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Besides the other commenter pointing out that Tokyo has low car ownership rates, so if that's your ideal model then you too are essentially on the same side as getting rid of most of the cars, there's a telling fact in your suggestion to remove people from the urban streetscape entirely by removing them to elevated walkways. Cities are for people. Why are cars so important that they should take over everything? Why ban people from the streets instead of banning the cars? I don't want to have to take stairways and bridges everywhere, and then have huge numbers of vehicles whizzing by constantly at ground level emitting lots of pollution (yes, even EVs emit brake and tire dust). That sounds like a dystopian nightmare city, not a pleasant city. And I don't know what to tell you, but I've been to Tokyo, and it's nothing like what you're describing. You sure you went to the right place? The most busy pedestrian crossing in the world, the Shibuya scramble, is in Tokyo, and it's an at-grade intersection. You know why it's safe? Because pedestrians are prioritized over vehicles, and the longest part of the light cycle stops all the car traffic entirely and lets people walk everywhere. And also, the Japanese are simply more communally-minded than Americans. Simply put, their drivers are better-behaved. They generally won't park in marked bike lanes (same as in Amsterdam) because of the social stigma of doing so. Meanwhile, in the US, drivers don't give a shit, and so we need a solution that isn't social stigma -- building more physical protection and removing cars entirely from many spaces, since people can't and won't operate them safely. And the discussion of "fault" is entirely missing the point. It doesn't matter who's at fault in any given fatal crash. What matters is that we have 40k deaths per year in the United States caused by vehicles, more than almost any other cause, and we need to fix it. The fault if anything is a systems problem; we have way too many cars, not enough alternatives to them, and the built city environment prioritizes cars too much and doesn't do enough to separate vulnerable people who aren't in cars from them entirely. |