Pedestrian Lane Quotes

I am the saint at prayer on the terrace like the peaceful beasts that graze down to the sea of Palestine. I am the scholar of the dark armchair. Branches and rain hurl themselves at the windows of my library. I am the pedestrian of the highroad by way of the dwarf woods; the roar of the sluices drowns my steps. I can see for a long time the melancholy wash of the setting sun. I might well be the child abandoned on the jetty on its way to the high seas, the little farm boy following the lane, its forehead touching the sky. The paths are rough. The hillocks are covered with broom. The air is motionless. How far away are the birds and the springs! It can only be the end of the world ahead.

She described to us six lanes' worth of unadulterated fear, populated exclusively by motorists whose driving education had been paid for by the blood of pedestrians.

Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile ‘cigarette and sweets’ stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway.

The dude gunned his BMW 528i (of course it had to be a BMW) and shot down Commonwealth Avenue, ignoring the lights, honking at other cars, weaving randomly from lane to lane. “You missed a pedestrian,” I said. “You want to go back and hit her?” Randolph was too distracted to answer.

Since the Leeburg Pike [at Tyson's Corner] carries six to eight lanes of fast-moving traffic and the mall lacks an obvious pedestrian entrance, I decided to negotiate the street in my car rather than on foot. This is a problem planners call the 'drive to lunch syndrome,' typical of edge nodes where nothing is planned in advance and all the development takes place in isolated 'pods'.

The car sped along. She kept her foot permanently on the accelerator, and took every corner at an acute angle. Two motorists we passed looked out of their windows outraged as she swept by, and one pedestrian in a lane waved his stick at her. I felt rather hot for her. She did not seem to notice though. I crouched lower in my seat.

The Sinsar Dubh popped up on my radar, and it was moving straight toward us. At an extremely high rate of speed. I whipped the Viper around, tires smoking on the pavement. There was nothing else I could do. Barrons looked at me sharply. “What? Do you sense it?” Oh, how ironic, he thought I’d turned us toward it. “No,” I lied, “I just realized I forgot my spear tonight. I left it back at the bookstore. Can you believe it? I never forget my spear. I can’t imagine what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t. I was talking to my dad while I was getting dressed and I totally spaced it.” I worked the pedals, ripping through the gears. He didn’t even try to pat me down. He just said, “Liar.” I sped up, pasting a blushing, uncomfortable look on my face. “All right, Barrons. You got me. But I do need to go back to the bookstore. It’s . . . well . . . it’s personal.” The bloody, stupid Sinsar Dubh was gaining on me. I was being chased by the thing I was supposed to be chasing. There was something very wrong with that. “It’s . . . a woman thing . . . you know.” “No, I don’t know, Ms. Lane. Why don’t you enlighten me?” A stream of pubs whizzed by. I was grateful it was too cold for much pedestrian traffic. If I had to slow down, the Book would gain on me, and I already had a headache the size of Texas that was threatening to absorb New Mexico and Oklahoma. “It’s that time. You know. Of the month.” I swallowed a moan of pain. “That time?” he echoed softly. “You mean time to stop at one of the multiple convenience stores we just whizzed past so you can buy tampons? Is that what you’re telling me?” I was going to throw up. It was too close. Saliva was pooling in my mouth. How far behind me was it? Two blocks? Less? “Yes,” I cried. “That’s it! But I use a special kind and they don’t carry it.” “I can smell you, Ms. Lane,” he said, even more softly. “The only blood on you is from your veins, not your womb.” My head whipped to the left and I stared at him. Okay, that was one of the more disturbing things he’d ever said to me. “Ahhh!” I cried, letting go of both the wheel and the gearshift to clutch my head. The Viper ran up on the sidewalk and took out two newspaper stands and a streetlamp before crashing to a stop against a fire hydrant. And the blasted, idiotic Book was still coming. I began foaming at the mouth, wondering what would happen if it passed within a few feet of me. Would I die? Would my head really explode?

Never underestimate the anger directed at bicyclists. They ride too fast, terrorizing pedestrians. They ride too slow, dangerously obstructing drivers. They don’t wear helmets or reflective bike gear, jeopardizing themselves. They look ridiculous riding around in those helmets and reflective bike gear, more like Mad Max marauders than human beings. They shouldn’t ride in streets, which are hostile, car-only zones. They shouldn’t have their own lanes because there aren’t enough of them to take away space from cars. Yet there are so many of them that they’re running down pedestrians and therefore shouldn’t ride on sidewalks.

We will need comprehensive policies and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone. Most of all, these policies need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifice to offset the excess consumption of the rich. That means cheap public transit and clean light rail accessible to all; affordable, energy-efficient housing along those transit lines; cities planned for high-density living; bike lanes in which riders aren’t asked to risk their lives to get to work; land management that discourages sprawl and encourages local, low-energy forms of agriculture; urban design that clusters essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in pedestrian-friendly areas; programs that require manufacturers to be responsible for the electronic waste they produce, and to radically reduce built-in redundancies and obsolescences.

...moderate social deviance or class non-conformism I have imputed to the first generation of pedestrians. Improved roads, after all, were one of the principal means by which the country was building a national communications network that would underpin the huge commercial and industrial expansion of the nineteenth century; changing the landscape of the country to produce the arterial interconnection of the modern state in place of a geography of more or less self-enclosed local communities; consolidating the administrative structures of the state and facilitating political hegemony over a rapidly growing and potentially unstable population; and promulgating a 'national' culture in the face of regional diversity and independence. With the main roads such powerful instruments of change, the walker's decision to exploit his freedom to resist the imperative of destination and explore instead by lanes, by-roads and fieldpaths, could well be interpreted as an act of denial, flight or dissent vis-a-vis the forces that were ineradicably transforming British society.

We can use the same model for pedestrians. The rules will be similar, in that movement will be dictated by the space available, but there is more freedom of movement because, unlike cars, which have defined lanes and tend not to push around and over one another, people in a crowd are less constrained. That is why you can have crushing stampedes emerge from pedestrian congestion while cars patiently wait in line.

answers) 8.There is no crosswalk and you see a pedestrian crossing your lane ahead. You should: Stop and let him/her finish crossing the street. 9.It is illegal to listen to: Listening to music through headphones that cover both ears. 10.Always stop before you cross railroad tracks when: You don't have room on the other side to completely cross the tracks. 11.When you tailgate other drivers (drive close to their rear bumper): You can frustrate the other drivers and make them angry. 12.Should you always drive slower than other traffic? No, you can block traffic when you drive too slowly. 13.You see a signal person at a road construction site ahead. You should obey his or her instructions: At all times. 14.If you plan to pass another vehicle, you should: Not assume the other driver will make space for you to return to your lane  

In China, the transition has been to abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life - people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he's about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and they'll approach a roundabout in reverse direction if it seems faster. If they miss an exit on a highway, they simply pull onto the shoulder, shift into reverse, and get it right the second time. They curb-sneak in traffic jams, the same way Chinese people do in ticket lines. Tollbooths can be hazardous, because a history of long queues has conditioned people into quickly evaluation options and making snap decisions. When approaching a toll, drivers like to switch lanes at the last possible instant: it's common to see an accident right in front of a booth. Drivers rarely check their rearview mirrors. Windshield wipers are considered a distraction, and so are headlights.

My recommendation to the city was that they make this a two-lane street. With roundabouts at the key college entrances, traffic would flow just fine, albeit much slower than it does today. Such a design, with 10-foot lanes, would be easy for pedestrians to cross, especially with a nice, wide median and periodic jut-outs of the median and walk to shorten the distance people have to cross. You could put large walks along both sides and they would actually be used as the slow-moving cars would not threaten pedestrians. You could also skip the bike lanes as the bikes could actually ride right in the traffic stream.

Underneath the drones, the pedestrians and board riders along Plough Lane had stopped to look around in confusion as power and digital connectivity was taken from them—basic human rights since before they were born

Divided up into squares and corralled by the multi-lane highways were groups of multi-storey car parks, office buildings and department stores with small shops, cinemas, petrol stations and gleaming chrome snack bars on the ground floors. Many years earlier, when this city plan was being implemented, critical voices had been raised to say that the system would make the city inhuman and uninhabitable. The experts had brushed off the criticism. They argued that a modern city should be built not for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages but for cars. As on so many other issues, both sides had subsequently been proved right.

Instead of asking what can we add to our roads to make them safer, they began asking, in the counterintuitive style of IDEO, what would a safer road look like? What they discovered astonished them. It turns out conventional wisdom about traffic is wrong. Often, the less you tell motorists how to behave, the more safely they drive. Think about it. Most accidents occur near school gates and crosswalks or around bus and cycle lanes, which all tend to be regulated by a dense forest of signs, lights, and road markings. That barrage of instruction can distract drivers. It can also lull them into a false sense of security, making them more likely to race through without paying attention. Minimize the lights, the signage, the visual cues, and motorists must think for themselves. They have to make eye contact with pedestrians and cyclists, negotiate their passage through the cityscape, plan their next move. Result: traffic flows more freely and safely. Ripping out the signage along Kensington High Street, one of the busiest shopping strips in London, helped slash the accident rate by 47 percent.

For decades, big-city mayors and planning officials have been calling for more bike lanes, pedestrian access, and fewer cars. And for decades, traffic, air pollution, and accidents congested our streets and skies. Then, in weeks, cyclists took over the road, outdoor dining tables sprouted, and skies cleared.

Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I’m waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She’s probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer—equally sheer, skintight, and micro-short—and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea. She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision. There’s a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie origami.

During an intense, six-year period under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City proved to itself, the nation, and the world that almost everything that was assumed about how urban streets operate was wrong. Real-world experience showed that reducing the number of lanes on carefully selected streets or closing them entirely not only provided pedestrian space and breathed new life into neighborhoods, but also actually improved traffic. Simply painting part of a street to make it into a plaza, bike, or bus lane not only made the street safer, it also improved traffic and increased bike and pedestrian foot traffic and helped local businesses to prosper.

The safety data are even more definitive on streets with bike lanes, where serious crashes are 40 percent less deadly for pedestrians. In separate studies of streets with protected bike paths, injury rates plunged as much as 43 percent for cyclists, pedestrians, and people in cars.

For years, Tesla’s Autopilot system relied on a rules-based approach. It took visual data from a car’s cameras and identified such things as lane markings, pedestrians, vehicles, traffic signals, and anything else in range of the eight cameras. Then the software applied a set of rules, such as Stop when the light is red; Go when it’s green; Stay in the middle of the lane markers; Don’t cross double-yellow lines into incoming traffic; Proceed through an intersection only when there are no cars coming fast enough to hit you; and so on. Tesla’s engineers manually wrote and updated hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ code to apply these rules to complex situations. The neural network planner project that Shroff was working on would add a new layer. “Instead of determining the proper path of the car based only on rules,” Shroff says, “we determine the car’s proper path by also relying on a neural network that learns from millions of examples of what humans have done.” In other words, it’s human imitation. Faced with a situation, the neural network chooses a path based on what humans have done in thousands of similar situations. It’s like the way humans learn to speak and drive and play chess and eat spaghetti and do almost everything else; we might be given a set of rules to follow, but mainly we pick up the skills by observing how other people do them. It was the approach to machine learning envisioned by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.

A Journey Through Perfection: Experiencing India’s Best Highway Infrastructure Traveling across India is an adventure filled with surprises, but nothing enhances the experience like a smooth, well-constructed highway. On my recent journey, I had the pleasure of driving through a highway that truly represents the pinnacle of modern road infrastructure in India. From flawless roads to scenic surroundings, this stretch stands as a testament to how far the country has come in revolutionizing its highway networks. #modernroad Seamless Driving Experience Like Never Before As I entered the highway, the first thing that caught my attention was the sheer quality of the road. The well-paved surface, neatly marked lanes, and efficient traffic management made my drive effortless. Unlike many highways where potholes and congestion make the journey exhausting, this route offered a smooth and uninterrupted ride. Wider lanes and minimal traffic congestion ensured that vehicles moved swiftly without unnecessary delays. Smart toll systems reduced wait times, making the overall journey more efficient. Clearly visible signboards and proper lighting made night driving safer and more convenient. The highway is a perfect example of how modern engineering can transform road travel into a luxurious experience. #modernroadmakers Scenic Beauty Along the Way A great highway isn’t just about infrastructure; it’s also about the experience it offers. As I drove along, I was captivated by the breathtaking landscapes surrounding the road. Green fields, small villages, and a peaceful countryside atmosphere made my trip even more enjoyable. Rest stops at strategic locations provided much-needed breaks with clean washrooms and food outlets. Lush greenery along the edges of the highway helped in reducing pollution and enhancing the visual appeal. Safe pedestrian crossings and underpasses ensured that local communities weren’t affected by high-speed vehicles. This perfect blend of nature and technology sets a new benchmark for Indian highways. #indiabesthighway Unmatched Safety and Maintenance A highway is only as good as its maintenance, and this one excels in that department. The regular upkeep and advanced monitoring systems ensure that the road remains in top condition throughout the year. Some key features that make this highway stand out include: ✔ Emergency Response Systems: Quick-response helplines and patrol vehicles are available for assistance. ✔ Well-Planned Drainage Systems: Prevents waterlogging during monsoons, making driving safer. ✔ Speed Monitoring & Surveillance: Reduces the risk of accidents and promotes disciplined driving. These aspects make it not only a comfortable but also a safe travel route for all kinds of passengers. Impact on Connectivity and Economy This highway isn’t just about convenience; it plays a crucial role in boosting regional connectivity and economic growth.

In the words of Enrique Peñalosa, who instituted bike and pedestrian streets and rapid transit in Bogotá when he was mayor, if a bike lane isn’t safe for an eight-year-old child, it isn’t really a bike lane.

The Pulaski Skyway was designed to accommodate warships traveling up the rivers to the Port of New York. With that in mind, the Skyway’s cantilevered trusses stand on concrete columns that tower up to 135 feet above high tide levels. The Pulaski Skyway originally had two 10-foot-wide travel lanes in each direction, with a breakdown lane in the center. There were no shoulders and no provisions for pedestrian traffic. Unfortunately, this design encouraged motorists to use the breakdown lane as a passing lane, leading to a high number of head-on collisions. To resolve the situation, road designers replaced the center breakdown lane with a concrete median that kept the northbound and southbound traffic separated, thereby preventing cross-over collisions. This median became known as a “Jersey barrier.