General Road and Highway Discussion

[BuildingScout]

Your post said that you drive down Davenport "all the time" (what does that mean exactly?) and can count "on one hand" the number of people on bike or foot there. Well, I've biked down Davenport more than five times, so I guess my "data" are better than yours. Add that to the other poster who said he bikes there and appreciates the slower speed of car traffic, and I guess your observations are limited.

I'd say conservatively I drive at least once a week, to-and-fro, for the last year. That is 100 data points, which is not insubstantial. In fact the sample is large enough that we can upper bound the amount of time that the street is occupied, even if my sample is assumed to be instantaneous to your advantage (instead of the more accurate two minute each way).

Since I've seen less than five pedestrians this means that the street is occupied less than 1/20th of the time, otherwise my observed sample would be larger. This means there is a pedestrian in the street for 3 minutes of every hour. Coincidentally enough this is a good estimate of how long would someone use the street to walk down on it for 1/4 of its length at walking speed. This means one person per hour or about 12 people per day walk on that street. At a cost of $3 million we spent about $80 per each pedestrian use (note: use not user) for 10 years.

By the way, if we were building the street from scratch I'd be in favour of the current configuration, since it looks nicer with the median. What is questionable is the decision to apply the diet to this particular unused street.