3-Way Street

You may have heard of a 1-way or 2-way street; but a 3-way street? What the heck is that?

Fri Jun 10, 3:19 pm ET
’3 Way Street’: Artist video tracks scary traffic
By Claudine Zap

Warning: The video below may cause you never to want to leave your house again. A School of Visual Arts thesis project by artist Ron Gabriel, named "3-Way Street," tracks a camera at the Manhattan intersection of 28th Street and Park Avenue. The New York mayhem known as street traffic ensues.

The video of

As the artist puts it on his website, the point of the study is to show the "interconnected role in improving the safety and usability of our streets." Mission very much accomplished.

With the master student's helpful graphics added to the clips, it's almost like watching the video game Frogger: Pedestrians dodge bikes, run into oncoming traffic, and barely escape with their lives. An 18-wheeler makes a tight U-turn. Cars jump lights. Pedestrians jaywalk. Bikes do everything but follow the rules of the road. Riding on the sidewalk? Check. Riding on the wrong side of the road? Check. Nearly colliding with people on foot? Check. Check. Check.

Aside from the arresting visuals, the stats from the artist are scary: This is just one intersection of 12,370 in the city. And 74 percent of the city's accidents that kill or seriously injure three to four people a day usually happen at an intersection, which causes collisions of bikes, cars, and people.

Ref : http://news.yahoo.com

And, the very words of the artist himself:

By summer 2010, the expansion of bike lanes in NYC exposed a clash of long-standing bad habits — such as pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists running red lights, and motorists plowing through crosswalks.

By focusing on one intersection as a case study, my video aims to show our interconnection and shared role in improving the safety and usability of our streets.

The video is part of a larger campaign I created called '3-Way Street'. Please see blog.ronconcocacola.com for more details.

Ref : http://vimeo.com

traffic behaving badly has gone viral on the Web. No surprise: What you see is pretty hair-raising.