Perhaps I sound like a car-centric advocate here, but the fact of it is that our mentality for the past several decades has been to move cars and only cars. Now we’re attempting to shift away from that, but our arterials are quite simply designed for cars and are not conducive toward pedestrians – especially schoolchildren. We must decide whether we should build arterials to move traffic from one distant place to another; or if any can be converted into collector-class streets more conducive to neighborhood and multimodal traffic – requiring that people live near their work. It is worth asking yourself whether or not the latter is even feasible in today’s society.

I’m not car-centric, but I’m certainly not anti-car. All modes have their place, and I fully support the works of the late Hans Monderman and his concepts of shared space. However, we need to provide shared space and traffic calming where they are applicable: in environments where we *want* more equality among modes. If we want to install devices in the name of safety while all-the-while thinking “mobility first”, things will only get worse.

We need our respective planning and transportation agencies to (re)consider roadway hierarchies, uses, functions, and desired mode splits; and where schools fit into this infrastructure. Greater cooperation should be encouraged between planning and transportation agencies to ensure that important facilities such as schools can be located in a safe area whereby the roads are designed to reflect safety moreso than mobility.

With regards to crosswalks: I outright refuse to place *any* marked crosswalk at an uncontrolled location that crosses a roadway with more than one lane in a direction. The rationale is that while one motorist may properly yield, another motorist may either rear-end that vehicle; or could swerve to avoid and then strike the pedestrian that thinks it’s clear. I’ve seen this occur countless times, both as the driver, as the pedestrian, and with the latter: as the person getting hit. The real task has been trying to sway my coworkers, supervisors, & citizenry to my own opinions.

(In case anyone didn’t catch, the ‘right’ I’m talking about is the right to choose to own and operate and dangerously fast vehicle.)

Amen to that!

And yes…
“often the driver is someone taking a kid to the school..”

Some of the most important work of SRTS is to get the parents who are driving to stop since they are sometimes the source of the very issues they are worried about!

Yes, ideally we wouldn’t need the traffic light and we would create an environment where we ‘calm’ the traffic so it is clear that people can’t speed through this area but traffic engineers are even less likely to take these steps than they are to put in a traffic light.

I have an issue in my town where the traffic engineer wont put in a crosswalk because 1) it will get people crossing the spot in too many places (heaven forbid) and 2) it will give people a ‘false’ sense of security. The problem is they already are crossing in that spot AND cars are less likely to stop for them because it is not marked. We’ve watched that spot many times as parents try and cross and they wait longer and have to be more aggressive than at the marked crosswalk one block down.

The concern with our traffic department is moving cars. Until that dynamic changes people in our community will continue to fight for the crumbs of trying to get some sort safe and comfortable feeling when crossing a street- be it a traffic signal, sign, or crosswalk.

PS- I’m a Safe Routes to School coordinator so I’m interested to hear your thought on this topic.