I think the general point people are making to you is that, in many municipalities where right on red would be bad, there are enough voters in the pedestrian base alone that nobody has to “appeal to drivers” in order to win a majority. The issue itself has validity on the basis that the health of the pedestrians should be a higher priority than the feeling that drivers are being impacted negatively by not being able to perform this maneuver. You could maybe make a counterargument comprised of economic impacts, as a couple people have tried to do, or a counterargument about how it saves emissions, but I’m sort of inclined to think that caving and giving it over to cars is sort of an approach that has diminishing returns in both of those directions, compared to the alternative.
You absolutely do not have numbers and do need to consider what hills to die on. Otherwise you’d have basic crap like bike infrastructure in those cities.
Ehh, lot of “those cities” are getting better, if you wanna get more specific as to which one, you know, less general terms, we might get into it and how there are different, you know, ruling party apparatuses that people have to maneuver around and population demographics, I dunno. Mistakes into miracles of covid was that a lot of streets could get shut down and turned into temporary pedestrian streets for limited run studies, or for some amount of days of the week or what have you, so that’s kind of shown people what’s possible.
A lot of it is also that people who live within city limits and benefit from public services/would benefit from stuff like this kind of lack political will. The drive among most urbanists is less to compromise with drivers and is more to educate/appeal to the population who lives in these cities, is what I’m saying. Which, you know, it’s a safer strategy, those are easier people to convince, you’re having to compromise less on goals. I’d generally agree that maybe things like larger traffic engineering standards in these cities need to change, because standard practice is what tends to shape the built environment rather than one-off projects or even kind of broad legislation like banning right on red, but you’re seeing those happen rather than changing standards becaude one of those tends to be much easier.
I think the general point people are making to you is that, in many municipalities where right on red would be bad, there are enough voters in the pedestrian base alone that nobody has to “appeal to drivers” in order to win a majority. The issue itself has validity on the basis that the health of the pedestrians should be a higher priority than the feeling that drivers are being impacted negatively by not being able to perform this maneuver. You could maybe make a counterargument comprised of economic impacts, as a couple people have tried to do, or a counterargument about how it saves emissions, but I’m sort of inclined to think that caving and giving it over to cars is sort of an approach that has diminishing returns in both of those directions, compared to the alternative.
You absolutely do not have numbers and do need to consider what hills to die on. Otherwise you’d have basic crap like bike infrastructure in those cities.
Ehh, lot of “those cities” are getting better, if you wanna get more specific as to which one, you know, less general terms, we might get into it and how there are different, you know, ruling party apparatuses that people have to maneuver around and population demographics, I dunno. Mistakes into miracles of covid was that a lot of streets could get shut down and turned into temporary pedestrian streets for limited run studies, or for some amount of days of the week or what have you, so that’s kind of shown people what’s possible.
A lot of it is also that people who live within city limits and benefit from public services/would benefit from stuff like this kind of lack political will. The drive among most urbanists is less to compromise with drivers and is more to educate/appeal to the population who lives in these cities, is what I’m saying. Which, you know, it’s a safer strategy, those are easier people to convince, you’re having to compromise less on goals. I’d generally agree that maybe things like larger traffic engineering standards in these cities need to change, because standard practice is what tends to shape the built environment rather than one-off projects or even kind of broad legislation like banning right on red, but you’re seeing those happen rather than changing standards becaude one of those tends to be much easier.
Yes. Getting better. Because, and this will shock you, local politicians and people voting for them.