Matt Yglesias

The Streets We Choose

An interesting Boston Globe Magazine article by Billy Baker looks at state-of-the-art information about how to design streets that are safe and inviting for pedestrians. I understand the journalistic considerations behind doing it this way, but I kind of wish Baker hadn’t led with the nutty-sounding Mondermanite prescriptions for eliminating pedestrian-vehicle separation and road striping altogether. I think those are interesting ideas that people should learn more about, but at the same time it’s worth emphasizing that the bulk of the relevant considerations here are pretty much commonsense.

But to make a long story short, a town or city needs to decide whether or not they really think that maximizing vehicle speed is the right priority for the design of their streets. If you decide to make it the priority, then you’ll wind up with a city that’s bad for pedestrians — narrow sidewalks, wider roads to cross, walk signs that only work if you press a button, intersections where walkers defer to turning traffic, etc. — and at the same time you’ll have fast-moving vehicles that tend to collide with human beings in a relatively deadly manner. If you decide not to make it the priority, then you get the reverse — wide sidewalks, narrow road crossings, adequate walk signals, and intersections where turning traffic defers to pedestrians. Cars will move slower through your city and there will be fewer car-person collisions and those that do occur will be less lethal.

There are some exotic considerations that get a bit weird, but the basic shape of things, as Baker makes clear down the road, is pretty simple. And to me it’s a pretty easy choice. Shifting resources in a pedestrian-friendly direction helps save lives directly. It’s also good for the environment and boosts public health. If you live in a city with a walkable downtown, it might be instructive to go to a block that has heavy automobile and pedestrian traffic and just look at the amount of space dedicated to cars versus what’s dedicated to people. Even in places like New York and Washington, DC where only a minority of city residents commute by car to work, more space is dedicated to the cars than to the people. And in DC, the central business district dedicates almost no space whatsoever to bikes. Not only are those choices that I think are mistaken, but most people barely even realize that the choices are being made at all — but it’s not like it would require magic for the central business district in DC to feature bike lanes on all streets, wider sidewalks, and fewer traffic lanes. And you can bet that people’s preferences about commuting methods would shift in response to a shift in space allocation.