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| Re: What Really Causes Traffic Congestion (1234432) | |||
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Re: What Really Causes Traffic Congestion |
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Posted by fdtutf on Fri Jul 12 17:04:30 2013, in response to Re: What Really Causes Traffic Congestion, posted by BrooklynBus on Fri Jul 12 16:50:53 2013. If you are comparing someone who walks his entire trip and another who drives most of the trip, of course the driver walks less. But what does that prove?It emphasizes that saying "drivers are also pedestrians" is pointless! I already stated that drivers and pedestrians are not two mutually exclusive groups. In a Venn diagram the two circles would intersect. That's all I was saying. It doesn't matter what the interests of the groups are, they will conflict if they both need to use the same space at the same time which happens at 6th Avenue and 42 Street and at Times Square. *At any given moment*, nobody is both a driver and a pedestrian. You can be one or the other, but not both. As you went on to acknowledge above ("...they will conflict if they both need to use the same space at the same time..."). This still leaves me wondering what the point was of saying that drivers are also pedestrians. You avoid that with overpasses which really do not have to be inconvenient if no stairs are involved. Well, yeah, they're still inconvenient, to say nothing of the absurd amounts of space ramps would take up if you were determined to avoid stairs. Climbing a ramp isn't that much better than climbing stairs, except for wheelchair users, and the insanely long ramps that would be required in order to keep the grade shallow enough for them to use the ramps would consume even more space. Ramps would also block, or at least reduce the natural light through, some of the windows of adjacent buildings. Pedestrian overpasses definitely do improve pedestrian and traffic flow since people aren't crowding the sidewalk waiting for the light to change. Yes, getting people off the sidewalks "improves" pedestrian traffic flow by shifting the congestion elsewhere. However, that also gets pedestrians farther away from their destinations, which typically are at ground level. That's what I meant by "detour." And a detour is inherently an impediment. Pedestrians naturally take the straightest route available to wherever they're going, and they do not appreciate being steered away from that route for someone else's supposed convenience. I can see merchants near the overpasses opposing them because fewer people will pass their stores for impulse buying. Well, no kidding. That's another disadvantage they have. It's bad not only for pedestrians who want to reach the stores, but for merchants who depend on impulse shoppers. |
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