Abandoned map project
Some time ago, I had an idea that I would find and mark a bunch of "no pedestrian crossing" signs on a Google Maps bookmark set and publish it.
I very quickly gave up. It turns out that finding these is pretty hard - they obviously only ever face the sidewalk, so noticing them while I'm on my bike isn't always a sure thing. They also tend to appear in high traffic areas, or in the middle of long blocks, so they're often in places where it is genuinely unpleasant and difficult to bike. And to photograph them, you have to stop and get on the sidewalk and everything... anyway, it wasn't as easy to do as I'd hoped it would be.
I think a public list or photo project of these signs could be super interesting. I still am not sure what the best way to frame that data would be, though. I've wondered if video of these signs would be more illuminating than still photographs... the volume of traffic that passes while you're standing around in these spots is pretty extreme.
I still have a small map in Google Maps with a handful of these marked. I might go do something with it someday. If I ever become so wealthy that I never need to work again (this will not occur) then I might have the time to make something out of this... it's very low priority.
The main thing I'd want to communicate is that the places where these signs go up are uniformly miserable. It sucks ti be a person on foot in a place where the state has to warn you that it's too dangerous to cross a regular city street. These streets are terrible, loud, dirty, and they smell bad. A crowded urban street with a "no pedestrian crossing" sign is a place created by infrastructural and institutional failure and it sucks that we have any of them in these busy neighborhoods.
The picture above is from Hollywood, near where I went to see The Odyssey. This is far from the worst place I've ever found one of these signs - it was maybe the nicest spot I ever found one, actually - but I did find it just before being forced to eat my dinner while leaning against a parking lot fence that looked like a public pissing spot. (I did this because the only fast food spot on this block able to serve me a whole dinner before The Odyssey started didn't allow any indoor eating.)
Every time I see one of these, I kind of want the power to teleport civic leaders directly to the spot and force them to eat a sandwich in a cloud of piss stench, too!!