Quote:
Originally Posted by BnaBreaker
I think the problem is that cities are spending money on all of these over-engineered so-called "pedestrian-friendly" infrastructure improvements in areas in which they are immediately rendered useless as a result of the nature of the built environment in which they are placed, which will, no-doubt, in the future be used to those opposed to such expenditures as an excuse not to fund those sorts of projects. But you've got to have a built environment suited for pedestrians first! Nobody is going to be walking in a place where there is nothing to walk to. It doesn't matter how nice the sidewalk is.
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No, I've seen a lot of arguments against pedestrian bridges even in dense, walkable areas. There's this assumption that traffic calming is ALWAYS the better solution, but that's just not the case.
At the example I posted, there's only one road on/off of Northerly Island and to the planetarium (so that road is busy) and the lakefront trail is massively popular with pedestrians and cyclists. There's a conflict there that you just can't resolve by traffic calming; the underpass was needed.