{"id":625,"date":"2016-02-24T11:33:40","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T16:33:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/?p=625"},"modified":"2016-02-24T12:22:22","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T17:22:22","slug":"dante-ramos-just-nailed-it-in-last-fridays-globe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/2016\/02\/24\/dante-ramos-just-nailed-it-in-last-fridays-globe\/","title":{"rendered":"Dante Ramos just nailed it in last Friday’s Globe"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve all been following the tragic spike in deaths resulting from car-on-human-being-walking crashes in our city, including our neighborhood, to start this year. As Dante Ramos asserted\u00a0in an opinion piece in last Friday’s Globe <\/em>(“If jaywalking is wrong, I don’t want to be right<\/a>“), the answer to the carnage is not, as one of our state legislators has reportedly proposed, to jack up jaywalking fines. Instead, we need to reorder a badly\u00a0disordered transportation system and reclaim the right of human beings on foot to safely use and inhabit\u00a0our streets, intersections, and squares throughout Boston and here in Roslindale. It’s worth quoting from Dante’s piece at length as he talks about how Vision Zero will work here:<\/p>\n

Ironically, [Sen.] Chandler\u2019s legislation comes up at the State House just as Boston is embracing Vision Zero \u2014 a strategy for eliminating all motor vehicle deaths and serious injuries by 2030.<\/p>\n

Heightened law enforcement may be part of the strategy, at least at certain key intersections. But according to Chris Osgood, Boston\u2019s chief of streets, the city will rely more on education and on a deeper analysis of street-level conditions: the physical design of intersections, the timing of traffic and walk signals, the movement patterns of people and vehicles not just at individual intersections but throughout the surrounding blocks.<\/p>\n

Of course, the gradual fine-tuning of a city\u2019s overall transportation system may not seem emotionally satisfying to a driver who\u2019s been delayed by a jaywalker. And when you\u2019ve grown up in a world where transportation laws primarily serve cars\u2019 needs, it\u2019s easy to persuade yourself that stiffer jaywalking fines \u2014 what Chandler calls \u201cthe stick approach\u201d \u2014 are for pedestrians\u2019 own good.<\/p>\n

Never mind that pedestrian fatality rates are lower in places where jaywalking enforcement is lax than in Los Angeles, where it\u2019s been far more aggressive. Motorists don\u2019t need greater protection from the supposed threat of wayward pedestrians, and, anyway, not every annoyance in life can or should be fixed through tougher laws and stiffer tickets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve all been following the tragic spike in deaths resulting from car-on-human-being-walking crashes in our city, including our neighborhood, to start this year. As Dante Ramos asserted\u00a0in an opinion piece in last Friday’s Globe (“If jaywalking is wrong, I don’t want to be right“), the answer to the carnage is not, as one of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32,13,16],"tags":[59,204,191,195,109,46,49,196],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-safety","category-vision","tag-boston-globe","tag-dante-ramos","tag-pedestrian-deaths","tag-pedestrian-injuries","tag-pedestrian-safety","tag-pedestrians","tag-vision-zero","tag-vision-zero-boston"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6X5no-a5","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":626,"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkuproslindale.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}