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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

Time the lights and the crosswalks to the lights.

Do not _artificially_ lower a speed limit (people will drive the speed that feels safe) nor _artificially_ make a roadway more dangerous (it will be more dangerous).

Or even better still, build a separated pedestrian way. Skybridges, underground shopping district tunnels, all sorts of engineering solutions exist for isolating pedestrian and vehicle traffic entirely which will maximize safety and in climates with adverse weather encourage year round walking.

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If I'm reading it right, the advice in your comment is basically "Bad Infrastructure Planning 101" in 2023.

The right way to do it is what the Dutch do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA

It's called "traffic calming".

Oh, and underground pedestrian walkways, skybridges, etc are absolutely horrible long term solutions. If you'd use one of them for extended periods of time, you'd know. They're generally under maintained over the decades, they tend to get dirty and attract homeless people as shelter (I don't want to get into the debate of why homeless people need to use them as shelter), they're for various reason a top target for muggings, they inconvenience the people you should be encouraging (pedestrians) by greatly increasing the distances they have to walk, which means that people will just stop walking when their 500m straight line walk becomes a 1.2km runaround, etc.

You don't need to make the infrastructure more dangerous to lower speeds, it only needs to feel that way (narrower RoW with some plants around, more constant small curves, ...). If it would be more dangerous at higher speeds, but speeds are decreased due to this, it is often safer in the end.

Separate pedestrian ways mostly suck. Segragated infra in very bad weather is used, but in most conditions walking at ground level is preferred. In Germany, many Pedestrian Underpasses (often with shops), Overpasses, Skywalks were abandoned in favor of level-crossings, due to accessability concerns, pedestrian dislike, maintainance hassle and the general tendency of them to get unattractive very quickly.

The Netherlands seems to do pretty well with segregated infrastructure?

My understanding is that in dense towns and cities, the Dutch don't segregate infra very much. Though at some level of density/space they tend to drop car lanes entirely, like in the densest plazas of city centres.

In rural areas, segregated infra makes a ton of sense. Nobody wants to be near noisy, dangerous cars over 40mph. So they build separate bike and pedestrian paths in rural areas to connect the denser parts of the country without the need to get in a car in between.

It's a mix. On mid-size urban roads, the bike, ped, and auto lanes tend to be separated, but usually at the same grade. On smaller urban roads, bike and auto can be mixed, but speed limits are generally lower there than in the US. And in the suburbs/rural areas, there are definitely completely separate bike paths (in addition to mix of other layouts).

Typical urban road... https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XuBdf9jYj7o/maxresdefault.jpg https://bicycledutch.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/cyclelanes0...

Mixed on a slow neighborhood road (30kph is 18mph)... https://coordinates.ce.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/images...

Completely separate bike path... https://bicycledutch.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/cyclelanes0...

In the sense that they're not part of the road and may have their own RoW, yes. In the sense that non-ground level infrastructure is commonly used do replace level crossings and seperate cars and others, no.

> You don't need to make the infrastructure more dangerous to lower speeds, it only needs to feel that way (narrower RoW with some plants around, more constant small curves, ...).

That probably won't work long-term, see for example 55mph state highways that newcomers to the area tend to drive annoyingly slow on.

It's pretty setteled that people tend to drive slower on eg. narrow/twisty roads or with more stuff near the road (e.g. trees in an alleyway), even after acclimating to them.

Underground passages are so welcoming at night. Bridges need accessibility, lifts etc, all these are very costly too. Better still, make cars drive slower around pedestrians, increase penalties for cars that hit pedestrians and let them stop thinking that speeding is just something everyone does.

Why not put the drivers underground? Raise gas taxes to pay for it.

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