You can also check holographic and volumetric displays on Wikipedia.

Regarding the seemingly futuristic red 2D-laser display of people crossing at a crosswalk, it's pretty easy to say something is impossible if you do not have immediate experience on how a proposed idea might work.

Your mission – if you should decide to take it -- is to do a little research to determine how this might work.

Sure, that would have to be part of the calculation but unfortunately I don't think our carpooling rate is high enough to redeem personal cars in a comparison that breaks things out by busses, comercial vehicles, personal cars, and cyclists. Honestly. The emphasis on bad bikers, the endless anecdotes (thanks for providing another!) is a grim joke. Talk to me when the auto-to-ped kill rate is below 100 a year for this city. If we can keep up the decline of the past few years, that isn't too far off.

p.s. You know I'm not a "you thoughtful biker" ! I'm a thoughtful pedestrian, thank you very much, who doesn't see much point in a stereotype-inflamed "mode war" among those of us who do very little of the killing and very much of the dying.

A lot of bicyclists -- who require no license, no registration, no insurance and no demonstration of minimum qualifications -- have a lot of room for improvement, and you thoughtful bikers would be well served if they did. Just yesterday I saw a biker going west on 92nd or 93rd street (some cross street with a clearly marked and unobstructed bike lane) non-chalantly coasting down the center of the street glancing back over his shoulder at a car that was following slowly behind him. Then the light turned red and the biker went through it and made a right without even slowing down. The car of course stopped. I wouldn't be surprised if that driver thinks twice before yielding to the next bike he comes across.

As far as attitudes go, they can be bad all around but the fact is that attitudes and carelessness ARE a lot less dangerous on a bicycle or in shoes than in 3,000 lbs of metal. There's not much reason to look beyond Newtonian physics for an explanation of the disparity in death rates, but if anyone has solid VMT numbers for bikes vs. autos it would be easy to factor that out. (Given the distances delivery people cover on bikes, largely invisibly, I wonder how great the VMT difference would be?) What surprises me is that we do average almost one pedestrian death a year from bicycles. It's definitely something to look at after dealing with the 150x higher death rate from autos.

Please don't drive more.

Maybe I should drive more, walk less.

Cycling is only going to increase in the city, I hope. But as a pedestrian (and ex-cyclist: Bus, Pittsburgh, 1990), I'd ask, beg, plead, warn, scream that the cyclists here need to drop the holier-than-thou attitude and be more mindful of pedestrians, you need them (us) on your side. Yes, more pedestrians are killed by vehicles in the city than by cyclists. Could it possibly be related to there being more vehicles than bikes in the city?

Riding a bike doesn't make the behavior any less anti-social or more careful than the same behavior in a car, truck or bus.

Please don't complain about cyclists spurning crummy little bike lanes. Respectable bike lanes, maybe, but not those dinky meaningless white lines.

A pedestrian is something like 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a car than someone in a car. Car and truck accidents kill something like 300 people a year in this city. The numbers are so low for deaths caused bicycles that they are meaningless but, the last I heard it was about one-third of a person per year or 1 person every three years.

In any case, urban compatible vehicles should have acceleration and speed governors especially, so that they can't speed up to make lights. Adding intelligence to these governors in areas where there are a lot of people could provide even more limiting and even provide awareness-raising alarms to drivers.

Of course, it would be better not to have cars and trucks in these areas at all.

- the biker who is going the wrong way on a cross-street and yells at me for crossing the street in front of them
- the biker on a bike-laned street not using the bike lane but blocking traffic by using a traffic lane
- the biker racing through a pedestrian corsswalk (against traffic) yelling at the pedestrians to "get the f*** out of my way)

I hate to say that my impression (living on a bike-laned street in the village) is that a higher percentage of bikers break the rules of the road than drivers.

Bikers flame away but a lot of street space is being given to you and you still don't play by the rules. Explain.

Cars need to be penned in like that because every time they are stopped at a red light, they unthinkingly creep forward into the crosswalk.

A slight easing of the break pedal leads to great annoyance for others, but they don't care.

Build these things!!!