People did say exactly the same for regular cars. The result was a massive advertising campaign to establish the concept of jaywalking, and to make the street the sole domain of the car.
I can easily imagine a similar campaign to label pedestrians as irresponsible for walking outside without an ultrasonic emitter, or a lidar reflector, or whatever integrates with the self-driving system. Whatever shifts the responsibility away from the car and onto the deceased.
2. Roads existed before cars. This is an extremely American view to think that roads should be exclusively for cars. Roads should be for PEOPLE, regardless of which mode of transport they are using.
Okay, but now cars do exist. Do you think it's reasonable for cars capable of traveling 40mph should be stuck behind pedestrians at walking speed? Our modern transportation infrastructure exists for a reason, and that reason is speed/effeciency. Most areas with heavy pedestrian traffic have sidewalks. If I'm going 60mph down the highway then the presumption that I should be subjected to pedestrians casually strolling across is absurd.
Already today, cars do not travel at 40mph in those areas with heavy pedestrian traffic--the typical speed limit on a city street is 25mph, and even that is probably above typical speeds. If you want cars to travel more quickly, you need to resort to highways that completely cut off pedestrian access, which has seriously deleterious effects on the neighborhoods it travels through.
If you try to compromise, you end up with stroads... which turn out to be just as bad as highways for pedestrians in practice, thanks in no small part to people like you who believe that all of the compromises of street design and urban planning should be borne not by vehicular drivers but by pedestrians.
(I'll add a side note here: a lot of efficiency depends on what you're trying to make efficient. Many people--including you, apparently--define efficiency as moving cars with as high throughput as possible. If you instead want to move people with high throughput, usually step one is to ditch cars, since single-occupant vehicles occupy vastly more space than any other form of transportation.)
Alright, but 25mph is still significantly faster than walking speed. I do think that mass transportation would be nice and we could use a better public trans infra in the US, but that doesn't make the fact that waking is still much less efficient that driving. Even with cars taking up much more space, a bunch of cars traveling at 25 mph are able to carry a many more people through a distance X in a period of time T than the equivalent walking would be able to. The alternative that everyone seems to be forgetting is having roads for cars and sidewalks for people, which already exists in the vast majority of areas with a high potentiality for pedestrian traffic.
LOL, cars don't go anywhere near 25mph in Boston. They'll average 15mph, if they're lucky. Even with ~70% of the right of way allocated to cars, there's still too many of them for the road to handle. I don't know what "efficiency" you think cars have over other modes but I'm not seeing it on my commute. More often than not, my bike is stuck behind cars (because the bike lane disappeared) rather than they're stuck behind me.
15mph is still faster than walking speed. I'm not saying cars are the most optimally efficient mode of transportation, just that they are much more efficient that walking.
That's a completely useless comparison that applies almost no where in the world? You need to compare driving vs pervasive transit and bike networks. I doubt New Yorkers or Amsterdammers would accept your efficient car hypothesis.
In the few places with high 100% walking commutes, I don't see cars being more efficient either. Do you want every college student to drive from their dorm to class? How about poor countries without the money to maintain good road networks?
Are you joking? That applies in the vast majority of the world, the exceptions you named are just that, exceptions that are exceptionally rare.
This entire discussion started as whether pedestrians should/shouldn't be on roads. No, they shouldn't. They should be on a sidewalk, best of both worlds.
Speed, yes, but efficiency is questionable. Efficiency depends both on how fast you're traveling, but also on how far you need to travel in order to reach a destination. With minimum parking requirements, the space required for a shop increases drastically. If there's one shop every 50 feet, you can efficiently visit them at low speeds. If there's one shop every quarter mile, walking past a row of shops is impossible. The car traveling 40 mph can go at a faster speed than a pedestrian, but it also requires the shops to be spaced out such that the car can park. Optimizing for speed reduces efficiency.
Not necessarily. This assessment forgets things like sidewalks. I don't think anyone is going to visit shops on main street and every time they leave a shop drives 5 feet further down the road only to park and visit another one. In tightly clustered areas it's most common to park and then walk via a sidewalk to other destinations on the area.
For 1, this is well established history that I didn't feel was necessary to provide sources for. That said, the vox article linked to by jeromegv does a good job of describing the transition.
For 2, I'd make a distinction between paths built for long-distance travel (roads) and paths built for connecting to destinations (streets). The two have fundamentally different goals that cannot be safely achieved at the same time. To allow for high-speed travel, a road should be as predictable as possible, with limited entrances and exits and barriers to prevent people and animals from wandering onto the road, and should be restricted to vehicles that can maintain a high speed. To allow streets to connect to destinations; such as homes, shops, and workplaces; there should be many entrances and exits to the street. The destinations should be packed as tightly as possible, so that they can be reached with a minimal distance traveled. It's not just that these goals require tradeoffs, but that they are fundamentally antithetical to each other.
The best way to satisfy these two goals is by having separate designs for streets and roads. The roads are pathed around pedestrian areas, and allow branching off into them at limited locations. The streets are mixed use, with rougher surfaces (e.g. brick/cobblestone) to prevent high-speed travel. This doesn't exclude motor vehicles from using roads altogether, allowing for use cases such as delivering food to cornershops or dropping off somebody with limited mobility, but does steer motorized traffic off of the streets and onto the roads wherever possible.
1. Fair enough, but sources should almost always be provided. I hadn't heard that particular piece of historical trivia and I don't think it's necessarily common knowledge.
As for the later, why is that any better than just sidewalks and crosswalks, which the majority of areas with heavy pedestrian traffic already have? It'd be incredibly eco-unfriendly, expensive, and impractical to have two different types of roads for cars and pedestrians when we already have a solution that works just fine - sidewalks.
I do provide sources when something is difficult to find, uncommon, or uses numeric values beyond ballpark estimations. Demanding sources for every statement contributes to Brandolini's Law [0], which states "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it." In the spirit of restoring symmetry, I invite you to provide sources for the following statements made in this thread.
* "Most areas with heavy pedestrian traffic have sidewalks." I am uncertain on this one, as heavy pedestrian traffic is more frequent on mixed-use streets. Sidewalks are only used in places with car-centric design, which discourages walking.
* "Even with cars taking up much more space, a bunch of cars traveling at 25 mph are able to carry a many more people through a distance X in a period of time T than the equivalent walking would be able to." I am uncertain on this, because cars require very large amounts of space both for the physical size of the car, the spacing between cars, and the spacing between groups of cars at an intersection.
* "It'd be incredibly eco-unfriendly, expensive, and impractical to have two different types of roads" I'd be interested in a source for this, as I've generally heard that separating out usage improves the efficiency of each. Cars go faster because there are fewer stops requires. Pedestrians die less often because there are fewer cars nearby.
* "Bike lanes are less common than sidewalks" This is correct by my experience, but I've only lived in places with car-centric city planning. Can you provide a source?
I'm interested in continuing this conversation, but not if it is a conversation between sourced comments and unsourced assertions.
2: Roads are also for bicyclists, motorcyclists, and even pedestrians. It's true though that car drivers often think that roads are a car only domain and behave aggressively towards the other mentioned groups
2. No, sidewalks and bike lanes are for pedestrians and bicyclists. Bike lanes are less common than sidewalks so I think it's reasonable to include them on low-speed/highly congested stretches of road, but to assume they should have a full access to, e.g. and interstate or highway is ridiculous and would hinder literally thousands of people.
OK, let's all take a deep breath here - we might just have a different understanding of the word "road". My definition of "road" is not restricted to interstates and highways, but it includes any larger road, err, street. Of course, nobody wants pedestrians or cyclists on highways. It looks like we agree there.
But I refuse the popular notion that roads (as in larger streets, or any street between villages/towns/cities) should be for cars only. The usual examples of Copenhagen, Amsterdam or recently Paris show that shared roads lead to a higher quality of living. I personally appreciate this, and I'd prefer a world where this sharing would be more common.
There’s an entirety different worldview that you are missing here. Check out this great YouTube channel which goes into a lot of detail about how our cities and towns could be better designed. https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes
Sidewalks and bike lanes are not contiguous. Pedestrians and cyclists are not only permitted, but have the right of way, on nearly all roads other than controlled access highways and tunnels, even where sidewalks and bike lanes exist.
Yes but this conversation was about jaywalking and what roads are intended for. No one (I think) is arguing that a bike crossing the rode to go from one bike lane to another is wrong, but that it isn't the intended purpose of roads. Pedestrians do have the right away, but that doesn't make jaywalking illegal, it just makes it so drivers are (rightfully) held accountable for running over pedestrians trying to cross the street. It doesn't give a pedestrian the right to walk down the middle of the street at a leisurely pace
> 2. You don't think that roads should be a car only domain? What do you think roads are for?
You've clearly never had a UPS driver scream "Use the bike lane!" at you after parking his truck in that same bike lane. Drivers have bizarre reflexes for how to use roads.
> 2. You don't think that roads should be a car only domain? What do you think roads are for?
For example for my messanger on my horse so he doesn't get stuck in the mutt on it's voyage to the next city.
... or maybe my zenturie to support my legion?
What makes you think (or suggest) that roads where invented for cars?
I never said they were invented for cars. My question was why don't they think roads, as they are in 2022, shouldn't be a car only domain? This argument of "well their original purpose was for..." is logically incoherent in a multitude of ways. There are thousands of things that we use a bit different than originally as intended due to the advancement of modern tech
I can easily imagine a similar campaign to label pedestrians as irresponsible for walking outside without an ultrasonic emitter, or a lidar reflector, or whatever integrates with the self-driving system. Whatever shifts the responsibility away from the car and onto the deceased.