zerosleeps

Episode 641 of 99% Invisible is excellent. I love the way Roman Mars’ mind works. Here’s one of the questions he was asked during this episode:

A city hires you to make their residents’ lives 10% better without spending any money. You could only rearrange, remove, or repurpose things that already exist. What do you do?

When applying this to Melbourne city and its immediate surroundings I didn’t even have to think about my answer: give trams priority at all junctions. Simple as that. It’s stupid how much time cars get at junctions while a tram with 200+ people on board is made to sit and wait. And of course the overwhelming majority of cars have one person in them. Stupid.

I reckon this would have some lovely knock-on effects: it would make driving in the city even less tolerable than it already is, reducing road traffic and in turn making the city much easier for pedestrians as well.

Bonus answer which applies to the whole of Australia but isn’t low-cost because it would require a massive public-awareness component: eliminate the practice of allowing cars to turn into junctions when pedestrians are allowed to cross. In other words, if pedestrians have a green or flashing red light, give cars turning into their path a red. Not a day goes by where I don’t witness a driver ignoring give-way rules, or even worse not seeing pedestrians already in the crossing. I don’t often play the “in the UK” card, but this rule-of-the-road continues to piss me off. It’s bad at junctions where cars can turn left into an active pedestrian crossing, but it’s terrifying at junctions where cars can turn right into an active crossing.