I'm a game developer, professionally!
You may know me from things like: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Gone Home, Bioshock 2, or maybe something else.
Right now I work as a Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden
Perhaps there are other aspects of my personality that may also be revealed here on this website
we actually just passed the city measure that lets the cops do high speed chases whenever they have suspicion that someone might do something again, despite 38% of them ending in collisions historically
it's so cool to turn in your ballot and then learn less than three hours later that they ignored you
I'm not specifically a traffic engineer but my office does quite a bit of city sites (not San Francisco to be fair) and stuff like this can (and does) happen because of site constraints from all sides. You look at some engineering choices and just wonder "why the hell is it like that", and the answer is probably a combination of trying desperately to meet local design requirements and developers/property owners refusing to lessen the scope or size of their project because it "won't be profitable if we lose 2,000 SF of a 50,000 SF building." It puts designers in a chokehold because any good solution they come up with for pedestrians or otherwise gets shot down because it's too expensive or just doesn't fit on the site because nothing else can move. It gets frustrating especially when you see article titles like this.
Yeah the tradeoffs and conflicting requirements are genuinely very challenging. My goal is just to get to the point of recognizing that there are tradeoffs so that they can be discussed properly, rather than just going “welp nothing to be done”