Salt Lake City is not a walking city. The blocks are too big (660 feet x 660 feet) and the streets are too wide (132 feet) for that. This has translated into many of the streets have upwards of 6 lanes. To put this into further context, here is a block comparison chart from 99% Invisible:
In the past, I have called this inheritance one of the greatest city building challenges. Because once you've designed a city around the car, it can be hard to move away from that. But as I have also said in the past, there are, of course, lots of things that can be done to make a place more hospitable to pedestrians.
What is also interesting is that, according to 99% Invisible, the original intent for Salt Lake City's urban grid was not for its large 660 x 660 blocks to serve as a rigid and immutable plan for the city. The intent was that its large blocks would be further subdivided into smaller blocks as the city grew and developed.
Other than maybe a few examples, this never happened. Salt Lake City's large blocks remain a defining characteristic of the city. But who is to say it's too late for change?
According to this recent New York Times article, California is set to put into effect a new mandate that would require 100% of passenger vehicle sales in the state to be fully electric by 2035. Included within this mandate are also interim targets: 35% of all sales by 2026 and 68% of all sales by 2030.
When I first read the article, my first thought was: "Isn't 2035 kind of far away? Can't we do this sooner?" And this is usually how my mind works when I see some date in the future. But then I remembered that EV sales last year in the US only totaled somewhere around 5% of all sales.
So there is work to be done, and mandates like this will certainly help. As I understand it, this will be the first mandate of its kind in the US and also one of the strictest in the world. A lot of other countries have simply set targets, rather than all-out bans.
This is what it means to lead. You do things before others.
Vox recently profiled what they are calling the deadliest road in America -- a certain section of US-19 running along the Gulf Coast of Florida. It is generally an 8-lane road -- 9 at most intersections -- and so as you might expect, it is place that was designed for cars.
From 2017 to 2022, US-19 saw 34 pedestrian fatalities involving a car for every 100 miles. Indeed, this stat makes it the deadliest highway in the state of Florida for people on foot.
The other telling stat for me is the road's crosswalk spacing. This is a place that is lined with restaurants, hotels, and many other commercial uses, and yet the crosswalks are sometimes spaced miles apart.
This kind of street scale is mind boggling for pedestrians. No one in their right mind is going to go out of their way a mile or two just to cross a road, and so it's no wonder that people are jaywalking and that too many people are getting hit.
I know that our tendency is to try and solve these problems with things like flashing lights, speed radars, and orange flags that people can unceremoniously waive as they cross the street. But at the end of the day, this is an urban design problem.
Spaces that are optimized for cars are, by definition, not optimized for pedestrians. The choice is ours.
Salt Lake City is not a walking city. The blocks are too big (660 feet x 660 feet) and the streets are too wide (132 feet) for that. This has translated into many of the streets have upwards of 6 lanes. To put this into further context, here is a block comparison chart from 99% Invisible:
In the past, I have called this inheritance one of the greatest city building challenges. Because once you've designed a city around the car, it can be hard to move away from that. But as I have also said in the past, there are, of course, lots of things that can be done to make a place more hospitable to pedestrians.
What is also interesting is that, according to 99% Invisible, the original intent for Salt Lake City's urban grid was not for its large 660 x 660 blocks to serve as a rigid and immutable plan for the city. The intent was that its large blocks would be further subdivided into smaller blocks as the city grew and developed.
Other than maybe a few examples, this never happened. Salt Lake City's large blocks remain a defining characteristic of the city. But who is to say it's too late for change?
According to this recent New York Times article, California is set to put into effect a new mandate that would require 100% of passenger vehicle sales in the state to be fully electric by 2035. Included within this mandate are also interim targets: 35% of all sales by 2026 and 68% of all sales by 2030.
When I first read the article, my first thought was: "Isn't 2035 kind of far away? Can't we do this sooner?" And this is usually how my mind works when I see some date in the future. But then I remembered that EV sales last year in the US only totaled somewhere around 5% of all sales.
So there is work to be done, and mandates like this will certainly help. As I understand it, this will be the first mandate of its kind in the US and also one of the strictest in the world. A lot of other countries have simply set targets, rather than all-out bans.
This is what it means to lead. You do things before others.
Vox recently profiled what they are calling the deadliest road in America -- a certain section of US-19 running along the Gulf Coast of Florida. It is generally an 8-lane road -- 9 at most intersections -- and so as you might expect, it is place that was designed for cars.
From 2017 to 2022, US-19 saw 34 pedestrian fatalities involving a car for every 100 miles. Indeed, this stat makes it the deadliest highway in the state of Florida for people on foot.
The other telling stat for me is the road's crosswalk spacing. This is a place that is lined with restaurants, hotels, and many other commercial uses, and yet the crosswalks are sometimes spaced miles apart.
This kind of street scale is mind boggling for pedestrians. No one in their right mind is going to go out of their way a mile or two just to cross a road, and so it's no wonder that people are jaywalking and that too many people are getting hit.
I know that our tendency is to try and solve these problems with things like flashing lights, speed radars, and orange flags that people can unceremoniously waive as they cross the street. But at the end of the day, this is an urban design problem.
Spaces that are optimized for cars are, by definition, not optimized for pedestrians. The choice is ours.
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