In the laboratory/manufacturing world we use this thing called the heirarchy of hazards control. It defines the steps you should go through when trying to make a process safer. The heirarchy is Elimination - Substitution - engineering controls - administrative controls - ppe.
What most safety campaigns focus on is the administrative controls, or the 2nd to last step. Slogans and driving laws and things that can easily be ignored. Here, Hoboken has applied engineering controls - physical barriers that separate the person from the hazard. I guess in this case it’s removing an obstructing barrier.
The 20 dollar fix: 2 bollards near intersections to stop people from parking where they force bikes to swerved in front of distracted drivers and block pedestrians from the view of drivers.
You mean some paint on the ground isn’t enough to protect a human from a 2 ton hunk of metal on wheels driven by an idiot that’s not paying attention?
They used plastic bollards that can’t stop them either, but the psychological effect stopped them from parking there.
That, and the damage the bollards will do to the car of whatever asshole that may run over them
$20.00? For government work? I’d like to see some receipts
Presumably thats where the journalist got the 20 dollar per intersection number.
$20 for the bollards, then add $500 an hour for the one union employee and $1,000 per hour for the one union supervisor to watch the one union employee.
Figure this was a 30 minute job that they charged 8 hours for too.
Damn, I need to change unions, sounds like i could be making exponentially more. Where can I learn more about the $500/hr union?
and just in the back: a car parked on the cycling lane
And they didn’t even need traffic cameras to do it. Just made different choices for their road design…
I prefer traffic circles, but this is a step in the right direction and can be retrofit to the car-centric US infrastructure to make it just a little less pedestrian hostile.
Traffic circles… Presumably you mean the super compact euro ones? “Normal” ones are hell as a pedestrian.
Yes, I guess technically these are called roundabouts. I’ve seen a few of the bigger ones that are decently pedestrian friendly with good visibility and well marked crossings. But yeah most of the big ones are gauntlets.
In Europe, we call the super compact ones “normal”.
1 thing to note here is that Hoboken is a very very dense city and very hard to drive around in. Due to this many people are already driving extremely slower than other places. Im not denying that this works, but i dont think other cities will have the success that they did for the same fix. For example it’s neighboring city Jersey City would be a much better example for this and I hope they get to try, but that city is much bigger than Hoboken and not as uniform with the grid system which makes foe a lot more variablea. Still even if it saves 1 life its still worth it, especially if it only costs around $20 an intersection to find out.
It’s still increasing visibility, particularly for when a car turns, where they’re going to be moving slower anyways
I wonder if there are any examples of cities with faster traffic trying to implement similar changes.
Not quite the same but, near me there is an on-ramp for a highway that they added a turn lane onto. They used an existing straight lane and added lines and arrows to denote the change. No one heeded these new lane rules so they added a row of standing, plastic, reflective Ballard like lane dividers to separate the turn lanes from the others. They were quickly driven over by all the traffic and no longer exist.
Or we can fit 2 more paid parking spaces and allow a private company to leach off the city’s residents.
Most city mangers today: Not cost effective.
that is very interesting.
