Hello All - I apologize for the misfire this morning. The SS released was, uh, a bit rough. I forgot I set it to publish at 6am and some serious editing needed to be done. Now you know what a (super) rough draft looks like! Amirite!?
Thanks for not rage-unsubscribing. A much better version of today’s Satoshi’s Sidewalk is below…
Street planning is a doozy. Geographic space is wasted on asphalt in the form of excessively wide streets and turning radius around each corner.
How does one go about finding such streets and corners?
Easy - just wait for some snow!
Streets freshly blanketed in snow are an opportunity to see driving behavior when caution is required. The streets are slick, vision is down, it’s cold out, and - most importantly - there’s no visible curbs or striping on the streets. Drivers have a general idea of where street elements may be - but they don’t know where these elements are.
Without knowing where the curbs are, drivers tend to drive down the near-center of streets. I find street corners to be more interesting when snow is on the ground. Where drivers normally turn to change direction changes. Turns occur further into the intersection and are sharper. This sharper turn uses a smaller turning radius. Small turning radii can only happen at low speeds.
Larger turning radii are meant for one thing, and one thing only: traffic efficiency. A corner with a larger radius is not meant to provide safety for or improve the pedestrian experience. In fact, larger turning radii are a hazard to pedestrians. Speed is being promoted in exchange for safety.
This can be summed up to a collective act of worship of the Almighty Car.
The test for a turning radius is simple: if the pedestrian cross were combined to one per corner, would you feel safe crossing the street? Or do you feel like an obstacle to be missed?
The photos above from Andrew’s twitter shows how drivers behave with snow on the ground in a Hoboken, NJ neighborhood. Notice anything different about the tracks in the snow? Larger snow piles and the visible snow plow lines aside, people can and will drive on narrower streets with tighter corners.
Snowy streets allow us to see that people will drive more cautiously and make sharper turns. Street widths and corner radii can be reduced in both the cities and the suburbs. Reducing street widths and corner sizes creates more space for other uses. Alas, the Suburban Experiment is still going strong with little sign of slowing down.
Decisions were made to plan cities around cars, to promote the American Dream of suburbia. Central decision making never goes as planned, there are just too many complexities involved with human action. The built environment is costly to change both in terms of time and capital. Policies which direct the changes are slow to adapt or reverse course if wrong. Poor decisions in the built environment rarely get correct.
All decisions require a tradeoff. Reducing areas for streets allows more space for sideswalks, trees, benches, hotdog stands, outdoor dining, or even for buildings. One thing is certain, under a bitcoin standard, money does not available at the beck and call of new debt offerings. Geographic land is a scarce resource within a city and must create wealth to be sustainable.
Inflationary, debt-based fiat systems perpetrate a myth of spending increases when they are more akin to the frog in a slowly boiling pot. Cities will be boiled by their own ballooning debt costs and decreasing productivity. Without direct access to the money printer cities will go bankrupt and the locals will be left with bags of concrete and asphalt.