Dangerous Traffic

There has been terrible news lately about pedestrians being hit by cars. Maybe this has made me more alert to the issue, or maybe it's coincidence, but I've personally seen a lot of terrible driver behavior (or signs of terrible driver behavior) lately. I was walking down a relatively quiet avenue in my neighborhood when a van simply pulled into the intersection even though the light was red. A car coming from its left screeched to a stop and there was no collision, but it was some of the craziest behavior I've witnessed on the road. Later that day, I saw another car run a red light, although in that case it was the more usual situation where it had a yellow light and went for it even though it didn't really have time. There wasn't any near-collision, although the way cars speed up in that situation is a bit scary.

Then a few days later I was picking up a Citi Bike from a station on Fourth Avenue and I saw that a car had clearly hit the station at non-negligible speed. It had twisted the metal of the sign and shattered the glass. The scary part is that although the station is adjacent to the road, it is highly visible and a driver would have to be drunk or out of control to hit it. And imagine if someone had been using the station!

And then over the weekend I saw workers removing the wreckage of a light pole at Grand Army Plaza that had clearly been knocked over by a car or truck. This wouldn't have been a little bump, the vehicle must have hit the pole at significant speed. The vehicle would have had to jump a curb to hit the pole, so once again we've got an out-of-control car or truck intruding on what is supposed to be safe pedestrian space.

Anyway I don't really have a point, except that it's easy to be lulled into a false sense of security when walking in areas cars aren't supposed to go. Obviously streets should be designed to be safer, but I wonder what design features would have prevented the flagrant red-light running I saw. (Grand Army Plaza, by contrast, is an unmitigated clusterfuck and I have no doubt its design could be dramatically improved, perhaps at some cost to traffic capacity.)

[Update: I guess a driverless car just killed a pedestrian for the first time.]