|
> The YouTuber Not Just Bikes made a great point in one of his videos: why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate? If people keep falling off a walkway, we don’t hold town hall meetings to debate the merits of pedestrian safety, we don’t do studies on the impact to traffic flow, we just put up a railing. In my opinion, this isn't a great point, but a naive one. Literally anything can be argued for or against on the grounds of safety, and the fact that a safety-based argument exists isn't grounds to remove it from public debate. Also, blindly putting safety above all other concerns is just "safetyism", rather than a balanced argument. In the case of the railing, apart from a minor expense, there isn't impact to others. In the case of anti-car road diets, an attempt to create more safety will cause most users of that road to lose lots of time (to reduced speed limits, increased traffic). To most people, a few road fatalities a year simply does not matter in the grand scheme of things - it's a minor cost compared to the huge time savings of fast and convenient driving infrastructure. > Here in Philadelphia, advocacy groups spent years fighting to have a wide, lethal stroad that runs through the middle of the city put on a road diet. Residents were polled, and something like 70% of people in the surrounding neighborhoods were in favor of it. Mind linking to the poll? I find it hard to believe since the reality is that most people favor roads that are wide and have high speed limits, so they can get around quickly. A small but loud minority tends to argue, often successfully, for road diets. But most people aren't in favor of a war on cars because they get a lot of use from cars. Additionally, what you're claiming about the poll being ignored is the opposite of what I've seen in west coast cities. Here, anti-car activists get into the transportation department positions and then try to implement their ideological plan regardless of polls or studies. Usually, they run dishonest polls that provide justification to whatever view they already have - for example, an online poll that only activist groups are aware of, which lets them get whatever numbers they want. If a poll disagrees, they don't talk about it or act against it anyways (example: https://crosscut.com/2018/04/seattle-city-hall-listen-consti...). |