
Sun Belt Cities Are Dangerous Places to Walk - mxfh
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-25/sun-belt-cities-are-dangerous-places-to-walk
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49531
I don't live in a sun belt city, but rather a smallish town (60,000 pop) in
the US. I live less than half a mile from the nearest grocer store, but it's
too dangerous to walk. No sidewalks, no shoulders. I have to drive.

I live 0.1 mile away from my kids' school, but cannot walk over there to pick
them up, I have to get in a queue of cars that leads almost to my house. It's
ridiculous.

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davidw
In many places, it's not that difficult to get into local politics and start
making a difference. And it really is easier to get things done than at a
national level.

This group has a lot of good ideas for how to start improving your town:
[https://www.strongtowns.org/](https://www.strongtowns.org/)

~~~
Someone1234
I understand what you're saying, but using eminent domain to seize part of
people's property to expand the size of roads and add sidewalks is no small
(or popular, or cheap) task.

That's why a lot of places prefer the hands off approach: Legal mandate
sidewalks for all new builds/major changes, but grandfather in all existing
property and let the "problem solve itself" over tens of years.

It kinda works if an area is naturally undergoing development. As farmland
gets more urbanized and developers build housing they're forced to upgrade the
roads to add sidewalks.

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davidw
Road right of ways in most places are way more than sufficient to provide
adequate space for sidewalks, so eminent domain isn't really a big part of the
equation.

It's really a question of political will to stop making everything all about
cars all the time.

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609venezia
I live in a sun belt city. It's terrifying. People routinely run red lights
and blast through turns even when pedestrians have the crosswalk with a green
light. I am nearly hit at least a few times a month.

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BlameKaneda
Any idea why? Are the drivers in your city more aggressive and/or are driving
laws more lax compared to other places?

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viburnum
There’s tons of evidence that wide roads induce people to drive fast. If you
want walkability then you need drivers to be scared they might scratch their
side mirrors.

Tom Vanderbilt’s excellent book “Traffic” goes into depth about this.

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madaxe_again
Pedestrian infrastructure in the United States, on the whole, is awful. Yes,
there are initiatives and improvements happening in urban cores, but actually
walking a few miles to get from A to B is downright dangerous in many locales.
Sidewalks arbitrarily vanish or degrade into rubble, unsignalled and
inaccessible crossings in front of malls and retail outlets are rife, and in
more places than I can count I’ve ended up having to walk in the road.

This is understandable, given that many modern cities around the globe have
grown explosively around the automobile - Kuala Lumpur, for instance, is
spectacular in its pedestrian hostility - crossing town feels like a fever
dream after playing frogger and pitfall all night - pits in the sidewalk into
sewers or jagged rebar, bridges to nowhere, unshielded electrical cables
dangling at face height, and even the occasional fence to hop over.

We need to drastically rethink urban design around walkability - more and more
folks in urban cores are choosing to eschew cars in favour of public transit
and pedestrianism, as a result of congestion and consciousness about
environmental impact.

Simply put, cities which prioritise these values will attract the urban
professionals that drive growth. Those that do not will not. It’s not just a
nice thing to have, it’s a necessity in sustainable development.

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tomatotomato37
Not all cities want or need to optimize for urban professionals. The people
moving to places like Florida aren't there for hip job opportunites; they go
to cash out the 401k and play golf for 10 hours a day. To those people better
pedistrian accessibility just means more things to dodge while driving the
Grand Marquis to Cracker Barrel.

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munificent
_> It also suggests that our Sun Belt cities, built around the automobile,
aren’t designed for pedestrians at all. The trend of fatalities could worsen
as more people take to walking and cycling where they previously had not._

This goes for the classic morality play that "cars bad, walking good" which,
like, I get and agree with. One of the reasons I moved to Seattle and live in
the city is specifically because I wanted to be somewhere more pedestrian and
bike friendly.

However, I also grew up in the South and the reality of the climate there is
that it will never be very pedestrian friendly. When I lived in Orlando, I
tried _really hard_ to avoid using my car. I moved to one of the more
pedestrian friendly neighborhoods (College Park). But, when it's 95+°F six
months out of the year, it sucks to walk. You will show up covered in sweat.
With the humidity levels, you will sweat just standing still _in the shade._

Florida was barely developed at all until air conditioning and the automobile
were invented. Seriously, look at the population graph [0]. While the rest of
the US thinks of those technologies as social ills, in Florida they are
critical enablers of livability. If it wasn't for those, the state would still
be an uninhabited sweltering swamp of mosquitos and malaria. (You can argue
that maybe it _should_ be, but most of that population explosion came from the
Northeast and Midwest, so who's really to blame here?)

This is another example of a pattern I see really frequently in the US where
the North throws shade on the South. Yanks have decided that (a) you're bad if
you drive a car (b) you're gross if you show up somewhere covered in sweat,
and (c) you're unsophisticated if show up in flip-flops and shorts.

Then they make people in the South feel bad for not upholding those values,
despite the fact that the climate is massively different there. My impression
is that places like India and Thailand have cultural norms around clothing and
perspiration that let you actually function outdoors in hot climates. But here
in the US, you're obliged to pretend like you're in Los Angeles or Boston even
when it's thirty degrees hotter where you live.

[0]: [http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/florida-
population/#...](http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/florida-
population/#population-data)

~~~
non-entity
I suppose you're right. I've lived in GA, SC, and now Florida and have decided
to give up attempting any sort of walking lifestyle outside of leisure or
small trips. Dripping in sweat after 1 mile of walking doesnt seem very
practical

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traderjane
What does that have to do with people dying in those cities? Are pedestrians
falling over in a haze? And isn’t the west coast the land of sandals and
hoodies?

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non-entity
No, but the article attributes the higher number of deaths in part to the
design of sunny cities being primarily for automobiles. And while many
(including other chains on thos thread) seem to suggest building more
infrastructure for civilians, the comment above me makes a point about the
practicality of that solution (albeit with a bit of a tanget included)

Also my point about the customs (which I've removed as it was more related to
the aforementioned tangent) was more about cultural response to sweat and BO
than the clothing part.

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djohnston
There's a paywall, so im missing some context, but seeing what I see every day
from cyclists, which can best be surmised as "I'm a car when it's convenient,
I'm a person when it's convenient," I'm hesitant to chalk cyclist incidents up
to something more than hubris.

~~~
journalctl
Maybe because roads are designed without cyclists in mind, so sometimes you’re
forced to be a car, and sometimes you’re forced to be a pedestrian.

I bike. Not every day, but enough. I obey lights, I signal, I don’t do
anything overtly stupid. At the end of the day, I weigh maybe 170 and I’m
moving next to objects that weigh maybe one to two tons moving anywhere from
five to 45 miles per hour. In any bad interaction, I’m the one who’s probably
ending up dead. So I’m really sick and tired of this goddamn bickering back
and forth. Everyone should follow laws, yes, but roads should be designed to
be not deadly for cyclists, and drivers (which includes me) should understand
that they’re moving a very heavy object very quickly, and the onus is on them
to do it safely. If that’s not possible, maybe fewer people should be allowed
to drive.

~~~
MisterOctober
Yep. I stay on the road and act like a "vehicle" whenever I feel like it's
reasonably prudent, but many streets / blocks in phoenix are straight up
suicide for a solo cyclist -- no bike lane, motorists not looking, fast and
heavy traffic -- so I end up on the sidewalk probably 20% of the time. [Biking
with a group, it's not so bad because you're _much_ more likely to get seen /
not run off road or cut off]

'Course, in Phoenix, there are verrrry few pedestrians and so colliding with
them is not very likely provided one goes at a sane speed and uses bell /
voice to alert folk you're behind them, but still, it'd be nice to not be more
or less compelled to encroach on pedestrian space while cycling.

