The thing that I thought about a lot in the last lecture was the thing about the elevated sidewalks. I never actually thought about how the elevation was there to help people not having to walk in the mud. I always thought of that as a safety measure, so that the pedestrians would be more shielded from the cars. The more I thought about this, the more I realised that 15 or 20 cm elevation wouldn’t shield that much from a speeding car.
So I thought about a solution to this. How can we redesign the sidewalks so that we esclude as few as possible, and maintain safety at the same time.
The first solution would be to just lower the sidewalks to the same level as the street and paint a line that cars wouldn’t be allowed to cross. This is a beginning of a solution but far from a complete one. It would actually be more dangerous ´since blind people (or drunk and many other) would have a much harder time staying on the sidewalk.
I think a good solution would be to add a (nicely designed) metal railing, or even concrete barrier, with opening where you are allowed to cross. This would solve a lot of problems, specially safety issues with visually impaired or drunk people straying from the sidewalks, cars going onto the sidewalks, and even the most common problem, people crossing streets at the wrong places.
Non-excluding Design 