Dumb Design for Mobility (Public space and Bus transit)

     One of the major mobility issues I see in the city is the immense amount of space solely devoted to the automobile, to the detriment of every other mode of transport. This means that people walking or riding their bikes have very little designated space. This is frustrating to me because as a person who likes to walk downtown a lot it can be annoying to have to skirt the edges of traffic and go out of your way to find paths and safe areas to be. The quality of sidewalks makes this even worse; while roads will be repaved or repaired almost every year most sidewalks in the city will be left in horrible conditions for years at a time, to the point where they are nearly completely unusable, especially for people with physical disabilities. It also feels like construction disproportionately affects pedestrians. There are several areas downtown on Main and State Street where sidewalks have been taken over by construction crews and replaced with narrow, shoddy wooden walkways or pushed out onto the street. More and more space in the city is being designated for roads and parking, and spaces where people could once spend time are now only available for automobiles which take up an immense amount of space even when they’re only transporting one person.

     To address this issue we need to focus on ways of getting people out of their cars and onto their feet. I like incentives for walking and I also support the idea of returning downtown to the people. There are already several ways cities try to cut down on driving: higher gas taxes, congestion tolls on busy days, tolls for driving on days that already have bad air. You can also make walking, biking, and public transit more attractive by offering tax incentives, discounts, and events that encourage sustainable behavior (maybe a “Don’t Bring Your Car to Work” day). Another way to incentivize other modes of transport is to simply make these options more viable and more on par with the ease of car travel. This means putting out more buses; having shorter waits in between each bus or train; and having safer, more enjoyable, and more beautiful sidewalks and bike paths.

     You can also boot out cars entirely and start designating downtown pathways solely for the use and enjoyment of pedestrians and cyclists. This would decrease the amount of space for cars instead of giving cars more space. As we focus more on putting emphasis on public transportation and biking and walking we can focus less on creating more spaces for cars to be in the city and the university so that we can use that space for more important things. Less public space will be set aside for the automobile. So many of the roads downtown are already nearly worthless for car travel (traveling north on Main Street by car can easily take longer than TRAX or even walking depending on the day, but people still do it) that reclaiming them and turning them into pedestrian only spaces would be a quick and easy process that would make the city immensely better for the people that live here.
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A simple solution here would be to have this stop labeled with the bus routes that can stop here

Why isn't it?

I take the bus every day to school and so this is the main form of transit that I am exposed to. Our bus systems in Salt Lake City are run by UTA, and they provide a website where you are supposed to be a be to access information and plan out your trip in order to get from one destination to another. The first issue that I see with the bus systems is this website. The trip planner does not recognize many addresses that exist in SLC and even areas that are right along specific bus routes will not be recognized. Another reason that the website is not helpful for people planning their trips is the lack of information about routes. Each route has a schedule provided, but each schedule only has a handful of the stop listed. This is ridiculous because it means you have to roughly estimate when your bus will get to a stop you are not sure even exists (often the time gap between labeled stops is 20 minutes!), and even if the stop does exist, you will not know for sure if the bus even stops there. This is extremely irritating because the majority of the bus stops downtown are not even labeled with all the buses that may stop there! Agh. How is a person from out of town supposed to get around?
First solution: put bus route numbers on all bus signs
Second solution: put bus times on bus signs, park city has a simple system that labels bus signs with minutes after the hour that a bus will be at the stop. It's great!
Third solution: have every bus stop applicable to a specific bus route labeled on schedules provided on time.