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.