Jaywalking is an example of this power being used for good. Traffic flow is more important than being able to cross anywhere you want when we have crosswalks.
In New York and many other pedestrian-oriented cities around the world, more people get around via walking than driving for intra-city trips — the cars are the ones blocking traffic flow there.
Nevertheless, I’m of the persuasion that people who live in a neighborhood/city/region should be prioritized more for quality of life purposes than those merely passing through on a commute. Thus I would argue a pedestrian-hostile six lane road has no purpose going through a residential area, and in the same way I think there’s as many places where pedestrians should be prioritized highly above cars, such as neighborhoods, school zones, and dense commercial corridors.
There's a crosswalk at every intersection in New York. It would be unecessary and inefficient for the streets to be constantly crowded by pedestrians. The pedestrian's trip would be marginally faster while traffic would be backed up considerably.
"Traffic" has no inherent right to not be backed up.
If you are able to walk and you aren't carrying cargo, you should be walking. (EDIT: cyclists who can cycle at pedestrian-safe speeds are welcome, too!) The overwhelming majority of a city's residents fit into this category and the ridiculous amount of square footage allocated to car-asphalt is in defiance of this. And every able-bodied person who drives into the city for an office job should be dissuaded by geometrically increasing parking costs for increasing that unnecessary traffic load.
I live in on the edge of the suburbs and my car's gotten sixteen thousand miles on it in the last five years. Almost all of which is going to Home Depot and back or visiting people significantly outside of the city.
This is the sort of language we’re talking about: pedestrians aren’t (and rightfully wouldn’t be) “crowding” anyone. Pedestrians have been crowded onto sidewalks, to the advantage of a relatively small (and substantially less dense) class of drivers.
Driving in NYC should be a matter of necessity, not pure expedience. If and when our policies match that fact, those drivers that need to drive will find that they’re stuck in less traffic as a result.
Jaywalking has been exported to the rest of the world, but Tokyo is not a great example: they’ve successfully applied just about every urban design technique that allows cars and other traffic to coexist, to the uniform detriment of cars.[1]
In other words: the restrictions that Tokyo places on urban car traffic would make the average American driver scream bloody murder.
One could just as easily say that "[foot] traffic flow is more important than being able to [drive] anywhere you want", and in some locales that attitude may serve to benefit more people than the inverse. It's not a given that cars must be the default mode of transportation, but the idea that this _is_ a given is ingrained in the public conversation about infrastructure due to precisely the sort of propaganda the original commenter in this thread was talking about.
Nobody thinks that traffic flow isn’t important. What’s striking is the prioritization of one form of traffic over another, largely at the expensive of neighborhoods and the people who live in them.
