My friend was hit by a car
Recently a close friend of mine was riding a bicycle along a city street. They had the right of way. A careless driver making a fast turn either did not see my friend (somehow... it's not like there were obstructions) or did not even bother to look. The driver and their 2000-pound steel machine slammed into my friend, throwing them off the bike.
The bike was completely destroyed/unusable. My friend was scraped up, and shaken, but by a miracle did not hit their head or have to be hospitalized. They were lucky: the car was traveling fast enough to kill. The driver was apologetic and paid for my friend's bicycle and medical bills. But this should not have happened. My friend could have died or been permanently paralyzed.
I don't know all the details. But I do know that intersection. This was so ridiculously avoidable.
- Had the bike lane been fully protected with a clearly visible (but not sight-line-blocking) concrete curb or at least a bollard at the intersection, the driver probably would not have taken the turn so fast, or would maybe have been more generally aware of cyclists. They may have had time enough to stop before crashing into my friend, or the impact may have been small enough not to hurt them.
- Had there been a raised crosswalk or had the entire intersection been raised (as a speed table), requiring cars to slow down, the driver would definitely not have taken the turn so fast. The driver may also have been more aware of pedestrians/cyclists and more likely to yield.
- Had there been a curb extension shortening the crosswalk (in this case a pedestrian crossing island past the bike lane, I guess), the driver would probably have subconsciously taken the turn more slowly, as they would probably have felt more enclosed within the intersection.
- Had signal priority been given to cyclists/pedestrians, the driver probably also would not have made the turn at that point in the light cycle, and would probably not have hit my friend. (I'm pretty sure my friend was going straight on green, but if they were making a right turn, then had no right turn on red also been enforced for cars, the driver would probably not have made the turn at that point in the light cycle, and would probably not have hit my friend.)
(This wasn't a parking-protected bike lane: the city had just removed parking from that side of the street and left it fully unprotected. If it were parking-protected, I would also suggest that two parking spaces be removed approaching the intersection to ensure that the driver could see cyclists in their peripheral vision. As it stands, I have no idea how this person did not see my friend. Gross negligence. They should not be allowed to operate a motor vehicle.)
Driving shouldn't be considered such a mundane thing. When someone steps into a car they should be aware that, at any point, they could kill someone. But really infrastructure is an easier, more repeatable, and less exhausting solution than trying to change attitudes directly. Probably had any one of these infrastructure changes been implemented, my friend would not have been hit by a car. Had more than one or two been implemented, there would realistically never be a cyclist collision here.
It irritates me that my friend's life was put in danger because a driver was being careless. But also that they were able to make a careless mistake. And incidents like this remind me that traffic safety is not a theoretical problem. At any time, without warning, the life of someone you care about could be immediately taken away because we have a culture that normalizes driving a dangerous vehicle with basically zero oversight; and because our roads are designed for car throughput and not to be safe for vulnerable people.
Someone called me "militant [about traffic safety]" once. This is why.
We have a car culture problem in the US for sure, but putting anger and blame on the driver is, I think, misplaced. That driver probably is average and no more negligent than many others in the same situation. We should have a realistic view of the limitations of drivers and understand infrastructure changes as mitigations designed to compensate for the limitations of human behavior and attention. And we should also be addressing the incentives that lead to there being so many drivers to begin with.
Even when people are vigilant, aware of the risks, and making responsible choices, human error rates are still pretty high. Human attention is a malleable and wanton thing. Something else on the road that you could also be a problem can distract you for the critical seconds it would take to understand that a cyclist is there. So there's a lot more to it than just saying "drivers be better".
I once had a very close call with a pedestrian in a crosswalk because they were in the shadow of my A pillar for my whole approach to the light. (Side curtain airbags have greatly inflated them). Now, I know to move my head around more in the turns. But I had had that vehicle for five years when it happened. I don't think I was negligent, just unlucky.
I think this will not be a popular opinion, but the other problem is that there are just not enough bike riders. I live in a pretty bike-friendly city, but I still see less than one a day, even back when I was living and working in the heart of the city. If I were to encounter dozens of bikes every day, I'd have a model of the range of expected behavior. I'd expect to see a bike at that turn. But if there's almost never a bike there, you're only going to check so many times before your brain says, "this is not a place bikes are" and you get lax about it. That's just the way brains work. And it's not going to change while bikes remain outliers in the driving experience.
Second unpopular opinion, but I think bikers need to take more responsibility for their own safety and be more defensive in their behavior. The reality is that most drivers are not aware of bikes and will not yield correctly. It's not the way it is is supposed be. But it's the way it is. If we're going to ask drivers to be realistic about the risks of driving their 2000 lb death machines, we should ask bicyclists to recognize that they are making a high risk choice too. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't do things to make things less risky for bikers. We just need to be realistic about it in the meantime.
The problem with addressing the "not enough bikes" and "too many cars" problems is that it requires time to make significant cultural shifts. How do we get away from a majority car society when people's houses are in the suburbs because they grew up in a car commuter culture? We can't just all move to city centers. In most cases, the infrastructure there can't support the people that already live there. It becomes a chicken and egg problem.
I think gradual changes to infrastructure and other structural changes are the only realistic path to change. But in designing those changes, we need to remember that most drivers are just getting by. They are a product of a car culture and a system that incentivizes car-centered behavior. We should be making road improvements that protect vulnerable road users like the OP outlined. But we should also be addressing the reasons why people feel like they have no alternatives to driving if we want to see real change.
Nah, you would have had to not look where you were turning to have hit my friend. If you're at fault for hitting a pedestrian or cyclist in a car in an avoidable situation, you should immediately lose your license and have to re-take a driver's test. If you kill someone, you should never be allowed to drive a car on a public road again.
IMO if the "average" driver can't safely drive a car without literally killing people, they shouldn't be allowed to drive. Think about all the licenses our society requires to do other dangerous things... electricians need annual renewals of their licenses to operate on systems, for example, and the licensing is way harder than a road test! Driving should be considered no different.
Implementing tougher requirements to drive cars would be valuable to society, although I understand that this would realistically have to be a slow roll-out.
But like I said, safety-first pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure is the way we realistically induce positive change in a rapid manner. While I think driving should be limited exclusively to people who are very good drivers, I understand that in the real world, it's politically challenging to take away a privilege like driving that is ingrained in our culture and that people enjoy doing, even though it's dangerous and unnecessarily kills thousands of people every year.
I think the data actually agrees with you! The more cyclists there are, the more drivers are aware of their presence. And the more people who are actively cycling, the more pressure cities have to build out their bicycle infrastructure into proper fully protected networks, rather than disconnected patches of unprotected lanes. That means the roads become safer for cyclists and less stressful for drivers. Win-win!
Some cities have publicly accessible "bike counters" to track usage. Philadelphia's bike counter shows that fully protected trails like the Schuylkill River Trail and the Delaware River Trail have extremely high use: the highest in the region by a significant margin. Central/critical but unprotected bike lanes like Spruce St/Pine St also have high use, but the fact that they don't beat out the circuit trails despite being in the absolute densest parts of the city speaks to the importance of building real infrastructure.
I agree with that but I don't think this is a balanced equation. Cyclists are literally always the vulnerable road users at greater risk of death in a car-on-bike crash (usually by several orders of magnitude). While I agree that all cyclists should engage in defensive cycling, that doesn't necessarily save their lives. My friend is not an aggressive cyclist in any way - they were not even close to at fault, and being more defensive wouldn't necessarily have stopped them from getting hit (the car was going fairly fast, from what I understand).
Unfortunately the fact that cars are what they are means that even the safest and most defensive cycling doesn't mean anything if a driver is watching their phone and drifts into the bike lane at 40 mph, or doesn't check their blind spot and hits a cyclist. The cyclist is going to die, and the driver is usually going to be physically unharmed. It's a very imbalanced power dynamic and I think we have to recognize that by shifting as much focus as possible onto the group that has the "power [to kill]."
To me, this point has always felt like a deflection from the real cause of the issue, which is that automobiles are huge, heavy, and allowed to go way faster than is safe on urban/suburban streets. (I know this is not your only suggestion though, and you have a much more nuanced take.) To me, it has also always been the #1 way car-centric thinkers use to justify not expanding bike infrastructure: I know you are definitely not trying to do this, but this is the "victim-blaming" logic that, while maybe technically true, is not really helpful or actionable toward root causes of problems. So I just want us to be careful with these kinds of statements.
In the areas with the worst cyclist safety, most people are cycling because they can't afford cars, or are incapable of driving for age/medical reasons. I think in my friend's case transit was not a suitable option. You have a small portion of bike enthusiasts who will cycle anywhere no matter what, but my friend is an example of a person who really has no other acceptable mode of transportation.
Totally agree! It's a tremendously large problem. There's a lot going on here, including a need for more density near transit stations so that fewer people feel like their only affordable housing options are in car-centric places. In general, I think that "transit-oriented development" patterns get us part of the way toward our goals of sustainable/safe living arrangements without requiring huge social upheaval. And there's a need for more transit to begin with, which is... a whole thing.
I think that in the case of cycling specifically, you don't actually need to get 100% or 80% or even 50% of people onto bikes to see major improvements to safety. Even if only 25% of people semi-regularly use a bike to commute or do some other task, their political power as a group becomes huge, as is their general societal visibility. Apparently about 30% of NYC residents ride a bike (in general, not necessarily for commuting), and you can see firsthand how much that's impacted the city's bike network in the past few years. Of course you have to start somewhere and while it is a chicken/egg problem, a little bit of infrastructure build-out from the government has to be the first step.
In urban/suburban areas, I think it's important to build out the infrastructure but also to understand why people travel in the ways they do. @literallytwisted mentioned the perception of safety, which is a super real concern. Even if safe bike trails/lanes exist, some people may still not take them because getting to those trails/lanes is unsafe; or intersections along the way may not be great. Or the location of certain bike lanes may just not be very pleasant, even if they're relatively safe (like being next to a highway, which is very loud). Or there might not be bike-friendly amenities at destinations people want to go to, like a lack of bike parking for both regular bikes and things like cargo bikes (e.g. for groceries). Or there may not be good bike integration in public transit: different subway car layouts are more or less suited for bikes, for example. And so on.
The problem with making it harder for people to drive without providing viable alternatives is that it will disproportionately affect the least privileged people in our society. You mentioned that many people bike because they can't afford anything else, which is true. But for many people with low income, having reliable vehicular transportation is the difference between having a job and not having a job. Especially in places where service jobs are in places that are too expensive for the service workers to live. They are the ones who lose out if it's harder to get or keep a drivers license, not the (raging stereotype incoming) yuppies driving 120k SUVs that never have an passengers or the folks driving lifted F250s that have never been off pavement.
The least privileged people in our society don't own cars! (And many of them are in extremely car-centric suburban and rural places!)
Morally/philosophically, I feel that someone who is incapable of driving without hurting/killing others just does not deserve to drive even if losing that privilege will hurt them too. By driving and hurting/killing others, they inflict a broader cost on society (loss of life/health, medical costs, potentially permanent disability; i.e. someone else's death, or a contribution to someone else's poverty) than the cost inflicted on them by not being able to drive (a contribution to their own poverty). In one case, someone is dead; in another, no one is dead, but someone is poorer. It's more complicated than that, but while the latter is very much not a good thing, it is itself less worse.
But yes, I agree with you. The precise way that stricter driving regulations are implemented would have a disproportionately small or large impact on disadvantaged groups. Realistically, while I think driving should be a carefully granted privilege, I am completely with you that providing alternatives is crucial. I have always advocated for walkability and transit for this reason. The "push factor" only does so much if there isn't a corresponding "pull factor."
Personally I think that building out bike infrastructure is one such alternative in basically every urban area and in many suburban areas. Expanding and revitalizing transit networks is another important alternative. In urban areas, that means heavy rail, light rail, and bus networks (in that order as far as "overall impact" is concerned but in the reverse order as far as feasibility of construction is concerned).
In suburban areas, expanding rail and bus service is also still quite important and feasible, although not all suburban areas can be within a 0.5 mi radius of a train station. In these places, 100% modal shift is not necessarily a feasible goal, but it's very much feasible to capture a large portion of trips by building out transit networks to actual destinations, like commercial areas and job centers. (Currently, many networks do not do this effectively). Additionally, it's important to offer more frequent service, including for regional trains, so that people can begin to rely on transit lines without fastidiously checking schedules.
You say that like it's just a choice that people could make and are consciously deciding not to, but that's just not true. This is the point I was trying to make. Even after you go after the drunk drivers and the cell phone idiots (which we should), people just ... fail. So then you're punishing them for being unlucky and there's no justice in that in my book.
The very best case error rates for humans making critical errors (literally life and death, from nuclear power plant operator research) are around one error every thousand hours. That may sound like a lot, but target error rates for safety critical systems is typically less than one per million or billion hours.
What you are proposing is exactly the same as when factories have don't have enough safety procedures and when someone gets hurt, they fire the guy who happened to be operating the machine that day. It's not that guy's fault, it's the system's fault. But he's the one who can't make rent or feed his kids.
The best term I've heard for this is a "moral crumple zone". Blaming the unlucky individual prevents people from having to examine the system that incentivized those behaviors.
It seems that you and others in this thread want to dismantle the system that is a car-centric society. Having rail or bus routes or whatever that and not spending hours a day fighting traffic sounds great. Sign me up!
But the changes that you and others propose embody values that our society (or its leaders, at least) don't think are important. Should we want to change those values? Yes! But I don't think pretending that being allowed to drive is anything less than a necessity for the vast majority of Americans, or that all risk is avoidable and people who make mistakes were too lazy or stupid to do so is the way to get there.
Maybe the exact licensing proposal I made is extreme, but current driving regulations are absolutely too lenient. "Mistakes" happen although I intentionally do not use the word "accident" because, really, there is always someone negligently at fault (if it's not a person, it's an engineer).
Our licensing does not adequately ensure pedestrian/cyclist safety. Our current system has not reached the point where exclusively "genuine accidents" are dominant; someone, usually the driver, was at fault for a reason they could have changed, usually speed-related. Our current system does not recognize this fault. It allows people who get DUIs to continue driving. It allows people who negligently kill people to continue driving. It allows people to continue being killed for no good reason.
We should at least "go after the drunk drivers and the cell phone idiots." And more. Right now, we don't even come close. Looking at your cell phone while driving and causing an accident should have your license revoked. A DUI should be an immediate revocation and at least a 5-year stay on renewing it, because if you can't be trusted to make a safe choice about drinking, you really just can't be trusted with other people's lives.
The real solution is to severely restrict the speed of vehicles within city limits. On any road except limited access highways, set the speed limit to 20 mph, around the top speed of a bicycle, ebike, scooter, etc. That way people can still drive if they need to. Deliveries can still be made in car-centric areas. But you eliminate the speed differential. If everyone is traveling at the same modest speed, it eliminates most of the friction between bicycle and vehicle traffic. You don't have road ragers honking at bicyclists for blocking the lane, as the bicycles travel as fast as the cars do.
Now, obviously there is still the culture of regular lawbreaking that almost every driver regularly engages in, continuous violations of speeding laws. I think at this point, it's clear that drivers really can't be relied on to follow speed limits. Thankfully, we already have the technology to fix this. The solution is GPS governors. We have require e-bikes to have governors installed on them that limit their speeds to those legally allowed. You can't buy an e-bike without its speed kept to legal levels. And yet, we allow people to purchase 2 ton metal death machines that have no controls on their speed at all! Tiny e-bikes? Heavily regulated. 2 ton metal death machines? No restrictions!
All cars should be required to have GPS-controlled governors on them. Cars should simply refuse to violate speed limits. New cars already have all the necessary tech to enforce such limits. They all have GPS capability, their accelerations are all computer controlled. GPS navigation software built into cars already shows you the speed limit of whatever road you are on. We finally have the technology to do this effectively. It's time we require all new vehicles to have GPS governors in them that completely prevent them from exceeding speed limits.
I'm sure some drivers will whine about this. The culture of wanton criminal violation of speed limits is deeply entrenched. But there's no reason it should remain so. People will suggest fanciful scenarios like "what if I need to speed to the hospital?" But if you actually think about it, any scenario that requires speeding is a case where speeding really isn't safe or warranted. Allowing people to speed to the hospital, people who don't have the training to do such driving, and who don't have the right-of-way that ambulances do, simply risks creating more victims. Your spouse may be dying of a heart attack, but that doesn't give you the right to go barreling through traffic lights and flagrantly violating speed limits. Saving your spouse is not worth creating more victims. Again, that is what ambulances are for. And of course, if governors are acceptable on e-bikes, a vehicle orders of magnitude less dangerous than a full-sized car, then such limitations on vehicles are acceptable as well. E-bikes should not be more regulated than cars.
So there are two things we actually could do that would radically transform are cities to make human-scale transportation far safer and more practical. Limit speeds within city limits to 20 mph, and enforce all speed limits with GPS-controlled governors. Everyone who needs to drive can keep driving, but we stop designing our entire transportation system solely for drivers. Want to bring your car into city limits? Fine, but you're not traveling in it faster than a bicycle can travel. Your time and safety are not more important than a cyclist simply because you use a car.
The impact of frequency dominates that of reliability. If I have to plan my day around the bus schedule, I’m driving. If service is every 15 minutes, who cares if it’s 5 minutes late?
Regarding stricter driving enforcement, diligence is not a realistic solution at a societal scale. Anyone who insistently suggests it should rightfully be laughed out of the room. Build systems to make the wrong decisions impossible rather than increase enforcement and licensing.
Safe infrastructure is a system which allows people to generally "make the wrong decisions" while driving and still not kill anyone. But no passive system can ever be completely foolproof, nor can it predict the unpredictable (that is, every aspect of human behavior). It's proactive in the sense that it can minimize some or many problems, but humans can and will continue to repeat the same "mistakes" if permitted; potentially life-threatening ones that infrastructure has trouble dealing with. There are always weak spots.
"Diligence," on an individual psychological level, is not the only thing I'm looking for. I think it does help, and I think that psychological studies demonstrate this on localized scales (people actually do drive slower in school zones, for example, like when a display shows them their speed; though that is a mix of infrastructure and psychology). But in the context of this thread that is mostly a vent, and not a comprehensive suggestion by itself. Driver education is important: it's also not infinitely effective, and requires a ton of effort.
As far as I'm concerned, strong licensing is an active system which minimizes harm in a way that infrastructure (and education) just can't. It addresses the human side of the equation both proactively (high barriers for a privilege) and reactively (withholding of privileges after safety violations). I don't think it's mutually exclusive with better infrastructure either. Having passive and active systems of traffic safety complement each other.
Safe and mature infrastructure can totally save lives. Stronger auto licensing can also totally save lives. The latter is probably several hundreds of billions of dollars cheaper, just more politically challenging (well, maybe... I'm actually not sure which is harder). We should aim for the best of both.
Sure, passive controls aren’t perfect. But they help reduce the risk and rank higher on the hierarchy of controls than changes to licensing (an administrative control), fitting in either as a passive engineered control (e.g., a speed bump or chicane), or as an elimination of the hazard (a street closed off with permanent bollards), depending on what infrastructure is being discussed.
Yes, this is why I advocate strongly for infrastructure and other passive hazard controls in every discussion I ever have about traffic safety. The framework you link to is a useful one.
It's not "either or" though. You can have better infrastructure and also have stricter licensing/enforcement. In practice, infrastructure can be expensive for a municipality, whereas enforcement rules typically do not cost anywhere near as much. This is why, in practice, both are necessary.
On further thought, one of the big drivers of my skepticism of licensing and regulation is the flood of uninsured (and probably unlicensed?) drivers in my hometown that have emerged since the pandemic. Cars with torn temp paper plates are doing blatantly reckless driving on the highways (they're mildly better behaved on the urban streets, surprisingly enough).
It may be illegal for them to drive, yet they get behind the wheel anyway.
I do wish the cops would do something about the 100mph speeders instead of justifying inaction with "we don't want to risk additional fatalities with a police chase."
That's why we should instead have a 20 mph speed limit inside city limits. That's the upper limit for the speed of a human-powered bicycle, and it exceeds the average commuting speed of any rush hour highway. We can set the speed limit to 20 mph, and thus completely eliminate the speed differential between cars and more human-scale forms of transportation like bikes, ebikes, scooters, golf carts, etc.
As far as enforcing it? It's high time we require all new vehicles to have GPS governors in them. We require ebikes to be fit with governors limiting their speed to legal limits, but for some insane reason we've normalized law breaking when it comes to drivers. Most drivers would be aghast at the idea of GPS-limited governors on their vehicles. They'll come up with fantastical scenarios to justify their daily law breaking. They'll say things like, "but what if I need to speed in order to get my dying loved one to a hospital?" Of course, they're not trained on that type of high-speed emergency driving, the traffic lights won't give them the right of way like they do hospitals, etc. They'll also say that they only speed since speed limits are set artificially low. But if we mandate GPS governors at the same time as setting the speed limit to an objectively set 20 mph, then that concern disappears.
I am not in favor of banning cars outright. People rightfully point out that some people need to be able to transport large volumes of goods. Some also need to be able to drive out into the country where public transit doesn't reach and biking is deterred by the distances involved. So we still need cars. But that doesn't mean we need to just let our cities be a free-for-all, where people can drive their 2 ton metal machines at dangerous speeds. Going between cities on a limited-access highway? Sure, set the speed limit nice and high there. But within city limits? Your car should not be going faster than what a bicycle can manage. Sure, you may need to transport large volumes of material, but there's no reason you can't do that at bicycle speed while you're in city limits. And a GPS governor should enforce this. Your car should simply not allow itself to be driven faster than 20 mph while inside city limits. A restriction on your freedom? Sure. But driving is a privilege, not a right. We already accept innumerable restrictions on how you can drive, vehicle requirements, etc. This would just be one more that makes sure you're not barreling a dangerous death machine through a city at speeds incompatible with human-scale transportation.
Defining what counts as "city limits" is important. Is it just the urban core? Does it also include the outlying suburbs which are incompatible with human-powered transport regardless of speed limit? Include the undeveloped areas the city annexed for political reasons? The limited-access highways within the city?
Also, I can easily imagine a market for used cars and gray-market mechanics popping up as soon as such regulations are passed. It's not a bad solution, just one that's naively "simple and just works"
There are no accidents in traffic safety. Someone was always at fault. If it wasn't the driver, it was the engineer.
Driving a car requires proper training. I presume the accident happened in the US. If I compare the 'training' of a learner-driver in the US with that of in Europe, as well as the examination, there is a major gap.
In the Netherlands, on average, you have to drive about 40 hours with a qualified and certified trainer before you are ready for a (strict) examination. Passing percentage is around 50% at the moment. You also need to do a theoretical examination, which is difficult by itself.
I know the UK, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Austria and Sweden are similar. Finland is even more strict and requires a roughly 2 year of lessons!. Training involves the presence of pedestrian and (especially in the Netherlands) cyclists.
The United States has roughly twice as much traffic related deaths that Northwestern European countries.
I do agree that infrastructure definitely plays a role. Countries like The Netherlands and Denmark have a long history of good cycling and walking infrastructure, providing safe and fast travel.
I don't think it's an unpopular opinion at all, unfortunately. And as someone who doesn't even own a bike, I strongly disagree. I'm the one operating a 1+ ton machine, I'm the one responsible of what happens.
I'm not saying that pedestrians should cross right in front of cars, or bikes should ride like cars don't exist, but if the biker follows the rules and yet still gets hit by a car, the fault is 100% on the car. Saying "well duh you're on a bike of course you risk your life, you should have been more careful" is the worst way of thinking. You're placing the blame on the victim, and normalizing the fact that bikes don't have their place on the road since it's somehow their responsibility to not get hit by car drivers.
A good start to make this shift would be to not place the blame on weakest road users.
Like, I've definitely seen a fair share of bad bike riders. Not wearing a helmet being the worst offense far too many do. Second is wearing nothing reflective or a light at night on rural roads (helmet helps here too!). Third is fucking around on their phones. Like, at least you probably won't kill someone like a car will, but if you hit the slightest bump with one hand off and no helmet you'll do yourself serious damage. But notice that all are problems just for their own safety.
Finally, they need to adhere to at least some modicum of road rules. I can forgive riding on the left lane the way a pedestrian should to a point. I can't forgive running through red lights without stopping to check for cars. Or swerving back and forth between sides of the road. That's not car-centric ignorance (of which there is too much), that's suicidal negligence.
One bike rider the other day started on my side of the road. As I approached to pass, moving halfway into other lane to give wide berth, they veer directly in front of me into opposing traffic (luckily nobody coming) to ride on a sidewalk for 20 feet. Then I see in my rearview they moved back into opposing traffic for a bit before making it back over to the right side.
Hence the emphasis I put on "if the biker follows the rules".
Here's the thing though...short of actively jumping in front of cross traffic who don't have visibility, their rule violations don't matter nearly as much. I feel much the same about pedestrians. No other law besides "Pedestrians have right of way" matters. If some dude starts walking across a 70 mph freeway, those cars are obligated to stop and/or veer out of the way. If one hits him, then there damn well better be skid marks on the road and proof they weren't speeding, proving they tried their damndest to stop and couldn't.
Even in that personal experience I shared with that borderline-suicidal cyclist, I still feel I would have been in the wrong if I hit him. Now if I was beside him when he did that and he veered into me, that'd be different. For me it was an annoyance that required tapping a brake pedal adding 10s to my trip.
I think the problem boils down to many drivers feeling "rules for thee and not for me".
I've decided that a car is a privilege, even in the most rural areas. If you can not handle that privilege, you lose the ability to use it.
There are always other options. You might have to move to a different area. Or rely on having friends and family to help you out. Or use a bike or walk.
DUI should be an instant-revoke as well, and often is after a first offense. We do that to keep drunk people from killing others. I don't see how instant-revokation for injuring or killing someone is somehow worse. Hell, killing someone is way worse than DUI.
People will either learn to drive better, or they'll lose their licenses and be forced to relocate and/or fund proper public transport.
Whenever I drive into Philadelphia and back, about an hour each way, I count it as a good day if I only have to be milliseconds from death less than 5 times. There are too many idiots fucking around on their phones and relying on cruise control, lane assist, and gps.
Guess what morons? If you're in the left lane and you're less than 1/10th a mile from your exit, and there's traffic, you already misssd your exit. Go to the next one and reroute. You don't veer right at the last possible second and hope everyone else slams their brakes in time.
Related: Don't ever pass on the right (in USA). It's dangerous as hell. If you ever feel the need to you are going too damn fast.
The scariest part to me is that when people are in a bad mood, their driving becomes visibly worse and more dangerous. We have a tendency to see this in others but give our friends the benefit of the doubt. (Or I do.)
Once in a while a friend of mine offers to drive me to an event in our area. I can get there by transit, it just takes twice as long. While they are a... precise driver, they are on the aggressive side. I had the misfortune of driving with them after they had a particularly bad day at work, and they felt rushed/stressed. Wow. Unpleasant. Speeds I didn't want to think about, and the number of traffic violations made on that drive was through the roof. I think part of it was that they didn't want me to be late to our thing. Like... no! We can be late! I don't want you to kill someone! Ahgjadjhgkg! (After an initial period of shock, and an indirect attempt to persuade them to relax a little, I did ask them to drive more carefully, and they listened [but assumed I was scared for my safety]. I just wish I didn't have to ask...)
Or just the other day I connected with some friends for a stroll in a more woodsy area. Our driver would accelerate slightly more aggressively than I was expecting, and take slightly faster curves than was probably safe. There were no pedestrians there, but had someone been in the wrong place at the wrong time... I'd rather not think about it. I know how fun it is to drive fast down those windy country roads, but we weren't actually in the country, we were actually in a rich, low-density suburb with gigantic lots, blind curves everywhere, and no sidewalks. People do walk their dogs there. (Being in a group having a lively conversation, and being that they were only on the "going a little faster than I would drive" side, I did not comment on it.) Unfortunately, this driver's behavior was actually pretty normal: that is, most people would drive this way, and it just isn't very safe.
It's this kind of thing—the awkwardness of being painfully aware as a passenger that my driver is being reckless, but being in their debt for doing me a favor and therefore half-paralyzed to complain—that makes me prefer to take transit, walk, or cycle places even if it takes quite a bit longer. People are just bad at driving, period, and I'd rather not be anywhere near a potential crash. I think some of this is baggage from one incident in my teenage years: being a passenger while a (former) friend almost killed a pedestrian and then sped off. In hindsight, I wish I had gotten out of the car and helped them, but I froze. Seconds later, when I snapped out of my daze, I was shouting at my driver to turn around, but they wouldn't. There is a reason we are not friends anymore.
It's easy for me to grumble at people on the internet about traffic safety, and even to assign personal blame (though I try to be fairly charitable)... but it's quite a lot harder for me to correct bad behavior from friends and family in the moment, even though they would be more likely to listen. (Actually, I think part of why I feel compelled to talk about things online is that I can't always say what I want to say in person.) If someone is really and truly negligently putting lives at risk, I will absolutely berate them, but I can't always physiologically respond that quickly in a stressful situation, and even if I can, social dynamics make it less easy. And I am hesitant to be anything other than gentle while they're driving, lest they do something more erratic. :/
I would love to give you a ride sometime so you can see what an actual good driver is like. Full stops. Mostly adhere to at or below speed limit (I make exception for going up/down hills if good visibility to save fuel). Never above 25 in residential area. Slow accelerate/decellerate...I often never need to stop for red lights if outside of dense cities as I slow sufficiently to coast to the red light and cars in front have started moving again. But you gotta look 1/2 mile ahead and see what's happening. The walk signal countdown lights are also fantastic for this. If I'm approaching and see I have 20s, I know I can keep going. But if it's only got 3s, I just start slowing before the yellow so I don't need to slam the brakes.
Passengers regularly compliment me on not making them nauseous, which is a really disturbing compliment. Is that really the default state for most passengers?
Thank you for being a safe and conscientious driver!
This makes an assumption that people aren't going too fast to begin with and that apparently you're the asshole if you're going 75 in a 65 becsuse everyone else wants to go 80, lanes be dammed. "flow of traffic" doesn't take into account real world physics, weather, road conditions, and average human reaction time. All those taken into account with an actual speed limit.
See that mentality all over your town and it's not surprising there's always some accident on the freeway. All to what? Save 10 minutes on a commute?
Oh no, I'm saying that in the context of people going too damn fast. Your exact description is what I was referring too. The rest of the "you" in the post refer to Mr.Swervypants.
If there's a three lane highway, and someone is doing 65 in the middle, then you always pass on the left even if the right is free. I often will be doing 65 in a middle lane as I move to overtake a semi doing 60 up a hill. And some ass doing 90 will veer into the right instead of the left, then immediately go to cut me off as soon as he nearly slams into the semi.
You can't "outdrive" traffic Mr.Swervypants, you are traffic. It does give me immense pleasure to roll past people in stop and go traffic at 5 mph who zoomed past me at 80 less than 5 min ago.
I firmly believe that cars should be restricted to the speed limits, and should mechanically not be able to exceed them. I hate being a pedestrian walking down what should be a 50km/hr road, only to have people flashing by at 100 easily (including the cops). Why should they get to save 2 minutes on their trip and put my life in danger? Also some sort of machine that tickets you a couple 100$ for every second you are not looking at the road (unrealistic obviously but I stand by the sentiment)
That's a pretty dystopian system you're envisioning. These speed limits would almost certainly have to be centrally controlled, so as a result police would be able to press a button and disable any vehicle. Which is not a power I want to give to cops. Then there would be the inevitable software failures that would disable all vehicles. And what happens when I modify this vehicle that I ostensibly own to disconnect it from the central speed-control system?
I'm all for safety too, but frankly this idea is nanny state nonsense.
To be fair you could just build it into the car, as limiters are a thing, and having a speed limit sign pinging with some signal is probably doable.
It's also just not a good idea even then. Ignoring all the potential remote attacks you now have, there are reasons that speedlimits are treated as guidelines even under the law. You can speed up to pass and slow down in bad weather and all sorts of other things.
Locking down speed limits (especially based on bystander perception of speed, which has been routinely proven to be shit) is going to cause so many more problems and not really solve the main one, which is you just need less people driving.
Your car likely already knows the speed limit of the road it is driving on. Most all new cars have GPS navigation already baked in to their cars. When you use GPS, it typically pops up a little sign showing you the speed limit of the road you're driving along. It would be pretty easy to tie this into a governor that just prevents your vehicle from exceeding the speed limit.
As far as the Orwellian handwringing, well welcome to driving on public roads. The police can already pull you over if they want. If you refuse to pull over, they have any number of ways of stopping you against your will already.
Moreover, we already heavily govern much more safer forms of transportation. E-bikes are a great example. In most areas, they are legally required to have governors installed in them that restrict them to the maximum allowable speed e-bikes are legally able to travel. For some reason, it's not an Orwellian confiscation of freedom that a 40 lb bike can't drive faster than its speed limit. We accept that as normal. But then when we want to do the same to 2 ton death machines, suddenly it's 1984.
You receive a ticket just like you would if you sawed off your catalytic convertor. You own your vehicle, but we put regulations in place for vehicles on public roadways. Want to drive your jailbroken car at absurd speeds? Do it on your own land. Do it at the racetrack. Those would remain legal. But a car without a working governor would simply be illegal to operate on public roads, just like it is to operate a similarly ungoverned e-bike on public roads.
Your car should not be less regulated than a bicycle that has a hundredth the weight.
A catalytic converter doesn't require an always on connection to 3 satellites 12000 miles in the sky.
A GPS to ECU speed governors is such a massively complex system that trusting it for the essential operation of a car's basic functionality would be insane.
My car's GPS frequently thinks I'm on an entirely different road, or going a different direction than I am. The maps are frequently out of date and have the wrong speed limit. My car's infotainment system frequently just spazzes out and locks up. That's not something that can just be fixed. It's a massively complex system. There's no way I'd want that thing to be the ultimate authority in how fast I'm allowed to go.
Ok fine. There are other ways to handle this, though I imagine you'll find some other excuse why they won't work. Don't like governors? Very well. Let's line the roads with speed cameras and hand out aggressive fines for anyone who exceeds the speed limit. A governor will be something you demand the manufacturers actually include, just to avoid the endless fines you'll face for the slightest violation of speed laws.
I think you're also misunderstanding how such a system would work. Obviously no GPS system is perfect, and no speed camera system is perfect. But we shouldn't let rare odd technical errors serve as an excuse to keep allowing dangerous vehicle speeds, often in flagrant violation of the law.
If done rightly, the issues with GPS inaccuracy would be very minor. For example, we should have blanket 20 mph speed limits on every road within city limits. That way, your GPS doesn't have to precisely track your position, speed, and direction. Instead it just serves as a geofence. Once the GPS detects you're inside city limits, it activates the governor built into your vehicles accelerator system. The governor itself isn't tied to GPS, it uses the same mechanical system to determine your speed as your speedometer. The GPS just determines when the governor is active or inactive. Don't try to track individual streets and roads, just use a geofence model. And if it's off by a few hundred feet, who cares. Maybe an error forces your car to slow down a few hundred feet early before you technically enter city limits, or it mistakenly allows you to speed up when you're still a bit inside city bounds. But who cares? A slight technical error of little consequence.
Let me preface this by saying that I like cars in general, in spite of the damage they're doing to our planet. I like dealing with the complex electromechanical systems, and I like going fast, and towing, and riding with a well-tuned suspension and responsive steering.
I also like to actually own the things that I own. Your "it's fine" argument for surrendering control over the machine that I purchased will never carry water for me. You're right that in a lot of ways, my thing (the car) isn't really mine already. But that isn't an argument. I'm going to fuck with my thing, and any government or manufacturer or whoever who fucks with my ability to fuck with my thing is going to have a problem.
E-bikes are a terrible example. Someone else owns it, go wild with whatever controls you like.
Again, you can do whatever you want with your own vehicle. But when you want to take that vehicle onto public roads, then your vehicle becomes subject to the laws of the road.
Most people own their own e-bikes. They don't rent. I don't rent mine, I own it. And yes, e-bikes sold in stores have governors, just like I'm proposing for larger vehicles.
The road is not the place to live out your libertarian fantasies. Again, do whatever you want on private property, but on roads, vehicles have to follow many requirements. These include:
Yes, I get it, it sucks to have to give up some freedom. But this isn't a tech company locking your device down for their own profit. This isn't a car company charging you a subscription for heated seats. This is regulation put in place to prevent you from killing other people with the two ton death machine you chose to operate on the public roadways. You can't just cobble together whatever vehicle you want in your garage and then take it on the public roads. Regulation meant to prevent you from killing people is not a horrible violation of your freedom.
Your freedom ends where my face begins. You have the freedom to do what you want with the things you own. But when you start endangering the lives of others, then those freedoms face limitations. This isn't a new or revolutionary concept. It's a basic idea of law that goes back to the beginnings of civilization. We by necessity need to accept all sorts of laws and regulations that limit our freedoms, but for some reason people go crazy and bring up the specter of 1984 when you suggest putting governors on cars. The idea is not revolutionary, it's not unprecedented. It's not a horrible violation of rights. It's just saying adding to the list of equipment required to safely operate a vehicle on a public road. Don't want to have a governor in your car? Keep it on your own land where you're only endangering yourself.
I wish I could be a libertarian. Without socialization, society falls apart. Libertarianism only works in hypothetical situations in which all people are actually rational, which is not real life.
Governors are fine. All I'm against is putting technological controls on your "two ton death machines" that prevent them from exceeding a government-determined speed at a specific place. Your hyperbole about seat belts and cats and all the rest doesn't change the fact that a centrally controlled, road-specific governor system is a terrible idea.
I agree that it’s a pretty firm take, I would even say though that if not for our society being dependant on them I’d say cars should be illegal altogether. Why does anyone need access to a 2000 pound machine capable of hurling its self in excess of 150km/h? (Again I understand that we can’t do that because we need cars to get anywhere in NA, but it’s crazy to me that this is fine with people)
If the police want to stop you, they have the power to do this anyway. If they start stopping random cars in the middle of roads, people will sue them for damages.
That sucks. I hope your friend recovers - mentally and physically- and is back in the saddle soon if they want to be.
I'm really sorry about your friend. That must be really scary, and I can see why you're very upset.
The fundamental issue is though, the Bike Lobby (and the Walkable Streets Lobby) isn't ever going to have the political leverage that industries such as Construction, Automotive, and Oil Lobbies have. Additionally, those kind of fixes cost taxpayer money, and that's always a thorny issue.
Recently, in my city, they redid a 20 block stretch of an avenue, and it cost ~15 Million. (I've seen a few figures online, and this figure might not be the most accurate is it also includes other necessary "non street related" expenses, but some of those may have been on other budgets as well, I've seen a few numbers thrown around.) It was slightly over budget, but one huge issue was that while they did set it up with bike protections, it also created issues for snow plows, and emergency services. It actually necessitated a last minute redesign, and people were furious. It is essentially complete at this point, and I personally like what they ended up doing, but the amount of political will and effort it took to get one single 20 block stretch done was immense.
This is the damnable fact of American roads. They are, and have been designed for the automobile. In the eyes of the city and federal, governments, your friend was not using the roads as intended as he was not in an automobile. He is an acceptable casualty in the eyes of the state. If he were to have perished, the driver of the vehicle would be scapegoated, and you would have the ability to set up one of those little "side of the road" crosses.
America doesn't value human life. That's the long and short of it. Cars are just a fun little part of that. The highways were built by bulldozing through African American neighborhoods. The streetcars were taken away because the automotive industry partnered with governments to get rid of them. This of course leads to issues with fumes from leaded gasoline. Hell, I haven't even mentioned the conspiracy theories behind the lack of development in solar panels and the electric car.
The average American owns a car. Actually, 87% of Americans own cars. 34% of Americans own bikes. Democratically, the interests of the car owners continue to exceed those of the bike owners. It might be higher, if there were, say, reliable public transit options for Americans, but that only makes up about 45% of Americans. Investment in public transit immediately runs into the NIMBY crowd, and essentially always runs over budget. And, assuming that it is even set up, it's chronically underfunded, leading to issues with crime.
The deck is stacked against anything that would help with the safety of bikers. It just is. I wish I had a better answer for you, and maybe you live in a community that can overcome these obstacles. At the end of the day though, the issue isn't "It's not good that the road didn't have protections for bikers," the issue is "America, as a whole, isn't designed for people who don't want to own a car."
One issue with this is that fire trucks in the US are stupidly oversized. They're way larger than comparable firetrucks in countries with more walkable city designs. They're a net negative for safety. Yes, in theory having a larger truck allows for better fire response, but the differences are minor. And in turn, building around them means more dead from cars running over pedestrians and cyclists. People are used to giving the fire department cart blanche to dictate road design around their bloated fire trucks. But trucks have been just subject to bloat and fattening as SUVs have been.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/fire-trucks-and-engines-are-too-big-let-s-shrink-them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_vEFakF03A
https://www.firerescue1.com/fire-products/fire-apparatus/articles/are-american-fire-trucks-too-big-YBcUmD5TGHp0I9HJ/
I grappled with this moral dilemma when I first started driving as a teenager. It was astonishing to me how one day I wasn't allowed on the road, and the next day I was controlling a vehicle that with the slightest mistake could kill anyone around me. This fear was so strong that every time I went out for a driving lesson my body started visibly shaking (ironically making it more difficult for me to safely control the car). When I got my full license I didn't even want to go out and drive alone; my parents had to push me into it.
Of course, I lived in a car-dependent suburb surrounded by car-dependent suburbs and car-dependent cities, so I had no choice in the matter. The nearest bus access was over an hour away by bike (if you wanted to bike on deadly suburban roads the entire time). Over time my fear of driving was replaced with boredom out of pure necessity, and the dangers of driving became mundane. I'll never forget what it felt like in the beginning, though. We desperately need to build a society where freedom and agency for children and teenagers isn't locked behind being driven in or driving cars.
(Also in the years since I've been able to move to NYC and now live a car-free life. Happy ending!)
I never quite got to the point of shaking, but my hands got so sweaty that I sometimes worried about having enough grip in case I needed to quickly turn or swerve to avoid danger.
I’ve since lost that, and I’m frustrated that mentally driving (especially longer distances) has become tedious and I’ve noticed my attention slipping. This isn’t so bad while I’m on the separated freeways in the middle of nowhere, but I notice that as I arrive at my destination town, my mind doesn’t snap back into the proper pay attention mode like it used to.
As a non-American, can someone expand on this? Wouldn't "red" generally mean "stop here"? Or was it separate signals and there was no explicit turn-right signal, only a straight one?
“Right on red” means the driver may, after coming to a complete stop and yielding to those with right of way, make a near-side turn which does not cross traffic unless otherwise instructed (e.g a right turn when driving on the right side of the road if there’s no red-right-arrow light). The legality varies by locality, and even where generally allowed there may be specific intersections with signage disallowing it or a light explicitly controlling it, typically those with heavy traffic or limited visibility.
It's one of those rules that makes complete sense in rural areas, where you might be the only car for the next hour, but is dangerous as hell in urban ones.
Relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
Bike rider has just as much a right to be there as you do. Ever consider slowing down when you’re going over hills or into blind corners?
Personally this is why I advocate for bicycle infrastructure. I don't feel comfortable cycling on most US roads. Every street you'd realistically want to bike on should have a fully protected bike lane with all other necessary accoutrements, unless it's a really low-traffic local street.
Thankfully, it is 100% feasible to add bike infrastructure all over the place. Elected representatives have to want to do it, and concerned citizens have to reach out to them to advocate for it. (If you don't advocate, it won't get built.) I think the research is pretty clear that when safe bike infrastructure exists, people ride it happily.
I'm deeply skeptical of the ability of self-driving cars to operate effectively in areas with lots of pedestrians. Or at least I don't think that they are the end-all solution to traffic safety. Urban environments in particular often change quickly and in unpredictable ways. Sometimes these systems malfunction, and our streets should still be designed to be as bike/pedestrian-friendly as possible.
I guess it's a question of data, and of right of way preservation. If a local council builds out an unprotected bike lane, they're reserving that right of way for cyclists, even if it's not actually super usable. I suppose this allows them to model the effects the lane would have on auto traffic flow without committing thousands of pounds to a proper lane. From their perspective, I guess I would understand, but this kind of approach is only taken by people who... never cycle, and don't understand the problems cyclists experience. It's a car-first model which isn't in keeping with Vision Zero: it prioritizes throughput over safety. Not my preference.
I would much rather that the council installs a bike lane safely and correctly than just painting a line on the asphalt. Because realistically car owners will drive/park in unprotected bike lanes willy-nilly, so it's unsafe and honestly the data from such "experiments" probably isn't that clean to begin with.
Infrastructure is such a pain in the ass to fully realize, because they're all so closely interconnected.
A common complaint against people advocating for bicycle infrastructure is that it's a waste; no one will really use it.
The sad thing is that they're mostly correct. My city is built so far apart that biking can only be done realistically in tiny pockets of neighborhoods that aren't well connected by transit. The development patterns suck for biking.
A good biking program can only exist here with a good transit program to back it up, and zoning reform to break up the gigantic, massive housing subdivisions and retail shopping stroads all over the place.
At that point though, you're asking for a lot.
People don't see the benefit of one part of the urbanist paradigm, because without the rest of it, the benefits aren't that apparent. It's very hard in most American cities where establishment homeowners have such a massive voice in local politics to make the pitch that if we shrink the roads, build bike lanes, fund massive transit projects, and reform our zoning and city planning policies, in 10-15 years, this place will be a wonderful place to live where you can feel safe walking to a cafe in a few minutes, or biking to work, or taking a short trip in a clean well maintained train to see your friends.
But they're not correct. When cities build "pockets" of bike lanes in certain neighborhoods, they are not building a useful network that gets people where they want to go. Even in places with nasty Euclidean zoning and bad development patterns, bicycle use increases significantly when safe and dedicated infrastructure exists. That infrastructure has to be a network though, not just a few trails. It can't have major gaps.
Bikes are going to average ~10 mph in a fairly dense city, e-bikes maybe more like 15 mph. (If the protected lane has no traffic lights, bump that up to 15/20 mph). At that speed, a cyclist using dedicated infrastructure can safely travel 5-8 miles in 30 minutes. In a lower-density place, where there are fewer crossings, then the average speed increases significantly. While most people aren't going to want to take a non-electric bike more than 3-5 miles one direction, an e-bike makes the trip much more realistic. Technically, E-bikes have a range of 40-100 miles!
The Department of Energy has data showing that says that 60% of all vehicle trips are under 6 miles, and another 17% are under 10 miles. If there were safe infrastructure for cycling, people would cycle to take a large portion of these trips. There's work to be done in normalizing non-driving trips, but infrastructure is the #1 barrier.
If your city is truly so spread-out that every trip you would ever want to take is more than 5-10 miles away, you are not living in a city but rather a super low-density suburb or a rural area. I think that having bike lanes in these rural areas is still useful for some people, but in very spread-out places, 100% bike use is not the goal.
I'm with you that improving transit and development patterns is necessary in many places, but I don't subscribe to defeatist philosophy in any sense. "It's too hard" is not an expression I am interested in saying personally. I think those particular topics are out of scope here though.
"Anti-everything" NIMBYs have a "massive voice" in some areas largely because advocates for density, walkability, and safe streets don't bother to attend neighborhood meetings, don't necessarily aim for relationships with their neighbors, and don't run for local office. Advocates give up and stop advocating, so the only remaining voices are those who want a car-centric status quo. I think you will find that even the "entrenched homeowners" are willing to make plenty of concessions, including around bike lanes and transit, if the issues are framed appropriately.