The secret is to encourage cob buildings.
Once people figure out how to make something "charming" as opposed to "soulless", it becomes a formula and therefore, soulless.
That's why secrecy is of the utmost importance. I use a different pseudonym for P&Z.
All you need is taste, unlimited political power, and a whole lot of money.
You could become the local champion of High Futurism and push for building a giant dome enclosing Heebieville.
I really should have had McDonald's for breakfast. I'm so hungry now.
People stopped eating at Chili's in other places?
Surely if any unfogged poster is going to be championing Buckydomes, it'll be LB.
9: Huh, I guess not. I kinda thought those places were on the way out but apparently they're still in business.
Those descriptions of soulless UMC and soulless MC development are the Western flavors thereof, right? And/or suburban? Because I can recognize them from TV but they don't really fit anywhere I've ever lived or visited.
I began trying to explain what each of them would look like to me until I realize that I was describing upper-class places instead of upper-middle class, and UMC instead of MC. But that's always a vague discussion anyway.
Soulless lower class does sound familiar, except that single-family dwellings in the neighborhoods I'm thinking of start at 200K if the copper plumbing hasn't been stripped and go up from there.
If you want to visit, I recommend Cary, NC, or Dublin, OH.
There's a McDonalds in Freeport, Maine that built into a Victorian house, because local regulations wouldn't allow a standard-issue McDonalds building.
Freeport in general has done a good job of being a shopping town (home of LL Bean and a bunch of outlet stores) yet still maintaining some semblance of soul. Admittedly, it has less soul than comparable Maine towns that lack for economic activity, but there is a trade-off to be had. I think insisting that out-of-town chains adapt to local aesthetic standards goes a long way.
I've been liking Japanese colonial architecture. How about a new town hall for Heebieville? At, like, 4x scale, because Texas.
What if the local aesthetic standard is a 1920's frame house that hasn't seen any exterior maintenance since 1982?
What if the local aesthetic standard is a 1920's frame house that hasn't seen any exterior maintenance since 1982?
Then lack of soul probably isn't your problem.
Freeport outside of L. L. Bean reminds me of an airport concourse, Body Shop and all. I'm pretty sure there's a Hudson News in there somewhere.
17 is pretty great.
Can you not grant something a permit for being soulless? Or ugly (as opposed to not meeting some particularized specific criteria, whatever they are, that can accompany varying degrees of soulfulness).
There's a McDonalds in Freeport, Maine that built into a Victorian house, because local regulations wouldn't allow a standard-issue McDonalds building.
That's nothing. There used to be a Starbucks adjoining the wall of the inner sanctum of the Forbidden City.
There used to be a Roy Roger's in the basement of the Cathedral o' Learnin' here.
Can you not grant something a permit for being soulless? Or ugly (as opposed to not meeting some particularized specific criteria, whatever they are, that can accompany varying degrees of soulfulness).
Don't most planning codes have some generic provision about developments being in keeping with the character of the neighbourhood? I suppose if it's already soulless that's not much use.
soulless lower class - gross gas stations and pawn shops and McDonald's
There's a trend toward remodeling fast food restaurants so they look "nicer" (like so), usually with a stone facade and wood-laminate walls inside. (Here is another one.) I find this trend really depressing, because it just makes the fast food joints resemble all of the could-be-anywhere-in-America shopping centers.
I'd like to now make an ethical judgement in favor of clean empty spaces as connoted by 'big white limestone rock'.
If you can see the rock, it's not obscured by hoarders' clutter or garish merchandizing, or by overly busy collections of cultural tchotchkes.
Like an NYC subway station, in my Vanilla Sky dreams !
22/25: The land use code is being re-written and this summer will be spent revising drafts. So I think that's the place to hardwire provisions about heart and soul. From what I understand, it's completely appropriate to do so.
What Heebie should prioritize is is instituting some kind of exorcism ritual before the soulless building is condemned to the bulldozers. I'm thinking incense and solemn chanting of the zoning code.
Surely you'd need more of a soul-rebinding ritual, a la Spike and Angel.
30 assumes that a soul existed in the first place, which strikes me as optimistic.
I found out from Jeopardy the other day that Montpelier is the only state capital without a McDonalds. Does that explain Bernie, or is it because of Bernie?
Also makes me concerned about the possibility of a New Hampshire - Vermont war.
I hope the Budapest train station (Keleti?) McDonald's is still there. Or at least the building that housed it.
Denton seems like a pretty good model for what it sounds like you'd like Heebieville to become.
I'd say the big things that made Denton work out so well were, in no particular order, and all of which I'm well aware Herbie may not have any power over:
1) Walkable areas with a mixture of daytime and nighttime activities (the town square has both coffee shops and bars and you can picnic there) and businesses nearby.
2) Locally owned coffee shops and cafe-type restaurants where people can do any of lounge, work, read, and socialize. These double as places for community organizations to meet (the Frack Free Denton people met at my favorite coffee shop when I was there). When these places are locally owned, local artists' work will appear magically on the walls and open-mic poetry will magically happen.
3) musicians/singer-songwriters that were willing to play in them for very little money. This sounds bad, but it can be a good deal for the musicians. For instance, the Greenhouse in Denton has jazz every Monday night where the band gets a $100 bar tab, which they usually use to get themselves dinner. In exchange for not being paid, the musicians get to play whatever they want, so you get lots of experimental stuff that they likely wouldn't get paid to play anywhere because it's either too out or too rough around the edges. Plus, it's not like they're missing a better opportunity; all of the paying gigs are on the weekends. Hell, a friend of mine (who happens to live in Heebieville) plays regularly at Whole Foods for a couple bottles of wine because they let him play jazz.
4) People from the local university who got involved in local government.
5) Locally-owned restaurants/bars
What Heebie should prioritize is is instituting some kind of exorcism ritual before the soulless building is condemned to the bulldozers. I'm thinking incense and solemn chanting of the zoning code.
ADSO: Then do you believe that this is a place abandoned by God?
WILLIAM: Have you ever known a place where God would have felt at home?
32: It explains Bernie more than it is because of Bernie. Montpelier is the smallest state capital, or close to it, and that was true before Bernie and the hippies came to Vermont. It's also relatively dense, as much as the smallest state capital could be, so its character is more worth describing as such than the character of a lot of places.
Looks like the Montpellier in France has multiple McDonald's.
2) Locally owned coffee shops and cafe-type restaurants where people can do any of lounge, work, read, and socialize.
That makes me wonder if BALLE has any recommendations for zoning? Probably not, because they're a small organization, but it could be interesting to contact them, say that you're involved in the P & Z process and just ask if there are any people or resources that they could direct you to.
34 is a very good template. Denton seems to be a really great place.
I've never been to Denton. I was in Richardson. There was street after street after street of houses that all looked the same. That was 30 years ago, so maybe they look a bit different by now.
My kid wants to be an urban planner, and I have a friend and a couple of acquaintances who do this. Zoning that supports mixed-use, minimizing parking requirements for new development, and Business Improvement Districts to encourage some higher density neighborhoods are three planning tools that I can name off the top of my head.
If you're interested, I can cast around for actual literature that quantifies and maybe provides template language for these or others.
I would love actual literature. The Master Plan definitely is heavy on those specific ideas.
Didn't our Alaskan correspondent study urban planning or something related to it.
I would love actual literature.
Looking at the BALLE site a little bit more I found this which seems like it might be useful or might be slightly crackpot (hard to tell at a quick skim).
Here is the list of suggestions for rules that localities can set up to promote local businesses, some of which seem like good ideas. For example:
States and municipalities have long evaluated the impact that large retail development projects may have on such things as traffic and the environment. Some are now adopting policies that require that the economic and fiscal impact of these developments be considered as well.(Economic impacts include the effect on local businesses, jobs, and wages. Fiscal impact refers to the impact on tax revenue and government costs.)
These policies usually have two key components:
They require that an independent study of the economic and fiscal impact of the retail development be conducted by a qualified analyst selected by the municipality (or other reviewing authority) and paid by a fee assessed to the developer.
They establish a standard (or multiple standards) that the project must meet in order to be approved. The policy may say, for example, that the planning board (or city council or regional planning commission) may approve the development only if it concludes, based on the data provided by the study and other evidence submitted, that the project will not have an undue adverse impact or that the benefits of the development will outweigh the costs.
Typically, these reviews are triggered when the proposed development exceeds a certain size. For example, the law may apply to all projects involving retail stores larger than 10,000 square feet or those that will generate more than 500 vehicle trips per day.
Or Community Ownership of Commercial Space.
There are four primary models of community ownership of commercial spaces. These are: investment cooperatives, commercial community land trusts, customer cooperatives, and community-owned stores. Though several of these models are small, they hold outsize potential.
For more information on each model, including policy recommendations to help them scale and spread, see the pages below.
41:
I live kind of near Richardson now. Richardson is still very, very boring -- probably the opposite of what heebie would like heebieville to become. It's actually the town on which King of the Hill was based. My cousin actually left UT-Dallas for a worse school (for his major) because he was so miserable in Richardson.
Denton has blossomed in large part because it's very much unlike the rest of the metroplex. It also has a university and a baseline of walkable areas work with, which is why I thought it would be a nice template for heebieville.
If you ever find yourself up there for any reason let me know and I'll drop a list of recommendations of things to do on you.
Thanks. My cousins were there, but I really don't see them much anymore now that everybody has grown up.
The city we have decided to live in next school year has now been described to us by two different natives of the country as boring. I'm guessing that means lack of clubs and the like which isn't that big a deal for us.
Denton, of course, is mostly known for their death metal band.
There's a bat flying around my apartment again.
Downtown Minneapolis is currently without a McDonald's OR a Burger King. I'm not entirely clear why -- there's all kinds of stupid little boutique burger joints in the skyway, and we used to have 2 or 3 McD's and a BK right there, but they all wafted away, like sands through the hourglass.
Deserted as it is at most hours, I have a hard time calling downtown San Jose soulless in the sense used here. More like a wasteland with lots of parking. The McDonald's seems to have closed, unless it's being renovated. There is a Carl's Jr., though.
My girlfriend is studying something very closely related to urban planning. I told her in a text messaged that there was a discussion on urban planning on Unfogged and she responded with this text, which I am sharing with her permission:
Is [the discussion] all about how even the most idealistic, intelligent, and charismatic urban planer inevitably just heads towards a soul sucking downward spiral of hella basic commercial zoning because all hopes and dreams have been dashed by incompetent elected officials and people who will throw fits because "but muh property values" "but muh pollutant transporation" "but muh segregation"?
Answer: no, but there's still time!
54 Dude, you told your girlfriend about Unfogged ? I've told Chani about a bunch of blogs but this remains "the secret blog".
Yeah. She doesn't post here but we find a lot of good fodder for conversation. I actually really enjoy the threads about thirty/forty-something stuff and parenting even though I'm in my mid-twenties. She doesn't follow it herself, though.
Didn't our Alaskan correspondent study urban planning or something related to it.
He did! heebie, I can provide you with some resources but it will require a bit of digging in my old files. I've never actually worked in this sort of planning, partly due to happenstance and partly due to the dynamic described in 54.2, a dynamic which heebie is in a position to push in a (slightly) more positive direction.
Denton seems like a pretty good model for what it sounds like you'd like Heebieville to become.
The one in the Rocky Horror Show?
Actually your description sounds pretty good and something you could feasibly work towards. Heebie would need to work on some people to make point 4 happen, and I'm not sure the kind of planning regs you get these days can ever guarantee locally owned anything. What incentives would you need to persuade people to put their redundancy payoff into going up against Starbucks?
From a physical POV, [lack of] open floor plate is the biggest thing that can favor local businesses over national. Locals don't freak out over a column in the middle of their sales floor, but it's pretty much a deal breaker for most chains. Doesn't really apply to Starbucks--they're small and actually quite flexible, design-wise--but almost any retail.
You're not going to be able to outlaw clear spans above 20' or anything, but you could create favorable regs for buildings that e.g. conform to traditional lot sizes for tenant spaces, or something along those lines: if your demising walls are 20' or less, you need less parking, or you're allowed to be in certain districts. Or hell, if your structural bays exceed 20' (for new construction), you need to go through a PITA review process, but smaller than that you can build as of right. What you want to do is to tilt the field towards local-favoring projects, and make chain-favoring projects have to jump through hoops.
What's a demising wall? I have no idea how long mine are.
Another place to put hurdles: demolition. Require an approved design/plan/master plan prior to issuance of a demo permit, unless they hire a city-approved structural engineer to provide a report saying it's an immediate danger.
At some point this becomes onerous, and I'd imagine Texas property owners will become ornery, so you need an early success to point to: either some terrible outcome averted, or some new, fairly large project that goes through the system successfully and everyone loves it. Is there a known local developer who's largely done the right thing without strict rules in place? Perhaps bring them in for informal discussions about future projects they envision. You'd have to be careful about inside dealing, but it's often useful to hear from bona fide developers what things are and aren't problems for them (bad faith developers consider every restriction unacceptable meddling, not to say illegal taking)
Speaking of requiring a permit for demo, did they ever figure out who burned down Poli's?
OMG, I can't believe I haven't recommended City Comforts to you. Both blog and book. Sucher is a bit single-minded on his Three Rules, and he's a bit of a cranky contrarian by nature, but he's basically correct.
For the blog, I'd suggest going far back into the archives and working forward: like most blogs, it's less vibrant and interesting than it used to be.
63: Not AFAIK.
61: The wall between tenants in a multi-tenant structure (including condos). They're not set in stone, but they don't change much once built.
Somebody should know. I used to think it was hobos or high school kids, but don't think that now since they didn't catch anybody.
if your demising walls are 20' or less, you need less parking, or you're allowed to be in certain districts
This is clearly one of those key transatlantic points of difference - here the concession would be that you're allowed more parking. eg Essex (hardly a pedestrianised wonderland): Shops (excluding
food stores) [maximum] 1 space per 20 sqm.
We also have exceptions for parking at food stores.
To respond unnecessarily earnestly, food stores are max 1 per 14 sq m.
It's all fun and games until you can't pick up coffee on the way home because some asshole is parked on top of the store.
On review of other pictures, he's right over the produce aisle. Other news sources also said the driver claimed to have been cut-off. This would be a great deal more convincing as an explanation if he wasn't driving on a residential street so fast that he cleared a three foot gap in the air with enough force to break through a brick wall.
It would have only been amazing if the car were still driveable after.
But when I kick a car, I'm the asshole.
67: Almost every place in the US has high parking minimums. The guidelines from the Traffic Engineers say that a parking lot should be no more than 85% full at the absolute peak demand (above 85% os "overcapacity" by their definition). In most places, a 400 sq. ft. micro apartment is required to be accompanied by about 160 sq. ft. of parking space, which in turn is served by another 115 sq. ft. of drive.
25 ...Don't most planning codes have some generic provision about developments being in keeping with the character of the neighbourhood? I suppose if it's already soulless that's not much use.
If it does then this seems like the thing to change if you want to avoid soullessness. Is there any way to quietly propose a revised version of the planning code where you highlight some innocuous but slightly wordier change on page five and then quietly replace "in keeping with" with "wildly different from", in the hopes that people shrug and vote it through and no one notices or reads far enough to get to that point?
(".. no I'm sorry the strip mall over there already looks like that. You'll need [checks file] to make it a three story basement where the only above ground floor is the size of a potting shed and has a stairwell and nothing else in it. Also at least three of these signs need to include extensive profanity.")
From a physical POV, [lack of] open floor plate is the biggest thing that can favor local businesses over national.
Is this a typo? Open floor plan, I assume?
No, floor plate is the term they use talking about large, mostly open structures, like a new strip mall (which can be ~150' x 750' with very little internal structure). It's trivial to have a single tenant space that's 50' x 150' with just 4 4" columns in it. That's a big floor plate compared with an old structure that's 20' x 80' with bearing walls breaking it up.
Ah.
Anyway, your links and advice are super helpful. I'm actually feeling very optimistic because in the training, we were specifically instructed about how high intensity zones will require large sidewalks, buildings up to the edge of the sidewalk, parking in the back, and so on. It seems like there's momentum towards making good decisions.
Built along the edges,
Always when high intensity.
The further on the edge
The higher the intensity
I remember seeing a persuasive argument that street parking (not parking lots, but one row of cars at the curb) is a walkability plus as well. It's a barrier between sidewalk-walkers and traffic, and it slows traffic because it narrows the roads and because cars in the process of parking or leaving spaces are an obstacle.
So many cars drive into buildings here. Parked cars protect walkers and people standing in the grocery store.
Lots of people here all riled up about a new proposal to demolish one of the key historic buildings downtown and replace it with a Marriott. The city was founded on retail, and this store was built in 1877 -- settlers used the excavations for the basement as fortifications when it looked like the Nez Perce & Chief Joseph were headed this way -- and been continuously used for retail until 2010.
After which it's sat vacant, as one proposal after another has failed to get off the drawing board.
My architect friend next door is on the historic commission so I get lots of opportunities to spout off about burdens of proof and complete prevention of reasonable economic use.
buildings up to the edge of the sidewalk, parking in the back
I've seen this fail. The biggest way is to have the building effectively face the parking lot so that the even foot traffic comes that way. The street side ends up dead.
85: Correct; the third rule is windows on the sidewalk. But yeah, it's a big issue: before our fight over our local park (uncertain, but promising), the same bad developer bought a smaller nearby parcel at the corner of a major, major intersection. He leased it (wants to lease it?) to AutoZone or whoever, which wants to put a parking lot mid-block, face the front door to the parking lot, and have completely blank walls at the corner. It's incredibly insulting and anti-urban in one of the most pedestrian-friendly sections of the city.
And of course the assholes are pulling the old, "We're saving one brick on the back corner of the building, so this is really a renovation project" move. Heebie, this is absolutely critical: the zoning code needs to define renovation/addition such that this bullshit, which is fairly common, can't be pulled. It's a Ship of Theseus deal, but somebody must have figured it out. Maybe ask the Planning Dept. to research it for you?
82 is exactly correct. Traffic engineers hate them for exactly those reasons.
It is almost literally the case that you should do the exact opposite of everything traffic engineers say. Here's a good example: there is no safety increase associated with widening surface street lanes from 10' to 12' or beyond; what there is is an increase in speed. Traffic engineers will imply that wider lanes are safer*, but there's no evidence for this, and in fact they're more dangerous for everyone not driving. But traffic engineers are taught to value "service level"--code for moving more cars--above all else.
A common street Right of Way (ROW) is 50' from property line to property line. A traffic engineer sees this as an opportunity for a pair of 14' lanes with a 12' turning lane in the middle, with 5' sidewalks on either side. An urbanist, or anyone who cares about pedestrians or cyclists, can see a pair of 10' lanes with 8' parallel parking on either side and 7' sidewalks, or perhaps parking on one side and a bike lane on the other (with the arrangement reversed on the next block, so that eastbound bikes use one street and westbound are the next street over). Slower traffic, safer for all users, more welcoming access for cyclists, more generous sidewalks. Everyone wins except for drivers whose goal is to get through the district ASAP; IOW, people who are not constituents of the district.
*and here's the reasoning: they allow more room for a careless driver to veer without actually departing the lane. In narrower lanes, drivers are forced to, you know, pay attention. But that's an intolerable burden.
Holy crap, has neb recoded the site to automatically convert em-dashes to double hyphens? What a madman!
On a sort of related note, I kicked a car yesterday.
No. Late week. Anyway, I don't think I dented it.
I just learned the other week that trade shows have urban planning! I was talking to someone from Nokia Networks about why their enormous behemoth stand's major architectural feature was a huge expanse of empty space, and it turns out they wanted to build right up to the edge but were told they had to have open corners and a degree of setback so as to provide a clear sightline down the hall.
Oh hey, a piece about Stapleton, Colorado and these issues.
http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/04/a-case-study-in-flawed-street-design/389291/
And another thing from city lab, this on roundabouts:
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/03/america-traffic-roundabouts-street-map/408598/
Actually, that's not a great link, because it doesn't explain what's great about roundabouts:
1. When traffic is light, they're infinitely more efficient that signalized intersections (nobody ever has to stop when there's no oncoming traffic).
2. When traffic is moderate, they self-regulate traffic (primary routes move more vehicles through, secondary routes fill in as able).
3. When traffic is heavy, nobody is hung up by left-turners that hold up traffic disproportionately.
4. They slow traffic without inefficiently stopping it (far more fuel efficient), which also allows/forces drivers to be more aware of their surroundings, etc.
5. They can be more space-efficient than intersections with multiple dedicated turning lanes.
6. When the Tour de France comes through, it's fun to see some riders aggressively take routes tangential to the inner circle.
They should put on in Schenley Park at that three-way intersection just past Phipps.
94 Ha that's hilarious. And completely bogus. You should come to Arrakis and see how well they work. They suck. That's the funniest thing I'm sure to read all week.
Maybe there's a cultural element to their use and they work fine in France but holy hell do they make traffic miserable here. Thank god they're all too slowly getting rid of them.
95 is super-true.
96/97 is very surprising. Every bit of evidence I've ever seen--both in person and in the literature--is that they're far more effective than American-style signalized intersections. I have no idea why they're not working there.
Are these huge intersections like at the Arc de Triomphe? Maybe JRoth is talking about the one-to-two-lane ones that are the more conventional kind in the US.
On a sort of related note, I kicked a car yesterday.
No kicking, but I Ratso Rizzo'd a car myself last week in a low key way. I was crossing, he came up much too fast and much too close, so I paused in front of him and gave him a look. As I started walking again, he honked. So I stopped, put a hand on the fender, and asked why he'd honked at someone with the right of way in a crosswalk. He said something irritated but not threatening or profane, a passerby pointed out that I was completely right about everything, and we all went on our way.
(I was a little prepped for it, having just that day worked on a case with a man suing to get his license back after killing an old lady in a crosswalk. He thought a yearlong suspension was disproportionate.)
The first step in making traffic circles work is acknowledging that you have to work with them to make them work.
I read something from the mid-to-late 20th arguing that maybe traffic circles worked better in Europe than in the US because Europeans were more comfortable working collectively but individual freedom loving Americans wouldn't stand for it, ironically requiring hard stops and signalled intersections. Trump will ban all traffic circles.
Every bit of evidence I've ever seen--both in person and in the literature--is that they're far more effective than American-style signalized intersections. I have no idea why they're not working there.
It could just be the result of the normal variation in the extent to which people fiercely observe traffic rules or just sort of vaguely gesture at them but then drive however they feel. Americans and Europeans, from what I know, sit pretty far on one side of that divide. I know that the several times my parents have returned from living in Africa [does not necessarily apply equally to all parts of Africa] there's been a couple weeks of adjustment to the fact that people really will expect you to stop at red lights even if that guy with the green light is, like, meters away from the intersection and you totally won't run into him if you just go right now. I suspect roundabouts work best in those cultures too, though, even if they don't necessarily appear to given how people are driving in them.
82 is neat, and sounds very plausible to me too. At this point we've spent so many years designing everything for the explicit benefit of people in cars that I can't help but suspect anything where you could reasonably say "but people driving will hate this" gets a substantial point in its favor right there.
101: My link upthread references the same argument. Whether or not it's inherent to the national character, it's certainly accurate wrt how we're socialized to drive.
That said, people hold to an unrealistically rigid, deterministic view of that situation. You can see it clearly when planners propose shared space streetscapes (where there are few, if any, curbs, and pedestrian and vehicular spaces are only loosely defined): people act as if it would be madness, drivers slaughtering pedestrians by the dozen, but in fact drivers respond intuitively and rationally to the driving environment, which means that if they're in a place where driving carelessly and quickly is not safe, they'll pay attention and slow down (they did a fairly small scale version here, and everyone's been amazed that it worked as well as, if not better than, the designers said it would). To the extent that becomes a norm, American drivers would be less atomized and dangerous.
104: That's a good point. Roundabouts are inherently flexible, but they do require predictability from your fellow motorists, or else you'll be jerky-jerky rather than smooth-flowing. One of the practical issues of autonomous cars, even aside from the technological issues*, is that for the foreseeable future, they simply won't drive like humans do, and that will cause a lot of disruption. That is, you may be able to fix the computer vision issues well enough, and you may come up with very clever algorithms, but the gap between "on-road functionality" and "drives like a safer human, not like a weird (but cautious) alien" is a big one, a place where I suspect we'll spend decades unless there's some other solution (like banning human drivers, which is what the paranoids at automotive sites fear).
*taking as read Sifu's points, but supposing that we can get to a semi-functional model at some point
103: He was sober, making a legal turn, and not going unreasonably fast -- if there hadn't been a pedestrian in the crosswalk it would have been unexceptionable driving. He just wasn't looking where he was going. So, bad driving, but not criminal.
The papers his lawyer filed made me want to punch someone. It kept on characterizing his error as not honking to warn her. No, you evil, horrible moron, the driver's responsibility when turning through a crosswalk is not to warn pedestrians to leap out of the way, it is to yield to those pedestrians.
I guess you're not the only one who wanted to punch a lawyer.
What is it about the culture of violence in the OC that leads to stories like this?
107: He was driving without looking where he was going, through a crosswalk which a reasonable person would have known often contains pedestrians, he failed to yield the right of way as he should have, and killed someone as a result. Is that genuinely not criminal? It really sounds like (it ought to be) one of the lesser species of manslaughter. (Is there some loophole there, other than the general "oh, cars are an exception to the rules about killing people who aren't also in cars" thing?)
I completely endorse 110. It's breathtaking the extent to which IOKIYADriver is ingrained in the legal system.
Plus, I understand it is fairly difficult to kill a pedestrian if you are traveling at a reasonable speed to be turning a corner. That is, not just that you are less likely to hit somebody, but that if you do hit them, you are less likely to get a death. I suppose the elderly are more vulnerable.
