Totally agree. This strikes me as a reckless strategy. The transportation authorities are quite literally training people to ignore their eyes when they see obstacles.
You could argue that drivers should treat a crosswalk the same as a real obstacle insofar as they should slow down and carefully assess the situation before continuing to drive, but that sounds like every other idealistic, prescriptive (rather than descriptive) attempt at policy-making. The people who will treat crosswalks with care and attention were probably doing so already, and I suspect that the people who were not previously paying attention to crosswalks will quickly return to their old behavior.
The failure modes also strike me as worse. If someone is already not paying attention, and they suddenly notice what looks like an object right in their path, they might reflexively veer away from it and into a pedestrian. I can think of other such scenarios.
I just don't understand how this idea wasn't immediately and definitively struck down as soon as it was proposed.
You could argue that drivers should treat a crosswalk the same as a real obstacle insofar as they should slow down and carefully assess the situation before continuing to drive, but that sounds like every other idealistic, prescriptive (rather than descriptive) attempt at policy-making. The people who will treat crosswalks with care and attention were probably doing so already, and I suspect that the people who were not previously paying attention to crosswalks will quickly return to their old behavior.
The failure modes also strike me as worse. If someone is already not paying attention, and they suddenly notice what looks like an object right in their path, they might reflexively veer away from it and into a pedestrian. I can think of other such scenarios.
I just don't understand how this idea wasn't immediately and definitively struck down as soon as it was proposed.