Comment 88527

By Rational Optimist (anonymous) | Posted May 09, 2013 at 12:03:48

I am ambivalent about this. On the one hand, I experienced the pilons at Locke and Herkimer, and believed that they did make a difference. I am generally of the mind that such a feature would improve a lot of intersections, and that this city has far too many intersections designed like on-ramps. Additionally, I really respect someone who perceives a problem in his or her neighbourhood, and tries a solution. I am especially in favour of the quick and inexpensive nature of the changes that these individuals made. I believe that we should in a lot of cases choose small, incremental changes, and frequent experimentation (government is for a lot of reasons not usually good at this).

On the other hand, the environment you inhabit is not only inhabited by you. Public space is used by everyone, and we collectively decide what restrictions are best to put in place. Flouting the democratic will of citizens (even if that will is expressed imperfectly) seems wrong to me, and just because I think these individuals did so for productive reasons does not mean it is an unalloyed good decision. I can imagine someone breaking the law for much more dubious reasons, all the while believing that he is doing the right thing.

We live in an imperfect democracy. The complaints about our municipal government (both what they do and how they go about doing it), I mostly agree with. So, it's pretty clear that changing our municipal government is a good thing to do. Let's do that. What's the best way to go about doing that?

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