Pedestrians and drivers are part of the same dance, and must pay attention to one another.
For Pedestrian Safety, Get Rid of the Traffic Lights
Updated February 19, 2014, 7:32 PM
Walking is a mostly unconscious activity. The smoothness with which urban dwellers navigate city streets is not attributable to people making complex, thoughtful judgments about how to move. Instead, reliance on simple rules -- avoid bumping, follow others and keep up -- allows the movement of people through Grand Central or Times Square at rush hour to evoke enormous flocks of starlings or great schools of fish. One has to be awake, but only barely, attending from the depths of the brain -- and mutually creating a kind of pedestrian hive brain.
Those who study "pedestrian behavior" -- meaning human beings, walking around in cities -- sometimes refer to it as self-organizing. For instance, a large group of people moving together, as seen on city sidewalks, will, without discussion, form impromptu walking lanes.
What happens when these unconscious, self-organizing pedestrians step off the sidewalk is something else altogether. Obviously, this is no time to be absent-minded. The driver, with her vehicle, is not in the slip-stream of the pedestrian hive brain. (Although drivers, on highways in particular, seem to have their own unconscious coordinations of movement.)
And everything about the city's current design seems to work against the very thing that is pedestrians' strength. "Walk" signs and green lights encourage pedestrians and drivers alike to believe that they are still among their own kind, flocking together with everyone keeping their ancient fish brain on.
Instead, we should take a cue from the Dutch traffic planner Hans Monderman and the idea of the "naked" street. At just those moments where drivers and walkers intersect, he took away the signs and street markings that indicate that each can continue to walk or drive unconsciously along. Instead, the driver and walker are forced to acknowledge each other as persons, moving differently -- and each yield to the other.
What might then happen would change the city: Drivers and walkers could form their own hive brain together, that of the urban commuter, united in their humanity -- and their desire to get somewhere, fast.