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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

A lot of walking would be eliminated too if you actually completely got rid of perpendicular intersections. You kind of need cars to stop sometimes to make it possible for people not in vehicles to get through safely.

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There are still crosswalks which are distributed around the circle. Rarely there are pedestrian tunnels to get inside the doughnut, like in Paris to visit the arch.

In Arnhem they did the reverse: Vehicular traffic is raised to a higher level and pedestrians and bikes take the lower (inner) level.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Airborneplein,+6828+KP+Arn...

It's extremely efficient.

That's really awesome, but you need a tremendous amount of land to make that possible.

Most roundabouts of that type I know have replaced similarly sized all asphalt intersections. Now there is more green. When planned ahead there really isn’t that much extra real estate required if you are willing to have steeper grades for pedestrians only for example.

Oh wow, years ago I randomly came across that place upon once when I was in Arnhem and was very confused about it, interesting to see it here!

I definitely like the idea of this but it seems like the tendency is always the opposite because it's much cheaper to build a pedestrian overpass than a car one, even though they're also an accessibility nightmare and usually kind of a terrible experience and aesthetic blight in their own right.

Those crosswalks tend to be -in my experience - some of the most stressful to interact with. If they're controlled then you've just made the whole thing even worse than they were before. If they're not then you've got a much harder time as a pedestrian to figure out when it's safe to cross (because of the curve) and the traffic all wants to free flow.

I dunno. Maybe I just haven't experienced the right ones, but my experience is that the most pedestrian friendly urban spaces have mostly (roughly) straight lines and right angles and lots of natural or man made barriers to free flow of cars to prevent them from going too fast. I don't know how you can square that circle.

One option:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble

Oh wow never knew this had a name and have been curious on the origins/history of the "diagonal crosswalks" for a long time - have only seem them in specific districts/neighborhoods in Oakland/SF.

Thanks for the link, a bit sad to read to following(!)

> later fell out of favor with traffic engineers there, as it was seen as prioritizing flow of pedestrians over flow of car traffic.

Mathematically speaking I am not sure why they are not all like this. It means one pedestrian phase in the sequence (so sequence is quicker) and everyone is a winner. There is one near me it is a joy to go diagonal!

It's only better if the intersection has high, consistent pedestrian traffic. Unfortunately, many cities aren't built to be pedestrian friendly so those criteria are rarely met outside of busy cities, downtowns, and college towns.

But if the intersection allows pedestrians at all it needs two sets of allowing pedestrians across.

Unless it does that awful hybrid “turn if no one is crossing” crap that I hate as both a driver and pedestrian.

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