Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[plam]

There are a few ideas that we can steal from Europe:

1: Raised crosswalks that act as a speedbump and force people to slow down and subconsciously give priority to non-cars

2: Tighter exit turns, our roundabouts are particularly bad at this in order to prioritize vehicles (example). Our exits from roundabouts are almost straight and encourage you to speed when leaving the circle.

3: Signals for both cars and non-cars, prioritizing non-cars

As usual, it’s shameful that normal citizens have to come up with this shit instead of the engineers and planners that we pay a lot of money for.

NZ is great but also suffers from car primacy, especially outside of Wellington. The thing that is completely bonkers is that there are raised crosswalks that are also signed "pedestrians give way". WTF?!

I haven't actually thought about exit turns from NZ roundabouts. I think they're not straight lines. Sometimes people signal their exits, suggesting it's not a straight line.

Not a fan of beg buttons on roundabouts. Would be better to have people detectors and signals.

(Off topic: I just wrote thoughts on Can't Get There From Here: New Zealand Passenger Rail since 1920, at https://patricklam.ca/post/20230107-cant...from-here/. Here I am sitting in a taxi on the 401 from Pearson because I'm not up for complicated transit things after 24 hours in a plane.)