Highway 22 and the ramp system are real barriers and there is no place to cross safely |
the online news piece |
1937 propaganda - via NYRB |
The medium alternative, UC, has ad estimated cost of $9.5 million |
The other is the proposed Marine Drive by Wallace Park, part of the giant bridge and highway known as the Third Bridge. (With more time you may think of others?)
Marine Drive high-speed expressway skirts Wallace Park Kids will want to cross it to play in the park |
Pedestrian Impedance |
Marine Drive will add another layer, a busy barrier of zooming cars. And people will not want to make the lengthy out-of-direction travel to reach the signalized crossings - and indeed, if Marine Drive is designed primarily as an expressway, places where we might think signalized crossings are appropriate will find them erased as high-speed auto through-put is prioritized in the design process. Already we have seen a morph in the "Salem Alternative" towards the bigger 4D.
What happened on Wednesday night will happen on a high-speed Marine Drive near the park.
And the story will be, as it seems likely to be here, that the people on foot were in the wrong place and they were in the way - that this was an unsurprising-but-tragic outcome after a bad choice by a person on foot. The driver will not be at fault.
And that's because we design roads (or segments of roads) explicitly for this outcome: To exclude road users other than people in cars. (And we buttress this with a legal framework of authorized crossing points at marked and unmarked crosswalks.) This system might be ok for rural interstates, but in many ways it is not appropriate for urban byways.
If we know a "jaywalking" fatality is a likely outcome of a design for an urban highway, why would we continue to use such designs?
1 comment:
On Marine Dr. Recently no third bridge has been attacking the Salem alternative because it doesn't provide a Marine Dr. Expressway. They have not been arguing against Marine Dr. They have been arguing that it doesn't provide the benefits of an expressway for regional traffic.
I believe that configuration of Marine Dr. is already in the TSP and supported by the West Salem NA. So at least from a planning level, the damage is done.
One of the missed opportunities in the no build fundamentalism is improving the design of these intersections. A roundabout would be the best option for Glen Creek intersection. If you ever get a chance to ride in Bend, I think you would agree that they are far superior to signalized intersections for a variety of reasons.
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