On the subject of designing public spaces, Ian Robertson coincidentally sends in a well-illustrated piece from This Old City on a pragmatic way to find the spaces in cities that could be used for enhanced urbanspace, using a technique called ‘sneckdown’:
If you haven’t heard of a “sneckdown” yet, it’s a clever combination of “snow” and “neckdown” – another name for a curb expansion – that uses snow formations on the street to reveal the space cars don’t use. Advocates can then use these sneckdown photos to make the case to local transportation officials that traffic calming interventions like curb bumpouts and traffic islands can be installed without any loss to car drivers.
Immensely goofy. A compact car weighs 3000 lbs., a larger vehicle such as an SUV weighs 4500. A loaded cement truck is 60,000 lbs. Sixty-thousand.
Now propel all that at 60 kmph. Placing some ‘urban use’ as close as possible to that trajectory is madness. How about a pop-up first responder booth?
From fatal accident reconstructions, the safest buffer from a lane of traffic (for cyclists, peds and building fronts) is a row of parked vehicles.
These are some of the same goofy people who bark that setbacks between urban buildings (which don’t move as fast) should be larger. Let’s focus on lawn space, in this city, mostly contaminated by disease-causing bacteria caused by the dog feces.