“We continually flame road violence as an outcome of personal choices yet we all know very well it’s the result of our cities choices,” Tom Flood said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“This is an unacceptable ad; victim blaming road violence is not the city I believe in,” architect Toon Dreessen said.
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Statistics provided by Gonthier shows 25 per cent of all fatal and major injury collisions on Ottawa’s roads involve pedestrians. The memo provided data on collisions between 2017 and 2021 on Ottawa roads:
- 29 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian was crossing a road midblock (away from an intersection)
- 23 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian with the right-of-way was struck at an intersection by a left turning driver
- 11 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian who did not have the right-of-way was struck by a vehicle travelling straight through an intersection
‘Jaywalking’, like piracy, is a crime invented and enforced among the public by greedy corporations. Roads were originally for pedestrians. This and the fact that cities are designed only for car owners means more profit for car makers. Don’t encourage corporate demonization words like jaywalking.
Fuck cars
If bears kept killing people in our cities, would we do something about the bears, or would we blame people for being mauled?
We need to design our streets to be safer, which involves incorporating traffic calming measures so that drivers will choose to drive at speeds that are safe for everybody.
With infrastructure for pedestrians to regularly cross major traffic arteries, whether that be regular lights, bridges, etc.
Or, hear me out, the major arteries are designed for people, not cars. Trains, busses, and metros instead of highways and bypasses.
You don’t need cars to move people. That’s a design choice that cities make.
This is a bit of naiive fantasy. How are you going to transport a 90 year old woman from the train station to her house?
You could design the main arteries to all be trains, but ultimately you still need cars for last mile transportation.
It’s wild that this city (read: the suburbs and rural communities that shouldn’t be a part of the city of Ottawa) decided the dude with ZERO political experience and ZERO urban planning interest was the right choice for mayor.
It might be me being very tuned in to urban planning, but it feels like across the world, and even Canada, there’s a huge wave of urban planning progress being made. People are begining to realize that we cant continue to build car dependant suburbs, but our own mayor hasn’t caught up to this fact. There’s huge improvements in Montreal, Toronto, even places like Calgary and Edmonton are getting proper biking infrastructure. Granted, do see it slowly progressing in Ottawa, but my god it could be done so much faster and with less of this bullshit.
Like, maybe before this he didn’t know anything about cities and shit like this, but you fucking hire someone who does and have them explain it to you. You’re a mayor now, you MUST be into urban planning and all it entails.
Apologies for the long rant, this bugs me to no end. Can I protest somewhere? Can I give the mayor some book recommendations? (Walkable Cities by Jeff Speck, and Strong Towns by Charles Marhon.)
I’ll get him the audiobooks then lol
No but really, he’s not stupid, I’d say willfully ignorant or naive (I’m not sure of the right word.) Plus very boomer minded about cars and the way a city should be focused around them.
I’m sure his financial supporters don’t help too much either.
Jaywalking is not a real thing XD