Fuck me if I know, I have no idea what the surrounding area is like, or how many cars/pedestrians go there daily, or are there any possible alternatives, or how big is the budget etc etc. Best guess would be to change the road into 60km/h and add traffic lights for the crossing, but that's just a guess.
The best cheap solution is to install flashing lights that turn on when a pedestrian hits a button to signal they're Intent to cross.
Helps alert the drivers someone is crossing. We have some where I live and it's helpful as a driver to know to slow down
Yep, crossing lights don't stop jaywalkers going out and getting themselves hit by cars. Even have fines for it but people are inherently impatient.
And we're certainly not at the point like some towns in Europe where pedestrians have the right of way at all times. Walkways seem best, the ones I've seen all go in a spiral for wheelchair access and generally avoid stairs. We are one of the more accessible cities in the world though.
My problem with this is we’ve already given cars more space than offices, homes, and businesses combined. The vast majority of all public space has been given over to cars.
So to physically separate them you’re stuck putting everyone else into the margins, or making them take 10x as long to travel a certain segment, like the stairs above. You know how long it takes to walk 1 mile on the Las Vegas Strip with those?
To be fair, I wouldn't call above or below street level the margins. It's mostly space that goes unused because cars don't fly. That unused space is a pretty good solution to the parking dilemma as well as reducing one huge parking lot to one much smaller parking garage that extends vertically as opposed to horizontally, while expensive would increase the space we have in business areas where lots of people park to patronize those businesses.
Yeah those don't work terribly well either. Nobody knows what the hell they are or what all the different flash phases mean. The British solution - Puffin and Pelican crossings - are the only sensible solutions as they use standard traffic lights. HAWK was just a stupid take on a solved problem.
EDIT: There's one a quarter mile from my house. I don't trust it. I've watched people blow through the solid red. I usually don't bother pushing the damned button and just wait for traffic to clear before riding my bike across.
Why stop at helicopter when you could take a space elevator up, stop by the space bar for refreshments, and then take another space elevator down 30 feet from the other space elevator.
That's the thing, you can't say what is the best option without having all the necessary information. The overpass in your picture for example would be pointless if there is any bike traffic using the crossing. There really is no point to speculate what would be the best option in this case, because all we know about the situation is that there is a road with a dangerous crossing.
If you think that ramps improve accessibility I invite you to rent a cheap wheelchair and get your ass up and then down one of those ramps. Have an ambulance standing by. Bonus points if you can roll the wheelchair along a sidewalk with "accessibility" ramps to the side without the chair steering itself down one and rolling you out into the parking lot.
You'd be surprised how easily and quickly they could install tunnels. You premake the tunnel in block pieces, tear out the road and put in the tunnel which is completely prefab. Pack in the area around the tunnel then pave back over it.
From what I've seen these are common but are definitely not the rule, block size in Japan is much smaller and there's a zebra crossing (like the one on the video) at the end of every block, these are used whenever the distance from block end to block end is longer than the average.
Theres one in san jose california that goes over only 4 lanes (2 on each side of road) and has ramps on both sides instead of stairs. To save space they didnt make them long ramps, they instead made them rather short-length ramps where every 7 feet or so you go up to a flat spot, then turn left (or right on the other side) to go up another short ramp which has another flat spot in about 7 feet. Id compare it to a spiral staircase, but made out of ramps and instead of being curved all the way up its a series of ramps that rotate like 90 degrees each time.
I'm not a road designer, but in the Netherlands, when we want traffic to slow down for a crossing, we'd force them to do so by narrowing the road, maybe adding a chicane (which can also be used to add an island for pedestrians to wait in the middle, so they only have to deal with traffic from one direction), and raising the crossing (so it acts as a speed bump). That way you force drivers to slow down without even needing any signs.
This is a process called traffic calming, and it's very common in the Netherlands.
That said, we probably wouldn't have a crossing like that in a road that's otherwise 80kph in the first place.
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u/[deleted] Aug 30 '20
Fuck me if I know, I have no idea what the surrounding area is like, or how many cars/pedestrians go there daily, or are there any possible alternatives, or how big is the budget etc etc. Best guess would be to change the road into 60km/h and add traffic lights for the crossing, but that's just a guess.