I live in Denver - it's got the Standard American Design on every junction (every junction is a SAD junction)
There's a house near here that was written about in an article - it's at the end of a long straight road, and then there's a curve, and often-enough people go way too fast on the road, don't catch the curve, bounce through a bunch of grassy median and end up HITTING THIS HOUSE!
It's been hit so many times.
so, I really like bollards (https://josh.works/bollards) and I went to his house to see about adding some. He'd already had large rocks (1000lbs) placed in his yard, and after the most recent car hit them (and bounced one of them into his house) he added some 3000 lb rocks. It's still not a full layer of protection, but it's better.
Anyway, the real danger is the junction, not him having good enough or not good enough bollards. So, there was a meeting at his house the next day with city traffic engineering staff, police, city council, lots of neighbors...
and I'm popularizing a fix that I'm calling 'the traffic bean' - it's a shared-space junction, that is as effective as the existing junction, and much, much safer:
The director of Denver's DOTI has been looking it over, as a city council person has been pushing for it to get approved, and it might get approved! This would be basically the first real improvement in how american junctions are designed in decades.
It's currently just my side-project wish. All I want is to live near and use a road network that doesn't deal death constantly to others.
i fear for my kid's life, the same way these kids lives were affected. American road networks are horrific, I cannot take seriously anyone who takes them seriously.
alistairSH · 24m ago
Is that effectively a double roundabout/traffic circle? I'm not sure I intuitively understand how to navigate the bit of the "bean" that's round but doesn't have a central circle to flow around? [I'm totally fine with UK-style traffic circles, single, double, multi-lane, etc]
drcongo · 6m ago
There's a couple of these in Bodmin [0], Cornwall that I've driven through a few times. It used to be traffic lights and was constant jams at each junction. I'd never seen one before when they first changed it, I approached cautiously, drove onto it cautiously, and exited pretty impressed. I do wonder what less considerate drivers are like on it though. Local residents apparently complain about it [1], but then it seems to be part of the British psyche to complain about anything new and different, especially if it's done by your local council.
Everything about American cities makes more sense when you realize they are designed entirely for cars to go fast. That is the sole metric and everything is optimized to sure cars can go as fast as possible no matter the cost, both literal and less tangible.
bryanlarsen · 50s ago
And ironically, you can generally drive faster from point A to point B in Amsterdam quicker than you can in a comparable American city. Point A & B are closer together in Amsterdam, and you're so much less likely to get stuck in traffic in Amsterdam.
SirFatty · 48m ago
A very broad generalization that just isn't true. Certainly not for residential areas.
foxyv · 38m ago
Have you seen how wide residential streets are in America? They are also very straight and cleared of obstructions. In other countries you will see traffic calming measures such as chicanes and road narrowing. In my own neighborhood people won't park on the street because people driving 40+mph will crash into their cars randomly.
potato3732842 · 35m ago
Exactly. Culdesacs exist. Residential developments with all sorts of absurd meandering roads have been the norm since the 70s or 90s depending on where you look. They have their own problems though.
I wonder how many social issues would be rapidly solved it we just rejected people from the discussion for spewing overly simplistic opinions on the basis that they clearly don't "get" all of the nuances of whatever is being discussed.
alistairSH · 18m ago
Culdesacs are effectively a rich person's solution to "Main Street is too fast and dangerous". They also don't answer the question of "how do I walk someplace useful" - like the local grocery store highlighted in the article.
For reference, I live in a "culdesac" neighborhood (3 big ones smushed together). The main suburban street that we use to actually get anywhere is 2-5 lanes wide, 40mph posted but 50mph actual speeds, with limited pedestrian crossings and in the 8 years I've lived here at least 2 pedestrian fatalities on a 2 mile stretch.
This is pretty typical of the DC suburbs (largely built in the 70s-present). Smaller enclaves that are "walkable" in the sense you can walk around the block. But they aren't walkable in the sense you can live your life sans car/bus/whatever.
silisili · 1h ago
As a kid, I remember at least in the area I grew up in(USA, kinda poor) there were a lot of pedestrian bridges and underroad tunnels. I realized it's something I rarely if ever see as an adult in pretty much everything built since. Did they just stop making them?
mapt · 1h ago
I was always warned away from them because who knows who might be inside. There were some legitimate issues with the lack of any eyes on these spaces permitting mildly antisocial behavior, and some illegitimate issues with every other made-for-TV crime movie featuring a rape or murder in them; The "back alleys" of suburbia.
pixl97 · 1h ago
The answer mostly is about when they built them. My guess is this was from the 50's or 60's on a lot of this stuff, when the amount of suburbs was still low which limited the costs of infrastructure spending on maintenance. Now we can't afford that because we have zillions of miles of roads that have to be paved and kept up for low tax providing single family homes. The density of these houses is too low to justify tunnels/bridges all the places we need them.
Then add in modern cost disease on top of it and it starts making sense.
bluGill · 30m ago
Roads are nothing to governments budget. They are big to normal people but the cost is very small to any town and they are visible. That is why so much happens - - you can build them for cheap enough and get votes without spending much. Or you can appear to cut spending without touching the budget. Anyone who really cares about spending ignores roads while those who don't play games with that area to look like they do something without affecting anything
pasc1878 · 1h ago
In the UK at least subways under roads have gone out of fashion I think mainly as they get used by homeless as shelters and urinals. SO we get more road level light operated crossings.
as for footbridges they were uncommon in towns at least.
dddddaviddddd · 1h ago
Better to design a street that can generally be crossed safely, than to make a road so dangerous that pedestrians have to use tunnels and bridges. People should be able to cross a street safely anywhere.
pixl97 · 58m ago
I mean, not exactly with the cities that already exist. I mean, we could do what you say, but you'd get voted out of office and hung on a cross for the immediate economic crisis you'd create in most major cities. You simply can't have 1 to 2 vehicles per household as exists in our suburbs now with all the places those cars go miles away. It will cost places like the US tens to hundreds of trillions over decades to 'fix' this issue.
renewiltord · 1h ago
People don't like them because they attract trash and junkies. The maintenance cost is too high. To say nothing of the cost and environmental law protection that prevents their construction.
nluken · 1h ago
I know what the author is getting at but he frames the article like he agrees with the State charging the parents with involuntary manslaughter, which, barring some detail not included in the linked NYT piece, seems ridiculous to me.
The death of a 7 year old is a tragedy. Why do we then need to feel the need to hit bereaved parents with a manslaughter charge? Either there's something missing from the story or we're blaming a systemic issue on individual negligence.
noah_buddy · 1h ago
I don’t think that’s a reasonable takeaway considering the follow through to the end of the article where he states that the environment is the culprit. If anything, I think his supposition is that any one of innumerable actors are just as a guilty as the parents but that our system must reduce scope to find a specific culprit and charge them with something. I don’t think the author would agree with charging the parents with manslaughter, but I think the implication is that they were in some sense negligent considering the environment in which they live.
tantalor · 40m ago
> they were in some sense negligent considering the environment in which they live
Criminal negligence involves a "gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the same situation".
Given the 7-year-old was escorted by a 10-year-old, I think that alone demonstrates a reasonable level of care was taken to protect the younger child.
If the streets are too dangerous for a 10-year-old to cross safely, then you need to look a lot deeper for the true source of the risk.
karmakaze · 13m ago
Yes, this is what caught my eye:
> West Hudson Boulevard is a high-speed arterial road with narrow sidewalks, a tiny median, and no truly safe crossings. Even a healthy, alert adult is taking their life in their hands by walking to that store. For a child, it’s playing the worst kind of roulette.
The fact that it did have a sidewalk, even a narrow one means that it's meant for walking. If it's unsafe then the existence of the sidewalk is only asking for trouble. It either has a sidewalk and is safe, or it isn't safe and shouldn't have a sidewalk. Having a sidewalk and being unsafe is the fault of the city/construction not the user.
Claiming a child was playing with roulette amounts to it also implying that lethal roulette games for kids is something that should be legal.
alistairSH · 11m ago
Agreed. The sidewalk is not fit for purpose - too narrow, adjacent to high-ish speed traffic, frequent turns into shopping plazas, few/no pedestrian crossings, and no sidewalk on the opposite side of the road, nor on many intersecting roads.
alistairSH · 12m ago
The street is, in fact, too dangerous for a 10-year-old, or even an adult.
There's a skinny sidewalk on one side. No sidewalk on the other. No signaled crossings for blocks. High-ish speed traffic.
Given an option, nobody would walk that particular stretch of highway.
Should the parents have been charged? Probably not (unless there are details missing from the artcile). Should we reconsider how we build our suburbs? Absolutely.
runako · 1h ago
> there's something missing from the story
The missing piece is a picture of the parents. The author argues that the system needs to lay blame somewhere, and the parents present as a soft target.
roncesvalles · 51m ago
I'm not a lawyer so I can't comment on the charge itself but as a lay citizen, after reviewing Street View, the parents are definitely at fault.
That area is not walkable and I wouldn't trust a 7 year old to go there alone, period. And then to allow them to jaywalk at the spot where the kid was struck is downright unconscionable. And the median looks like it's easy to lose your balance over (I suspect that's what really happened).
I'm not generally against the notion of letting a 7 year old walk alone in public but this isn't some cornerstore at the end of a 25mph residential street. This is basically a highway. Although the speed limit on that stretch is 45mph, I'm pretty certain drivers would be hitting 60 there since the road leading into it looks like a 60 road.
alistairSH · 9m ago
But there's a sidewalk there. Without any thought, we should be able to assume a sidewalk is fit for purpose.
The fact that we have a sidewalk that's "obviously" not fit to purpose is a massive failure on the part of the local transit authority/DOT.
tantalor · 38m ago
> I wouldn't trust a 7 year old to go there alone
The 7 year old was not alone, he was with his older brother.
> They had sent Legend out to the grocery store with his 10-year-old brother when he stepped out in front of traffic.
'jaywalking' is a term that supports the concept of vehicular homicide.
A normal ethical system would say the obligation to not kill anyone with a vehicle is on the operator of the vehicle. The environment should also support safe handoffs between priorities.
The parents are not at fault - they were born into this shitty country. It is the road engineer, the city engineer, full stop.
Jaywalking is a supremacists, propagandistic term, I would propose it be excised from your vocabulary: https://josh.works/jaywalking
It was used mostly to imprison formerly enslaved people for walking around. In some american cities in the 50s and 60s, thousands of people PER YEAR were ARRESTED for jaywalking!!!!
It's how deputized slave patrols (police) can easily initiate harassment against the enslaved/formerly-enslaved class.
potato3732842 · 26m ago
There's a lot of nuance to marked crossing vs not. You can definitely make an argument that waiting for a break in straight, undistracted, traffic and then jumping to the median is safer than trying to cross at an intersection where there's other things going on. If you do it right, it can be much safer.
On the other hand, if you do it wrong it can be way worse. Considering that we're talking about children who have no experience behind the wheel and no ability to accurately predict what the drivers will do I think "use a crosswalk and wait for traffic to let you cross" is likely the best advice.
All that said, your race baiting language policing game is stupid, malicious and actively detracts from the discussion.
We are rounding a surface street with a 45 limit to a highway at 60 and then pretend its obviously unsafe. This is obviously wrong, given the crosswalks.
Also, we have 0 idea if the child was allowed to jaywalk. We know they were on the phone with the older one at at least some point. That's all.
It's a tragedy, but, hard to get my head to the idea that its manslaughter that both parents are culpable for. As noted in coverage, it's an odd gap compared to how unsecured guns are treated.
amluto · 30m ago
> This is obviously wrong, given the crosswalks.
If you’ve marked the right spot, I count one single intersection within credible walking distance that has crosswalks at all, and it only has crosswalks in two (!) of the four places where they ought to be.
I guess that, if you happen to be at the SW corner of Lyon and W Hudson, then you’re just stuck there? There’s even a “SCHOOL” marking without a crosswalk a short distance to the south.
omnicognate · 1h ago
On the contrary, he makes it pretty clear he doesn't agree with it.
> So we do the next best thing for our consciences: we blame the victims. We prosecute the parents, demonize the driver, or scold the pedestrian for “not being careful.” And in doing so, we avoid indicting the real culprit: the American development culture that produced this environment.
nluken · 1h ago
It came across more mixed to me. It seemed like he spent the whole article making the case for negligence and then took it back at the end.
pixl97 · 56m ago
Hence why people should read entire articles instead of just headlines and bites of it.
dddddaviddddd · 1h ago
I'd be happy if whoever built the road (municipality, state, etc) had civil liability for deaths and injuries, in cases where it could be shown that an inadequate effort was made to protect pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists (nearly all roads in Canada/US, unfortunately). Maybe that could be a positive incentive for safer design from the people with the power to change the situation.
pixl97 · 36m ago
But it's not just the road. The road itself is an outcome of the buildings on it. When you have things like Super Walmarts/Targets taking up 500,000 square feet, with another 500k sqft of retail shopping surrounded by single family homes you pretty much guarantee that people have to drive there. The entire parking lot is pedestrian unfriendly from the number of cars that arrive there to the excessive heat generated in summer, especially in the southern US.
It's the single family home buyer with two cars and is a registered voter that is demanding the human unfriendly architecture at this point. We are getting more integrated architecture and people seem to like it, but it doesn't replace the millions of miles of bad design we already have.
renewiltord · 57m ago
Inevitably you'll have to grandfather in existing infrastructure because a lot of it is from ancient times and all you'll do is make it impossible to have a Chinatown, or a NY brownstone. So what you'll get is that almost nothing new gets developed because the cost structure makes it impossible.
Everyone always thinks "why don't we make it harder to make things and that way they'll be nice" but they can't connect the dots to "but to do that we have to grandfather in the existing stuff" and from that to "nothing new will happen and all the old things will stay that way".
Thing of the obvious effects, man. Come on.
CalRobert · 42m ago
Why couldn’t you have a China town or brownstone? If the infrastructure is unsafe for cars, don’t allow cars there.
potato3732842 · 20m ago
Because you people and the sum total of the "well intentioned" regulation you peddle across the myriad of issues you peddle it render the kind of organic incremental and piecemeal development that yields those sorts of neighborhoods an economic non-starter.
CalRobert · 2m ago
… huh?
pixl97 · 33m ago
I mean, seems like a smart idea until you realize at least the US is a democracy (well hopefully still) and the moment you tell people they can't drive their car home they will vote you out or lynch you. So there's that.
Unfortunately the answer isn't going to be telling people they can't do something. We already don't give a damn about the number of deaths we cause, so the actual answer is probably somewhere closer to attempting to educate people so eventually we won't want it.
CalRobert · 32m ago
Usually the problem is the locals do want traffic calming but they are overruled by suburbanites who have more power and want to force their cars in to old neighbourhoods (and then complain about parking)
shortrounddev2 · 43m ago
> Inevitably you'll have to grandfather in existing infrastructure because a lot of it is from ancient times and all you'll do is make it impossible to have a Chinatown, or a NY brownstone. So what you'll get is that almost nothing new gets developed because the cost structure makes it impossible.
I don't see how that's true - if you create cities or neighborhoods which are more walkable, such as New York's Chinatown, then you'll have less civil liability than suburban car-centric infrastructure. I would think that NY style neighborhoods would be MORE incentivized
dmoy · 51m ago
> If this were a neighborhood where people regularly fired guns in the air, we would warn parents to keep their kids inside. A stray bullet may not be intentional, but it’s a predictable outcome of such an environment. On West Hudson Boulevard, the stray bullets are motor vehicles, and the result is the same: occasional, random, but entirely foreseeable deaths.
Maybe that analogy is a little off.
1. The cases where parents are charged with negligence in the context of guns is extremely rare, and like.... kid is a mass shooter or something like that. Or kid shoots someone (or themselves accidentally, and often parents are not charged in that case). The analog here - charging the parent of a kid who is accidentally shot by a total stranger, never happens.
2. It's also wrong order of magnitude on numbers? Accidental stray bullet shootings of kids do happen, but they are extremely rare compared to kid-accidentally-shooting-self-or-friend or car-on-pedestrian-kid. Stray bullet hitting you is not predictable at all. You're talking like <40 per year across all ages <10 per year for just kids. A closer analogy would be accidental self shootings or shot-by-friend (~50 child deaths per year?). An even closer analogy would be swimming pools (hundreds per year for both kids drowning in swimming pools and kids hit by cars).
Some of that is due to better road design, some of that is due to better car safety, but a lot of it is... due to kids not being outside as much (30-40% decrease compared to previous generation).
CalRobert · 44m ago
But why do you suppose the kids are outside less?
Kim_Bruning · 23m ago
I wanted to link to "stop de kindermoord" (stop the child murder), but seems like WP doesn't have a proper article about it atm. :-(
The only issue I have with this article is the assertion that we demonize drivers in cases like this. More often than not, we let the driver off the hook and call it an accident.
barbazoo · 1h ago
That picture of nothing but concrete, cars and stores. That's what it's all about. Humans are secondary, and so is their need to be able to walk to a store. What a sad way to live for so many.
michalpleban · 1h ago
> this is not a fixable situation, not in any meaningful sense. You can’t slap in a crosswalk, a flashing beacon, or a strip of sidewalk
What about an overpass?
hathawsh · 1h ago
I really hope the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel takes a look at this. I love the analysis they do there.
bullfightonmars · 57m ago
It would be a very angry rant, after living in NL for a few years and absorbing how good infrastructure can be, he can barely stand this stuff.
hathawsh · 12m ago
Good point. I suppose he has addressed this stuff already. I wish every city planner would watch his videos.
setgree · 48m ago
Well said. This is a subject where I’ve become radicalized as an adult (veganism is the other). Even Brooklyn, where I live, has a million little choices which prioritize cars over pedestrians, and any effort to reclaim space — maybe the avenues bordering prospect park should not have free parking? — creates huge backlash. Culture problems are hard.
omnicognate · 42m ago
> raising the sanity waterline
Is a marvellous phrase. Public opinion can be changed, and it's good to see people doing the hard work to bring that about. It often seems these days that the only people willing to put that long-term effort in have the worst goals in mind.
user214412412 · 1h ago
"why don't kids go outside anymore? all they do is sit around and play video games and play on their phones!"
Qem · 1h ago
I wonder how much are cars contributing to the current fertility crash. The multi-ton metal projectiles that clog the streets and we call cars make the urban landscape hostile to children. They can't be raised "free-range", demanding constant micromanagement from parents indoors.
endemic · 1h ago
There's a major intersection about a mile from where I live, which unfortunately is next to public schools/local library/etc. The other day I was in my car waiting for the light when I saw a young girl on a scooter push into the crosswalk. She had the right of way, but I inwardly cringed and hovered my hand over my horn button, just anticipating that a vehicle was going to turn without seeing her. Fortunately she made it through OK.
CalRobert · 41m ago
As a parent my biggest fear is drivers. Bodies of water are a distant second.
pixl97 · 45s ago
My daughter has her learning permit and it is rather nerve racking. It's by far the most dangerous thing most people do in life. It's like carrying around a loaded gun all while interacting with thousands of other people with loaded guns.
shadowgovt · 1h ago
Road design in towns and cities is probably the biggest example of the POSIWID principle that people interact with daily. In some cases, we know from historical record that the disruption created to communities was actually intentional (highways in many major cities were built through minority communities because they were less politically distasteful to displace or destroy). But even when it wasn't, many American cities have been carved up by arterial roads that have converted livable areas to ghost towns; when a highway cuts you off from the grocery store, you suddenly need a car to buy food where you didn't before, and that forces people from their homes.
Now that we recognize these effects, we can start addressing them.
"Legend’s death was not a fluke. It was the expected outcome of a system working exactly as designed."
I find this to be a very disingenuous take. No one "exactly designed" this road to kill children. There were clearly tradeoffs made for vehicle vs pedestrian usefulness and it's worth examining those if we want the space to be used differently, but this is exploitive rage bait.
jgeada · 1h ago
The tradeoff was that pedestrians were not considered and any pedestrian death was therefore considered an acceptable tradeoff to allow cars the least encumbrance.
shortrounddev2 · 41m ago
I don't think they considered pedestrian deaths an acceptable trade-off. Probably the way it's framed is "if you don't cross at a crosswalk, your death is your own fault" or "if you let your kids go outside unattended, their deaths are your fault". Nevermind the total lack of crosswalks available. They see these things as examples of rule violations rather than a deficit of pedestrian infrastructure
freehorse · 1m ago
It is true that it is not designed to have pedestrians killed; imo it is designed to not have pedestrians at all, and everybody having to have a car to move around. This pays for both the car and the fuel (industries).
csoups14 · 1h ago
The author didn't say the road was designed to kill children. They said the system was working exactly as designed in that it prioritizes vehicular traffic over other concerns and this is a predictable side effect of that prioritization.
mitthrowaway2 · 1h ago
Was it designed to be safe for pedestrians? No? No surprise that it isn't.
Was it designed to allow someone living in that apartment to cross the street to buy a sandwich? No? Then it's no surprise that it didn't.
aeturnum · 41m ago
You can take a look at the map of West Hudson Bldv[1]. It cuts the area in half with a single crossing point on the road. Try asking google how to get to the Philips Center from anywhere north and google will tell you to cross at West Hudson and Echo, an intersection with no lights and no crosswalk. The author is certainly using hyperbole to make their point, but there is no question this road was not well designed for foot traffic. Boulevards like this often have people driving faster than the speed limit and not expecting people. There is tree cover that makes spotting cars in the distance difficult.
These things are simple facts about the road. They would have been known when it was designed and they massively raise the risks for pedestrias as compared to alternate designs. Splitting hairs in the sense that the designers did not "want" to endanger people is hyperbolic as the article. The intent is less important than the effect.
> If this were a neighborhood where people regularly fired guns in the air, we would warn parents to keep their kids inside. A stray bullet may not be intentional, but it’s a predictable outcome of such an environment.
This is literally TFA
neuroelectron · 1h ago
Who lets a 7 year old cross 5 lanes of traffic?
dddddaviddddd · 1h ago
Who builds five lanes of high-speed traffic where people live and would want to cross the street? The problem is the design that puts danger where people want to be.
neuroelectron · 59m ago
Did the street just show up out of nowhere? What ridiculous anti-logic.
michaelsshaw · 43m ago
No. It was purposefully put there, with crosswalks, designed to make lip service to pedestrians while maximizing their chances of dying.
potato3732842 · 11m ago
The street was almost certainly there a long time before it was turned, to the detriment of other aspects, into the current lane high speed boulevard it currently is.
Bjartr · 1h ago
To the article's point, why did we put five lanes of traffic in a place a seven year old could reasonably want to cross? It didn't have to be that way.
neuroelectron · 56m ago
There would be no place the kid wanted to go without that street there. That's why.
Bjartr · 44m ago
But the street could have been designed in a way that was safe for a seven year old to cross. Instead of was designed with little to no thought of how anyone could be safe in that space outside of a car. It's demonstrably possible to facilitate both motor and foot traffic in a sane and safe way, but its not just slapping down five lanes and calling it a day.
mitthrowaway2 · 51m ago
It's not possible to put a Subway restaurant within a safe walk of an apartment complex?
michaelsshaw · 41m ago
Sure there could be. There could be other streets. Thinner, more accessible streets. This may surprise you, but there are other places in the world (crazy, I know), and they have streets that aren't super dangerous.
permo-w · 1h ago
This is quite the fascinating story.
1. Being on the phone is as distracting to pedestrians as it is to drivers. His dad was doing him no favours by having him on the phone the entire journey. Stupid? Yes. Involuntary manslaughter? ...
2. From the number of kids and the given name, you get the sense that "Legend Jenkins" came from a very particular kind of family, one which may have a tendency to rub authorities the wrong way. No doubt if he was from a small middle-class WASP family the reaction would be very different
LorenPechtel · 1h ago
I'm not seeing what's supposed to be so horrible about the spot. I fairly regularly cross worse near home, it's something that demands caution and is completely impossible during rush hour, but the only part of it that worries me is the central median is simply painted, no physical reality and thus does not preclude danger from bad left turners.
(Now, if your vision is flawed it becomes quite another matter. Figuring out how much time you have before that oncoming car gets there requires decent vision--but a driver must make a pretty similar judgement every time they make an unprotected left turn.)
com2kid · 1h ago
Have you ever spent time in a city designed for people first?
Lanes are narrow, forcing cars to go slowly. Side walks are large[1], stop signs, roundabouts, or even curves in the road, exist to force drivers to pay attention to their surroundings and not just speed straight ahead.
> it's something that demands caution and is completely impossible during rush hour,
Cities should be safe for people all day and night. "Can't go out now, too many cars" shouldn't ever be a thing.
My city (Seattle) is working hard on ensuring 0 pedestrian deaths (they were doing good on this goal up until this year), and a driver it is super annoying. As soon as I get out of my car I appreciate the changes that are being made to the city.
[1] I actually saw some exceptions to this in Spain where the side walks were level with the road and there was just so much foot traffic that cars obviously came second in importance to people. I've seen similar design principles in China as well. Really narrow one way streets with only a few feet of set back from the road, lots of foot traffic and the occasional slow moving car.
deepsun · 1h ago
Let me exaggerate for comparison. We don't allow dangerous playgrounds with sharp edges, even though "no one designed them to kill children". We force designers to make them safe (or build a fence around dangerous places, so they cannot go to a store through it).
jjulius · 1h ago
So... the article provides a Google Maps link to the area where this happened. According to the piece, the kids visited the Food Lion and Subway, and then re-crossed Hudson Boulevard. There's a related NYT piece that also says an older woman was hit "a few weeks ago" trying to "cross via the same median".
I see the wide-laned Hudson Boulevard on Google Maps. I see the median. I see why it might be tempting to cross there. But I also see that ~345 feet to the west is a crosswalk.
I'm a parent. I get the impulse to protect your kids and ensure that they grow up with a healthy level of independence and freedom and the ability to be their own person and know how to operate in a world by themselves. But I struggle, as a parent, to understand how, if I were on the phone with them, I would've let them cross via the median rather than insisting they walk themselves a little ways down to the crosswalk.
I'm not attempting to blame the parents, and am sorry for their loss. But I'm generally stumped as to why they would've allowed that and, further, why there's outrage about an "unsafe median" when people have a crosswalk ~300 feet away.
QuercusMax · 1h ago
300 feet is a LONG WAY to walk to cross a road. Do you not get that? You're asking people to walk 700 feet out of their way - you have to walk both directions, remember.
mitthrowaway2 · 56m ago
Both directions twice, so 1400 feet.
ectospheno · 44m ago
So 5 and a half minutes total. Sounds reasonable.
wat10000 · 16m ago
If you somehow let the pedestrians cross instantly at the cost of a five-minute delay to the drivers, they’d string you up by your toes.
mindslight · 1h ago
345 feet isn't even 7 seconds out of your way at 75 mph (</s>).
Talking about crosswalks also misses that this is probably a common crossing spot for lots of people, so in the "crosswalk paradigm" it should have had a crosswalk built.
Personally I live on a fast road and I've taken to only mowing the frontage and clearing snow with a 2000lb tractor. About half of drivers simply give zero fucks about soft fleshy blobs outside of steel cages, regardless of right of way. It's only when you add something that might scratch their car that they magically become considerate.
runako · 59m ago
In my small city, people are routinely hit at crosswalks of roads that look like this.
There's a spot where the crosswalk is marked, with lights and signage, where the curb even just out a little extra to make the "unprotected" part of the crosswalk a shorter walk. Cars blow through the light all the time, it's totally unsafe to cross until oncoming traffic comes to a complete stop and makes eye contact. And this stretch is single lane, not designed for the speed of the Gastonia intersection. (Yes, there have been pedestrian fatalities on this stretch.)
The bigger issue is that the road is designed in such a way that a driver would not feel uncomfortable driving at highway speeds, regardless of the speed limit. Adding pedestrians into a system like that will always result in pedestrians being hit.
This road would be super dangerous even if the city moved the crosswalk to the place(s) where people want to cross.
coldpie · 1h ago
I understand where you're coming from, but, how often do you travel by foot in car-heavy areas? I'm not trying to ask a "gotcha" question, but rather trying to point out that the experience of actually traveling in these areas on foot is very different from how it looks in a car, in a way that I think drivers often don't realize. You really have to have some experience doing it, to understand how awful these areas are for pedestrians, and why people don't follow the rules. It can be counter-intuitive, but pedestrian accommodations are often actually counter to pedestrian safety.
For example, regarding this particular scenario, it actually very often is safer to break the rules and jaywalk, than it is to cross at a signaled intersection. Drivers at intersections are paying attention to a half-dozen different things: is my light green yet? can I take this turn on red? is the car behind me stopping in time? what portion of the stoplight cycle is currently happening? what did my friend just text me before I stopped? Notice that none of these things are pedestrians. As a pedestrian, it's a very common occurrence to get a right-turner almost colliding with you because they were looking left instead of where they were driving. In car-heavy areas, drivers frequently just forget pedestrians can even exist, they're not even a concern. The zebra striping indicates where they should stop their car, it's not a pedestrian zone.
None of that happens if you as a pedestrian cross in the middle of a straightaway. The drivers are (mostly) looking straight ahead, they're focused on where they're going, they don't have a ton of other variables to contend with like they do at intersections. It's a much simpler place for a dangerous interaction (crossing the street) to occur. There's often a median in the middle, so you as a pedestrian only have to contend with one flow of traffic instead of 2 or 3. It still sucks, don't get me wrong. But it sucks less than an intersection.
For the past 50 years, we have built our cities for cars and exclusively for cars, and our pedestrian accommodations follow that rule. Just because an accommodation exists, doesn't mean it's actually safe.
mapt · 1h ago
345 feet there, wait for the light to change to pedestrian crossing, watch both ways ANYWAY because pedestrian crossings are not going to be exclusive use at an intersection like this, then 345' back, adds up to five to ten minutes.
noah_buddy · 1h ago
Why do people litter if there is a trash can simply 400ft away? Convenience.
endemic · 1h ago
300 feet is a fairly significant distance. I would personally "jaywalk" rather than go 600 feet (there and back) out of my way.
noqc · 1h ago
This is America, you can just call 345 feet a football field.
scotty79 · 1h ago
This crosswalk looks terrible. As an adult I'm not sure if I would choose it over crossing where the median is the widest. At least there there are only two lanes to cross at a time and with cars coming from one direction. While the poorly marked crosswalk has 5 lanes with median in the middle that's narrower than length of one foot. It's tragically funny how "aspirational" Google map of this place is when compared to street view.
Also, why there's no crosswalk on the intersection where the Food Lion exit is?
bena · 1h ago
100 yards away with a sidewalk on only one side. And that sidewalk being right against the road. Compare that to where they likely crossed at the entrance to the apartment complex directly across from the fire station that's neighboring the parking lot entrance.
It's an area that's shitty to pedestrian traffic. And it's fair to point that out.
There's a house near here that was written about in an article - it's at the end of a long straight road, and then there's a curve, and often-enough people go way too fast on the road, don't catch the curve, bounce through a bunch of grassy median and end up HITTING THIS HOUSE!
It's been hit so many times.
so, I really like bollards (https://josh.works/bollards) and I went to his house to see about adding some. He'd already had large rocks (1000lbs) placed in his yard, and after the most recent car hit them (and bounced one of them into his house) he added some 3000 lb rocks. It's still not a full layer of protection, but it's better.
Anyway, the real danger is the junction, not him having good enough or not good enough bollards. So, there was a meeting at his house the next day with city traffic engineering staff, police, city council, lots of neighbors...
and I'm popularizing a fix that I'm calling 'the traffic bean' - it's a shared-space junction, that is as effective as the existing junction, and much, much safer:
https://josh.works/traffic-bean
The director of Denver's DOTI has been looking it over, as a city council person has been pushing for it to get approved, and it might get approved! This would be basically the first real improvement in how american junctions are designed in decades.
It's currently just my side-project wish. All I want is to live near and use a road network that doesn't deal death constantly to others.
i fear for my kid's life, the same way these kids lives were affected. American road networks are horrific, I cannot take seriously anyone who takes them seriously.
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/LQ9kSNZxQwYV8S9C9
[1] https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/bodmin-round...
I wonder how many social issues would be rapidly solved it we just rejected people from the discussion for spewing overly simplistic opinions on the basis that they clearly don't "get" all of the nuances of whatever is being discussed.
For reference, I live in a "culdesac" neighborhood (3 big ones smushed together). The main suburban street that we use to actually get anywhere is 2-5 lanes wide, 40mph posted but 50mph actual speeds, with limited pedestrian crossings and in the 8 years I've lived here at least 2 pedestrian fatalities on a 2 mile stretch.
This is pretty typical of the DC suburbs (largely built in the 70s-present). Smaller enclaves that are "walkable" in the sense you can walk around the block. But they aren't walkable in the sense you can live your life sans car/bus/whatever.
Then add in modern cost disease on top of it and it starts making sense.
as for footbridges they were uncommon in towns at least.
The death of a 7 year old is a tragedy. Why do we then need to feel the need to hit bereaved parents with a manslaughter charge? Either there's something missing from the story or we're blaming a systemic issue on individual negligence.
Criminal negligence involves a "gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the same situation".
Given the 7-year-old was escorted by a 10-year-old, I think that alone demonstrates a reasonable level of care was taken to protect the younger child.
If the streets are too dangerous for a 10-year-old to cross safely, then you need to look a lot deeper for the true source of the risk.
> West Hudson Boulevard is a high-speed arterial road with narrow sidewalks, a tiny median, and no truly safe crossings. Even a healthy, alert adult is taking their life in their hands by walking to that store. For a child, it’s playing the worst kind of roulette.
The fact that it did have a sidewalk, even a narrow one means that it's meant for walking. If it's unsafe then the existence of the sidewalk is only asking for trouble. It either has a sidewalk and is safe, or it isn't safe and shouldn't have a sidewalk. Having a sidewalk and being unsafe is the fault of the city/construction not the user.
Claiming a child was playing with roulette amounts to it also implying that lethal roulette games for kids is something that should be legal.
There's a skinny sidewalk on one side. No sidewalk on the other. No signaled crossings for blocks. High-ish speed traffic.
Given an option, nobody would walk that particular stretch of highway.
Should the parents have been charged? Probably not (unless there are details missing from the artcile). Should we reconsider how we build our suburbs? Absolutely.
The missing piece is a picture of the parents. The author argues that the system needs to lay blame somewhere, and the parents present as a soft target.
That area is not walkable and I wouldn't trust a 7 year old to go there alone, period. And then to allow them to jaywalk at the spot where the kid was struck is downright unconscionable. And the median looks like it's easy to lose your balance over (I suspect that's what really happened).
I'm not generally against the notion of letting a 7 year old walk alone in public but this isn't some cornerstore at the end of a 25mph residential street. This is basically a highway. Although the speed limit on that stretch is 45mph, I'm pretty certain drivers would be hitting 60 there since the road leading into it looks like a 60 road.
The fact that we have a sidewalk that's "obviously" not fit to purpose is a massive failure on the part of the local transit authority/DOT.
The 7 year old was not alone, he was with his older brother.
> They had sent Legend out to the grocery store with his 10-year-old brother when he stepped out in front of traffic.
https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/nc-lawmaker-bring-attentio...
A normal ethical system would say the obligation to not kill anyone with a vehicle is on the operator of the vehicle. The environment should also support safe handoffs between priorities.
The parents are not at fault - they were born into this shitty country. It is the road engineer, the city engineer, full stop.
Consider this book: [Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201978334-killed-by-a-tr...)
Jaywalking is a supremacists, propagandistic term, I would propose it be excised from your vocabulary: https://josh.works/jaywalking
It was used mostly to imprison formerly enslaved people for walking around. In some american cities in the 50s and 60s, thousands of people PER YEAR were ARRESTED for jaywalking!!!!
It's how deputized slave patrols (police) can easily initiate harassment against the enslaved/formerly-enslaved class.
On the other hand, if you do it wrong it can be way worse. Considering that we're talking about children who have no experience behind the wheel and no ability to accurately predict what the drivers will do I think "use a crosswalk and wait for traffic to let you cross" is likely the best advice.
All that said, your race baiting language policing game is stupid, malicious and actively detracts from the discussion.
We are rounding a surface street with a 45 limit to a highway at 60 and then pretend its obviously unsafe. This is obviously wrong, given the crosswalks.
Also, we have 0 idea if the child was allowed to jaywalk. We know they were on the phone with the older one at at least some point. That's all.
It's a tragedy, but, hard to get my head to the idea that its manslaughter that both parents are culpable for. As noted in coverage, it's an odd gap compared to how unsecured guns are treated.
If you’ve marked the right spot, I count one single intersection within credible walking distance that has crosswalks at all, and it only has crosswalks in two (!) of the four places where they ought to be.
I guess that, if you happen to be at the SW corner of Lyon and W Hudson, then you’re just stuck there? There’s even a “SCHOOL” marking without a crosswalk a short distance to the south.
> So we do the next best thing for our consciences: we blame the victims. We prosecute the parents, demonize the driver, or scold the pedestrian for “not being careful.” And in doing so, we avoid indicting the real culprit: the American development culture that produced this environment.
It's the single family home buyer with two cars and is a registered voter that is demanding the human unfriendly architecture at this point. We are getting more integrated architecture and people seem to like it, but it doesn't replace the millions of miles of bad design we already have.
Everyone always thinks "why don't we make it harder to make things and that way they'll be nice" but they can't connect the dots to "but to do that we have to grandfather in the existing stuff" and from that to "nothing new will happen and all the old things will stay that way".
Thing of the obvious effects, man. Come on.
Unfortunately the answer isn't going to be telling people they can't do something. We already don't give a damn about the number of deaths we cause, so the actual answer is probably somewhere closer to attempting to educate people so eventually we won't want it.
I don't see how that's true - if you create cities or neighborhoods which are more walkable, such as New York's Chinatown, then you'll have less civil liability than suburban car-centric infrastructure. I would think that NY style neighborhoods would be MORE incentivized
Maybe that analogy is a little off.
1. The cases where parents are charged with negligence in the context of guns is extremely rare, and like.... kid is a mass shooter or something like that. Or kid shoots someone (or themselves accidentally, and often parents are not charged in that case). The analog here - charging the parent of a kid who is accidentally shot by a total stranger, never happens.
2. It's also wrong order of magnitude on numbers? Accidental stray bullet shootings of kids do happen, but they are extremely rare compared to kid-accidentally-shooting-self-or-friend or car-on-pedestrian-kid. Stray bullet hitting you is not predictable at all. You're talking like <40 per year across all ages <10 per year for just kids. A closer analogy would be accidental self shootings or shot-by-friend (~50 child deaths per year?). An even closer analogy would be swimming pools (hundreds per year for both kids drowning in swimming pools and kids hit by cars).
All that said, it's worth pointing out that kids getting hit by cars has declined a ton in the last 3 decades: https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
Some of that is due to better road design, some of that is due to better car safety, but a lot of it is... due to kids not being outside as much (30-40% decrease compared to previous generation).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_de_Kindermoord (redirected)
What about an overpass?
Is a marvellous phrase. Public opinion can be changed, and it's good to see people doing the hard work to bring that about. It often seems these days that the only people willing to put that long-term effort in have the worst goals in mind.
Now that we recognize these effects, we can start addressing them.
I find this to be a very disingenuous take. No one "exactly designed" this road to kill children. There were clearly tradeoffs made for vehicle vs pedestrian usefulness and it's worth examining those if we want the space to be used differently, but this is exploitive rage bait.
Was it designed to allow someone living in that apartment to cross the street to buy a sandwich? No? Then it's no surprise that it didn't.
These things are simple facts about the road. They would have been known when it was designed and they massively raise the risks for pedestrias as compared to alternate designs. Splitting hairs in the sense that the designers did not "want" to endanger people is hyperbolic as the article. The intent is less important than the effect.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/HQ1jTv6JUWa32QGAA
Traffic deaths are a public health crisis in the U.S. - https://harvardpublichealth.org/policy-practice/car-accident... - December 13th, 2023
The car is king in the US – and pedestrian deaths are rising. Where is the outrage? - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/27/car-ro... - June 27th, 2023
US pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36490283 (92 comments) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480122 - June 2023 (607 comments)
Counterpoint:
Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736025 - July 2025 (651 comments)
Hoboken Hasn’t Had a Traffic Death in Four Years. What’s It Doing Right? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31799733 - June 2022 (15 comments)
Oslo got pedestrian and cyclist deaths down to zero. Here’s how - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197102 - November 2020 (109 comments)
New York’s success provides road map for others taking aim at pedestrian deaths - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17710199 - August 2018 (149 comments)
HN Search:
pedestrian deaths - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
traffic deaths - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
This is literally TFA
1. Being on the phone is as distracting to pedestrians as it is to drivers. His dad was doing him no favours by having him on the phone the entire journey. Stupid? Yes. Involuntary manslaughter? ...
2. From the number of kids and the given name, you get the sense that "Legend Jenkins" came from a very particular kind of family, one which may have a tendency to rub authorities the wrong way. No doubt if he was from a small middle-class WASP family the reaction would be very different
(Now, if your vision is flawed it becomes quite another matter. Figuring out how much time you have before that oncoming car gets there requires decent vision--but a driver must make a pretty similar judgement every time they make an unprotected left turn.)
Lanes are narrow, forcing cars to go slowly. Side walks are large[1], stop signs, roundabouts, or even curves in the road, exist to force drivers to pay attention to their surroundings and not just speed straight ahead.
> it's something that demands caution and is completely impossible during rush hour,
Cities should be safe for people all day and night. "Can't go out now, too many cars" shouldn't ever be a thing.
My city (Seattle) is working hard on ensuring 0 pedestrian deaths (they were doing good on this goal up until this year), and a driver it is super annoying. As soon as I get out of my car I appreciate the changes that are being made to the city.
[1] I actually saw some exceptions to this in Spain where the side walks were level with the road and there was just so much foot traffic that cars obviously came second in importance to people. I've seen similar design principles in China as well. Really narrow one way streets with only a few feet of set back from the road, lots of foot traffic and the occasional slow moving car.
I see the wide-laned Hudson Boulevard on Google Maps. I see the median. I see why it might be tempting to cross there. But I also see that ~345 feet to the west is a crosswalk.
I'm a parent. I get the impulse to protect your kids and ensure that they grow up with a healthy level of independence and freedom and the ability to be their own person and know how to operate in a world by themselves. But I struggle, as a parent, to understand how, if I were on the phone with them, I would've let them cross via the median rather than insisting they walk themselves a little ways down to the crosswalk.
I'm not attempting to blame the parents, and am sorry for their loss. But I'm generally stumped as to why they would've allowed that and, further, why there's outrage about an "unsafe median" when people have a crosswalk ~300 feet away.
Talking about crosswalks also misses that this is probably a common crossing spot for lots of people, so in the "crosswalk paradigm" it should have had a crosswalk built.
Personally I live on a fast road and I've taken to only mowing the frontage and clearing snow with a 2000lb tractor. About half of drivers simply give zero fucks about soft fleshy blobs outside of steel cages, regardless of right of way. It's only when you add something that might scratch their car that they magically become considerate.
There's a spot where the crosswalk is marked, with lights and signage, where the curb even just out a little extra to make the "unprotected" part of the crosswalk a shorter walk. Cars blow through the light all the time, it's totally unsafe to cross until oncoming traffic comes to a complete stop and makes eye contact. And this stretch is single lane, not designed for the speed of the Gastonia intersection. (Yes, there have been pedestrian fatalities on this stretch.)
The bigger issue is that the road is designed in such a way that a driver would not feel uncomfortable driving at highway speeds, regardless of the speed limit. Adding pedestrians into a system like that will always result in pedestrians being hit.
This road would be super dangerous even if the city moved the crosswalk to the place(s) where people want to cross.
For example, regarding this particular scenario, it actually very often is safer to break the rules and jaywalk, than it is to cross at a signaled intersection. Drivers at intersections are paying attention to a half-dozen different things: is my light green yet? can I take this turn on red? is the car behind me stopping in time? what portion of the stoplight cycle is currently happening? what did my friend just text me before I stopped? Notice that none of these things are pedestrians. As a pedestrian, it's a very common occurrence to get a right-turner almost colliding with you because they were looking left instead of where they were driving. In car-heavy areas, drivers frequently just forget pedestrians can even exist, they're not even a concern. The zebra striping indicates where they should stop their car, it's not a pedestrian zone.
None of that happens if you as a pedestrian cross in the middle of a straightaway. The drivers are (mostly) looking straight ahead, they're focused on where they're going, they don't have a ton of other variables to contend with like they do at intersections. It's a much simpler place for a dangerous interaction (crossing the street) to occur. There's often a median in the middle, so you as a pedestrian only have to contend with one flow of traffic instead of 2 or 3. It still sucks, don't get me wrong. But it sucks less than an intersection.
For the past 50 years, we have built our cities for cars and exclusively for cars, and our pedestrian accommodations follow that rule. Just because an accommodation exists, doesn't mean it's actually safe.
Also, why there's no crosswalk on the intersection where the Food Lion exit is?
It's an area that's shitty to pedestrian traffic. And it's fair to point that out.