Very interesting video. Thanks for sharing. It looks a bit chaotic but honestly not _that_ unsafe to me as everything is going quite slow. It reminds me a bit of the idea of "shared space" which is a recent concept that is actually claimed to make streets safer.
> It reminds me a bit of the idea of "shared space" which is a recent concept that is actually claimed to make streets safer.
It's a 1990s concept from France. It was implemented in the 1990s on Theater Way in Redwood City. CA, and did not work well. One side of the street has a curb, but the other side does not. Vehicle traffic was allowed, and people could get out in front of the movie theater. The other side of the street, with no barriers, had cafe tables.[1]
This worked badly. The cafe tables kept creeping outward. Some auto traffic was too fast. During COVID, the outside seating kept growing into the roadway. Plastic bollards were erected to discourage non-delivery traffic. Overpowered electric bikes zooming through became an problem. Police cars were sometimes deployed to block the
roadway. Then plastic Jersey-type barriers were set up at one end, but not filled with water, so they could be moved for deliveries. Currently, one end of the street has been torn up for installation of some kind of raiseable barrier.
I think it comes down to things like speed. If we accept that the road is a place to be able to quickly move a lot of vehicles, then that just isn't a safe place for pedestrians.
If we go back to lower speeds then maybe it could be manageable in a same way.
But as it is actually used now for 3000 pound vehicles to zoom about in, it makes no sense for pedestrians to be intersecting and sharing the space at all. Just due to the physics of collisions between a person and a vehicle.
I don't think slow vehicles is a good solution because we do need to get places.
I think an actual good (but very expensive) solution is for new cities to be designed differently in several ways. One of which is for roads to be only for small autonomous vehicles and entirely separate from pedestrian paths. To make that reasonably practical you need some other core assumptions to be changed. And also a totally new development probably.
Bingo--this argument (like many others) is one that doesn't require us to speculate or to invent new ways of building cities. We just need to look around the world to cities that have dealt with this problem successfully, and learn from their examples.
The American mindset is not. I swear that a huge portion of people in the US have been propagandized to believe that the car is king and that any idea to the contrary is heresy punishable by death under the front bumper of a Ford F-250 jacked up 3 feet higher.
> But as it is actually used now for 3000 pound vehicles to zoom about in, it makes no sense for pedestrians to be intersecting and sharing the space at all. Just due to the physics of collisions between a person and a vehicle. I don't think slow vehicles is a good solution because we do need to get places.
Urban design talks about street vs road. You can have places for vehicles to zoom about in (roads), and you can have places with shops and businesses and homes for people to use (streets), but you shouldn't try to make the same place serve as both. So in cities and town centres you need to prioritise pedestrians and cyclists: low (and enforced!) speed limits, narrow streets that naturally reduce speed, car-free zones. It doesn't need radical new development, you just need to break the assumption that cars are entitled to go full speed everywhere and everyone else has to deal.
> ... new cities to be designed differently in several ways. One of which is for roads to be only for small autonomous vehicles and entirely separate ...
As I understand it, this vision does not compute. The number of movements of people in a dense city is too large for everyone to move in a car, autonomous or not. Cars take a lot of space. They need to stop someplace for someone to get in and out, merge in and out of traffic. Streets cant be designed in a way that accomodates this at the scale of a city like NY.
Similarly, in spread-out suburbia, autonomous cars would still get stuck in traffic jams if everyone has to use them to get to work. Making cars autonomous makes things a bit more efficient, but not by orders of magnitude.
Mass transit, combined with walking and biking, is simply way more efficient for moving people in cities and is a proven model that does scale.
