Safer Streets LA – Wrap a couple of spare neurons around this one

In the first quarter of our 2012 collaborative project on Safe Streets, we promised that we were going to keep eyes, ears and brains open to the fullest possible range of ideas, approaches and policies that promise, each in their own way, to somehow take on and perhaps do something about increasing the safety of our streets. Of course, we have our own ideas on this topic (who doesn’t?), but it seems preferable before sounding off from the bully pit to see if we might first challenge our thinking and in that process collect information and views from the wide variety of perspectives, including those which at first glance seem to be probably pretty unpromising.  All this in harmony with our long-held belief that “you never know where the next good idea is going to come from”.

Man and car: Who is driving whom this morning?

What is it about what the English call a motor car that, when an otherwise perfectly decent human enters it and slams the door shut, somehow there is a total transformation of that person gripping the stirring wheel into something, into someone who is just a little bit less decent and a little bit less human. A consistent theme of World Streets is that over the last hundred years or so our cars have not only transported us but they have also in the process also transformed us. Oops. And in the process they have fatally (I chose my word) altered the dimensions of the space in which we live our daily lives, and in the same process made this thing that was supposed simply to transport us from A to B at our leisure, into a defining part of our daily lives — and indeed in some ways part of ourselves. A cruel critic might say, half Faust and half Frankenstein.

Honk! Collision of cultures

This for your weekend reflection concerning the wide range of very different concepts and approaches that we are able to see when it comes to the challenge of safe streets (safe for whom? and how?). Without wishing to point a finger at the firm whose Indian office thought this one up (I am sure there were some pretty furious people back at headquarters in Stuttgart), let’s spend a minute to look at how far our ideas on this topic do in fact diverge.

Seattle Crosswalk: Tap foot, Lights blink, Cross street

In the Safe Streets 2012 Challenge, what we are looking for at this (early) point is to ferret out a wide range of approaches and techniques of improving safety on the street. Here is one from Seattle Washington in the USA that our friends at Streetfilms reported on in 2009.