Originally Posted by Ferdinand NYC

The vast majority of New Yorkers are pedestrians. Only a small fraction drive. If pedestrians make driving a pain, that is good thing. Driving in a city should be a pain, because city streets are for people. Cities came before cars, and are fundamentally unsuited to them. Drivers in a city must accommodate pedestrians, not the other way around.

The alarming regularity with which drivers break the law is downright scandalous. All drivers speed, turn without signalling, open their doors without looking, and blow stop signs; and when they deign to stop at red lights, they do so well ahead of the stopping line, sometimes within the crosswalk. They do all of this because lax enforcement has resulted in there being almost no chance of their getting caught.

What's more, even if a driver hits someone — even if a driver kills someone — that driver will face virtually no punishment. This is why a drastic reording of enforcement priorities is needed, so as to impress upon drivers their responsibility to behave according to the law and to exercise due care when operating their deadly machines around pedestrians.

We should have a national urban speed limit of 20 miles per hour, with blanket enforcement by means of cameras and sensors. (Ideally we should have automatic speed governors in cars that won't allow the vehicle to go any faster than the speed limit in the area where it is operating.) And we need police forces that understand the menace created by speeding and other driver misconduct, forces whose officers comprehend the vital importance of traffic enforcement and do not consider it low-status grunt work.

Most important, we need urban leadership that is prepared to hold drivers accountable, leadership that is willing to look these dangerous sociopaths squarely in the eye and say to them: you are the problem.