The Road That Killed Legend Jenkins Was Working Exactly as Designed
When a child is killed on a street like West Hudson Boulevard, it’s not a tragic fluke. It’s the outcome we designed for.
The truth is, everyone who participates in building these places is complicit. Everyone. The planners who approved the land use. The engineers who designed the road geometry. The developers who built apartments near retail without safe connections. The retailers who designed parking-lot entrances instead of pedestrian routes. The public officials who sign off on all of it.
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I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at this corridor. It is familiar in all the wrong ways. My diagnosis is that this is not a fixable situation, not in any meaningful sense. You can’t slap in a crosswalk, a flashing beacon, or a strip of sidewalk and call it safe. The entire nature of the road — its speed, its function, its relationship to surrounding land uses — is incompatible with the safe movement of people. That’s unsafe for those both inside and especially outside a motor vehicle.
And yet, we build more places just like this every day. Everyone knows better, but we do it anyway. When we do, we make an unspoken agreement: some number of people will die here every year. Some number of people will be sacrificed for the sake of a built environment that few professionals really believe is worthy of their energy, expertise, or even their attention.
We don’t say that part out loud because, if we did, it would force us to confront the morality of our choices. These choices are deeply immoral.
This is part of why I'm no longer a practicing traffic engineer (and in fact, didn't last very long in the profession at all): you don't have the power to insist on building differently until you're a fully-licensed PE, and you can't become a fully-licensed PE until you've done what you're told long enough to be indoctrinated into accepting the immoral status quo. It's like the "blood in" requirement of street gang initiation: you don't get to be a full-fledged member of the traffic engineering profession until you've designed infrastructure that will kill someone.
This is messed up. What country are you talking about? Is that a problem in many places, to your knowledge?
So this is the road where this poor boy was killed: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SqeEZE6R5tBhiakw9
One thing I fail to understand about American towns is how they build a wide four-lane road in a residential area and they don't even consider sidewalks.
Money. It is always money.
There was probably state or federal funding for the concrete and asphalt that the cars drive on, the lights, and the median. Sidewalks are local costs that are limited by whatever the relatively wealthy in power want, and that isn't sidewalks for poor people that they don't personally use.
and they don’t even consider sidewalks.
And then don't expect people to walk there, cross the street there, do business there, visit friends there...
Car-centric infrastructure is anti-human infrastructure.
In the Netherlands, if a road has “too many accidents”, the layout of the road is also taken into account and often changed based on that knowledge.
I'm (super un)glad that parents are being charged with manslaughter anytime their kid dies. Honestly, children dying is unnatural(??) and we need to punish the people responsible. If you try to keep a child safe, I guess that makes you responsible for unrelated drivers' actions. The kids father practically killed him himself!
/s i hate car culure I hate car culture
