Ignoring pedestrians? Drivers beware!

Drivers who ignore pedestrians, beware! At least, beware if you’re in Chicago.

My buddy Tom Low – architect and planner with Duany Plater-Zyberk’s Charlotte office and founding father of the Civic By Design forum – shares this link to a ChiTrib article about that city considering plainclothes “stings” to catch drivers who endanger people on foot.

The article says on average more than one pedestrian is killed in a traffic accident each week in Chicago – one reason the city takes the problem seriously.

Tom wonders: What are some other things and places that makes it hard for pedestrians here in Charlotte? (And just today, a student at Providence High School was hit by a motorist. Story here.)

He writes, “For example, excessively wide street-corner-turning radii allow for motorists to move faster around corners, while potentially doubling the crossing distance from curb to curb for pedestrians, compared to more traditional tight urban street corners.

“The combination of fast cars and longer crossing distances discourages pedestrians from at least getting an even chance to use the public realm. This will become more of an issue as suburban places like SouthPark rebuild the private property with more urban uses and density, while the public streetscape was originally designed as higher speed, suburban arterials. My office at Queens and Providence in the Myers Park commercial neighborhood suffers from this problem too.”

Charlotte DOT is a lot more sensitive on this than it used to be, but much of the city was built in the bad old insensitive ways.

My beef, as a pedestrian? I have dozens. Here’s a big one: We need more pedestrian crossing lights, and longer crossing times for walkers. For example, in the SouthPark and Morrocroft areas (and lots of others, too) many of the lights don’t give a pedestrian crossing OK at all unless you press the button. Even then you get maybe 5 seconds, max, before that “Don’t Walk” hand starts flashing.

This absurdity is subtly training me to ignore the blinking hand – NOT behavior traffic specialists want to encourage, I presume.