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Though my general prejudice is in favor of pedestrians over cars' needs, I guess I have some sympathy for planners trying to herd pedestrians toward the crosswalk rather than the desire line when the intersection has been particularly dangerous in the past and the crosswalk isn't particularly far out of the way. A good example is the metal barricades they've put up at the acute-angled intersection of 16th and Pine streets NW, in front of the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, to get pedestrians on 16th Street to use the crosswalks that cross Pine Street perpendicularly rather than following the direct north-south line of 16th Street. The streets running at an angle to the true cardinal directions in the Mt. Pleasant/Columbia Heights area were already there in the 1880s before 16th Street was plowed through the neighborhood so it has a lot of those funky intersections. You see the same thing with some other older neighborhoods in U.S. cities that a later grid was clumsily superimposed on, such as Greenwich Village west of Washington Square (where 6th and 7th Avenues were rammed through the pre-existing off-kilter grid in the 1920s as part of cut-and-cover subway construction).

However, it is particularly egregious when following the rules would force pedestrians to go really far out of their way, as in the White Flint example and the examples Jamie mentions above.

by neff on Aug 18, 2010 2:13 pm • link • report