The light blue line shows the posted detour.
It's 486 meters longer!

"There's no other infrastructure available, so this is the only option to get pedestrians around this small construction site safely!"

That's your carbrain talking. There's 39' of asphalt for 3 lanes of car traffic. THIRTEEN FEET PER LANE. On a straight section of road with a 35mph speed limit. We can't spare 3 of those feet to get pedestrians around this tiny construction site?

Yes, of course we can. If only we decide we want to.

@DrTCombs I have difficulty believing that most people are doing that

@Lyle I sure as hell am not. Even with my kid in tow, it's far safer to just wait for the car traffic to get backed up at the light and squeeze through.

It's ridiculous to expect people to go this far out of their way.

@DrTCombs I love doing these kind of measurements on Google Maps–they can be really illuminating about how the design of American cities is totally hostile to people without a car.

The growing number of pedestrian deaths has been in the national news a few times recently, and a common refrain from people who are used to driving everywhere is "I see people jaywalking everywhere in the dark, can't they use a crosswalk?". Satellite maps offer a great two minute exercise in response:

- Zoom in on a random American city
- Search for a grocery store / pharmacy or similar
- Scroll around looking for one that's directly across a big road from a residential area (pretty common)
- Zoom in and measure how far you'd have to walk to use a crosswalk vs going straight across

Often it's totally ridiculous. Like a whole neighborhood of people who live a few hundred feet from a supermarket, but would have to walk an extra mile in each direction to get there via crosswalks. Suddenly the fact that people are crossing wherever they can makes much more sense. What else is someone who cannot– for any one of many and varied reasons–use a car, going to do?

@DrTCombs Pedestrian detours really aren't a thing. You do something like this and people will walk along the barrier in the road, or at best cross to the median and then cross back mid-block.

@DrTCombs JFC that overhead shot. I look at that and my first thought is "you could fit an entire block of buildings in that space and do something productive with it."

I mean, hell, there'd still be plenty of space for pedestrian/bike/delivery traffic, green space, and light, it wouldn't even be cramped.

@DrTCombs And now I'm wondering how much of the country's reasonably priced housing shortage would be alleviated if we built housing on all the land we mostly waste on cars.