Signal-1: From a highway to a pedestrian plaza in minutes!
Carlo Ratti is an architect, engineer, and a civic innovator. Recently — in collaboration with Sidewalk Labs — he designed a modular paving system intended to make streets reconfigurable, smarter and safer.
It is time for us to take back our streets from the automobile, or at least set some rules for equal sharing of the public realm. Cars take almost triple the space reserved for pedestrians in streets, and almost four to five times in avenues.
In a smart way of dealing with the latter, these modular pavements offer quite an astonishing solution for better street usage. During rush hour, these modules could allow streets to create an extra car lane before turning it into a pedestrian-only plaza in the evening. All of this is done though real-time interactive lights embedded in the modules.
In the near future our curb will become interactive. We will never have to worry about walking on the snow to work because our curb is smart enough to melt it down!
