Apparently pedestrians should take personal responsibility but not drivers
having to drive slower than reasonable
Honestly, this only exemplifies why speed limits by themselves don’t work. We have to design the streets so that the lower speed feels reasonable.
I know I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but it’s always worth saying.
One thing that people forget when talking about speed limits is the physical infrastructure.
Feeling reasonable is directly correlated to the designed speed of the road, meaning it’s an engineering problem. If a road isn’t engineered to its specifications the speed limits imposed are merely a suggestion.
Yep, have a highway by me that is three lanes (sometimes 4), has good sized shoulders on both sides, median divider, and it’s pretty much dead straight. Speed limit is 55mph but most people go 70 or more cause you can without issue.
I can’t think of any roads around me that have pedestrians and a speed limit of 50+. All the places pedestrians are 40 at most and have guardrails between the sidewalk and road. Usually 25 is the norm when pedestrians will be present.
I live near a state highway that just recently lowered the local speed limit to 40. No physical barrier and loads of intersections and crosswalks.
Every time I’ve been hit by a car, it’s been when I’ve had the right of way. You have to be super defensive as a pedestrian because you can be thoroughly solidly right and follow all the rules… and still end up dead.
How many times have you been hit by a car? To be hit once is a lot.
Different person: I’ve been struck on a bike. Driver didn’t look while pulling out of a driveway and hit my rear wheel as I passed directly in front of them. They didn’t notice until I was right by their window (having pushed my bike aside) then they stared blankly at me and drove off. Zero awareness or concern. If I had been slower I’m sure they would have lazily driven over me.
And I know a dude who was intentionally hit by a car at speed (also cycling) and has permanent injuries.
And I know another guy who was hit by a drunk driver at a crosswalk.
It’s not that uncommon.
Oh, and one of my sister’s childhood friends was killed by an inattentive driver. It’s way too easy to get, and keep, a license.
Twice. Once by someone turning right on a red, head turned to see if the traffic cleared and who didn’t bother looking straight ahead before moving and I was in the crosswalk; and once by someone who drove through a crosswalk, stopped to park, I believe realized they weren’t in a parking spot, and backed into the crosswalk after I had started crossing. Both times I was in the centre of their car and thankfully a soild whump of the hand made them stop.
Twice more than I would have liked to.
Very fortunate nobody was hurt
I got hit once. He ran over my toe, when I had the green crosswalk, and then yelled at me and sped off. Old timer and his wife. Yay
Personal responsibility is driving below 40kmph when in high pedestrian area, fancy that.
As long as everything works out perfectly in every way, we don’t need safety stuff
And it always works perfectly every time, except those times when things don’t work out, which is often, but they don’t count, so we ignore them
We all just need to act more correctly and then this kind of thing won’t happen! If the guy simply didn’t run over pedestrians, this wouldn’t be a problem! Problem solved!
Any time “personal responsibility” comes up, ask who is getting the bulk of the consequences when it fails. Is it the person failing at personal responsibility, or did it fall on someone else?
In this case, the personal responsibility was on the driver to not run a red light. However, it’s the pedestrian who risks major injury or death. The driver may suffer a damaged vehicle, or possibly trauma leading to PTSD, but they will mostly likely be OK physically. It’s clear that the consequences to the driver are vastly outweighed by the consequences to the pedestrian. However, the pedestrian can do everything right and still get hit.
This is why we have safety rules. Your lack of personal responsibility can hurt me. If you feel that there are too many rules around how to safely drive a car, maybe that’s an indication that the idea of using it on a mass scale is fundamentally flawed in the first place.
A person who pipes up on Facebook to champion “personal responsibility” as an argument against common-sense safety regulations does NOT have the intellectual ability to process what you’ve just typed.
I have no clue what this dude’s argument is even trying to be.
“I never killed anyone yet, so I should be allowed to have an opportunity”
“It’s your fault, and even if it the facts say it is my fault - there’s nothing we can do about it, and it’s probably also still your fault.”
I think “I want to drive as fast as possible with no thoughts in my skull whatsoever” but maybe I’m wrong??
As far as I can tell: “My personal freedom is threatened by rules that I didn’t make. How we get to having too many rules is immaterial; my skewed moral compass dictates that my personal freedom comes first.”
Jackass is a brainless ideologue, and engages in performative empathy and/or justice only to save face.
</salty>
It’s as if they’re reflexively doing some sort of magical incantation to absolve themselves of logical inconsistency.
So the point of view is Pedestrians should evolve superhero reflexes so cars can do whatever they want?
A more charitable interpretation is that they are arguing that we don’t need to impose any new traffic regulations to stop that specific incident from happening because running red lights is already against the law. Not that I agree
I’m thinking more the scene from Constantine.
Quite literally braindead, full zombiemode
The lack of self awareness is at maximum speed.
It’s classic rightwinger stuff anyway: nothing should be regulated, everything just works, oh my god my car broke my family’s dead my ass is on fire…
More “guns don’t kill people” logic. Blaming victims from the crime, and separating the tool used from the criminal.
or look at the road, adapt your speed to not run over anything, pedestrians included
people in cars assume that it’s the others that have to be careful and not the person driving one tonne of metal on wheels…
In France, and probably most countries in the world, pedestrians are priority on crosswalk (without lights): it’s just like a Yield the right-of-way intersection when you can engage only if it’s free, and therefore have to slow down.
But we were taught as kids to thank drivers for stopping when it’s actually the law, by this logic I should thank people for stopping at stop signs, red light and stuffs…
by this logic I should thank people for stopping at stop signs, red light and stuffs…
Really feels like it these days.
People seem really annoyed whenever they have to stop at a stop sign for me instead of being able to treat it more like a speed bump
My youngest and I have done a lot of walking through our town the last few summers and any close calls were mostly
- twice someone going the wrong way on a one way street
- people turning right on red without stopping, without yielding to pedestrians, without regard to the walk signal
- special hate to people parking or driving on the sidewalk. It’s never been immediately dangerous but you have no business there.
- I do worry about my dog since all too often someone cuts corners enough to be up on the sidewalk in turns and she thinks she can stand near the edge
people turning right on red without stopping
We drive on the other side, so it’s our left turns. Newer intersections have a red left arrow while the pedestrian light is on green, then the red arrow goes out and the drivers may turn.
Older intersections have slip lanes which are pretty dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists
Yeah but the problem at least here is right on red is by default unless explicitly disallowed, whereas lights like that are nowhere near as common
right on red
As much as I like this convention, I have twice seen it almost cause the car I was in (not driving) to strike a pedestrian. I think maybe we should get rid of it. If we want to allow right turns into sparse/nonexistent cross traffic, we need a signal that says “possible cross traffic, but no pedestrian parallel traffic”.
I always understood “right on red” to be “after coming to a full stop”. I don’t remember learning of that to be changed but when I wrote that in an earlier thread, a lot of lemmings jumped on that as false. Assuming it’s the law, I’ve never seen it enforced. However whether it’s law or not, the reality is drivers don’t stop. That’s what makes it dangerous. If they did, pedestrian and cyclist injuries would go way down.
While there’s an argument for changing the law if necessary or enforcing it if it does say to stop, that’s not going to work. Drivers will not give up their bad habits based on targeted enforcement.
There are cities that ban the practice. hallelujah! That’s the answer. “Right on red” was passed in a more car-centric time where much higher injuries and deaths were accepted, and road designers didn’t believe in roundabouts. It’s not ok. It has to go.
Edit: yes, Wikipedia confirms a full stop is legally required in us and Canada. Too bad drivers don’t seem to know that
In one of my incidents, the cabbie did not come to a full stop. In the other of my incidents, the friend had come to a full stop, but she did not notice the pedestrian traffic (which, at the time, wasn’t common [and without signal] at that intersection).
In any case, yeah, “right on red” should be done away with and we can deal with any negative effects (of not having it) better than we can deal with dead or injured pedestrians / cyclists.
Kinetic energy scales not just with velocity, but with the square of velocity. Speed makes a BIG FUCKING difference in your ability to avoid an accident.
It’s been decades since I started driving but wasn’t 25 MPH taught as when most accidents with pedestrians became fatal? 50 kmph is much faster.
I think the math is a little confusing. 50 km/h is about 31 mph, which is very close to the number you’re thinking of
Edit: the person knew the math and was commenting that it is a big difference in speed, my bad.
That’s beyond 20%, which is the rule I use for speeding. I never go more than 20% faster than the posted speed limit, except on the New Jersey Turnpike, where all bets are off.
Did you just admit to speeding on Fuck Cars? May god have mercy on your soul
Oh Jesus, what have I done.
Not the speed limit apparently
You were in NJ and keeping up with traffic is important
I’m not debating that 31mph is over 20% faster, which is certainly more likely to get a speeding ticket. The context I was replying to was “25mph is the speed when it’s fatal to a pedestrian, and 50km/h is
somuch faster.” In the context of life and death, considering both would be potentially fatal to a pedestrian, those numbers are not substantially far apart.I took that original statement to be an honest mistake in not realizing those two numbers used two different measurements.
Edited to fix the paraphrased quote
Yeah, I meant that anything above the 20% threshold is too fast! But below is within the Goldilocks zone.
Yeah I get that. I try to stay close to the speed limit myself, but try more often to take the train or to walk whenever possible. I wish it was more widely available in the States and not a horrible chore to try and use transit in most states.
Also just dangerous…my local train system is simply not safe to use once it starts getting late as a woman. I truly wish I could use it more often, but the safety factor makes it very difficult for me.
It’s such a sad reality, and I’m sorry that you experience that.
I think part of it is the mandatory driving culture - if you can afford a car you will drive, so you only take public transit if you can’t afford to drive yourself. That, plus public transit in the US is typically only available in high population cities, and it feels like there’s little law enforcement around transit locations.
I’m sure there’s other reasons as well but it’s a really unfortunate situation altogether.
“much faster” not “so much faster” and IMO 25% is a sizable difference.
Thanks for the correction. I’ll edit it, though i was intending to paraphrase and not provide a direct word for word quote.
It’s a bit of a semantic debate at this point as to what constitutes a substantial difference in the context of competing scientific studies, but in a casual conversation.
I was under the impression that the original person did a mistake in the mental math. I’m not trying to critique how people feel about differences in speed.
i am the original person. the point of my comment was to explain why I thought that.
I’m tired and missed that, thank you for the clarification.
Ah, the American brain.
Literally any amount of increase in speed increases fatality risk.
As long as it’s not so low my cruise control won’t work. (j/k)
When Fayetteville started switching to 20mph for capillary streets, my “complaint” was that my cruise control only works down to 24mph, but I still welcomed the change. Public safety needs to be a bigger focus and should be the primary driver of regulation.
25mpg is about 40 kph. 50 is moderately faster.
Does not sound “over regulated” to me??
In 2022, 42,514 motor vehicle fatalities occurred across the United States¹ This was a 1% decrease in fatal accidents compared to 43,230 deaths from collisions in 2021.¹ In total, 5930,496 motor vehicle accidents were reported to the police in 2022.¹ Among all non-fatal auto accidents in 2022, 1,664,598 caused injuries and 4,226,677 caused damage to property.¹ There were approximately 8,650 motor vehicle accident fatalities in the first quarter of 2024, compared with 8,935 during the same time period in 2023.¹ In total, injuries resulting from motor vehicle accidents caused $481.2 billion in financial costs in 2022.² 1,910 (25%) of the 7,522 pedestrians killed in motor vehicle accidents in 2022 were involved in a hit-and-run accident.¹ Motor vehicle accidents are the second leading cause of deaths resulting from unintentional injury in the United States
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/auto-accident/car-accident-statistics/#3
Cars are a privilege of rich people.¹ So is personal responsibility rhetoric.
So, for that matter, is no political violence rhetoric, as well, though the affluent version is we don’t negotiate with terrorists.
-1.- ( ¹ ) Granted, there are destitute, homeless people with cars, but they’re a higher strata than destitute, homeless people without cars and look down on their sans-car brethren.
ETA: I’m a home-enabled poor person without a car, trying to get by with an e-bike and thin-spread public transit. And my car-enabled peers look down on me for being transit-restricted. It sucks.
Cars a privilege when your city is garbage. When it’s well built they’re more of a pain.
I own a literal sportscar from when I lived in a car centric place and now I keep it parked behind my mid-density apartment, rarely using it because it’s almost never better than taking public transit. You have to be super rich for it to be actually better because then you can pay for all the parking fees, maintenance, etc. without much thought. I’m not a rich person(BRZs are not expensive sportscars) and all the extra maintenance and tires and whatever else are such a huge pain to deal with and I do most of the work myself!
What I’m trying to say is that, as someone who can actually claim to “be a car person”, and who has all the skills to back that up, people who think cars are objectively better are dumb as hell and you shouldn’t let their hollow words get to you if you can help it. They’re just losers who repeat shit fed to them by companies like GM so said companies can make more money.
