What will happen if we’ll RETHINK our street corners?
We'll realize that until now, we've made them too car-centric. Street corners are designed for fast driving, which means pedestrians have to risk their safety just to cross the street.
But if we’ll rethink our street corners we’ll get
■ More space for pedestrians
■ Shorter crossing distance and time
■ Greener spaces
■ Safer Streets
■ Beautiful street corners
A great example from PGAA Creative Design in Manila
Forcing pedestrians to cross at corners is a stupid multiplication of "pilot work load" for everybody whether on wheels or feet.
Ample -signaled- pedestrian crossings mid-block, away from the complication of intersections would produce a positive statistical benefit.
Red light for automobiles. Simplify, reduce the processing load.
Against "improving the flow of traffic," if by "traffic" we mean people sitting on their asses.
In reality, a postive engineering trade.
The arithmetic on that inverts!
Vehicles may cross wherever they want, pretty much. People? 50% of the time adding steps.
[It's true that folks on multi-block headings need corners. I'm certainly not suggesting those be removed from the menu. Even so, an option for mid-block will improve stats, let alone being a bit more fair. Big picture, think about how the term "jaywalking" came to be. That was a removal of rights.]
@Doug_Bostrom @LiorSteinberg how do you figure it adds steps 50% of the time? If I'm walking down first avenue and want to head in the same direction the whole time I would constantly be going into the middle of blocks then around half a block, etc.
Unless you propose punching a path through the center of every block to create a walkway, which is something we could consider of course but a significantly larger undertaking.
As I mentioned in my edit, yes.
The thing that would be nice to partially address is the insane choice to force pedestrians to cross at the most dangerous places: intersections, where attention is heavily sliced.
And if I'm mid-block and want to cross to another location mid-block across a roadway, I'm -made- to go to that danger. That's stacking crazy.
Lior Steinberg 
Doug Bostrom
kungtotte