Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
2people
2024–2025years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I appreciate and approve of this detail applied to many interesting design features of an otherwise banal collection of junctions.
I live in Denver, and daily appreciate how much self-harming behavior is built into American road network design standards. It's truly stunning.
Consider reading the book "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System"[0]
I wish he'd titled it as "the transportation system of the Greater United States". I emphatically disagree with the use of "our".
Anyway, american road networks were designed, funded, built by people who wanted to accomplish ethnic cleansing, and I think it's plainly obvious that this is the case, so it feels strange to even talk about it sometimes.
to my knowledge, no one in the netherlands road design system has been recently thing to accomplish ethnic cleansing, so their road networks can develop towards/with mutuality.
in the USA, at minimum the founders/originators of these systems were openly supremacist and spoke openly about what and how they were doing. I.E:
> If we [road funding authorities, municipal authorities, and their political supporters] could build a highway through their neighborhood, we could get rid of some of them, and make it harder for the rest of them to exist, and we'd see less of them either way.
the "they" was always an ethnic group. The playbook of these supremacists was to squish all people within that group into a tiny compression of humanity, then attack it directly, using the normal tools of colonial empires.
- Book called Killed by a Traffic Engineer talks about this
- 'jaywalking' is a term that supports the concept of vehicular homicide.
A normal ethical system would say the obligation to not kill anyone with a vehicle is on the operator of the vehicle. The environment should also support safe handoffs between priorities.
The parents are not at fault - they were born into this shitty country. It is the road engineer, the city engineer, full stop.
Consider this book: [Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201978334-killed-by-a-tr...)
Jaywalking is a supremacists, propagandistic term, I would propose it be excised from your vocabulary: https://josh.works/jaywalking
It was used mostly to imprison formerly enslaved people for walking around. In some american cities in the 50s and 60s, thousands of people PER YEAR were ARRESTED for jaywalking!!!!
It's how deputized slave patrols (police) can easily initiate harassment against the enslaved/formerly-enslaved class.
