Here’s some blunt truth — I haven't seen a single North American city with a stated policy goal of mobility "balance" that has actual street standards/designs, budgets, supporting land use decisions etc that would actually ACHIEVE mobility balance. Not yet at least. It’s usually code for some version of the status quo, only slightly better — still cars first.

#cities #cars #urbanism #streets #transport

@BrentToderian any thoughts on a city that seems likely to be the first to make such a commitment?

@Cldfire @BrentToderian I suspect it will have to be a state.

Municipalities usually have their hands tied by state and federal guidelines when it comes to road design. Many of the roads are actually funded at that level to boot.

Stuff like 25mph minimums, minimum vehicles-per-day to justify a traffic light or crosswalk, and so on.

@viktor @Cldfire @BrentToderian Strangely enough, there's a very similar concept in networking to quantify such unfairness -- Jain's Fairness Index:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_measure#Jain's_fairness_index

One problem that happens all over the Internet is when a single network flow shares many streams of communication within it, as a bundle, making those N flows get the share of only 1 flow, creating unfairness. (This was a big concern in the migration from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, because the latter two have many network requests in a single flow.) This is analogous to a bus getting the same priority as a car at a streetlight despite usually carrying many more people.

Fairness measure - Wikipedia