little kid (in the Netherlands) and I've had zero people actively try to kill me, I'm not sure why any nonzero number is not a big deal.

I imagine most people don't know the law this well, but... the vehicles don't have to stop unless you have at least one foot in the crosswalk in most states. So they could just be assuming you are letting them go, or they're jerks.