On Pedestrianism and Other Transportation Matters
ד׳ תשרי, תשס״ו
One observation I’ve made about Jerusalem in the realm of my professional “field” is that although the city is very spread out, and so because of sheer distance one might not be inclined to walk from outlying neighborhoods, there are sidewalks nearly everywhere, even along the big three-and four-lane roads. Yes, the air is unpleasantly polluted from vehicles, and yes, parking on said sidewalks is prevalent and in many places legal. But in most cases the way is (at least minimally) passable and safe, and there are designated pedestrian crossing areas even at huge five-way junctions. Unlike in the U.S., where often you have to watch for turning cars even when crossing with the light, most intersections here have reserved pedestrian green signals, meaning that when the “walk” light is on no cars have a right-of-way across the pedestrian path from any direction. Usually this entails several crosswalks across a road with islands in between, where the lights on each crossing segment are in different phases at any given time. But surprisingly enough, Israelis, who rarely wait for much else, seem to wait for the green light at each segment…wisely, I might add, as when the pedestrian light is red there are often cars turning from three lanes away that would be quite unforeseen until they were a very immediate danger. (The
posted by Alisha @ 12:45 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
That's funny. I find J'lem to be rather pedestrian-unfriendly. Start with the fact that almost nothing there is built anywhere near the scale of a pedestrian. Notice that sidewalks are narrow (due to minmal setbacks or narrow streets) and curbs are often low, or indestinguishable. Add in the lack of public spaces like parks and piazzas, and finish with the fact that the pedestrian walk signals at all of these major intersections often last about 10 seconds each, and you get a pretty awful walking experience. Oh, and there is hardly any green space (or brown space, as J'lem is a desert) ... anywhere.
Incidentally, Israelis wait for the traffic light walk signals, because unlike in NYC (or most places in the US), it's actually illegal to cross on red *even* when there are no cars in the street. And, yes, this is reinforced... by all the cops who should be handing out speeding tickets on the highways, and traffic violations to the cab drivers. I'll skip quoting Israel's death-by-road-accident stats here.
Sorry for the rant-ish tone of this post. Pedestrian J'lem has been a rather sore issue for me of late.
Everything that you write is true as well. It's just that I was addressing the purely practical aspects, and you're talking about the aesthetic sense. It's nice when the two go hand-in-hand, but sometimes you have to take what you can get.
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