It's a square root of negative one. A sneaky way to get two answers with one question.
ped_xing
The number of times I walked out of the shower without using soap plus i times the number of times I soaped at least twice to avoid that scenario.
Car-free Manhattan is just the 78% of households without cars winning out over the 22% with and the daily invaders from out of town. Those percentages are way beyond pro-weed vs. anti-weed and weed has won in a lot of places even without overthrowing capitalism. It's long overdue there and even the late mayor Koch considered it before I was born.
Stop lines farther back from the intersection.
People don't stop for the stop lines, nor the crosswalk, nor the red light. We haven't even solved stop-on-red. Solutions that will only be implemented in the occasional rich neighborhood are a joke. The problem is that we never had a proper conversation of whether the general public can be trusted to operate heavy machinery. Some dickheads got rich selling the heavy machinery and that was enough to quash any discussion about people being squashed. We need car-free places where people can truly live their lives not only without cars, but without other people zipping by on their cars. Not just 14th Street but all of Manhattan. Make that the go-to move for rich parents who prioritize their childrens' safety above all else. Make other cities get jealous of the money flowing into car-free Manhattan and implement their own car-free zones.
Tinkering around the edges is Vision Maybe-Marginally-Less.
Getting mad you're allowed to go over 20mph?
I'm a pedestrian. A car going over 20 mph isn't getting me to my destination any faster, it's putting my life at risk to get its driver somewhere faster.
because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits.
I think that while the threat is real, the threat being a major motivator for upper management is largely illusory. It's absolutely there, but it's not making them do stuff they're not already keen on doing. Nobody weasels their way up the ladder to do non-profit-maximizing things, occasionally getting reprimanded for not maximizing profit and always one stray "the old phone's fine" tweet away from getting canned. They're willing and enthusiastic profit-maximizers.
If I had a nickel for every time my boss fired somebody so humiliatingly that they forgot to take their jackets with them on the way out the door, I'd have two nickels.
I didn't observe this myself -- she e-mailed everyone she didn't fire asking if any of us wanted a jacket and went on to describe the ones her victims were wearing just last week.
Sorry, what's unserious about a car ban in places with adequate alternative infrastructure? Why can't pedestrians who don't want to be honked and nearly (if lucky) run over be able to take refuge somewhere, even if it's only one city per country, with drivers retaining control over literally everywhere else?