Mildly Interesting

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.

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.

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.

Most city mangers today: Not cost effective.

Or we can fit 2 more paid parking spaces and allow a private company to leach off the city’s residents.

that is very interesting.