3-Way Street

[sensei8]

Here, at this intersection, is where the danger zone exists.....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20110610/od_yblog_upshot/3-way-street-artist-video-tracks-scary-traffic

[JusticeZero]

Yep, i've been telling people this for years. Most people don't even know the laws, they just assume that they are whatever is convenient. A lot of people on bikes don't realize that there are road laws that apply to them (same laws as apply to cars), but car drivers ignore the law regularly too, especially if driving legally might cause them to be three or four seconds late to the next red light.

I've been yelled at to 'get on the sidewalk' a few times in places where it is illegal to be on the sidewalk, and most everyone is aware of the raw hatred that you can be exposed to for choosing to drive at the highest speed you can go at without breaking the law - too slow!

I assure you, there are other things besides all that recklessness that are just as bad.

You might be concerned by the other health issues associated with driving. There is a substantial correlation between cars and health problems springing from inactivity. As roads are built up and improved for cars, neighborhoods tend to become increasingly spread out and forbidding for those who might want to walk. And so heart disease and diabetes goes up.

There is evidence that mental development in the latest generation has been and is being impaired by a lack of contact with the world at large, since they are driven everywhere.

This exposes them to dramatically higher risk of death or injury. Instead of letting their kids get some physical activity in, parents want to make sure that their kids are "safe". More on that in a bit.

There is also the social cost. When I am in a car, entire neighborhoods whoosh by, and I am only able to gather the vaguest hints about them from the window. On a bike, I meet the locals, make friends, see all sorts of interesting sights.

When I moved here, we rented a car to get from our hotel room into the city to apartment hunt. We found a place which is probably overpriced, but passable, through some online searching and looking for signs. On a bike now, we see that the apartment we are in has the only HUGE sign in the area - but in a two mile ride to my wife's job, we pass close to a dozen houses and duplexes for rent or sale that look at least as good.

My apartment is in, as a woman who looked at the apartment next door put it with a disgusted sneer, "One of "THOSE" neighborhoods". From the window of a car, it's easy to see some lingering damage from Katrina, the big graveyard as a vague 'creepy graveyard here', and crowds of what look like poor, minority teenagers and the like that many might dismiss as a threat. The woman looking at the apartment certainly considered the neighborhood unsafe. I doubt she would have allowed a child to walk two blocks through the place.

On a bike or on the sidewalk, I can admire the beauty of the graveyard, which isn't spooky at all. I can see the vitality in the neighborhood and the work that's been put into it. I meet the people hanging out on the street and trade jokes and recipes; they're really nice people, and not the vague sense of danger that people see when they look through a pane of glass in a metal box traveling five to ten miles an hour faster than the legal limit.

When I cut deeper into the neighborhood, I pass kids playing with each other on the sidewalks, in lots and the street. Kids are running, kids are playing, kids are hanging out with each other, parents are sitting on their porches visiting and keeping an eye out. There are friendly people all over the place; I talk to my neighbors and they look out for me and let me know if anything is going on.

I have a term for that; that's what I call "a good neighborhood". That's a neighborhood that I would feel safe letting a kid with a quick sampling of taught street sense wander off into for a couple of hours.

There's a watermelon vendor on the corner. Nice guy, sells the juiciest fruit. For the life of me I can't see a place to easily park a car within two blocks of the guy, though. I drove past him in the rental car, but by the time the thought went through my head to check it out, I was three blocks away on a one-lane road with no place to easily turn around. Might as well go to the big chain store that some people blame for the woes in their neighborhood.

The really ironic part about that is that I still make really good time going through town - I just don't spend it snared in jammed up lights with nothing to look at and nowhere to pull off.

There's a laundromat a few blocks up the street. There are flashier and shinier laundromats if I were to toss my clothes in a car and check the yellow pages. I don't know that I would have even found the place in the yellow pages. But then I wouldn't have met the folks who were there. I ran across one of them at the store; he remembered me.

Seriously, it's almost as if by the act of not driving the car everywhere, the world around you transforms into something out of the Andy Griffith Show.

Met a woman at the store riding a scooter, one of the mini motorcycles that doesn't need a license. She reflected on how nice it was to experience all the same things on her trip through town at a more leisurely pace.

For the most part, I no longer use a car, and I don't regret it. I feel like a better and more aware human being for it.

[Amanda]

OMG! NYC reminds me India. People, drive safely.