Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[dtkvictim]

As for pedestrians, I think the number of people jumping into traffic with their backs turned is smaller than you think. Most of the time people do look, but drivers being focused on scanning the road (or worse, their twitter feed), probably do not happen to be looking at the exact moment pedestrians are also looking.  If pedestrians didn't look, they'd be run over.

I don't have any interest in the greater debate going on here, but this comment stuck out to me. While the number of people who blindly step out in to traffic is certainly a very small percentage of pedestrians, anecdotally it's way higher than I thought it would be. When I commuted by foot daily I saw people doing this probably at least once a month. I don't even mean people that step out on to a road with live traffic and time their way between cars, I mean people that genuinely stepped in front of cars and forced them to stop or change lanes. The craziest part to me was that most of these occurred on Weber street where I'm extra careful with my mid-block crossings.

I even saw a woman once step directly in front of a moving police car on King St. Not a difficult street to watch for traffic on, and not the car you typically want to force to stop for you.