Wednesday, December 3, 2014

From StrongTowns.org
Just another pedestrian killed

CHARLES MAROHN I’m fed up with people being killed because my profession contains a bunch of dogmatic idiots. I’m sure the response of some will be: But Chuck, the driver was drunk, this isn’t the engineer’s fault. Ridiculous. If I had a $100 for every time I heard an engineer recommend some stupid tree removal or curve widening because “some drunk is going to come through here and get killed” I would be fully funding Strong Towns with the interest off my latent wealth. We consider the drunk when it suits our purposes -- the free flow of traffic -- and ignore them when it doesn't. That's the sign of a broken moral compass.
The right thing to do here is pretty obvious: SLOW DOWN THE CARS! When you enter into an urban environment, the expectation must be that travel speeds are very slow (I think a 20 mph design speed is too fast – 15 mph would be the top in my opinion) because we need to FORGIVE the common mistakes of humans, both in their cars and out. In a complex urban environment, the only way to do that is to slow down the speed of travel. We must lower the cost of a mistake. Read more: JUST ANOTHER PEDESTRIAN KILLED

No comments:

Post a Comment