Back to the future in Phoenix, when pedestrians could use the streets


In my lifetime, pedestrians have had to stay off of streets. And not only for the law, but because it's extremely dangerous. As a kid growing up in Minneapolis, even with those small streets and even, uh, so long ago, I was warned by my parents to stay out of the street.

And this morning, as I was walking for my coffee in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, I got to wondering what it would have been like in old-time Phoenix to be able to step out into the street and not have it be considered an act of suicide. And in my imagination those days will return, and I'm hoping that I'll live long enough to see it.

Now calm down here, I'm not criticizing the wonderful engineers who created the streets of Phoenix. And I know that the drivers are doing the best they can, trying to stay always vigilant, never checking their cell phones for even an instant. But it's still deadly. So much so that people always tell me to be careful, just to walk a few blocks.

Speed, of course, has a lot to do with it. When you look at the pic up there of Phoenix in 1908, it seems incredible that the bicyclist is right in front of the trolley car. The reality is that back then the car and the bicycle were going about the same speed, just a few miles per hour, so there really wasn't any danger of a collision. If the trolley were clanging along at fifteen miles an hour, people would have thought that it had gone out of control!

No, of course I'm not imagining that everyone slows their cars down to four miles an hour, I'm imagining automation, the same way that elevators were automated, and traffic lights, and just about everything that happens over and over in the modern world. Right now Google is backing this up as I type, I don't have to stop and click "backup" like computers used to be a few years ago. I won't lose my document.

In my imagination when I step out into the street I don't have to wonder if someone sees me, any more than I have to wonder if the elevator will stop on the correct floor, it will. And when people get used to it, and take it for granted, they'll look back on the days when it was deadly just to cross the street, and wonder why?
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