Comment by blackeyeblitzar 5 days ago
Saving seconds for cars is important. It adds up across all the intersections they cross, and makes travel time shorter. These safetyism arguments are tired because they never honestly consider the tradeoffs, particularly that cars have lots of benefits.
This is my take in a nutshell. Instead of trying to force pedestrians and bikers to share with cars, we could go one level better and fully remove pedestrians and bikers from these roads until a city fund for building them a proper bike-only lane has fully matured. The only reason we force them to share public roads is because it seems logical, but the physics and logistics just doesn't work well.
They get a concrete maturation date on funding the bike-only lane construction, and also get to die another way than being hit by a truck.
So your proposal is to ban bicycles temporarily and walking forever?
Saying walking is banned is ridiculous. However, if one needs to go from A to B in the USA, road funding will always come first. Whatever comes second should be up to the local voters, and each mode of transport should have separate lanes and be funded separately, as the laws of physics always trump any laws of man.
Driver and pedestrian are not immutable characteristics. A driver you slow down in one intersection becomes a pedestrian you made more safe and saved time for in another. I agree that analyzing the tradeoffs are important but the broader picture is that in the US' dense urban environments, many of the benefits of cars are that they allow you to avoid pedestrian hostile infrastructure.
The wheel and spokes of a road network should prioritize cars and most urbanists will concede that, but hubs have a wildly different set of constraints. Picking a one-size-fits-all cost to slowing down drivers completely ignores that reality to the detriment of pedestrians and drivers.