Changing the street hierarchy

Motorcide can be eliminated by taking away the irresponsible ability to speed on hundreds of miles of unchecked roadway. Reassigning lanes, streets, and intersections to other modalities is equitable.

General Plans are designed to run over pedestrians with LOS requirements. Here from Taking Back the Streets is how to question the conventional street-curb-sidewalk motorcide friendly General Plan endorsed public space layout with:

The Woonerf
Erase the boundary between sidewalk and street to give pedestrians the same clout as cars. Elements like traffic lights, stop signs, lane markings and crossing signals are removed, while the level of the street is raised to the same height as the sidewalk.

Play Streets
Block off streets so children can play. The city by refusing to provide street playgrounds create dangerous streets. Year-round play zones could extend the sidewalk as a landscaped area, or as a playground. 5th Ave between Broadway and O’Neil would work well.

Bicycle Boulevards
Bicycle boulevards divert motorists at key points but allow bicycles and pedestrians to continue on, and add higher property values on kid-friendly, traffic-calmed community streets. Bryant Street in Palo Alto is a very nice example. Many streets in Berkeley were retrofitted recently. Bicycle boulevards can be used as urban connectors to link trails and parkways and expensive infrastructure like pedestrian over crossings, in a system linked to children's landuses, into an Urban Trail System with regionalized traffic calming programs .

Pavement Hierarchy
Pedestrians are left to grope in fear on the edge of streets designed primarily for cars. Under a more varied approach, some streets could be retained as traffic ways, while others could be transformed into plazas or vest-pocket parks.

Green pedestrian Grid
Turn the main corridors into a center of a pedestrian-only plaza, car-free and lined with seating, trees, cafes and vendors with a bordering busway on a landscaped pedestrian space.

Mental Speed Bumps
Gentler slowing measures for traffic include tweaking the timing of traffic signals and adding street-side social activities, like parking spot barbacues that slow drivers without their knowing the foot is on the brake.

Swaled Streets
Replace soul-sapping asphalt with bird-friendly turf, put layers of plants around the skeletal infrastructure of the elevated Caltrain line, and tie those planted areas into landscaped areas with cisterns to collect storm water. Canada style streets could accomodate equestrians.

Lanescapes
Dress up streets with public spaces in various imaginative ways like Save the Music at 6th and Emmert. Streets where storm-water runoff pollute Belmont Creek could be wetlands.

Gentle Congestion
Instead of designing cities for cars, why not design cars for a kinder city? Neighborhood electric vehicles go slow, DONT POLLUTE, do not create potentially dangerous areas, and need 25 mph streets. Parking meters, linked to each other and to the vehicles, could encourage smaller vehicles. Removing parking from the transit core to a charged or lease authority would encourage walking and multiuse designs.

Urban Acupuncture
First, plant a bodacious tree in the middle of an intersection. Landscape the rest into a green berm, radiating coolness and quiet to calms the traffic in its lee. This greened intersection would be linked with vacant lots and pedestrian paths, creating green zones that force development toward the center and encourage pedestrians into unscripted seductions of city fame.

Motorcide versus wars

Motorized vehicles kill more that 1.2M worldwide, a jumbo jet load in the US every three days. Trucks, motorcycles, automobiles, public works vehicles, and buses use scofflaw behavior to run over pedestrians and bicyclists at will. Many small changes, like lead walk signals and barn crossings can prevent these crashes but cities are loath to "delay traffic" and sacrifice the poor on the alter of motorcide.

The problem is so bad that there is nothing a parent can do to teach a child how to be safe. Surface Transportation Policy Project Campaign Connection reports that 90% of pedestrian deaths were the drivers fault and 74% resulted from a traffic violation. Every intersection is a potential death zone from scofflaws who may be on phones or speeding or reaching for a cassette or in diabetic shock or just too old to drive. Cities try to work on motorcide one intersection at a time.

Drivers have lost a sense of responsibility for the pollution which results in a larger death toll than cigarettes or the crash death toll which is fastest growing disease in history. People drive when they are tired or on sleep medication. The law doesn't care. The media has forgotten how to report bad behavior while driving. The elderly drive because they have no options. Drivers have completely lost a sense of honor or responsibility for the planet toasting momentum bombs they control. They exhibit a perverse sense of lynchmachoism in their treatment of weaker vehicles like walkers or bicyclists with message brushbacks, gunning, catcalls, verbal abuse, road rage, or simply driving blind.

Since the problem is everywhere enforcement is overmatched and technology is too expensive to install. Streets other than auto only streets need to be reconfigured into the public works lexicon and general plan requirements. Studies say that for 85% of the population the most effective device is a speed control display sign. That means, except for the pollution, all the mayhem from bad driving is caused by a whopping 15% or 1 in 6 drivers.

According to Margaret Pye "motorcide" would mean: "death" (or "murder") "by motorized devices, most commonly: vehicles."

Under the pbpcroutes yahoo groups there is motorcide flyer called speedkills.
Speedkillsdraw is the front of the flyer which describes the problem of motorcide and speedkills is the back of the flyer which lays out a recommended street hierarchy. They are both pdfs.

U.S Deaths: Cars Vs. Wars
Car deaths total since 1899 roughly 3,500,000 not counting deaths from pollution strictly crashes. There is a three to one disparity between the two.
Revolutionary War 4,435
War of 1812 2,260
Mexican War 13,283
Civil War Union 364,512
Civil War Confederacy 133,821
Spanish American War 2,446
World War I 116,708
World War II 407,316
Korean War 36,916
Persian Gulf War 299
Bush's War 4 WMDs 4,033
TOTAL 1,145,222