This article from Next City shows what happens when you have a very successful walking city like New York City. Those sidewalks get full and people spill onto the streets, which is not a good thing with traffic in the way.
Recently a city councillor introduced a bill that would require NYC DOT to study 10 locations with heavy pedestrian traffic and come up with a plan to alleviate the overcrowding. New York’s pedestrian fatalities sound staggering-over 85 pedestrians killed out of a population of 8.5 million and 7,000 injured since the start of the year-or one fatality for every 100,0000 population. (Just a quick note that Vancouver has a worse record with 11 pedestrian deaths this year and with a population of 603,000 has had one fatality for every 54,800 population) .
With Vision Zero in New York City Council is talking about a new era where pedestrian (and of course tourism by foot) gets priority. “Streets and sidewalks are 80 percent of public space in the city,” says Caroline Samponaro, deputy director for Transportation Alternatives. “This bill really gets at the importance of really making the most equitable, sane use of that public space. Many of our streets and sidewalks haven’t changed in more than 50 years even as travel habits and patterns have changed. We need to be able to do more than just stay alive while walking and biking,” she explains. “I think this bill calls that out in a good way. It forces the city to keep doing what they’re doing with pedestrian safety, but also push beyond that and think about what we are doing to make really dynamic public spaces.”
So it’s not just about using the street as transport whether you are on bike or foot, but actually using the space as public space to go to and linger in. Widening pedestrian spaces, providing places to sit in, and making a high quality pedestrian environment that everyone wants to use.
There’s still no date for when this bill will be going forward to New York City Council, but you can be sure it will be actively followed by many across North America, looking for groundbreaking ways to enact Vision Zero and enhanced walkability in our cities and spaces.
I hope Vancouver doesn’t do this. I hope Vancouver’s Council instead passes a bill to study the most dangerous locations for pedestrians, not simply the most crowded. Focus on measurable safety outcomes; not just appeasing frustrations.
“Pedestrian overcrowding” with “pedestrian safety” are often very different things. A lot of sidewalks and crosswalks are crowded and statistically very safe; while others that see relatively fewer pedestrians are very unsafe. A lot of opportunity to improve safety is going to be wasted by simply focusing on high-density (“overcrowded”) locations.
NYCDOT does a lot of things to improve pedestrian safety at locations that are actually proven to be high-risk. They’ve implemented some very effective programs. This NYC Council bill looks to be either an easy, cynical sop towards commuter appeasement or a well-meaning effort by a Council member who simply can’t parse the difference between pedestrian ‘safety’ and ‘density’.
“It forces the city to keep doing what they’re doing with pedestrian safety, but also push beyond that and think about what we are doing to make really dynamic public spaces.”
That’s from the Deputy Director of the nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, and I have no doubt that is her wish. But that does not detract from my original assertion: this bill is not strictly about pedestrian safety. It’s about pedestrian convenience and comfort. Wonderful, dynamic public spaces could result; but any positive or negative impact this has on the pedestrian crash totals would be incidental.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
Sadly, many people in BC don’t understand the crosswalk rules, that basically all crossings are crosswalks. The BC government and ICBC need to do more education on this and other safety issues. The news media also doesn’t help by often saying the pedestrian hit was not in a marked crosswalk, as if that was the cause of the collision and not that the driver wasn’t looking.