Now is an opportunity, perhaps first in ~100 years, perhaps last, to recover the streets for unaugmented humans: slow down cars in urban areas, increase qualifications for humans to drive, eventually ban human drivers entirely, leaving only automated vehicles with enough sensors and going slowly enough to reduce auto-related deaths for pedestrians and passengers alike to zero.
If automated vehicles become popular, I predict new crimes will be added in addition to jaywalking. Cyclists may be restricted and anything else that confuses AI drivers. If certain intersections or sections of road consistently confuse AI drivers, automakers will lobby for ways to change these roadways. I suspect calls for AI regulation by people like Elon Musk are really attempts at regulatory capture to make automated vehicles possible and dominated by the first market entrants.
Absolutely. I see this here on hacker news with people excited about the notion of doing away with stop lights so that AI traffic can flow easily. People are completely ignoring the existence of pedestrians and cyclists. It would not be surprising to see a new crime of "hindering an autonomous automobile" be lobbied for.
It's only a matter of time before some stupid kids start jumping in the way of self-driving cars to make them brake hard. That's when we'll see the anti-pedestrian regulations appear, by my estimation.
Self driving cars are not magic and judging their braking distance is not much easier than with a human driver. I think kids trying that will quickly find out that it's not too hard to make an autocar hit a human. In other words, I think the problem would quickly solve itself.
In bad neighborhoods, the carjackers(might not want a autonomous car though) or robbers might just roll a beach ball into the street to stop the car or maybe just a cheap open umbrella. I can imagine those people who practice "rolling coal" doing the same thing to rich autonomous car riders or just throwing a beach ball out the window on an interstate. Lots of possibilities that security researchers will need to consider.
Rolling a ball on the street is probably enough to stop human drivers as well. Is carjacking that much of a problem where you live? I've never heard of anybody being carjacked here. I guess you could equip your car with one of these devices if you're concerned:
Um where do you think this is happening exactly that people know that beachball = carjacking? Based on the language used, I suspect you aren't in such an area and are coming up with an unrealistic scenario here.
Given that autonomous vehicles are supposed to lower the amount of traffic accidents, they should be programmed to exclude the lethal traffic accidents which are justified (basic on split-second information, live a little). At least beach balls will be relatively easy to recognize with computer vision. Problem is those pesky hoodlums will start dressing up as beach balls, throwing inflatable dolls in front of cars. And if you think that's a crazy idea, just wait and see what the actual future comes up with.
Honestly, the 21st century is basically clickbait: You won't believe what happens next!
Autonomous cars have a lot of data gathering sensors - even if the car doesn't know something is going on, logs of what happened will greatly aid the police in their efforts to track down the criminal.
If carjacking becomes a problem the cars will figure it out and start locking all the doors. Or if the car is unoccupied, let the carjaker in, then notify the nearest police station it is coming in with a criminal.
Maybe in situations where someone throws a beach ball in front of your car and your immediate split-second reaction is to turn your car into a murder weapon directed at the first "hoodlum" you spot who may or may not have thrown this ball.
That is a complex question. I see both sides of the issue and a lot of grey area between (I'd be shocked if I foresee even 10% of all the things philosophers will consider).
I'll just say that it is an option with some merit. Depending on the technology and the local situation I might or might not be in favor of it.
Not to mention all autonomous cars will undoubtedly have video evidence of what happened. The kids won't have a chance of proving their case if they get hit.
To be fair, regulations put in place because kids are jumping in front of cars could be anti-pedestrian, but it could also just be anti-fucking-idiot if drafted well.
i don't understand; it is already a violation of traffic law to jump in front of cars. if you survive the punishment meted out by physics, the cops can fine you. what change do you think would be made if folks started doing it more often?
In Chicago, at least, that would be implicitly legal, unless the car actually hits you:
9-60-060 Pedestrian crossing.
[...]
(b) No pedestrian shall suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield.
Yes. If the car hits you because you stepped out in front of it and the car did not have time to stop while going the speed limit with a driver paying attention to the road, the pedestrian is at fault and can be ticketed. If you don't survive the encounter, at the very least the driver doesn't receive a ticket.
Your comment reminded me of a Sci-Fi novel I read when I was a kid, it was a mystery with the background being a fully automated world, a fairly central point was that all vehicles were self-driving. Standing in front of cars to stop them was somewhere between a fad and a minor rebellion against the status quo.
Ever since self-driving cars started being a thing I keep being reminded of this book, and am half-waiting for at lease that part of it to come true.
I've been searching for a bit now, and I still haven't find it. I think it was from the 70s or 80s.
Abruptly stepping in front of a vehicle is basically already illegal in the US. So no need to pass laws, except maybe to clarify the use of recordings from the vehicles as evidence.
Of course that won't stop the behavior completely but it won't be a free for all either.
Well, implicitly, I meant to hint that after one or two incidents, the lobby might convince the legislature to swing way too far in the other direction. (A very common tactic. You can't just hand liability from one party to another, not in an area people know and care about.)
Why jump in the way? All you need is a showstopper- a cheap chinese gadget that bounces back lidarlaserlight and radarwaves, ahead of time- thus creating the ilusion of a wall.
carjacking vehicles with constant internet connections and GPS's doesn't strike me as an extremely profitable maneuver.
the whole "car detects obstacle in an untrafficed area, stops, door is opened, passenger gets out, passenger gets back in, changes destination to a place not proximate to anywhere they've ever been before" process also sounds like the sort of thing that would justifiably raise a bit of a red flag. maybe not an automated call to 911, but it should probably dump all records to the cloud and trigger a call from an onstar operator or similar.
I think the idea is that they'd stop the car, incapacitate the driver, grab what they can and run like hell.
Besides, if we're talking about this happening in the "bad" parts of town, the car can call 911 and broadcast is position all it likes. There won't be any immediate response.
Finally, people who do this long enough will eventually figure out what to disconnect to allow themselves enough time to do what they want with the car- like today's car thieves do with modern car alarms.
They straight up throw a car in a cube van and drive it off to the chop shop. Not a huge leap to faraday-cage the transport vehicle.. probably acts as one already, come to think of it.
The irony of it all is that traffic signals were introduced to make traffic flow more easily! The primary function of the traffic signal lies not in the red period, but the green. Traffic signals are what lets you blow through intersections with bad visibility at 50 mph, rather thanhave to slow down to 15 and carefully check for cross-traffic.
Haha this is a great example of how North America can use old, tested and proven techniques to make our cities better but instead people are drawn to shiny, fanciful new technologies for a solution instead.
> People are completely ignoring the existence of pedestrians and cyclists.
just because the lights for cars are gone doesn't necessitate that the pedestrian crosswalks and buttons be removed. they might even work more effectively, if they can communicate with all the vehicles in the vicinity.
Much better would be smart traffic lights that allow pedestrians or other roads to cross when there are no cars approaching for n seconds. The number of times I've waited for several minutes at a stop light in the middle of the night...
You can have it both ways -- add a new light state (or just use flashing red all the time) that self-driving cars can ignore.
All other road users have to stop and the light cycles normally. (and during this specially triggered light cycle, even self-driving cars need to stop)
We could end up with roads dedicated to cars being separated from roads dedicated to pedestrians or cyclists. You could imagine if a city was designed from scratch the vehicles could move around almost in tunnel-like back-alleys, with periodic embarkation points into pedestrianized open plazas and boulevards. If Musk's reduction in cost of tunnelling is more than just a pipe-dream, then you might be able to retrofit something like that into an existing city.
But I agree that if autonomous cars come to pass, there will be a lot of pressure to go down the route you discuss.
This is the future of cities. Doing this would open the door for massive efficiency gains. Within these controlled "back-alleys," you could lay down metallic guides for the cars to glide down (dramatically reduced rolling friction losses), and couple vehicles moving in the same direction (dramatically reduced aerodynamic losses). Eventually you could electrify the whole thing so that cars wouldn't have to carry fuel while in the back-alley network
.
It needs a catchy name though. Back-alley is too harsh. Something that represents our aspirations for the cities of the future. I'm thinking "Metro."
I like that nobody caught on. But yes, that's basically a Metro system. The difference is that a Metro system doesn't allow divergence without transfer and it's a "mass transit" system. Autonomous vehicles provide an opportunity to blend controlled and uncontrolled transit paths, privacy, and the ability to diverge without transfer while increasing traffic efficiency, reducing the dangers of driving, and freeing up commuter time for other activities, just like mass transit.
But with a difference of point to point rather than line-based. Autonomous technology will probably mean a kind of union between private and public transport, and between road and metro rail.
> vehicles could move around almost in tunnel-like back-alleys, with periodic embarkation points into pedestrianized open plazas and boulevards.
Sounds an awful lot like a subway or lite rail system to me. I've never understood the fascination with self-driving cars and what they imply for PT--how is such a system superior to a well designed and maintained train system?
I just find it amusing because autonomous vehicles don't really solve any traffic problems. You still have too many cars on the highway at rush hour. Even if they move better, they won't move as well as a train system would for the same number of people in much less space.
I don't really see the difference. You have to return to where your car is parked, too. And you have to transfer your belongings from your car to e.g. your house and so on.
Yeah. Something like that would solve so many problems.
We could really hide the rails underground and at last free the roads again for people to use, like the article says it was in the 1920's. We could reduce automotive accidents to a bare minimum, which btw is the main selling point of self-driving cars, far as I can tell. We could reduce pollution by a factor of 10, probably, which is the much bigger problem that the industry isn't try to sell a solution for - because more cars are not exactly what you'd call a solution to it. We could make our cities places for humans, rather than noisy, dirty, polluting, often deadly machines. But, no. We gotta have more cars. Because you can't stop the march of progress.
> If certain intersections or sections of road consistently confuse AI drivers, automakers will lobby for ways to change these roadways.
I doubt that attitude will ever catch on. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but it seems to me that there's a healthy suspicion about AI drivers.
So far at least, the attitude taken by, well, everyone, is that AI drivers are untrustworthy until proven trustworthy. If AI drivers can't cope with the various challenges of real driving, then the AI drivers are to blame, not the external factors.
If they work well, AI drivers will be permitted to drive. If they do not, they will not be permitted to drive. At no point will they get to dictate what other road-users may do. Our Ludditism will see to that.
When 80-90% of car driving population have switched over to AI driven cars, the focus of Ludditism probably shifts to something more emerging technology and the great majority of people will just nod their heads in unison with those lobbying automakers.
It is not particularly difficult to imagine the general public swaying even to some opposite extreme, supported by some reasoning like "he probably did something wrong to get killed, the AI cars make very few mistakes."
Yup. The first thing I think about wrt to driverless cars being adopted en-masse is how trivially easy it would be to DDoS them.
Literally just stand in front of them and there will be nothing they can do. Once people get used to zero social repercussions (driverless cars will be empty probably 50% of the time en-route to pick someone up or go park themselves by my estimation) I imagine you will see things like certain folks simply crossing streets blindly comfortable in the fact that the cars will stop for them regardless of right of way.
Many will disagree that this will happen, but I think many underestimate the antisocialness of folks when there are no consequences.
And then you remember that as part of the passenger safety case for driverless taxis, there will necessarily be cameras and microphones and the ability to lock the doors and redirect the taxi to the nearest hospital or police station, right?
When we were building the Heathrow Pod[1] -- which is effectively an autonomous taxi system -- this was an objection that people raised all the time. In practice, it took approximately zero instances of bad passenger behaviour for people to catch onto the fact that the interior of an autonomous vehicle that can deliver you non-stop to airport security is really the last place on Earth that you'd want to engage in anti-social behaviour.
Presumably not if you own the car. Sex in public (including in buses, subways, etc.) is already illegal in many areas, and cab-company equivalents would presumably get to set their own rules as they do now.
> Cyclists may be restricted and anything else that confuses AI drivers.
I don't think that will ever happen. It may even be the opposite: AI will drive in a way it will always be able to stop if there's a possibility that there's someone behind some obstacle that may jump to the road at any moment.
Worst case scenario, beacons become mandatory. Cheap and anonymous beacons you have to carry when you're near a road. Smart phones may include such functionality.
This is the same United States where just about everyone already carries a tracking device by choice, where lots of people have installed 24/7 network-connected microphones in their homes, and where everyone believes you need ID to fly. This is the same United States where a common political argument is that of course ID should be required to vote because ID is required for everything else, and citizens should just carry ID. This is the same US where a special police force arrests and detains citizens and forces them to prove that they're actually citizens. It's been a long while since we actually objected to the "papers, please" world.
After all, these beacons are not mandatory - they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. If you don't, you can drive your car like any real (read: non-poor) American, or use a taxi or bus. Pedestrians already aren't permitted on highways, what's so different about restricting pedestrians on surface streets?
And if you don't carry the beacon, that's not illegal, it's just your fault if you get hit by a car. It's not the government forcing you to carry it, it's algorithms and corporations, which makes it okay, right? If these beacons are produced by the free market, why should government regulation step in and stifle innovation?
I'm going to assume this is a good-faith argument and not a "bury them in BS" reply:
> This is the same United States where just about everyone already carries a tracking device by choice.
Sure, that's a very reasonable counter-point, however not everyone does.
> where lots of people have installed 24/7 network-connected microphones in their homes
Plenty of folks find asking a wiretap for pancake recipes fine, and there are plenty that balk at the thought. This Christmas my sister bought everyone Amazon's cute little NSA Listening Post™ - was fun how quickly the look of disgust crossed their face when I explained that every conversation would be recorded and store in Amazon's data centers... and probably a few three-letter agencies.
> and where everyone believes you need ID to fly. This is the same United States where a common political argument is that of course ID should be required to vote because ID is required for everything else, and citizens should just carry ID. This is the same US where a special police force arrests and detains citizens and forces them to prove that they're actually citizens. It's been a long while since we actually objected to the "papers, please" world.
There is an insanely large leap between having an ID for a few specific purposes and being mandated to carry a homing beacon.
> they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist.
The post I replied to did not state "to use the roads" - it stated general use of mandatory beacons. You're moving the goalposts.
> And if you don't carry the beacon, that's not illegal, it's just your fault if you get hit by a car. It's not the government forcing you to carry it, it's algorithms and corporations, which makes it okay, right? If these beacons are produced by the free market, why should government regulation step in and stifle innovation?
If the AppleMobile hits me because I don't carry an iPhone, you can best believe they will be sued into oblivion. Remember, this is litigious America!
The Evangelical community would surely denounce a mandatory tracking device as the work of the Antichrist, and I would love to watch politicians shit on that high-turnout demographic.
> The post I replied to did not state "to use the roads" - it stated general use of mandatory beacons. You're moving the goalposts.
Sorry - my reading was that it was in reply to "Worst case scenario, beacons become mandatory. Cheap and anonymous beacons you have to carry when you're near a road," and so I thought you meant "beacons that are mandatory if you're near a road and don't want to be hit." If you mean "beacons that are mandatory just to be a human in America at all," then sure, I think that's going to be a much harder sell, but I'd also argue that the post you were responding to doesn't require such beacons.
I suppose this all hinges on what "near roads" means.
To me, that includes pedestrians walking on a city sidewalk who might jaywalk as the TFA that started this whole conversation is talking about. Now the only way you can ensure folks have that device is to mandate for everyone. Of course in the US it isn't nearly as common, but I know plenty of city-dwellers without cars. IANAL but I'm having a hard time believing a mandatory beacon would pass Constitutional muster, let alone public support.
Again, it doesn't have to be mandatory from the government. It's just that the car companies guarantee they won't hit you if you have a beacon (i.e., they take on all liability), and they make no such guarantee if you don't (i.e., you or your bereaved family have to go fight them in court, have fun). They will have complicated spreadsheets internally calculating the "acceptable" level of casualties, where they can keep the public convinced that it's their fault for not carrying beacons, and not invest in improving their detection algorithms beyond that. (Engineers working for these companies will earnestly try to build the best algorithms they can, but senior management won't staff or fund these departments any more than necessary.)
I'm curious if you were around and leading a normal adult life before 9/11?
I think you'll find "land of the free, home of the brave" is more or less a cheap slogan once the chips are down and people are afraid.
Exceedingly few people in the US actually care about individual freedom or privacy. 9/11 drove that point severely home to me - those born in the 90's and later will never know the America I once knew, and I'm sure those born before Pearl Harbor and the like would say similar.
The erosion of personal freedom and the expectation of privacy just in my lifetime has been absolutely astounding. Watching basically everyone trade their freedom for temporary security.
Hyperbolic? A bit. But I think if you spend some moments of reflection you'll realize almost none of your fellow citizens actually care. They will play lip service at best until an event happens that scares them, and at that point you're the crazy privacy freak with obviously something to hide.
> every conversation would be recorded and store in Amazon's data centers
I agree with everything else you wrote (I think?), but I thought that the Echo only transmitted things it recognized directly following the activation phrase?
I might have exaggerated / misspoken in saying that, but at the same time it hinges on you trusting that the manufacturer is A) telling the truth and B) that device has not been compromised. It is fair to say that it is always listening. Also possible, is that a device positioned in the kitchen helping being used to lookup a recipe could overhear a sensitive conversation in an adjacent room.
I would bet that the Echo and devices like it are amongst the most monitored consumer devices in existence. Plenty of people either already have enough network monitoring to catch it misbehaving, or will install that monitoring just for the sake of catching it. In a weird sense it's like open source software in that regard. I haven't read all the code myself, I really on group knowledge to reassure me. Same for Echo. As a practical matter the Echo and other similar devices are difficult to turn into full-time listen-and-record devices unnoticed.
I think the GP meant that it's harder for _the vendor_ to do it, because there are assuredly many privacy-attuned nerds who would run wireshark a bunch on it and notice when the $ListeningPost becomes an always-on bug.
I don't think they meant to imply that it would be hard to to cause such behavior via malicious action by 3rd parties.
>I'm going to assume this is a good-faith argument and not a "bury them in BS" reply
That reads so snarkily. You announce that what the other guy wrote sounds like a lot of BS, or you strongly suspect it is (why mention that otherwise) but you will very generously act as though it's not. It's good to assume good faith, not so good to announce it like that.
> After all, these beacons not mandatory - they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. If you don't, you can drive your car like any real (read: non-poor) American, or use a taxi or bus.
You just wrote two things:
1) Pedestrians and bike riders should wear beacons or aren't "real Americans".
Yes, that's what I meant to write. Note that those are not my personal opinions (as a pedestrian, cyclist, and non-car-owner, I'd like to think I'm as real an American as anyone else), but I do think they are common opinions in America.
Everybody misinterpreted what I've intended. SHORT RANGE BEACONS. Enough to be "seen" by car AI through obstacles. Here's the imaginary conversation between car and beacon:
- "Is someone behind that parked van?"
- "Yes"
- "Who?"
- "Mind your own business, just slow down in case I decide to jump to the road, ok?"
Good point... Well, that seems easy to police: Have one car patrolling for beacons not attached to what appears to be a person or bike. The only consequence of such troll beacons are cars slowing down on that point, that's all.
Would a beacon have to be a personally associated tracking device? I can imagine carrying a device that just broadcasts a generic "cyclist here, moving this speed and direction" signal, without identifying or being registered to me (bought with cash)
They don't need to mandate it, at least not at first. They can just incentivize it the right way and people will willingly jump on board.
"Install this app on your phone to make traffic lights recognize you when you approach them, for a timely shift to green light"
"Install this app to collect pedestrian-points, exchange points for prices and discounts!"
"Get a better insurance tier for installing this app which tracks your fitness. Do your daily 10.000 steps for a free <whatever>!"
Once enough people jump on board, and it's generally accepted as being "normal because everybody uses it", then you can mandate it and the few people left who resist can easily be branded as "paranoid tinfoil-hat people" to marginalize their opposition.
If you're relying on a smartphone to host a beacon, isn't that already a solved problem?
Smartphones are radio transceivers, I would imagine any anonymous beacon technology wouldn't be noticeably louder than what smartphones are already emitting.
Several states already have laws preventing that requirement. In those states, location-tracking must be opt-in, and must offer an economic benefit to the policyholder.
Any insurer which raises rates to pay for this would quickly lose most of its business unless they're (a) the only insurer in the state or (b) convince the rest of the insurers in-state to collude on pricing. The first isn't the case of any state with respect to auto insurance, and the second is a state and federal felony punishable by many years in jail for any executive stupid enough to participate.
And that's assuming they can get away with the rate increases in the first place. States like CA have insurance commissioners empowered to review and reject rate increases.
let's make walking and biking cool, but not at the expense of fast personal transport (cars).
the best solution isn't to try to slow down the cars but rather to make mixed-use urban areas the default so that walking and biking become the norm. you also get all kinds of other benefits with that (less traffic, healthier air, more fit people, etc)
i agree that driving qualifications should be more strict, but probably in a different dimension than you: test drivers on situational awareness and predictive decision making. fail people for both distracted driving and indecision (and lack of follow-through), as well as not communicating intent (e.g, signaling) to other drivers.
The concept of jaywalking is great for busy roads with high speed traffic. 30MPH+ (50KMPH+) roads should become much better and faster by reducing the amount of pedestrian crossing significantly.
Slower roads (max 20MPH/30KMPH) should be bicycle and pedestrian-first. Cars there should be "guests" catering to the slower non-motorized traffic.
This way we have the best of both worlds: nice & livable urban roads and faster driving in connecting roads.
yes, jaywalking laws are ok on higher speed roads.
my one pet peeve around that is that most californians don't respect the rule that any intersection of two city streets is a crosswalk, whether marked as such or not, and pedestrians crossing at a corner have the right of way. as soon as they start walking, cars must stop for them, even on larger streets (most drivers don't know/rememeber this and zoom dangerously close by).
i think that would be ok too, but the solution i prefer is to narrow residential street lanes (and on other urban streets as well).
all roads, but even residential streets, in car-centric cities like LA seem to be built wide enough to accommodate 747's with ease.
my proposal: rather than 12-15 foot widths, make urban residential street lanes 9 feet wide (cars are typically 6-7 feet wide, delivery trucks, 8 feet wide). replace parking lanes with slightly grade-separated (3-4 inches) bike lanes, leaving existing walkways for pedestrians only.
and make sure these narrow lanes have shoulder lane markings.
Grade separation would work in warm climates, but anywhere it may snow it is somewhat dangerous as hitting the hidden curb could send you out of control.
In one street of my city the parking was replaced with two way bicycle lanes, and there are plastic bollards to separate it from the road (which is probably around 9 feet now as you suggest). Compared to a grade separation that isn’t going to do much if you go over it, if you hit a bollard it’s going to leave a nice permanent mark on your car, so you are going to drive more carefully.
The only issue I’ve seen with this is if vehicles need to deliver to the shops and bars on this street, they have to park in the cycle lane (there is no rear access or parking).
I the city cars are already not much faster than bikes. For distances below 10km or so there is hardly any difference. During rush hours bikes are much faster.
I'd wager that you can reduce the top speed cars are allowed to travel significantly before the effective speed goes down by much, especially if you can improve traffic flow by e.g. vehicle-vehicle communication.
Bikes aren’t faster than cars for the elderly, the vision impaired, handicapped people or small children. I’m all for more bikes and more bike routes, but cars offer more independence for a lot of movement restricted people.
The vision impaired and small children should not be driving anyway. And depending on the "handicap" and the age-related abilities they may also be detrimental to safe piloting of a vehicle. The solution is public transport. (Or tandem bicycles).
Except that one of the big upsides of autocars is this demographic of people. And many (most) places in the US are not conveniently served by public transit. Heck, I live in one of the better places (Portland Oregon) and even in the core of the city it's going to be easily 2x as long to take PT anywhere vs a private car. IMO the big promise of autocars is the potential for eliminating mass transit along with all it's annoyances.
They can ride as passengers. You're arguing that tandem bicycles is a serious solution for the elderly or handicapped people? Is there a community where this is common?
I hope the vision impaired and small children aren't driving cars. And all of these groups would be helped much much more by not designing cities around cars, in the 95% of hours in the day where they are not in cars and need to navigate every day life.
A $60k retrofitted transporter van isn't exactly the definition of "independence".
Actually, there are many visually impaired people who can, and do, drive. As an example, I know a woman in her sixties who is classed as visually impaired. She can see well enough to get herself about but she can't make out peoples faces until she is fairly close and has to have a magnifying glass to read even fairly large text. She has been assessed as safe to drive, but is excluded from driving at night.
Well, there is a lot of rational thought (and frankly human lives) sacrificed at the altar of the personal automobile. Limousines with 200 hp, huge trucks with bull bars but can't see the pedestrian to the right, sound systems, entertainment systems, licenses that expire never, are checked never, 20% percent of space in SF for storing huge heaps of metal for >90% of the day but "there is no space" and people can't make rent, ..
Well, that depends on the local climate and the rider's constitution.
But my post was not about the relative merits of cycling versus driving. I simply wanted to rebut clairity's point that making cycling and walking safer necessarily makes driving slower.
Transportation cyclist in Texas here. The need for showering is overstated, I think. Even with the summers here I only know one cyclist who would take a shower after cycling, and they only do so for their training, not their commute as far as I know. If you ride at a comfortable pace and are in good shape, I find that a quick 5 minutes in the bathroom to freshen up is plenty, if it's even necessary. I usually wipe sweat off my head and chest and sometimes will change clothes. Outside of the summer these steps are rarely necessary, by the way.
Also, I think I would frequently (perhaps not every time, but at least 25% of the time) beat a driver to the door of my workplace from my apartment because of a combination of cars not actually being much faster than me due to traffic, stop lights, etc. and parking. My parking is so small that it's a lot closer to my building. This obviously depends on where you work, but here it seems to be a major factor. (On second thought this would also depend on which lot the driver would park in. Most would have a long enough walk to make cycling faster or at least about the same. I also haven't done this race, for what it's worth. Anyway, the point stands: travel times for cyclists are not necessarily worse than drivers.)
I had the time in mind. The ambiguity was a consequence of poor writing. I doubt this takes more than a minute or two in reality, and it's only necessary for perhaps a quarter of the year. Averages to around 30 seconds a day if it takes 2 minutes when necessary.
you really don't need to shower and change your clothes. You can if you want to ride your bike fast and push your physical limits, but generally casual biking won't make you sweat more than if you were walking.
What do you mean by casual biking? Walking home takes me a half hour or longer. Biking is less than 10 minutes according to my bike computer. Big time difference. Plus if it's hot I spend a lot less time in the sun on the bike, making biking less sweaty than walking. And I can carry a lot more cargo more comfortably.
We'll always keep roads with high speed limits just for cars (highways). But this expectation that you should be able to drive within your neighborhood at 50 mph is not sustainable.
>the best solution isn't to try to slow down the cars but rather to make mixed-use urban areas the default so that walking and biking become the norm.
hopefully you're not suggesting that cars should be travelling 50km/hr in mixed-use urban areas? Because "slowing down the cars" is a synonym for mixed-use area. That's the same thing, if you continue with car-only roads there's no need to slow down the cars.
This is actually happening. Portland has recently fallen in line with other cities, like Seattle, and lowered thousands of miles of streets from 25 MPH to 20 MPH.
Indeed, but when the automated system driving verifies real-time what the limits of the road are, it is trivial for an "Auto" to dispute and provide evidence.
The only thing these auto-scammers would get are human drivers not driving precisely and accurately.
Generally it only takes one driver wanting to stick to the limit for everyone else to do so too, because overtaking is contraindicated. Which isn't to say that it never happens :(.
I live in Edinburgh, which has been gradually introducing 20mph limits over the last couple of years, and I've actually taken to them much better than I'd expected to: they don't reduce my average speed all that much, especially as the arterial roads are still 30mph, and they're much more pleasant when I'm out of the car.
If they actually start issuing tens of thousands of speeding tickets as a result, someone is going to successfully use Oregon's initiative system to ban those cameras altogether.
That's interesting, because Cambridge, MA made a big deal about lowering the limit to 25 MPH in 2016 - which is still way too fast for most neighborhoods. I'd much rather see it taken down to 20 and even 15 for side streets. The funny thing though is, I haven't noticed one iota of difference in the speed that cars are actually traveling.
That seems to be happening, at least in some European cities. Paris for instance is (very) slowly chasing cars outside of the city. London has the congestion tax. The problem of course is that you need the infrastructure to replace all the cars and public transportation in Paris is close to saturated. Still, it's probably a move in the right direction IMO.
Sometimes it really is a zero-sum game. Pedestrians, bikers, personal cars, buses and trams compete for the same surface area, and out of those cars are the main cause of congestion due to their abysmal people/m^2 value.
> Now is an opportunity, perhaps first in ~100 years, perhaps last, to recover the streets for unaugmented humans: slow down cars in urban areas, increase qualifications for humans to drive, eventually ban human drivers entirely, leaving only automated vehicles with enough sensors and going slowly enough to reduce auto-related deaths for pedestrians and passengers alike to zero.
What about people who genuinely love to drive cars & ride motorcycles? Are we a danger this utopian self automated future? I just don't see it happening. There's so many people that are enamored with cars and motorcycles, who love the sensation, independence and freedom derived from the experience. Older manual Ferraris or air-cooled Porsches appreciate in value for a reason.
I almost lament at the future where an entire generation will grow up without experiencing such "archaic, manual and dangerous vehicles" because it will be too expensive, much as classic supercars will remain out of reach for majority of the population.
> What about people who genuinely love to drive cars & ride motorcycles?
I suspect we can find a place for them outside of our most densely populated urban cores. The popularity of cars isn't in itself a scandal. The scandal is that cars still enjoy undue priority in places like Midtown Manhattan, it's that urban neighborhoods were destroyed and divided by interstate highways, it's that most cities no longer function properly for the carless.
You can have high-throughout roads into cities, or hypergentrification in urban neighborhoods as people move closer to minimize transportation needs. The existing suburban masses are not going to vanish into thin air.
Personal cars are already banned in the centers of many cities. Or if not forthright banned, heavy congestion tolls levied. As it should be. It's about your freedom to drive vs. my freedom to not suffer from the negative externalities your driving causes.
As a hobbyist horseback rider, I can tell you what happened to people who genuinely love to ride horses: they became a hobby accessible to those with enough interest and money, and more common in rural areas (since as other comments have pointed out, horses - like cars - make much less sense in dense urban areas).
In my part of the rural US, one can get an isolated hour of horseback riding for $20 or so, or maintain a personal horse for a few hundred a month (if kept at a stable run as a business for that purpose; cheaper if you have your own property suitable for housing the horse).
I can see car garages and designated driving areas becoming the riding stables of the future.
I truly cringe at the thought of a ban on human drivers. There's a considerable amount of freedom in that ability to get in the car, and drive. Otherwise you're beholden to a machine, a corporation, and likely, a government. Trapped and unable to go anywhere unless they authorize it.
This is a huge deal to me that keeps me up at night.
I already see this with public transit. Public transport is a method of population control. You can keep classes of people confined to their neighborhoods simply based on how and where you choose to route buses/trains.
I can get in my car and go anywhere. That to me is the true spirit of America.
Remind me who's building the road infrastructure again?
Your freedom comes at a high price, direct and indirect. Countries with functioning public transportation are providing a lot of this freedom, to a broader population and at a fraction of the cost compared to personal cars.
Nothing stopping you from driving without a license. Sure, there are consequences to getting caught, but people drive all the time without a license. It's a bit different than not being able to catch the train or bus because the nearest stop is miles away.
I think the answer to pedestrians versus cars is the same as for cars versus trains: grade separation.
Turn the sidewalks into elevated walkways. Or use pedestrian tunnels underneath the road surface. Pedestrian crosswalks are a money-saving measure, ignoring one of the many externalities involved in automobile manufacture. Cars simply should not be driving on pedestrian walkways, and pedestrians should not be walking anywhere that does not have a significant physical barrier between them and the massive objects moving at high speed.
Elevated walkways? Half my city doesn't even have traditional sidewalks today, who's going to agree to pay to elevate them?
Around my area, people don't walk for pleasure, mostly, they walk because they're too poor for a car and the public transit system is terrible. Forcing them to climb stairs (assuming they're even physically able; a fair number of pedestrians near here are in wheelchairs) to get out of the way of cars is a non-starter.
You only need to grade-separate the crossings. There are plenty of examples of pedestrian overpasses for busy streets. You can get around a big area in lot of major cities without ever crossing a street at surface-level, but as already mentioned, it is expensive.
(Though I can't imagine people being happy about going up and down stairs, escalators, or elevators every time they want to cross a street.)
The necessity arises from the car-drivers, so you charge them for the pedestrian safety measures, just like you charge them for the creation and maintenance of limited-access highways.
Without crosswalks, there is no pedestrian-crossing phase needed in the traffic signals, so separating the two types of traffic simultaneously makes cars faster and pedestrians safer. The question really is how much drivers would be willing to pay to shave that last minute off their commute.
If you look at projects like Boston's "Big Dig", the answer is that they are willing to spend quite a lot [of other people's money].
Some traffic engineers¹ argue that the problem comes from humans adopting the mechanical role of a "driver" who is entitled to seek the quickest route by a set of rules which they understand and adhere to imperfectly. Instead of trying to encourage everyone to pretend to be a robo-driver they emphasize returning to self-evidently confusing and complex environments which put the onus on the driver to negotiate.
Digging out extensive underground road infrastructure is very expensive. Ask Boston residents if they'd like to do a second Big Dig on a much larger scale to bury the streets.
Elevated walkways would be vastly cheaper, but still infeasible on any current budget. You would end up having to rebuild the lobby of most buildings to be on the second floor, and probably turn the first floor into parking. It feels like one of those utopian ideals from the 50s or 60s that came out before people started thinking about the money.
On the other hand, the downtown area of Chicago was raised up from natural ground level in the 1850s.
Seattle was raised in the 1880s.
A portion of Atlanta was raised in the 1920s. They actually did rebuild new lobbies on the upper floors, and a lot of the old storefronts are still intact down below.
i lived in boston during (the tail end of) the big dig and remember the excess costs were largely due to corruption and maybe some incompetence. look at how much nicer it is there because of it. i'd vote for it again in a heartbeat (with some better processes and oversight of course).
but yes, underground infrastructure is expensive (maybe the boring company will help drive equipment costs down), but we're a rich nation and we want nice things. i think we can do it if we want to. plus, it creates working class jobs and that makes the economy go 'round.
This was tried on a fairly large scale in Milton Keynes, a new planned city in the UK founded in 1967. The traffic grid is high-speed (and roundabout-heavy), and there was an extensive network of grade-separated pedestrian and cycle lanes.
The results are... mixed. Some people love the place, but the grade separated cycle paths are not popular. Well worth looking at, if this is an area you're interested in.
Umm, sidewalks are a separate right of way with significant barriers (parked cars)? Most train crossings are at-grade and use simple traffic lights. In congested areas, they install gates that prevent cars from barreling into trains.
You're thinking of sidewalks in a city. I don't know about elsewhere, but more populous places in Metro Atlanta have long sidewalks running between subdivisions and retail with no more than a small bump between it and the road.
Sidewalks found in suburban sprawl are purely decorative. Only the very unfortunate walk there because everything is miles apart from each other, making a car mandatory. Meanwhile, even super-dense cities, where walking is obvious, have to fight the ridiculous notion that cars deserve 80% of the street right of way and stupendously subsidized street parking.
No, sidewalks in suburbia are super useful for walking between houses. They're not useful for shopping or commuting, but they let kids walk to their friend's house to play. Not every trip is a commute downtown.
Underground tunnels have a mythos of danger surrounding them. Somehow a tunnel as long as the width of the road is supposed to be a hiding spot for a mugger.
I think we should limit the mass of urban cars, so that they would not be heavier than a golf cart. This way, most accidents would be of no consequence (I remember an out-of-control cart in a football stadium that hit several people and none were hurt), and we could let even younger people drive.
It really makes no sense for an 80Kg person to go around in a 1000kg vehicle.
Mass is only part of the equation. If you move a golf cart at 45mph it's still going to do damage if it hits someone. We have to reduce speed as well and that means it takes longer to get to your destination. There are solutions there (mixed use/high density residential?) but it's not as simple as "smaller cars".
The 1000kg vehicle protects the 80kg person from harm because the 80kg person is not designed to go 100kph.
People tend to get less motion sickness when they are in control of the motion (i.e. drivers are not as susceptible to motion sickness as their passengers). So in this future world you might still be allowed to hold the steering wheel (if you paid for the option of having one in the car at all), but the car will take control from you immediately as soon as it decides that someone might be in danger (just like some present-day cars can auto-brake if they sense an impending collision).
I try to be careful in where I sit on the train so that I can keep my pain to just a mild headache and maybe a little sweating. Just because I don't vomit on you nor complain out loud about the suffering doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Motion sickness comes from the conflict between your eyes and the part of your ear which tells you which way is up and lets you stay in balance. It is way less of a problem in big vehicles where you have a lot of things and people to look at, which experience the same forces as you and so move the way your brain expects. Being in control of these forces is another way of aligning what you perceive and what your brain expects. Motion sickness is very real, don't discount it as a non issue.
Could a windowless vehicle help this? If the car is in control, there's really not any need for windows. I know we are a very long way from that level of autonomous cars, but I don't think motion sickness is the biggest hurdle we will need to overcome. There is room for a lot of creative solutions.
A windowless vehicle makes it worse, because you don't see any movement, you just feel it. As klibertp said....
> Motion sickness comes from the conflict between your eyes and the part of your ear which tells you which way is up and lets you stay in balance.
If there's no windows, then your eyes will say "We're not moving", but your inner motion sensor in your ear will say "We're definitely moving", and you'll create motion sickness.
It's for the same reason some people feel motion sickness in some VR apps that involve movement in the virtual world that doesn't match your real world movement, such as driving a car in VR. Your eyes say "We're moving", but your ear says "No we aren't!", and the discrepancy triggers motion sickness.
The appearance of control might be a better solution for that problem, as the many of the efficiencies gained with self driving cars are not just accidents avoidance.
Part of that makes sense - only automated vehicles will be a great boon. Going slower in already-congested urban areas is a non-starter; it doesn't solve the problem and makes it worse. Automation could tremendously improve the accident rate all by itself anyway.
And until ALL the human drivers are gone, automated ones are going to have to drive 'on eggshells' in case an uninstrumented car happens by. IF it were known for a fact that all cars were instrumented (so the software knew where ALL of them were) then we could even do away with stop lights etc - the cars could regulate intersections 'in the cloud'. And so on.
Which leaves the interesting problem - what do we do to cross the chasm - from all human drivers to all automated drivers? There are few good solutions in the middle.
I would be stunned to see this happen in the US. Culturally we are a long way from accepting such draconian ideas and I don't see that we're getting closer. And even as liberal as I am, I'm glad.
Reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic accident and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for accidents to pedestrians
To me, that is the craziest sentence in the article. Reporters were outsourcing writing to the auto industry? Of course they blamed the pedestrians! In what world is this ethical?
What is next? Sending overdose details to pharma companies for them to blame the drug users?
The auto companies presumably were providing significant advertising to the newspapers. It's reasonable go along with what a significant customer wants. The papers were probably spinning everything for their major advertisers as a matter of course.
Even today it is fun to compare media articles with the original police press release. The media tends to spin such articles against any involved cyclists/pedestrians for free. There doesn't have to be much of a conspiracy, most of the media's consumers are drivers and don't want to hear bad things about that group.
No one's linking to pg's famous article about it the dynamic? [1] He makes the point that that kind of thing happens because reporters are pressed for time and good journalism is hard. And generally, a PR person who feeds them such an article won't lie, they'll just selectively include facts.
I'm just impressed it was going on even then.
I agree that this kind of thing should be disclosed, just as same as if it were "here's $500 and remember where it came from". It's something of value being provided by an interested party that taints the publication. Not so much that it shouldn't be printed, but definitely enough that it should be disclosed ("I'm just parroting what GM told me").
How many people would be willing to let someone else do their job for them when the cost is adding a little extra bias, something that isn't even a big deal in a single case (but which adds up over time)? It feels like ethics will quickly take a back seat for some small boon.
Suddenly that ecologically unsound packaging was no longer their problem; disposing of it properly was the consumer and the government's shared responsibility.
In much the same way I'm happy we no longer empty chamber pots by heaving the contents out the front window, I don't really care where litter or rubbish comes from but I'd prefer it not pile up on the sidewalk.
and? obviously I don't want heaps of chamber pot contents on the sidewalk either. The point I was making is that, yes all littering is bad, but why does the consumer shoulder the burden when a huge majority of packaging can be avoided?
Can be avoided, but there's a cost. Wrapping food in plastic makes it easier, and thus cheaper to distribute, and vastly lowers the risk of foodborn illness. If you get rid of plastic packaging, the consumer will bear that cost in other ways.
I agree that companies often avoid the negative externalities of their activities, and support things like a carbon tax to fix that. But in the case of littering, whoever creates the mess needs to clean it up.
How exactly does wrapping potatoes and bell peppers and cucumbers individually in plastic make it easier to distribute them? As far as illness goes, any number of steps along the food distribution chain can introduce pathogens, so they still have to be cleaned, separated, prepared and stored properly, regardless of plastic use.
On the other hand, if you get rid of plastic packaging, the consumer will bear the benefit in other ways. A lack of plastic in the environment means a healthier ecosystem, which affects their food as well as their quality of life.
But this is all a bit of a red herring because goods aren't packaged in so much plastic in order to reduce costs or improve quality. The single most important factor in consumer packaging is "Will this make the consumer want to buy it more".
In the case of cucumbers, it's to extend the shelf life because otherwise they very easily dehydrate through their skins[0]. (The alternative is waxing the skin.)
I've never seen an individually shrink-wrapped potato or bell pepper where I live. I do see sets of 3 large bell papers, or of a pound or two of "baby" bell papers, in a plastic bag, and don't know of any excuse for that beyond convenience.
Same, or that we have to dodge or wait for pedestrians when we're trying to get somewhere. I mean we do but only rarely if people abide by the laws / common sense.
As a frequent pedestrian who also pays road taxes, I am also trying to get somewhere, and I don't appreciate all the times I've had to dodge cars while using a crosswalk. The stakes for me are much higher.
I can't watch the vid right now, but I don't see how it's not the consumer's responsibility of where they put their trash. It's also the consumer's responsibility to demand environmentally friendly packaging.
I agree with you. Laws should reflect what society (collective individuals) want. It's all driven by individuals who should take responsibility, not say it's the corporation or government's fault.
Many people throughout history have found that when they push for laws for whatever they want, other people do the same thing. See any group of 3 presidential elections and the laws that were passed in the first year of a presidency.
tl;dr Legislating for everyone to do what you want inevitably leads for others to legislate that you do what they want.
Can HN please stop it with this "not owning a car is virtuous" shtick? I went most of my younger life not having a car, only learning to drive at age 28. I lived in a new england suburb close enough to go to my work and shopping services at a ten minute walk at the time, and it still was horrid.
People here don't get how limited your life is without a car. You are limited to a ten-fifteen mile radius for everything, unless you use inefficient public transport which tacks on a huge time tax for even basic trips. You are captive to that transport, which means something like being called in is hard to impossible, as well as many duties of your workplace; dropping deposits off to a bank after hours as a manager, for example. That transport doesn't even expand your range that much, maybe one or two towns over; the time for further is so long as to be prohibitive.
Even with walking, you wind up spending far more time and expense on basic tasks. Instead of shopping one day you need to shop five, just because you can't fit more than a couple bags of goods. If you are on the bus, you can't even easily use perishables; 30-45 min one way is the norm. You can't do things like buy a mattress without tacked on delivery fees and more time spent waiting to receive it. If anything happens where you simply can't walk like doctor or dentist visits (because doctors don't always stay in walking distance of most people) that's an expensive cab or uber both ways. Sometimes its even worse...jury duty can be in the county courthouse 30 min by car and an hour and a half by bus.
You have no social life with no car. Not every town can simply cluster everything in one place; the downtown can easily be 30 minutes away from where people live. It took me an hour to walk to the comic shop one way; the bus would had made that longer, not shorter. Dates are impossible because of that; if the nearest date spot or bar isn't within five minutes, what do you do?
A life without personal cars would be a rather limited and even serfish one. Everyone assumes driverless cars might save us, but they have yet to prove they can even navigate a highway during a New England winter, which is what you'd need to do to replace a commute. People talk about bicycles, but 0 degree or snowy weather makes that horrid, as well as high heat. Please stop assuming cars are this evil thing that more walking and biking will solve; they wont, not at all.
> A life without personal cars would be a rather limited and even serfish one.
This is highly dependent on your location and life circumstances. I live in Eastern Europe, have resources to easily buy a couple of cars, yet choose not to. I prefer to walk or cycle.
> People talk about bicycles, but 0 degree or snowy weather makes that horrid
In Amsterdam, people cycle in -10°C when there's 10cm of snow on the ground (I did so myself). While a little unpleasant, apart from walking it was the only viable means of transport: the metro and trains were cancelled because of snow, and cars and buses were mostly stuck in traffic jams because there were so many crashes everywhere. (Someone tell the Dutch about winter tires!)
I have walked in that temperature. Its only something the young and very healthy can do, and the wind cuts like a knife. I wouldn't bike in that weather due to wind chill and the slushy nature of most roads, as well as the fact its very hilly where I live.
I cannot see an entire society doing this, in areas that range from small towns to medium sized cities.
> I have walked in that temperature. Its only something the young and very healthy can do, and the wind cuts like a knife.
The wind doesn't cut through proper clothes. I try to avoid the roads as well, but the bike paths work well where I live, even when the temperature goes down to -20°C.
You just need some extra clothes to handle -18°C no problem at all IMHO, and as long as the temprature is below freezing you will have no problem with shitty roads. I would say the winter is the best season to bicycle, you can go everywhere.
I'm going to assume you're unfamiliar with being poor. I recall my shoe's sole could flap open and let in snow and the only clothes I had were the pair of jeans that I had on (that were wet from snowmelt) and a crappy jacket. Just getting some extra clothes was not as easy as going down to REI. And if the weather fluctuates from below freezing to above, you have unforgiving ice that cannot be cycled upon. Sorry for an off topic rant. Being poor and cold and cycling struck a cord from my youth.
That type of weather is not the norm, the amount of potential misery days on bicycle can be counted on one hand in a year, and it's easy to alleviate and make them potentially enjoyable.
Please try it again it's not really the same experience if you choose to do it. All your problems described above are easy to solve, if you have resources to buy a car[1]. Ice bark roads are navigable with cheap winter tires (it does take you 40% longer to traverse though). I need to have a change of clothes and layers. good gloves, shoes and socks are vital below -12° if you bicycle for and 1 hour in such conditions it's going to hurt alot.
[1] You might need to sell the car though, which might not be an option, but in the long run you should come out ahead
I'm in my 30s / no license / live in nyc my whole life
I would be surprised to learn someone over the age of 16 doesn't have their license in a new england suburb. In my limited experience public transit is terrible in smaller US cities.
The truth is in NYC I don't even think about owning a car. In fact the opposite is true, sometimes I think to myself "wow, I'm so glad I can live my life and don't have to worry about all that car related stuff."
I'm not saying that's true anywhere else. I'm not telling you to feel guilty about owning a car. All I'm saying is that in NYC in 2018, no, life really isn't limited without a car. This isn't virtue signaling this is a calculated part of life for many people living in major cities. Public transit isn't perfect but the cost/benefit of car ownership overhead just isn't worth it in some places.
Edit: I retract what I said below taking verylittlemeat's comments into account.
i dont know what the value of 'i live in nyc and i dont need a car' provides. everyone already knows most people in nyc doesnt need a car. the problem is getting people in the densely packed urban areas to understand not all people can (or wants to) live without a car. likewise europeans, we get it, a lot of you dont need a car.
there is very few places in the US most people can function without a car. Philadelphia, NYC, and DC that I can think of. I guess SF, but walking around there was really hard for me.
In Philly, I can walk nearly everywhere and get what I need. like you, it would cost me a ton of money even if I were given a car. I dont need it, and I dont want one. However, I am also a bit trapped in the city. if I want to do any hiking or anything 'outdoorsy', I either have to ask someone to give me a ride or I simply cant do it.
So then who exactly is the OP arguing against? Who here is arguing people living in suburbs with no public transit should give up their cars?
The OP argues not owning a car is a "virtuous shtick" and then: "You have no social life with no car" and "People here [hacker news] don't get how limited your life is without a car."
Such ridiculous claims deserve to be challenged since the OP seems to be speaking about car ownership in general, not just people living in suburbs.
Counter point. Late 30s here, family, no car, no license. I use cabs all the time, it's great. I have a fine social life and can drink safely. I can rent houses and move about for work, then change countries without offloading assets at fire-sale prices. I choose not to live in an unpleasant climate, so snow is a non-issue for me. Have you considered the option that maybe you just don't get it?
Cars are responsible for many problems including wasted space, noise, visual and air pollution, danger, and unpleasant urban space breakdowns.
The Highway and Automobile culture are symbols of totalitarian cultures which deny people more sustainable and equitable alternatives for mobility and transport - Vandana Shiva, February 19, 2004.
The reality is that most people live in dense Asian urban environments, and this trend is increasing. More and more people rely solely on public transport, and this is a good thing for society and the environment. If everyone carried on like Americans or Australians, global warming would be insane. Let's encourage pluralism and change. Cars have had their chance - the 1950s called and wants its suburban utopia back.
That's called "being wealthy." Being wealthy enables you to escape a lot of the problems that not having a car involves, because you can just throw money at the problem to overcome it. A lot of people are not wealthy and cannot do this.
There's also a bit of good fortune involved. I was young, single, and healthy. But I'm older now, and there are times when I simply cannot afford to use public transit or walk. If you get the flu, you don't even have the choice; walking fifteen minutes to get medicine or food is agony. And you always have to walk fifteen minutes, just to get to the transit spot. You feel the weather a lot more as you age; a brisk rain shower is rougher on you at 40 than at 20.
And come on, what can be more totalitarian than restricting the ability of people to move beyond a tiny radius apart from communal vehicles that can be shut down on a whim?
I think you are evaluating many things from an American context and you reveal that you are older. IMHO the problem with American environments are that they're often semi-explicitly designed around the car. If you are used to a car, not having one is probably a horrible prospect. However, as you explicitly discussed aging, you can't put your head in the sand - obviously eventually you won't be able to drive a car, so you'd better get ready for it. Most of the US likely won't change quickly enough to lessen that challenge for you, but perhaps with younger generations behind change one day that issue won't be faced by others.
You can drive a car a lot longer than you can walk. I could do a 30 minute walk as a younger person, but now it's something I could only do as a special thing, not every day to a job. Society will not be able to redesign for this; if anything it's other people who own cars that act as caregivers for housebound seniors as their work.
Oh, wow, that's not my experience at all. Most of my older relatives and their friends walked 30m/day into their 80s, long after they no longer had the reflexes or eyesight to be safe drivers.
The thing with walking is that it's very much a "use it or lose it" thing; people who never owned cars are much more likely to keep walking.
Can I ask what age you? You should easily be able to walk 30 min at any age short of 60, unless you have relates health issues. If you can't then you need to seriously consider improving your health.
My dad is 66 and can easily walk for hours. I think the problem here is strictly health issues, not age. (Obviously, health issues often come with age... but age itself is not the limiting factor at all!)
> And you always have to walk fifteen minutes, just to get to the transit spot.
I know a lot of broke people who live within less than a two minute walk of a bus stop and could not possibly afford a car. You might want to consider how the built environment has dictated your choices.
You've clearly never lived in pedestrian friendly environment. The nearest transit spot in areas with good public transport is a 5 min walk max. The nearest shop or doctors/dentist or bar/restaurant is 10-15min max and as another poster said you can easily use a taxi in cases of illness.
Also on the point of cost, cars are incredibly expensive, especially in the US where everyone seems to have massive vehicles. If you live without one, in a pedestrian friendly area you'd find the costs of using a bus or subway would be a small fraction of your car costs.
I agree that not owning a car would be better than owning. But simply saying "you should move to a better place" is not only a privileged statement but also a callous one. You assume people are not in a place for important reasons like staying close to family, working for a company they like, simply loving where they live or not being able to afford living to an urban environment. These are all valid and if not owning a car is too prohibitive to basic life needs than a person should own a car.
Also, the Americans or Australians comment is a bit of a broad stoke, no?
I personally choose not to live in a freezing place, and most people can do that. Even without crossing a border intra-EU/CN/US/AU moves achieve this goal.
This is true, but you can also petition your local authorities for better public transport, bike lanes etc. You can campaign against urban sprawl. One of the issues at the moment is complete lack of awareness of any alternative to car centric urban planning.
>Counter point. Late 30s here, family, no car, no license. I use cabs all the time, it's great. I have a fine social life and can drink safely. I can rent houses and move about for work, then change countries without offloading assets at fire-sale prices. I choose not to live in an unpleasant climate, so snow is a non-issue for me. Have you considered the option that maybe you just don't get it?
There's nothing to "get". His experiences are his experiences. I've also tried the living-without-a-car thing, and in both Atlanta and the Bay Area, it's about as fun as... I don't know, walking on hot coals or something. The fact that you feel otherwise (while living on a salary that allows you to talk about "offloading assets") doesn't invalidate his actual life.
How is calling a taxi every time you need a car any better than using a car you own in these areas? I do agree that the need for parking spaces is improved.
Reduced need to dedicate public space to storing private vehicles, a more efficient fleet (since they're incentivizes to optimize for cost/mi), no time spent looking or paying for parking, no need to maintain or fuel a vehicle, reduced risk of impaired driving, more experienced/capable drivers, freedom to switch between transit modes (cycle/walk somewhere but call a car to get back due to time of day/weather), often cheaper than owning a vehicle after considering all costs (depreciation, maintenance, insurance).
Outside a sufficiently dense city the pros might not outweigh the cons, but if walking/cycling/transit can cover most of your travel you probably don't need a car for the other half. I only have one for leaving the the city.
All of your complaints are US centric. I'm visiting the US right now for the first time, and it's incredible how reliant on cars you are. We had to drive for dinner tonight, and we did not see _one_ pedestrian.
In the UK, a 10 mile radius will probably encompass 4 or 5 different towns, each of which will have their own centre, and will provide _most_ of what you require, and public transport is sufficient for most people (there will always be exceptions).
> A life without personal cars would be a rather limited and even serfish one.
I invite you to come and live in the UK. Many of the cities, and even towns, are perfectly liveable in without personal cars. Yes there are things you can do with a personal car that you can't do without one, but that applies to most products in our lives.
>Not every town can simply cluster everything in one place
Of course they can. Why can't they? They have chosen not to. We can agree on that. But you think they can't? Why not? What do you think people did before cars?
Is there an argument against "not owning a car is virtuous" here? "The world owes me year round luxury climate controlled transport in Maine"? Daily private car use is nearly always ecologically unsustainable. Refraining from selfish acts, and accepting some discomfort, to benefit others is pretty close to the dictionary definition of virtuous.
You're in a tough spot because where you live forces you to have a car. Nothing wrong with that.
But not having a car is virtuous! It takes an incredible toll on our world to enable cars. Mining is the most polluting industry of all time, followed closely by oil extraction and then refining. Then you gotta burn all that oil to actually drive the car.
In the UK jaywalking doesn't exist; technically people still have right of way on roads, but try telling that to a car. In the 1930s, when the first footbridge over a road, Western Avenue in London was built, there were protests:
The Bridge of Fools, the first footbridge over a road in Britain
In 1938 the inhabitants started to protest about the rising death toll on Western Avenue, the "Avenue of Speed and Death". They petitioned the Ministry of Transport to impose a speed limit of twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. The ministry said that would be an "ingenious provision" to save lives, but it would be against "the whole object of constructing a road free from congested traffic".
On 21 July 1938 the protestors filed across Western Avenue from the Approach, and then back, causing a huge tailback. The next day the Ministry arranged to build two bridges, one here and one by Gipsy Corner, much to the disgust of the protestors, who thought it would encourage cars to drive faster and to force pedestrians off more roads onto bridges and subways. A week later a thousand people demonstrated again for "their right to cross on the level".
In September the hastily erected bridge was complete, and five hundred people demonstrated against it again. The bridge became a tourist attraction and it was "quite usual to see people from other districts coming to look at it".
In October torchlight processions were held on the road every evening for a week, with a dog with a red light attached to it and four bearers carrying a coffin, and placards saying "We want crossings not coffins".
The war brought and end to the protests, and for a few years the traffic.
(from Leadville: A Biography of the A40 by Edward Platt)
Point taken. However, when new tech comes along, new laws follow in their wake.
When people moved from farm to city and suddenly we had massive amounts of worker abuse, labor laws got introduced.
Barnstorming aviation gave way to regulated aviation.
It's not exactly the same, but it's similar in that it's a reaction to change in the operating environment. I mean, before cars, streets tended to be narrow and generally ad hoc. Today streets are prescripted and need to meet various contextual requirements (volume, traffic flow, vehicle types, pedestrians, weight limit, wear characteristics, etc.)
When a car gets crushed on the tracks, it's usually not blamed on the train. It's typically thought of as the responsibility of the car driver.
Now, sure, trains are constrained by tracks and don't enjoy manoeuverability, but same with ships, the little ones get out of the way.
Cars can't stop on a dime, so we put the ones on the entity with the most manoeuverability, in this case people.
It follows urban design, in most of Europe jaywalking isn't a concept, because most urban roads are not large or fast-moving enough to justify it. Most people would not cross dual carriageways just by default, but that is a rare enough case not to require enforcement. And people carrying those ideas of pedestrian-friendly streets into the way new urban areas are designed. When urban motorways and dual-carriageways are the default, then the idea of what is normal is different, and those ideas are applied more generally to enforcement on other roads and planning new roads.
It would be interesting to see data about the existence of the crime, and its enforcement. I know about the US and Europe, not so much elsewhere.
> I mean, before cars, streets tended to be narrow and generally ad hoc.
It's also worthwhile to consider all that cars have added to our society. People stayed in the streets because that's as far as they could go. Vendors came to the streets because that's where their customers could get to. Travel was limited, the movement of goods was basically nonexistent compared to today and "moving for a job" was not even a possibility for the majority of Americans.
We introduced cars, then made them faster because that enabled more of what we wanted for ourselves, and sure, we made a sacrifice in that trade but I don't understand this modern trend of decrying our future for love of navel gazing through the past.
The role of technology in society is a perpetual balancing act negotiated by the actions of the people. Perhaps it isn't so much "navel gazing through the past" as recognizing that the balance has, for some, shifted too far in the direction of sacrifice.
Luckily, there are other societies that have managed to achieve most of the benefits of cars with fewer of the costs. We can learn from them as we try to find a balance that is acceptable to a broader population.
I sold my car 3 years ago, and am lucky to live in a city where I no longer need one to get around. If someone wants to ban/inconvenience cars in a place where public transit is up to snuff, more power to them. But until then, let's get realistic. Most Americans need to drive in order to live their personal/work lives. We can punitively punish drivers all we want, but ultimately, the only people we're punishing is ourselves.
Having a combination of sidewalks and roads is the best of both worlds - both pedestrians and cars are free to go as fast as they want, without having to get in each other's way. I've personally experienced the chaos of driving through unruly streets, where pedestrians can get in your way at any second. It's intensely stressful and frustrating to spend half an hour on a drive that could have been easily accomplished in 15. I'll take the smooth roads, demarcated lanes and traffic lights, thank you very much.
For anyone that's interested in the subject, Hunter Oatman-Stanford wrote a rather more comprehensive article[1] with a much snappier title on the topic roughly four years ago, and Eben Weiss (aka Bike Snob NYC) responded with one of his charmingly vitriolic hot-takes[2] shortly thereafter.
As someone from the other side of the pond I always found it strange that pedestrians could be entrusted to carry a loaded handgun, but not to cross the road.
I’ve been driving for several decades. I’m also an avid automobile enthusiast, “will talk cars with anyone” kind of a guy.
But for 30 minutes every day, I’m just an ordinary pedestrian. And I follow the traffic rules and regulations which apply to pedestrians religiously: always cross at a crosswalk, never cross on Red, even if the intersection is devoid of traffic. Why do I do that? Because as a driver and as a pedestrian, I understand the challenges and the dangers of being on both sides. It has to do with discipline and maintenace of the very high standard of living I enjoy in the country where I live. Being undisciplined would erode that standard.
Many pedestrians are undisciplined. I see them crossing the road at places other than a crosswalk. I see them crossing the road on Red, while as a fellow pedestrian I patiently wait to cross at a crosswalk when the traffic light turns Green. It angers me greatly when other pedestrians aren’t disciplined, not only because they erode the standard of living, but because I could have just as easily been the driver who unwittingly hits them and has to live with that for the rest of her or his life.
You're presuming here that the current system is fair and reasonable. As it is, pedestrians are massively inconvenienced so that drivers can speed around in a two ton box of steel. To my mind that's not a fair trade off.
I’m not presuming. Where I live it’s more than fair and reasonable in favor of pedestrians and bicyclists, heavily skewed in their favor as far as traffic laws and infrastructure. Europe isn’t like the States in that respect.
And yet a lot of pedestrians don’t abide by traffic laws and a lot of bicyclists actively abuse and violate it. I just had a guy take my right-of-way in a rotor (roundabound) and fly right in anyway although I was already in it and about to make an exit, and when I honked my horn he just waved me down like it was nothing; If I had hit him even though he broke the law, the court would by default favor him because he was on a bicycle, never mind that when they are on one they are a vehicle like any other for the purposes of traffic laws and they have to abide by them.
Not surprising to read that Los Angeles was the starting point for jaywalking laws. Still today, it enforces them harder than most other cities. Try running across an empty street with no crosswalk for 1/4 mile in either direction in front of a cop. It's likely that you'll still receive a fine citation. I'd like to see it replaced with an "impeding traffic" law that would only apply if you're actually putting yourself or others in danger. But I presume the city makes too much money from the current jaywalking law to make that change.
The relationship between automakers and L.A.'s city government back in the 20s an 30s is an interesting topic. They seem to have had an enormous amount of power over the city. Automakers were instrumental in shutting down the extensive subway system as it transformed into the car based city it is today. Was this due to corruption or was L.A. just preparing for what we thought would be the future of transportation?
Wow, didn't know it was that bad. In Australia, as a ped (pedestrian) you may cross at any time when you're more than 20 metres away from a pedestrian crossing - if closer, you may get done. It's pretty darned rare for a police officer to charge you though, it'd almost have to a be a "safety blitz" or for the person to have their head down in their phone whilst doing so.
Seems much more sensible, and reasonable - basically you're technically free to cross as long as you're not immediately next to a pedestrian crossing, in which case use that.
Pedestrian crossing light control system is heavily geared towards cars, though, as pressing the button never changes the current cycle but merely says we'll consider your needs at the next check point. These intervals may be several minutes long (at least that's what they typically feel like).
I'm comparing this to Norway when pressing the button often has a rather immediate effect.
Granted I don't live in LA, but I've visited many times and I'm surprised by this comment because it doesn't match my experience. I"m much more familiar with Chicago, where a taxi cab will jump a curb just for the chance to run down a pedestrian. Meanwhile every time I've tried to cross a road in LA, the minute I lift one foot off the ground while standing at a crosswalk, traffic in both directions comes screeching to a halt with drivers waving me on against the light. I've found drivers in LA to be far more lenient to the random whims of others (pedestrians and drivers alike) than most cities I've visited.
If no motor vehicles are coming, then no police car or motor bike is coming, so you don't get a ticket. Unless it's a cop on horseback or bicycle. Or else the cop was already present there on foot, in which case don't do that!
People who get tickets deserve them because they are obviously not paying attention to their surroundings.
If you can't see that a cop is there, what else can't you see?
Maybe from cars hitting people - but how about death from obesity and environmental degradation of suburban auto-oriented lifestyle as compared to urban walkable/transit oriented lifestyle.
There have been massive increases in quality of life as a result of cheaper, faster transportation of people and goods.
Anything can be made to look like a massive net negative with the one-sided comparison that it's fashionable to apply to cars, social conservatives, and a handful of other topics around here.
Both points definitely true. I guess my argument is you can accomplish the same (probably more?) massive increase in quality of life without the suburban auto dependent monoculture. Look at quality of life (especially with regard to ease of mobility) of some bike infrastructure leaders like Copenhagen versus SF Bay Area where you pretty much have to own a car.
The graph in the picture showed 16K deaths in 1923, for a US population of 111M then, with likely much smaller per capita driving miles than now. Now population is 323M, and there are around 5K pedestrian/car deaths annually [1]. We drive around 3 trillion miles annually[2].
If you can find the total or per capita miles driven in 1923, I think that would make the data complete. But it seems quite clear pedestrian deaths are vastly lower now than in 1923.
Just to be clear, and I don’t think you said otherwise, that 5k number is only pedestrian deaths. In 2016 there were 37,000 fatalities from motor vehicle crashes.
The figure in the article is similarly reporting all automotive fatalities.
> Just to be clear, and I don’t think you said otherwise, that 5k number is only pedestrian deaths
I clearly wrote "pedestrian/car deaths" and linked to a source that clearly explained it. I'm not sure how else to put it.
Here's a better answer [1]: 21 fatalities per 100M vehicle miles of travel in 1923 to 1.36 in 2007. That should completely answer the request for a source.
Fantastic photo from 1914, but while the peope are gone, and the buildings are barely recognisable, I'm not sure the car has completely taken over on that particular street (Orhard and Hester facing SSW towards Division St.)
"Limited access" roads already exist. These are the places for unlimited speeds in autonomous vehicles. Everyplace else it should be assumed that cyclists and pedestrians are in the mix, and even if traffic signals for cars become obsolete, those cars will still have to enable bikes and pedestrians to move without joining the v2v network. You might be able to provide a safety advantage to cyclists and pedestrians carrying beacons, but you'll never be able to count on it, so city traffic will have to remain within speeds that keep un-instrumented pedestrians and cyclists safe.
There's an episode of The Dollop podcast that addresses the introduction of cars to the streets of America when horse and buggie still ruled the road [0]. It is highly entertaining and informative, and it touches upon why "jaywalking" and who "Jay" is supposed to be. I recommend it and the podcast in general to anyone who is interested in peculiar history.
People really turn into extremists around here whenever the topic is cars vs bikes vs pedestrians vs anything else. Of all communities you'd think that this one would be able to discuss this in a more generalized way without getting all emotional about how cars are the devil and bikes have no manners, etc, etc.
It would be a lot easier to have a productive discussion if there were some way to have it in terms of something people find more neutral. Maybe find+replace cars with aircraft and people with service vehicles. Fork trucks, pallet jacks and foot traffic could be another substitution.
It makes sense to segregate traffic and govern their interactions with defined rules and put lots of redundancy in those rules. That's why bike lanes and sidewalks, are a thing. In ports, rail yards, construction sites, mines an anywhere else there's a lot of different traffic there's similar rules about who goes where and how they interact with each other.
Interactions between classes of traffic need to be well defined and include lots of redundant rules for safety. Redundant rules allow the slack from a violation of expected behavior by one party to be picked up by another party that is following the rules that govern how it should behave.
With regard to this article in particular, I see jaywalking laws being more a result of society tolerating micro-managerial laws than I do on any special interest group.
Jaywalking laws would have happened sooner or later. The only reason people ascribe them to the automobile industry is because the automobile took over from the horse at about the same time period where society started tolerating putting the force of law behind what's just good manners.
If someone crosses the street in a dumb manner and expects other traffic to "just deal" they're in the wrong. Whether it's a car running red light or a pedestrian or a rider on horseback cutting off an ox cart does not matter.
If a pedestrian crosses the street at a particularly inappropriate time is there a statute under which they could be fined?
The "jaywalking law" in my state is that you have to use a crosswalk if it's within 300ft. In practice this means that you either use a crosswalk, or cross the street in a reasonable manner at a reasonable time. It's like speeding. If you behave reasonably you have nothing to worry about.
The US seems to have more restrictive laws about traffic behavior and enforce them less.
If you compare jaywalking laws with the rules vehicles have to follow[1] the result is that if one party is following all their rule. It's similar to the redundancy in road traffic laws (e.g. a safe following distances and using one's signal provide redundancy that prevents rear endings when one party doesn't do one of those things)
> If a pedestrian crosses the street at a particularly inappropriate time is there a statute under which they could be fined?
No.
There is semi-binding guidance called the Highway Code, which includes sections for pedestrians (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-for-pedes...) but there are no criminal or administrative penalties for not complying, except for Rule 34 (railway level crossings) which carry a criminal fine.
Crossing the road in a dangerous way is discouraged by education ("The Green Cross Code") and by the obvious downsides of getting hit by a car. If you do something stupid you may well get a bollocking from any passing police officer, but no fine.
edit: The Highway Code is actually a very good example of (kinda) law which is sensible, well-expressed, easy to read and well-illustrated. Well worth a look.
The Highway Code does say that you shouldn't cross within the zigzag lines of a "proper" crossing, but that's just Best Practices, and not enforceable. There are also roads where pedestrians are excluded altogether (no possibility of a footpath, no walking on the verge, fenced off apart from sliproads). The same rules exclude low-powered and slow vehicles from those roads too.
I thought jaywalking is only a thing in the US? I'm not sure who's less informed, you or me, I have no idea about the prevalence of the idea in other countries.
It's not a crime to "jaywalk" in the UK, and I quote it as the concept simply doesn't exist here.
Also, in the UK, if you are crossing a side street and a car wants to turn into it, officially speaking, the pedestrian has the right of way[1].
Edit: Seems it's a real mix, some there are none, others have it, some have it but it's never enforced and some countries have laws that only apply within a certain distance of designated crossings:
Europe is more strict esp Germany. I heard a story that if you get hit by a car they'll come to your hospital bed to give you the bill to repair the car damage, though I'm not sure how accurate that is.
Culturally, I've noticed Germans will absolutely not cross before the green man, even if there are no cars.
In the UK it is very common to cross even if the man is red. I've been in walking conversations with continental Europeans in London, then suddenly noticed they aren't at my side any more because they stopped at a crossing that was clear.
And in stopped traffic its normal to cross normal roads (ie not dual carriageways ring roads ).
There is also evidence that doing away with the aggressive use of traffic furniture to separate cars and people leads to safer driving. This also reduces the risk of people being crushed against railings and so on.
Even if they do cross, they have the right of way. Outside of maybe the autobahn, you should never be driving a car fast enough to where you cannot see a pedestrian in time to stop for them. It's pretty unlikely that the pedestrian is ever found at fault for an accident in Germany.
No, that’s entirely not true. See http://www.iww.de/va/archiv/unfallschadensregulierung-der-fu... for a summary in German with citations of relevant cases. It’s unlikely that the pedestrian is found to be entirely at fault, though. Tables with with cases and the resulting distribution are at the end.
What is the alternative? That vehicles have no obligation to stop when a pedestrian is in the road?
I think your reasoning belongs with whatever lies behind the need for the "State law: Yield to Pedestrians in Crosswalk" signs[1] which I find confusing in the USA. In which states am I not supposed to yield?
That when you disobey an explicit traffic signal, you’re responsible for your own fate?
Everyone has a duty to try and prevent an accident if possible, but you do generally get to trust that a green signal means no pedestrians are going to dart out.
Giving a green light when pedestrians actually have right of way is incredibly dangerous. Why not a 4-way stop or uncontrolled to avoid a false sense of security?
Where I live the signals are compulsory for drivers and advisory for pedestrians. It is not unreasonable for the regulation to apply only to the people who choose to create the risk.
That's nonsense. Jaywalking is not a crime or offence here. You cause an accident, you're paying.
//Edit, I stand corrected. It's a very minor offence, costing you 10€ if there's no signal, if there's a signal 5€ if traffic is endangered and 10€ if an accident was caused. 10€ for crossing the Autobahn (or, more likely, your life)
If you’re caught as a repeat offender you may get points or even loose your license. I’ve yet to hear of a case where a pedestrian lost his license yet, though. The line of reasoning, however, is that if you’re incapable of respecting the rules and regulations, you’re not fit to operate a vehicle. This argument has been tested in court and multiple people lost their drivers license for parking tickets, an offense in the same (price) category.
I don't think you can make a general rule for Europe at large. Germany is definitely very strict about this, most people won't cross if the pedestrian light isn't green even if there's no car in sight. Meanwhile in my experience German drivers always stop to let you pass when you have right of way.
On the other hand if you go to France everybody crosses everywhere all the time and most drivers won't stop to let you cross on a walkway unless you're already on the middle of the road. I don't know if jaywalking is an offense over here but if it is I have never ever seen it enforced. You could jaywalk right next to a cop and nobody will care.
Jaywalking as an offense exists and you might be responsible in the case where you caused an accident, but to be fully responsible you’d probably have to jump right in front of a car or do something equally reckless. There’s a legal construction called “Allgemeine Betriebsgefahr” which encapsulates the danger of operating a car, leading to the default assumption that the driver is at least partially to blame.
In France you could get fined for walking outside of a crosswalk, only if there is one within 50 meters. Not sure it happens often.
When a pedestrian gets hit by a car, the driver is responsible, crosswalk or not, unless the pedestrian was drunk, or actively trying to commit suicide (but good luck proving that).
Nobody is having a problem with walking on motorways being banned - we're talking about this kind of jaywalking (walking across non-busy regular city streets, especially while black):
I never really thought of that as "jaywalking" -- it's illegal to even be beside a motorway; you can't easily legally get into a position to walk across the road.
As far as I know no such crime exists in the Netherlands. Pedestrians are strongly encouraged to cross carefully, but there are no fines for crossing wherever you want.
It is illegal to ignore a red light, although I can't figure out if there's a law forcing you to use that crossing.
And there is probably some kind of law against creating dangerous situations, but that's not exactly a law against jaywalking.
You can get fined but you won't. The rule is that you have to cross using the crosswalk if there is one within 30 meters, any further than that and you are in the clear.
Well, we could be living in a situation where pedestrians take precedence and have right of way over cars in city streets, and the opposite in highways, which I think would be much more desirable, especially in crowded cities. Perhaps even ban cars except for abutters, commercial vehicles and emergency vehicles from the densest city center areas. God that would be a relief.
edit: OK, yes, obviously you can and should distinguish between streets and roads, the former being smaller and mainly for residents and visitors of a subsector of the area (who can play hacky-sack on their residential street if they so well please, and you still have to wait for them), and the latter being mainly for car transportation in and out of the area itself. You can prioritize humans in one and cars in the other.
And it basically means that pedestrians have an absolute priority before cars, they can walk on the street as much as they like and you as a driver have to exhibit some extreme attention because if anything happens, it's 99% certain you will be found at fault.
>In Europe you have to demonstrate knowing traffic signs before you get a driver's license.
I'm unaware of any state in which you don't have to do the same to get a learner's permit.
Test questions are a mix of obscure regulatory stuff (e.g. "what is the penalty for a 1 time DUI if the offender is age X and they have had Y speeding tickets in the last $X months?"), identifying signage (e.g. "a do not enter sign is what shape and colors?") and describing the appropriate action in a particular situation.
>They usually are graphics, not text like in US.
Literacy is technically optional to read signs in the US as well. Only auxiliary information is communicated via text. You'd just spend a lot of time waiting around when you could take a right on red or do a lot less sitting at red lights depending on whether you acknowledge the presence of signs you can't read.
Driving is more important to being a functioning member of society so in general we make getting a license easier and don't bend you over quite so hard if you do things wrong on the road. It varies a lot by state.
At first glance, I read it as "caution, children at play". But I assume that if this is a standard sign, it would be covered on the drivers license test in that country.
Almost all European road signs are ideographic, for obvious reasons, much more so than US signs. And they are, of course, tested as part of licensing.
There's a design language you learn: circular for mandatory, triangular for advisory, square for informational. Blue background for positive, red border for negative.
The official meaning is "begining of a traffic calming area" (verkehrsberuhigter Bereich) but most people call it "Spielstraße" (literal translation "street for playing"). I don't know if the sign was designed after the common term for those streets or vice versa.
When you have many languages to contend with and limited space images attempting to illustrate a concept are still more useful than words. The EU is such a place. That sign means 'woonerf' to me in NL, in Germany it would be read as 'Wohngebiet' and so on.
The idea is that this is an area where people live, and where cars, playing children and pedestrians can be expected to mix. To drivers this is a strong indication that they need to take great care when maneuvering because just about anything can happen. Typically the sign is accompanied by an explicit speed limit of 10 or 15 km/hour, or, alternatively it is encoded in the local bylaws but that doesn't really help for visiting traffic.
The whole idea behind traffic signs is not that you can decode them if you have never seen them before (though that is a nice benefit if you can have it) but that given some basic rules and a small booklet of those signs you can learn them by heart and the basic rules will help you to distinguish in case you forgot a sign or weren't sure.
As such this one is pretty clear, all the elements on it are also present on other traffic signs and the blue rectangle tells the rest of the story. As a driver I have no problem understanding this sign in isolation without looking up its definition, the sign is also common enough around here that you can understand what it means by the context within which it is placed.
> It is awful design. The meaning is complete obscure to me.
It's fine. It's just not the kind of sign you are thinking of.
There are at least two kinds of sign.
One kind tells you what the rules are or gives you specific instructions. An example of this kind of sign would be one that tells you that you must wear ear protection, or one that tells you that you must wear a hard hat.
Another kind tells you that you are in a region where a special set of rules apply. Examples are construction zone signs and school zone signs. These signs don't tell you WHAT the rules are, they just tell you that you are entering a place where the rule set changes from one well known set to a different well known set.
From what others have said, it seems this sign is the second kind. It's telling you that you are entering a region where the streets are shared more equally between cars, pedestrians, and playing children than they are in most places, and so you need to follow the rules that apply to such regions instead of the regular traffic rules.
In practice, many drivers do not like them, but it's probably because they are never pedestrians in those places. I often drive, bike and walk in the place shown above and I really find it nice, even if you sometimes have to wait for a minute or so for pedestrians to cross.
I work in and regularly travel through towns and cities that have various streets and junctions marked with the "shared space" designation for about five years now. Said towns and cities have furthermore had pedestrian precincts for decades.
Coventry's plans for pedestrian precincts go back to World War 2; it has had one since 1953. Exeter beat it by 1 year.
It would be chaos. You’d have some jackass walking in the middle of the street as slow as possible, meanwhile people who actually have some place to go are all sitting around waiting on some fool who wants to play hacky-sack in the street.
That doesn't happen with sidewalks because the vast majority of people have at least a tiny bit of politeness and will make way for someone trying to get through. For the extremely rare people who wouldn't, I assume that the police would stop by and get the person to move out of the way, just as they would if people were intentionally obstructing a sidewalk.
Generally no, because the roads you use to go places aren't designed like that. If you're facing a road designed as a shared space, you should probably be within a couple of hundred metres of one end or the other of your journey, maximum.
Ok, so you have a limited number of public transport only roads and add restrictions on crossing those. Or you just follow the UK system and have no restrictions other than fear pedestrians will get hit and you reach a natural equilibrium where drivers avoid certain areas.
New technologies require new ways of organizing things, in the same way nothing is expected to take precedence from a train in a shared crossing. It is technologically infeasible
Did the automakers invent 'crossing a red light' as well? Did they invent the parking meter?
>New technologies require new ways of organizing things...
I think it's pretty clear by now that organizing whole cities around the automobile was a huge step in the wrong direction and the sooner we begin to correct it the better. Just look at Copenhagen as a shining example of a city that began re-focusing its traffic on actual people (and not f*ing metal boxes taking up way too much space) decades ago.
Copenhagen isn’t McMansions on quarter acre lots, while most Americans panic at the suggestion of any density level higher than that. Permission to play in the street won’t fix low suburban density or the low effective density of high rise neighborhoods that are mostly vacant investment properties.
Traffic lights are for organizing cars, that's the whole point of the article. Pedestrians and bycyclists are just bystanders that suffers greatly from them.
As opposed to being able to just freely walk around as you please? You could say that, why not.
And if one insists on moving a 2 ton metal cage through a city going 30 mph or more, I think having to wait now and then is a reasonable trade-off. The natural habitat of the car is the highway and that's where it should stay.
I love cars, but they can not handle intersections at all.
For me personally it's a great injustice that cars are so valued that I am supposed to breath one of the worst kinds of air pollutions every other morning for 180 seconds while waiting for red light at just one intersection.
If someone wants to play soccer in front of the bus or tram, what do you do? Just shut down the public transit system that day? Tell all the commuters to turn around and go home? The city is cancelled today because streets aren’t for transportation?
At least in England, you prosecute them for obstructing traffic. Even if you have a right of way, you have a right to cross the road, not sit down in it.
How is it a strawman? If motor traffic can only move at pedestrians’ leisure, what happens if they decline to let it through for hours at a time? The soccer players would be committing no crime - the streets are for them first, motor vehicles last.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Right of way is the right to use the road as a highway, not for another purpose. That applies to motorists just as it applies to other road users.
Half of this “streets for people” stuff is about using the street as a public living room, with people sitting, hanging out, playing, etc., not just walking. I’d definitely support shared space that still gives priority to public transit vehicles moving through.
That's what I hate about articles like this. It's great for click-bait, but pretty short on the truth.
The article didn't prove that car manufacturers created jaywalking laws. The best they came up with was that they were involved in helping shape the laws that governed road. And why wouldn't they?
No doubt there were a number of different factors that led to current jaywalking laws. Auto manufacturer influence was just one of them.
But it makes for a much compelling story to simplify the issue and just call out one party.
It's not a crime on motorways. Pedestrians are not permitted on motorways at all (except for emergencies), so where and how they can cross them is a moot point.
>"Ultimately, both the word jaywalking and the concept that pedestrians shouldn't walk freely on streets became so deeply entrenched that few people know this history"
The article makes it seem like the only reason the rules exist as they do now is because some industry players forced us into this situation.
No. The rules exist now because the majority of people agreed that cars should be given the road and people should be given the sidewalks, and that people darting to and fro on the street would be very bad for everyone involved.
Sure the car industry backed these ideas, but people accepted them because they made sense.
> Streets are for cars and sidewalks are for people!
That didn't used to be true. I'm fascinated by ideas that become so canonized, so ingrained that you can't even imagine the alternatives.
> This article tries to make this seem like a pedestrian dystopia compared to the good ole days when kids could frolic in the streets.
Well said, we do live in a pedestrian dystopia now. I love that many urban areas in the US and globally are now designing more pedestrian and bike friendly streets.
There are no better alternatives. That's the point.
The article makes it seem like the only reason the rules exist as they do now is because some industry players forced us into this situation.
No. The rules exist now because the majority of people agreed that cars should be given the road and people should be given the sidewalks, and that people darting to and fro on the street would be very bad for everyone involved.
Sure the car industry backed these ideas, but people accepted them because they made sense.
Sure there are, cities in the US are starting to build better alternatives already.
> The article makes it seem like the only reason the rules exist as they do now is because some industry players forced us into this situation.
True, the article does make it seem like that. Because that's what happened, it's a fact that US auto industry propaganda led to the establishment of jaywalking laws.
> Sure the car industry backed these ideas, but people accepted them because they made sense.
You seem to be wanting to litigate the safety of mixing cars and pedestrians. Nobody here is arguing that walking in the street is safe. The article is the story of what happened, which isn't up for debate. We can argue about whether crossing the street should be legal, if you want, but there are many countries in the world where it's not illegal to cross the street. There are many people in the US who think it shouldn't be illegal, and also think crossing a busy street is a bad idea.
Of course the propaganda was a part of the laws being created, that is clear. But the article is trying to say they are the sole reason. That is not clear and is up for debate.
Sometimes people dont follow accepted standards unless that standard is legislated. If the standard is important enough, it should be legislated. This standard will vary from person to person, but eventually we resolve the issue and either legislate or not.
I think enough people would have agreed that jaywalking should be legislated about to have it actually written into law with or without auto industry marketing.
Logic and speculation doesn't explain history. If you think the propaganda wasn't the only reason, then bring some historical evidence rather than opinion.
The fact that some other countries don't have jaywalking laws, even though everyone everywhere agrees that walking in the street can be dangerous is already evidence that jaywalking laws are not a given.
> I think enough people would have agreed that jaywalking should be legislated about to have it actually written into law with or without auto industry marketing.
Someone else already mentioned this here, but that is not how US traffic laws are created. The public doesn't have to agree or disagree with it. It can sometimes influence the process, but public opinion doesn't usually make or break traffic laws.
I have found, in NYC at least, bicyclists are a much greater hazard to pedestrians than cars. Bicyclists don't follow traffic rules, veer centimeters away from you while speeding through painted crosswalks, ignore both car and bike-specific traffic lights. I have been nearly hit by bicyclists several times in the last year, and never had any problems with cars. And, in at least two cases, the bicyclists yelled at me for their errors and aggressive biking. It was enough to make me wish I had a steel pipe to stick in their front wheel and laugh in schadenfreude as they get carted off to the hospital.
Bikes are worse than cars. Cars respect pedestrians, at least in NYC. Bicyclists are a terror. Just my opinion.
A cyclist would have to try very hard or be negligent/unlucky to kill a pedestrian. When it does happen, as in Central Park, it makes national news because the average occurrence across the entire US is less than once a year. Meanwhile, thousands of pedestrians die annually from drivers texting/drinking/road-raging. It's hard to see how bikes are the greater hazard.
> I have found, in NYC at least, bicyclists are a much greater hazard to pedestrians than cars.
I'm sure it feels like that sometimes, and I have no doubt that in NYC that you have witnessed some bad bike behavior, but even in NYC cars are the greater threat to pedestrians by a long, long way. Here are some statistics:
Just so you don't have to read through all the links, in the three years 2014+2015+2016, there were 3 pedestrian fatalities and 932 injuries in all accidents between a pedestrian and a bicyclist. In the same time frame, there were 32,217 injuries and 421 fatalities in all accidents between a pedestrian and a car.
Between 2002 and 2016, there have been 10 pedestrians who died from a bicycle collision, and 2,345 who died from a car collision. The rate of death from bikes vs cars is 0.42%.
Something to keep in mind is that the main reason bikers are behaving badly is defensive biking turned aggressive. It's when they're terrified of cars and don't have a safe space of their own that they act stupid. If we design better biking spaces that are separate from both the driving and the walking spaces, both behavior and safety on the whole will improve. Cities across the US, including NYC, are studying this and have been proving it true for years.
> It was enough to make me wish I had a steel pipe to stick in their front wheel and laugh in schadenfreude as they get carted off to the hospital.
I hope you never act on that wish, it wouldn't play out well for any party involved. (And, incidentally, it's not schadenfreude if you cause it to happen.)
I know that peds, bikers, and drivers at times are all frustrated and scared of the others. Take pity on the minority of assholes, rather than get angry. If we understand they're just scared and acting out, then we can ignore the bad behavior and focus on improving the situation as a whole.
I agree. Cyclists are a serious danger, primarily because they don't believe they're a danger, and so they take more risks around people who are following the rules.
Sidewalks are for pedestrians. Cyclists are not pedestrians.
Okay that's your opinion, and it's a fine opinion to have. But it's just one way things can work.
Another way, is to give pedestrians priority and expect drivers to exercise due caution to not hit them the same way they do other cars or trains or ambulances or whatever.
In an alternate universe where the laws had ended up with pedestrian-priority being the norm, then you'd be coming in here saying "Cars shouldn't drive freely on the streets! Streets are for people! People have been walking freely on streets forever and now you're proposing we vacate them for the convenience of drivers?" and so on.
So let me ask you this: how are you any more right than alternate-universe-you? Other than the status quo bias that you're defending the way things currently are where you (and I) live.
(In my state) Pedestrians already have absolute priority. Whether their move is legal or not if you're in a vehicle you must always stop for a pedestrian in the road.
> now you're proposing we vacate them for the convenience of drivers
This argument already happened and would probably go the same way if it happened again. The value proposition for vehicles is too strong. I agree that's it decreases pedestrian liberty to an extent but our current system allows for cars to reach their destination much faster and doesn't meaningfully impact walk times.
I will agree that having walk-only city centers is a good idea. Just so long as there is ample parking on the border.
>So let me ask you this: how are you any more right than alternate-universe-you? Other than the status quo bias that you're defending the way things currently are where you (and I) live.
The "I have a tank and I'll go where I damn well please!"-universe version of them shows up, then they all agree with that one. So tanks are clearly the answer to the cars vs pedestrians argument.
You're not understanding the situation. The nature of all parties involved means that what we have now is the optimal compromise.
Given the inertia of cars, starting and stopping frequently takes tremendous energy. Cars having to avoid pedestrians would waste tremendous amount of energy.
Also when you're driving you're focused on what's in front of you. People darting to and fro on the street is almost impossible to keep track of when you're driving and focused on the road ahead.
This is not an opinion. This is fact. And so, taking these facts into account, we've decided a system that optimizes energy use and safety for everyone involved. Pedestrians have sidewalks, cars have streets.
Oh hi, it's alternative-universe-you here with a rebuttal.
Optimal for whom? Why should I as a pedestrian have to wait or take an alternate route (e.g. a cross-walk) just to save you a bit of time and energy? Why is your time more important than mine, just because you're driving a car? Why is a pedestrian's safety less important than a bit of energy? These are people we're talking about! If there are limits or inefficiencies about stopping and starting, that sounds like a design flaw in the car to me, not in our laws.
We have certain roads where drivers get priority -- they're called freeways. Everywhere else, you're a person using the road just like anyone else. If you can't keep track of a few people walking around, then you're going too fast! Slow down. Then you'll have more time to react, and it'll even take less energy to stop.
If I were to run on foot through the streets, tackling anyone who got in my way (after all, I would have wasted time and energy moving around them!), then I'd get charged with assault. They certainly wouldn't get charged for impeding me by getting in my way, would they? Of course not, I hit them! Why does anything change just because you're sitting in a car? Why does that give you special status, to the point where it's okay to endanger other people who might want to use the road?
You seem to be attacking a straw man argument along the lines of "Drivers should hit pedestrians whenever possible." The actual question here is whether pedestrians should be limited in their use of roads (e.g. having to use crosswalks), which is not answered by points like "Why is a pedestrian's safety less important than a bit of energy?" and "If I were to run on foot through the streets, tackling anyone who got in my way…".
Obviously cars should not hit pedestrians, but IMO it doesn't make sense to have the slow group getting in the fast group's way all the time. The time and energy needed for me to go 15 miles without a car is much, much greater than the time and energy it takes for me to wait at crosswalks when I'm walking places. You could weigh pedestrians' time and energy twice as heavily as drivers' and you still end up with it being better to have many (not all, but many) roads be primarily car-places.
The UK's roads are an unrestricted free-for-all and the amount of time you spend in your car having to wait for people walking in the road is far short of all of it.
The roads end up mainly for traffic anyway, because people aren't dumb, and they're well aware that most drivers would prefer to kill them than make the effort to press the brake pedal. But there's no need to enshrine this in law and prevent people from crossing where they please when the road is empty, the traffic light and/or slow-moving, or the mass of people large enough.
Why do we grant special entitlements to people who opted to use two tons of steel to move one person? That sounds to me like a reason to place heavy restrictions on their behavior. There's an implicit assumption somehow being in a car makes you more important than someone who isn't. And any argument that presumes a pedestrian is wasting energy over someone who has chosen to drive in a car is absurd.
Why are you being so reductionist? Drivers have to accept extremely tight restrictions on their behavior already. I feel like I'm talking to an alien that's never driven a car. I mean good lord you have to 6 month class to learn a subset of the rules of the road.
The fact that cars are given priority because its more efficient to do so doesn't imply that people think they're more important. In a world with only bikes we would make the same contract so that bikes could go faster.
Allowing cars to achieve and maintain speed increases efficiency without impacting pedestrian walk times. Compared to this, a system where roads are shared does waste energy, time, and economic value.
> Allowing cars to achieve and maintain speed increases efficiency without impacting pedestrian walk times. Compared to this, a system where roads are shared does waste energy, time, and economic value.
Probably, but "energy, time, and economic value" isn't necessarily an unalloyed good that must be striven for. There are societal costs to the decisions we've made.
The reason for it I feel is that the laws are designed to ensure pedestrians use crosswalks and use them responsibility, to promote safety. Its easier and safer for pedestrians to cross the roads at certain spots, with their own unique signal to stop traffic, rather than have them dart out at their own leisure and force the driver to react quickly.
The jaywalking idea was to add teeth to this; you want to train pedestrians to use crosswalks and signals. Its better all around.
This. If it's safe to cross and the pedestrian can get across why should there be a ticket. Waiting for a light to change to cross an empty street seems crazy to me.
Why should there be a ticket for not waiting for red arrow to turn green so I can take a left when I could take the same left into a parking lot 500ft down the road?
Traffic laws have redundancy to provide damage control for parties that don't follow the rules that apply to them.
Cars aren't allowed to hit people. People aren't allowed to cross in certain places. Hopefully at least one party is doing what they're supposed to do at all times.
The article is a historical overview, it's not talking about a "problem". It talks about how the auto industry changed the perception of what streets are for, and clearly, they did such a good job that you can't even imagine a world where roads are not for cars.
And yes, cars are bad for pedestrians. They impede their travel, sometimes hit them, cause air and noise pollution, and are highly space inefficient. We allow cars in cities so that we can traverse cities more easily, but from a pedestrian's perspective, cities would be far better without cars.
Firstly, that's an assumption that not everyone shares — there are alternative solutions to mass transit. Secondly, even if you, say, accept that driving across medium distances — across the city, but not to the corner shop — is a "good thing", that just means that there have to be some large transit roads, intended only for cars; residential streets could still be freely used by pedestrians, either with very stringent speed limits or no car access, at all.
These only work if the destination isn't an event that requires attendees to be presentable and thus avoid smelling like cyclists. (And if it was close enough for a "casual-effort cycling" then it was close enough to walk, too.)
> a segway
These are illegal in a huge number of places, iirc.
I am cycling to work, and I don't "smell like a cyclist". It takes 20-25 minutes by bicycle, would take a bit over an hour on foot. Huge number of my colleagues do the same. Pls get your facts right.
