AS EVERY NEW Yorker knows, San Franciscans walk painfully slowly. It’s a common observation, and now it’s a measurable one, thanks to the lidar laser scanners stuck on the roof of the van that’s currently steering me though rush hour traffic in downtown SF.
I’d been on plenty of these lidar safaris before, but this was the first that showed not just the pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles around us, but the velocity of each. Displayed not in numbers, though, but in colors. The things moving away from us are in red, those moving toward us are in blue.
