Make it 3D instead of taking space from cars and I agree.

Cars are dangerous and the best engineering solution is to isolate pedestrian scale speed and mass transfer from multi-ton industrial equipment. So go 3D, give cars their own isolated layer, give pedestrians and slightly faster moving exposed humans their own layer.

Wouldn't the path of least resistance here be giving cars the surface layer?

Vehicles also include construction cranes, dump and garbage trucks, etc. Those might have unlimited height, but weight is also a factor.

I'm split between an idea like Tokyo's underground mall areas (which work really well with climate control) and just over-specing several stories above ground for a platform layer that can be level across the whole city and completely free of non-emergency moving vehicles.

This is sort of what Boston tried to do with the big dig[1], where several highways were buried under the city. It ended up costing billions and took 15 years to complete. Also, while the RFK Greenway is nice it is also regularly bisected by busy surface roads and on/off ramps so it sometimes feels more like a grassy median than a real park.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

Money well spent. We put excrement underground, might as well do the same for cars.

On a side-note, I was in Boston this summer and it's so much more of an airy and accommodating place than I remember from 10-15 years ago. Lot's of the COVID traffic calming and patios still in place. Awesome, go Boston!

I moved away from the DC area long before electric scooters were a thing. Does metro PD still give jaywalking tickets to pedestrians being loaded onto ambulances (this used to be a thing)?

No - they basically went on soft-strike during the BLM protests. You can run a red light in front of them and unless you hit their SUV it’s unlikely they’ll react.

Just in case anyone is believing this, take my word for it, don't believe the hype.

DO NOT run a red light in front of a cop in DC. I'm just putting that out there as kindly intended advice. If you go to DC thinking it's free reign, you're likely to be disagreeably surprised. Especially if you're in the parts of the city that I'd imagine most of the people on HN would be likely to be in.

And Heaven help you if, well, other agencies watching DC misinterpret your red light running. You may be in the wrong place at the wrong time and find yourself trying to explain that to people who, as a general rule, don't believe in coincidence.

Yeah. Just don't draw that kind of attention to yourself in DC. That leads nowhere good.

I mean, yes, I’m not saying you _should_ do it but I see that happen almost every day and it does not get an official response.

Is that just SE of the Anacostia or the touristy parts too?

Scooters arent a big problem in DC, but it's definitely not problem free. Bike racks are sometimes taken up by nothing but rental scooters. People sometimes leave rentals in highly inconvenient places that block the path (supposedly there's some process for telling companies & they have to move them, but I've never tried this).The scooters mostly say "don't ride on side-walks" in huge letters at their base, but tons of people do.

I wouldn't say there are big problems at all, it mostly works ok. I'm glad there are new options. But infrastructure alone isn't enough. Like the parent, I do think there are low-quality users who don't give a shit & act bad, in a way I'd never see from for example a bicycle user. How problematic is that? So far it's generally not so bad. But bad users, bad parkers, and full bike racks all take their toll. It seems unlikely a lot of these things will get better over time.