The Atlantic Cities: 

“If Only Every City Had a Masked Lucha Libre Defender of Pedestrians

Sarah Goodyear. Feb 27, 2013

You know how it feels when you’re trying to cross the street and a driver comes through the intersection as if you’re not even there? Like he’s muscling through with that big box of metal as if to say, “Hey, get out of my way, you little flesh-and-blood weakling!”

Wouldn’t you just love to have a superhero sweep down, stand up to the jerk behind the wheel, and block the car so you could cross safely?

Enter Peatónito, the masked Mexican defender of pedestrians!

Peatónito is the alter ego of Jorge Cáñez, a 26-year-old political scientist in Mexico City who has also worked with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).

Cáñez created Peatónito to be a defender of the rights of the pedestrian in public space. He wears a cape and a mask in the tradition of Lucha Libre, the popular Mexican wrestling style. His mission, he says, is to protect the pedestrian’s much-assaulted right of way on the streets of Mexico City, where on average one pedestrian is killed by a motor vehicle every day and countless others are injured. His mask is black and white, the colors of a crosswalk.”

Photo: Peatonito

“DIY speed bumps: Traffic control for neighborhoods

Alexandria Abramian Mott. July 6, 2012 |  8:09 am

Take note, drivers who treat pretty much any stretch of asphalt as a highway despite the kids, the pets or the speed limits: Throughout neighborhoods far and wide, fed-up residents are reclaiming their streets, or at least trying to. It’s something of a global obsession, actually, and the solutions go far beyond the much derided speed hump, which some traffic experts say actually encourages bursts of speeding between the braking.

In West Vancouver, Canada, traffic safety groups painted holograms on the ground so that as cars approached, a child appeared to rise from the ground. (Never mind that detractors have said the holograms could cause cars to swerve and hit something real.)

In London, artist Steven Wheen converts potholes into miniature versions of English gardens. The idea: guerrilla landscaping as traffic-calming tool.

Here in Southern California, some other strategies are gaining traction:

Dava Waite lives on a relatively quiet dead-end street in Sherman Oaks, so when cars peel up and down, she’s pretty sure that they’re residents. “It makes me cringe,” Waite said. “We have people, babies and dogs hiking that street all day long, and I never understood how someone could go that fast without thinking about the safety of their own neighborhood.” So last year Waite hung signs that had messages such as, “Slow down. You’re almost home!”

The result: “The signs have helped a little, and other neighbors have loved having them,” Waite said. Now she wants to hang a banner that screams: “No squirrel should die on this street! Please slow down!”

Joe Linton, artist and organizer for the L.A. walking and biking event CicLAvia, has lived by the busy intersection at Koreatown’s Eco Village apartment building for 16 years. He rallied neighbors to paint an enormous road mural in 2005. After the road was repaved in 2009, Linton and about 100 others took to the street again, repainting the brightly colored, Olympic-pool sized creation. Linton, pictured here, said he asked City Council members for support but was denied a permit. He moved forward anyway.

The result: “I think it really works to slow cars down,” Linden said of the mural at the T intersection of Bimini Place and White House Place. He said the artwork helps to take drivers out of their typical “just-have-to-get-to-their-destination” frame of mind and makes them realize that “streets are public spaces where people can really interact. This was a way of reclaiming some of that space back for people who aren’t in cars.” The paint faded over time, Linden said, so “we refreshed it and added new parts last March.”

Via: LA Times

Photo:  Joe Linton and Eco Village mural by Arkasha Stevens / Los Angeles Times

“Poor Pedestrians More Likely To Be Struck by Cars

By Kate Hinds | 05/14/2012 – 11:26 am

Three years ago, Sharon Rodriguez was walking to her job as a bartender at a hockey bar in downtown Newark, near where the Devils play. She says the light turned green, and she stepped out into the intersection.

“And then a car came towards, me, turning. It just hit me from the front. And I slid across the hood.” She wound up under the car – at which point, she said, the driver backed up and drove away.

Rodriguez says her head hit the hood with such force her fillings popped out of her teeth. She needed stitches in her chin, and her jaw had to be reconstructed. She was taken to the emergency room at The University Hospital in Newark. Dr. David Livingston, its chief trauma surgeon, says he sees 300 pedestrian injuries a year.

“And not surprisingly,” he says, “they tend to be a lot of the times quite severe, because there’s a car, going at a moderate-to-high rate of speed, and a person!”

In all of Newark, roughly five hundred pedestrians are struck by cars each year. It’s one of just two dozen cities across the country singled out by the federal government as a pedestrian safety focus city.

Another thing about Newark: its average household income is about half the state’s median.

While a grad student at Rutgers, Daniel Kravetz starting sifting through data for several counties in Northern New Jersey.  “And I started to notice that all the roads that were most likely to have a lot of intersections with high crash counts, were in communities where the population was either highly African American or highly Latino,” he says.

So he dug a little deeper. And found what he calls “a statistically significant relationship” between low income neighborhoods and high pedestrian crash totals.

That correlation shows up everywhere. “The higher the income level, the lower the likelihood for crashes to occur in an area,” Kravetz says. “And that was found in almost any study that analyzed that relationship.”

Researchers are trying to hone in on why this is. One obvious reason: car ownership is out of reach for many low income people – so they’re walking more, literally increasing their exposure to cars. But poorer neighborhoods often lack even the most basic pedestrian infrastructure. And advocates are turning their attention to trying to improve intersections, one corner at a time.”

Via: Transportation Nation

Photo: The intersection of Park Avenue and 4th Street in Newark (photo by Kate Hinds)