The expert report recently posted here makes one of the silliest arguments in
the history of traffic. We have not resolved the conflicts between private
motorists, commercial vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, and etc on the regular
road system in over a 100 yrs, and yet we use technological fixes, stop and
go lights for example, to limit the damage from these conflicts.
The most common unresolved multi-use and multi-user path conflict is the
various lightless pedestrian, dog walkers, joggers, and cyclists. One solution
would be to insist that anyone using the path after dark wear a light, which
isn't going to work for the same reason speed limits fail to reduce motorists'
incessant speeding. Another solution is light the path so that the users can
limit the damage resulting form an potential conflict.
So I am with Goethe, more light.
I would also like to recommend Peter Norton's Fightinng Traffic: The Dawn of
the Motor Age in the American City(MIT Press: 2008), which does a nice job of
tracing the radical change in American's definition of streets from public
spaces similar to parks and cars as murderous tyrants bent on the destruction
innocent lives to the dramatically different world we currently, as it were,
occupy.
Tom Bach
“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of
the human race.”
—H. G. Wells, 1904
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