No, the side streets are the fronts of other buildings. The alleyways that might have been an alternative were long ago closed up.

One problem is the transition from one to the other. Another is that the "arterial traffic" in an older city is probably right through the older one-major-road-no-alternative-path "historic" section of town that always gets proposed as a pedestrian mall.

Nobody built the older cities around cars; cities were built a long time ago, originally for pedestrians and delivery vehicles, which is precisely why they are overwhelmed by the modern masses of cars. Which is better than the 1880s-1890s when they were overwhelmed with horse manure from all of the horse-drawn vehicles.

One might think that if two-way 14th Street is restricted, then one-way traffic would just move to adjacent streets - except THEY DON'T GO THROUGH. 15th through 17th streets are blocked by Union Square; 13th and lower are blocked by the irregular old streets of Greenwich Village. This isn't just "habitual" crosstown route, it's the ONLY crosstown route.

We don't need new laws - we already have laws about "filing a false police report" and "endangerment". We need for everybody in the news and the government to stop treating it as a "prank" like calling in a fake pizza order. Of course, we can argue about whether the civil police should really be showing up in military gear with continental-siege-level weaponry, but even an old-fashioned marshal with a handgun is dangerous if primed with a sufficiently horrific story to investigate.

Of course it's not economical. But a civilized country should connect everyone. So instead of leaving it in the hands of for-profit companies who will just steal the money, do it through government control and oversight. Let it be the training activity for the Army Signal Corps before they have to string wires in a combat zone.

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city
All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head
But at night it's a different world
Go out and find a girl
Come-on come-on and dance all night
Despite the heat it'll be alright
And babe, don't you know it's a pity
That the days can't be like the nights
In the summer, in the city
In the summer, in the city

Since Fahrenheit's scale was originally created to match HUMAN specifications - 0 was the coldest he could register, 100 was at/near his own body temperature - it is convenient to HUMAN descriptions. But yes, one can be accustomed to using either.

"triple digit" for those of us who measure in Fahrenheit. :-) Would you prefer the description "40+"?

Ditto. SE fits in my wife's small purse, and my pocket. Purely functional issue.

>>>>> it might be easier and faster to just write a new program of your own instead.

I have seen responses to query threads that say exactly this - that anyone having a problem should go write their own program. After all, the "advantage" of Linux is that you can go write your own program, or modify an open source one, to do whatever you want. BUT WHY? There are already a dozen programs out there that do what you want, if only you could find them, and install them, and make them work with the other things on your system . . . but that would entail people working as if they make functional devices, not "art".

>>>> it doesn't change with the next update

As noted better by others, any update to *anything* risks breaking some dependency that kills *everything*. Developers "deprecate" things with extreme prejudice, seemingly forgetting about (or never learning) concepts like "upward compatibility" and "installed base". Effort is squandered on forks of everything because of religious-to-cultish differences, dissipating progress in any single direction, because every single developer wants to be the pitcher/quarterback/center-midfielder. There is one unfortunate advantage to commercialism in engineering: when you know that you only get paid upon completion, you have incentive to get something *done* instead of spending your life customizing it.

Interesting problem. From an engineering perspective, it is very reasonable for the building code law to simply say "You must comply with national building code B and national fire code F" rather than duplicating documents B and F. But it is NOT reasonable for linked specifications to be at different access levels.

Take a different perspective: It is a solution to a RESTAURANT INDUSTRY problem. (And perhaps other political situations.) Fewer groups go out to eat from work because of the difficulty in satisfying the vegetarian/vegan/religious-restriction/diet members of the group? Every family has a teenager or two on some fad diet? Then to survive, restaurants have to find ways of satisfying more different diets. For example, the NYC-area chain Bareburger (how much more meat-focused a name could you want?), which made its fame with meat options like elk and ostrich and wild boar, has replaced some of those options with vegan and vegetarian options. (Bobby Flay's "Bobby's Burger Palace" tried the pivot earlier and made a big deal out of its veggie burger - and vegans made a bigger deal pointing out that it is basted in egg and therefore not even vegetarian, let alone vegan.) A restaurant cannot afford groups passing it by because there's nothing to eat for the picky eater.

It *is* considered an impediment, just like I have "corrective lenses required" clearly marked on my license. But the fact that some people are deaf and unable to hear does not mean that people who CAN hear properly can deafen themselves, the same way that assistive controls for limb-impaired people (steering wheel knobs, alternate throttles) are limited to use by people who need them.