Another way of stating this could be "transport is a policy question." How cities are built and what transport infrastructure they're built around.
Im fairly sympathetic to the overall aims of this article. I think a transport system more similar to those in the Netherlands makes for better urban landscapes.
But... this habitual style of treating everything as a conspiracy, built around a personified enemy ("They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year)... this way of thinking isn't doing us any favours.
In day-to-day political conversations and articles, it's mostly just formulaic and lazy. Name the conspiracy, point to vested interests that have been influencing policy, find a link to established personifications of evil.. big oil and segregation, in this case.
I'm not saying we should never think in abstractions... but there is a formulaic pattern here that's old, paranoid and harmful.
No conspiracy required when a lot of people are acting according to a common view. People see the real advantages of owning a car and the freedom it brings, and that activity builds industries and has an impact on policies.
Of course, GM really did conspire to put the trolleys out of business.
However, this is the kind of thing organizations (companies, government agencies, non profits) do when they get to a certain size or have accomplished initial goals and are looking to conquer that next frontier. Just look at the overreach of the SV titans, for example.
For better or worse, we have a car based society now, and pining for the good old days is backwards looking. The next thing should preserve the immense freedom and flexibility that cars brought. Prescribing a top down solution that gives even more power to the state at the expense of the people is a non starter.
> The next thing should preserve the immense freedom and flexibility that cars brought.
"Freedom" is a weird word to use for cars. Cities that have been configured for automobile supremacy, actually lack freedom. Every business, every residential area, every road has to be planned and sized to accommodate parking and mobility of cars.
In addition to stimulating sprawl and it's enormous costs, this limits the actual freedom and choices of people who can't or won't drive.
Even ex-burb homeowners whose every trip begins and ends in a parking spot eventually get pissed as the only way for a city to grow is then to pave more and more highways, and spread out in distance making automobile commutes a daily misery literally spanning oceans of asphalt.
> The next thing should preserve the immense freedom and flexibility that cars brought.
Did the car bring freedom? A car is expensive for people to purchase, maintain, and operate. In many regions individuals are also compelled to purchase insurance because they are dangerous. They also drive up the cost of living since the expensive infrastructure must be paid through taxation, construction is more expensive because a certain amount of space must be allocated to parking, land is more expensive since infrastructure reduces the supply. The cost of cars pretty much dictates a particular way of living, even before factors such as urban sprawl are even considered.
Perhaps there were elements of freedom and flexibility when the automobile first gained traction, but the social geography mutated. Workplaces became more centralized, then decentralized, as the automobile facilitated large and dedicated zoning regulations. The shifting of workplaces necessitated the shifting of shopping and recreation, typically following patterns of consolidation in a spatial and business sense. With cities no longer being walkable, there were fewer reasons for housing to stay put. It too drifted outwards, often with little consideration to schools and medical care. The end result is that people are often stuck owning a vehicle or making very serious compromises to live without one.
I didn't mean to paint such a bleak picture, and it is likely more harsh than it rightfully deserves to be, but the reality is that the family car (and, later, personal car) ended up being more of a trade-off than a liberator. It is difficult to deny that more is within reach because of it, yet it is also undeniable that less is within immediate reach.
>>Prescribing a top down solution that gives even more power to the state at the expense of the people is a non starter.
In a certain (much softer) sense, I think this is an example of the type of thinking I was complaining about in the original comment.
I do it myself, most people do it.. especially us "rational" thinkers. But, it is taking a particular and instinctively fitting it into a story that we're used to. Maybe the story is regulatory capture, maybe it's corporatism, overeaching governments and unintended consequences, patriarchy, empire, globalism... Whatever story we're used to refering to.
In any case, I think the next transportation revolution will be related to autonomous vehicles, so this particular conversation is probably moot.. AVs might just dissolve lines between public and private transport. It will, however, probably remain very impacted by both consumer choice and government (generally municipal) choices.
Can you give me an example of the immense freedom and flexibility that cars brought?
Can you give me an example that doesn't involve driving to the middle of nowhere, that isn't solved by a good public transportation system, and doesn't involve bringing home large amounts of groceries, or furniture, etc?
Daily routine for people who do not live, work and socialize exclusively in the city center. Things like going to work, piking up kids, shopping, visiting other people, having hobbies, outdoor activities, returning borrowed stuff,...
A city center isn't required for public transportation to be convenient. I've taken public transit through suburbs and tiny towns and out to the countryside.
It just so happens that most of the public transit in the states royally sucks -- even in the city centers.
It is not a matter of quality. By definition public transport cannot connect all the dots on the map. It is simply impractical or rather impossible. The car gives us freedom of movement that nothing else can currently match. You personal anecdote of taking public transport doesn't invalidate other people use cases and needs, because what works for your situation doesn't necessary work for everyone. If I may use a CS analogy: public transport is like a collection of linked lists and a car is like one giant dictionary. Totally different use cases.
Or has the presumption of car ownership (or indifference to those who without) exacerbated zoning problems, increased prevalence of food deserts, and widened the wealth gap in communities even within cities?
I sort of agree - I just wish there were more options, that didn’t have the same tradeoffs on alertness and attention that driving a car has. Self driving vehicles will certainly sell themselves.
maybe the trolleys where substituted by the coaches because there were more cheap to use, you don't have to create a network of cables overhead, and with cheap gas there where no need to electrify the public transport.
The coaches have the benefit to be able to go anywhere and modify your routes as suits you, while the trolleys need a fixed infrastructure. Both have their own pros and cons, so i don't see the need for a conspiracy.
As a rough estimate, a streetcar line is more efficient than a bus line above 40,000 passengers per day. My city (Dresden, Germany) has a bus line with 70,000 passengers per day, and you can really see it cracking at the seams. During rush hour, busses run every 3 minutes, and that interval cannot be increased any further because the busses would start blocking each other, thus backing up from the bus stop into the road and creating additional congestion.
The only thing the city can do (and that's what they're working on) is to upgrade from bus to streetcar. Dresden has some of the longest trams in the world, at 45 meters (50 yards), and these carry 3-4 bus loads at once.
The German bus systems I’ve used have been night and day better than US ones. Buses that mostly run to a schedule are incomprehensible to most in the US.
Probably related, I doubt we have a bus line with anywhere near that ridership.
SF has the notorious 38 Geary that had 55+K daily ridership (boardings) in 2017 [1]. It has many of the problems of an overloaded bus line (traffic causing buses to run together, etc). Oddly, the SF Muni metro lines (what they call the light rail, runs underground downtown but on the street elsewhere) don't seem as congested, but I can't find the ridership numbers.
People have been complaining about the 38 for years, but I don't want to criticize the SFMTA (local agency that runs buses/trolley buses and light rail) because it does seem to get the job done without much expensive investment (cost of most recent underground metro in SF was $1.6B for 1.7 miles [2]).
I was curious about this as I’ve never looked into ridership by route and at least for Chicago it is absolutely true. A 70k route would be more than 3x the biggest in Chicago.
This is absolutely true. Why, I myself am a member of no less than 8 conspiracies that I know of. Of course, I can't tell you any further details; that would defeat the point of a conspiracy after all.
The problem is that I keep forgetting the secret handshakes. One of these days, I'm going to leave my thumb out rather than in and someone's going to shank me with a shiv. Or shiv me with a shank; I can't remember how that goes either.
It's both historical & journalistic. Capitalism, corporatism, empire, patriarchy, globalism public choice, regulatory capture... these do all relate to reality, but they are not reality themselves. They are abstractions. A potentially useful way of seeing a broad picture, but also hazardous.
Spending too many brain cycles in these abstractions makes us formulaic. We no longer see unique & specific examples, just uninteresting specific examples of a greater truth.
We all do it. It's inevitable. It's how we think, especially politically. But, it is worth consiously avoiding, in my opinion.
your point seems to be directed at how human discussions happen generally and how we must necessarily abstract away details to even have those discussions at all.
but we sometimes collectively need to grind through the ruts a number of times before finding a good solution, especially if the solution involves a variable abstracted away by the model.
so why specifically does your noted pitfall need to be avoided? and what alternatives can you offer?
but more to the point, what's the model of car-centric cities you'd advocate?
yeah, it's like np problems. Nobody needs to talk about the travellingn salesman, and it's harmful to even say it's an no problem, since we already have SAT solvers, and that's all we need to understand that np problems are hard to solve.
Totally agree and totally ignores the fact that people like the flexibility and freedom (in fact as well as psychologically)
Unfortuetly this area and "green" in general does I am afraid does tend to attract "hobbyist" / "crank" activists. (I am using these terms in the political sense and not dising peoples hobbys
Eg the green movement needs to concentrate on the present problem (runaway global heating) and not on pious things like banning plastic straws.
Speaking as a Dutchman, I experience much more flexibility and freedom riding a bike than my car.
That's probably a consequence of both the overcrowding of our roads, and the density of our infrastructure -- I rarely have to drive more than 15 minutes to reach any kind of shop, and by bike I can take shortcuts that my car can't follow, especially in inner cities.
Ultimately, my car has been relegated to recreational purposes only -- everything else in my life (work, shopping, friends) I can do by bike or public transport. For me, it doesn't really feel like a conscious personal choice -- it feels more like the pragmatic consequence of our infrastructure design.
Also a practical consequences of urban "design." In Amsterdam, Rotterdam or den haag, a 5km radius is a large area that captures a large chunk of the city. In Houston or LA, a 5km radius is a very small area.
Tokyo is hyperdense despite its massive size. I think the point is less "what percentage of the city can I reach easily on a bike" and more "how many places of interest can I reach easily on a bike". In metropolises in Europe or Japan, 5km contains a lot. In the lower density, sprawling cities of North America, there isn't nearly as much utility to the places you can travel to within 5km.
That's because you don't live in a country as big as the US is and don't need to move around like we do in the US.
I am from Denmark who also have plenty of bikes and it's a thing. The reality is however that thats fine as long as you live in the cities, it's not way to get around if you live in the suburbs and have to drive 30 miles to work and take care of your picking up the kids and drive 20 miles to the nearest grocery store etc.
Biking is possible in small cities but you can't build infrastructure around a giant continent like the US on bikes and trucks.
Of course you can. That's pretty much the whole point of the article. You live in a suburb and have to drive 30 minutes because America decided decades ago that sprawl was preferable to dense urban cores. American decided 3000sqft McMansions on 1/2 acre lots was preferable to 1000sqft flats in the city. And that spending billions on road infrastructure and subsidized parking was a fair trade-off for that personal space.
No "America" didn't decide that. The geography of America dictated how America evolved to become a car preferring nation of sprawling cities.
The car is the perfect combination of flexibility, scale, speed, utility and so on.
Sprawls are a byproduct of what the car made possible, they where not created to promote the car they where created because the car made it possible and gave a number of benefits for the individual families.
Yes, and we turned around and codified all of that so we can't easily do anything different. For example, as noted in the article, developers are REQUIRED to supply parking in most locations. Looking out my office window, there's a sea of surface parking. If that was legally mandated, the developer could in-fill with mixed-use and some of us could live literally right next door. Instead, the closest I can get to work is a bit over a mile down the road.
They are required BECAUSE cars are base for the sprawl.
Again even in Denmark and other places that are extremely pro-public-transportation and anti-car, cars are still used by the majority of people because its the base means of transportation which provides the most benefits when you boil it down.
Forcing people to live in big cities with public transportation makes no sense on a continent like America.
Public transportation is only good for very dense areas and becomes extremely expensive once you need to cover less dense areas. This is true even in countries like Denmark which are geographically pretty small.
Denser cities mean more expensive real-estate which means less money for yourself and your family.
The sprawls and laws came after the cars, not the other way around.
Sure, the space is there, but there are real costs to using it the way we do. It is a choice we have made as a society. But, there's no natural law that required us to choose cars or stopping us from reconsidering.
As I see it:
- cars and the sprawl they allowed made sense at the time
- entrenched interested worked to codify the car-based lifestyle
- it is likely time to reconsider the path we took, given what we now know about pollution, the time wasted in traffic, and other factors.
- those entrenched interests have done such a good job of selling the car as a fundamental (and "free") part of the American Dream that many people are unwilling to consider anything else (see sibling comments about freedom and flexibility).
The discussion is what allowed cars to take over i.e. in the past not what might happen in the future.
Urbanization is a reality ex. because of the way the job market evolves, but the claim that there was some big conspiracy to make the cars take over is simply unfounded and based on very sloppy thinking.
Cars took over because they allowed us to live further away from the big cities which was cheaper and gave us more room and allowed us to build sprawl because the land was plentiful.
It's a combination of things not just some single reason that obviously isn't true which you will see the second you look at other countries who also need cars but doesn't have a legal system that helps.
Urbanization is taking over because of the benefits it offers today. Just because cars might not make sense in the future it doesn't mean that it didn't make sense in the past.
And no matter what, it's not something anyone of us decide to do just because it'something that we do once it makes sense and the benefits outweigh the negatives.
> it's not way to get around if you live in the suburbs and have to drive 30 miles to work and take care of your picking up the kids and drive 20 miles to the nearest grocery store etc.
That's a consequence of cars not the other way around. If cars were never invented, you wouldn't have the problem of traveling 30 miles to work and driving 20 miles to a store. Those things are possible because of cars and now it chains us to those kinds of design.
Of course you would have that problem, it would just be even harder to get around and to get things around or to go anywhere.
The reason why people choose to live further out is among other things to get more nature for their children, it is to get cheaper houses, it used to be safer etc.
You're ignoring the other side of the equation: the convenience of also being able to get food, medical care, entertainment, mail, etc. It's affordable and possible to live in suburban / rural locations because the automobile made it easy. Otherwise, these people would need to be significantly more self-reliant.
The car took over because the car was the optimal vehicle compared to the alternatives not because of some law which is easy to show since it's the same in other countries like Denmark where the opposite was the case and yet cars are still hugely popular.
It helps, but there is much more to it. Florida is flat, but Floridian cities are almost entirely non-bicycle-friendly. San Francisco is hilly, and has many people riding bicycles.
Strong winds are worse than hills. If you don't cycle then you might not appreciate how much headwinds can slow you down. Most of a cyclist's energy goes to overcoming wind resistance, and wind resistance increases with the square of the velocity. And crosswinds can be dangerous by making the bike hard to control.
But hills are always in the same place, so you just leave a little earlier and shift to a lower gear. It's slower, but no more difficult, and you have the downhill return journey to look forward to.
Rome is particularly bad regarding cars (we are probably the western city with the highest number of cars per capita, 73 every 100 inhabitants, if I remember correctly), but it is also a very complicated city for biking.
For two reasons
- hills: they are not a problem for the majority of expert bikers, they are if the average age of the citizens is 45 years, most of them are not expert bikers and there are hills everywhere.
Add to it the road surface which is less than optimal for biking in large areas of the city, including the city center (for many reasons, historical in primis, but also political, even more so lately that we have the worst major in the world).
- distances: many people live very far from where they work, 1.5 million people everyday come to Rome for working, but live outside of it, most likely in the range 30-50 kms from the city, not counting the distances you have to cover when in the city (it's easily around 10kms, or 20kms total in a day).
How many people can bike 100kms a day and make it alive?
How long would it take?
We need to give this argument a rest. Cycling infrastructure has everything to do with availability and very little to do with hills. I don’t avoid biking to work because of the hills, I avoid it because it’s treacherous.
Disclaimer: I don't like cars, I love driving, but as a sport, not in urban areas.
Biking is like running, playing soccer, playing tennis, swimming, many people don't do it because they don't do any sport.
Biking requires skills that normal people usually don't have, but that they believe they have.
It is in fact more dangerous than driving (compared to the driver, not pedestrians)
As soon as older people could not bike anymore, they started buying electric scooters and in Holland they have now more deaths caused by scooter accidents than cars.
France is going to ban them because they are too dangerous.
People than cannot drive anymore because of age or because they had their driving license revoked, started using less "law encumbered" vehicles and the number of accidents began to rise.
People on bikes are less controlled,they are not forced to use safety measures, they are not inside a "secured box", they don't have anti intrusion bars, air bags, safety belts, etc. etc.
Very few wear an helmet, many of them don't follow street rules, they bike on the sidewalk, very fast, they are very quiet and many pedestrian don't hear them coming.
They pay a lot less taxes (and fines), taxes used to implement mobility politics.
In Italy, for example, the money that cities earn from fines, cannot be used for anything else than mobility.
City planning is complicated, you don't solve problems just by changing few rules, you have to carefully plan for them
Changing a model that has been THE model for at least half a century and that have become so popular because freed people from the task of commuting or having to go somewhere, fast, without having to share the ride with other 150 people, just like the washing machine freed women from the task of washing clothes, it's not an easy task.
EDIT
I don't want to give the idea that cities are doomed, but biking is not the solution, biking is just like cars but with different problems, THE solution is walkability.
Most of your argument is about motorized vehicles, not bicycles. I agree that motorized two-wheeled vehicles are inherently more dangerous than non-motorized forms of transportation, but that is multiple separate discussions, and your argument doesn't necessarily apply to bicycle-oriented vs car-oriented city design.
Walkable cities are for everyone.
This is trivially untrue. Cities with lots of steps or staircases are only accessible for pedestrians, but no one else.
Bikeable cities are just for bikers.
I guess it depends a lot on what you consider "bikers". When you think of bikers, do you think of image [1] or [2]?
> Most of your argument is about motorized vehicles, not bicycles
They are the same thing.
Bicycles have wheels, they should be on the streets.
> Cities with lots of steps or staircases are only accessible for pedestrians, but no one else.
And that's good!
BTW, you can walk the bike.
Just like you do when you have to jump on a train or take the subway.
If you're talking about accessibility in general, that's a whole other problem.
Bike lanes on sidewalks aren't accessible either, there are deaf pedestrian, blind pedestrians, handicapped pedestrians, that are put at risk by sharing the same space with bikes.
> I guess it depends a lot on what you consider "bikers"
[1] is very young
[2] is expert bikers, people that dresses for biking
the percentage of the population that can bike regularly in a large city is quite small and Copenhagen is a very small city.
The point is that you don't solve anything with bikes, just like you don't solve anything with skates, kick scooters and whatever you are thinking of
You're over optimizing for a small percentage of the population.
You solve a lot by removing cars from the streets (think about underground parking lots) and giving way more space to walking lanes, hardly separated from wheeled vehicles (cars, public transport, motorbikes, bycicles, whatever...)
If you improve the walkability, you also improve the mobility: people can easily switch from bike, walking the bike for a bit on a sidewalk, take the public transport, get off, walk a bit more, jump on the bike again.
If you cannot walk easily, safely and fast, you're packing pedestrian on very small areas, you're making their journey uncomfortable and leaving them at the mercy of wheeled vehicles, because they can be obviously faster and demand precedence.
And those who use a vehicle are encouraged to leave it very close to where they are going, because walking, even a little bit, is painful.
That's how we end up with cars parked in handicapped spots or on double lines or on the sidewalks or bikes chained to school gates or road signs or bus stops as you can see in cities like Milan [1] (where they use the bike a lot)
Ironically the road sign in the picture says "bikes chained here will be removed"
The majority of people in large cities walks, even if you don't notice it, even in cities terrible for walking like Rome, it's what people are good at.
> You're over optimizing for a small percentage of the population.
From the link [1] in my GP post: "Cycling accounts for 24 % of all commuter trips." That doesn't sound like a small percentage.
> You solve a lot by removing cars from the streets (think about underground parking lots) and giving way more space to walking lanes, hardly separated from wheeled vehicles (cars, public transport, motorbikes, bycicles, whatever...)
There are people in their 90s swimming in freezing water
Would you say it is ok for everybody?
What kind of discussion are you trying to have?
> That doesn't sound like a small percentage.
And what accounts for the remaining 76%?
You are trying to force Netherlands way as if it is the only one.
But Netherlands is a very _uncommon_ place.
> What would you change in that picture?
Why would I want to change anything?
Can you see that there are vast areas for walking in that picture?
Do you think there aren't other small cities in the World where bike is the preferred vehicle?
This is Ferrara, Italy [1] [2]
This is Bologna, Italy [3] [4] [5] [6]
Can you see the large pedestrian areas?
I think they're even more beautiful then Deen Haag.
I've lived in Bologna for 2 years, I never had to drive a car or ride a bike, because I could walk.
Because they're also also very small (the size of Deen Haag) and everything is close.
Now let's talk about big cities:
Large areas for walking means that other vehicles have their spaces as well
Small areas for walking means that ONLY vehicles have their own spaces (streets have to be big enough for cars, but sidewalks can be reduced to a bare minimum or eliminated completely [7] <- this is in Rome) which make moving painful for the majority of citizens, especially the low income ones that cannot afford to own a car or to live near the workplace or people with kids or people with reduce mobility, that's why they then switch to using cars, because streets are not safe for them and bike lanes wouldn't change a thing.
Another aspect of this are discriminatory laws that apply to cyclists. Most states in the US have laws that state that cyclists have the rights and duties of vehicles, but then state that they must keep as far right as practicable within the lane when going less than the normal speed of traffic (no such requirement applies to slower traffic in general). Some states also require cyclists to use the bike lane or other path when one is available.
What freedom and flexibility? Being forced to drive everywhere is not flexibility. Being forced to subsidize massive parking lots and highways is not freedom.
> But... this habitual style of treating everything as a conspiracy, built around a personified enemy ("They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year)... this way of thinking isn't doing us any favours.
I get what you are saying, but isn't it, in this case, a relatively accurate description of what happened? If not all over the US, at least in some big cities.
Yet if you look at the countries that are held up as examples to follow you will find the one thing they have in common is no substantial domestic car industry.
Aren't Japanese cities often talked about as an example of good public transport (particularly trains) and reasonably dense areas with low housing prices?
German public transportation is also excellent and if they aren’t considered to have a significant domestic car industry, I’m not sure who else does qualify.
German policies don't advantage private car use over public transit use to anywhere near the degree US policies do. To give some examples, a few of which the article mentions or alludes to:
* In many US cities, businesses are required by law to have certain amounts of parking for employees and customers. This makes car use more convenient and takes up space, making walking less viable.
* German taxes on gasoline and diesel are over 100%.
* Most areas of larger German cities are zoned for high-density housing; it's typical for street-level businesses to have several floors of apartments above them.
* They may be high but motorists still pay less in taxes than the general public contributes to the upkeep of their infrastructure, even when excluding externalised costs (healthcare, climate change accommodation etc).
* The same is true for e.g. New York, whereas (e.g.) London has a fair amount of low-density housing. Not quite sure how this is an argument if the vast majority of space in cities is still reserved for cars (either parking or driving).
the one thing they have in common is no substantial domestic car industry
Another thing they have in common is that they were occupied by a country with a substantial motor vehicle industry, and then later liberated by another country with a substantial motor vehicle industry.
> How cities are built and what transport infrastructure they're built around.
Context is important.
The population of cities has grown. For example, the Chicago metro area has 70% more people now than in 1950. Population growth has impacted car ownership and use. We shouldn't use today's context against the past. Things were different and that's worth considering.
Urban areas are about 3% of the US physical space. The design of transportation for dense cities (and they are getting denser) is different from that of suburban or rural spaces. There is no one size fits all.
It's not personified, it's almost the opposite — to insitutionalize the mindset in the form of law is precisely to depersonalize it, take it out of any individual's hands. The reason this pattern seems so common to you is because it is an extremely important phenomenon in modernity. See Max Weber on the rationalization of society[1]
I too don't like the article presented that way. I should note that it was a conspiracy in this case. Automobile manufacturers ran media campaigns and lobbied to make walking across the street a crime.
Most of these are also laws passed by groups of people deciding to control others for a mix of perceived altruistic and selfish reasons. It's not secret but there's people conspiring.
Man, I was talking about this a couple of years ago and got called a conspiracy nut. I was like, "crack a history book." Now I can just point to this video. Cheers!
(FWIW, Robert Anton Wilson once pointed out that, of regime changes in the 20th century, over half of them were the result of some sort of coup. In other words, conspiracy is normal. Make of that what you will.)
Yeah, it is. Glad to see another person realize it. Most write-ups about it act as if believing in conspiracies requires a nutball. Whereas, the world is full of actual conspiracies going on all the time. I wrote a counterpoint to Bruce Schneier saying that:
FWIW, you identified the reason(s) why I'm personally not concerned about general erosion of privacy, while bring very concerned about differential erosion of privacy.
- - - -
A though, can animals conspire? It's something that almost seems to require intelligence and "higher level" communication. Do chimpanzees conspire?
Would there be an adaptive advantage to conspiracy skepticism? Is that why conspiracy skepticism is so common? Most people are followers and a few are... tricky?... leaders?
Maybe rampant conspiracy is a phase between the moment of evolution of intelligence and the time when "fake news" forces fidelity to reality? It's trivial to show that conspiracy is only ever a local optimum. Multiple competing "truths" incur caloric cost to maintain, but honesty is maximally efficient.
Maybe we all get a clue, become scrupulously truthful, solve all our problems, and go on to live in a new Golden Age...
Of 101 quads, 28 go to transport. Industrial use. is dominated by relatively clean natural gas (methane), with a large chunk likely being ammonia and other chemical production (I'd like to see breakouts).
Dense and local-first construction enables public. transit, walking and cycling, localised services, shared facilities, and numerous other mechanisms of increased efficience
Denser residential spaces and more cimate-appropriate construction hugely reduces
That article comes so close to defeating its own argument it's painful. If that land wasn't protected with zoning, it would have been built up long ago into a typical sprawling suburbia – the opposite of what they propose. So if it had been unprotected in the past, that would have been bad. And if it stays protected that's bad because it's underused.
It is only this short sliver of time that is today that this land should be developed into their dream city. That will somehow miraculously withstand the test of time.
No, it won't, that's just greed and narcissism – thinking that we're so special today that we deserve to have that land unprotected for us but doing that for either future or past generations is a mistake.
[Edit] The Williamson Act? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamson_Act) "The Williamson Act of the US state of California (officially, the California Land Conservation Act of 1965) is a California law that provides relief of property tax to owners of farmland and open-space land in exchange for a ten-year agreement that the land will not be developed or otherwise converted to another use."
LLNL have produced these since the early 1970s, with both retrospective estimates to the to the 1950s and forecasts through 2000, created ~1975 (actual usage is well below forecast).
There is no doubt that we are over-reliant on cars. We (Americans) spent the last century towards developing automobile infrastructure. Now with global warming, it will take many more years to undo the damage. We can agree over that.
But focusing the blame on car companies and the wealthy one-percenters is historical revisionism. It undercuts the fact that these policies were eagerly supported by lower-middle class and middle class people like my family, as well as by many working class people from the countryside. It expanded our agency. It allowed us to vacation to beaches and parks. It allowed us to visit faraway families and pursue work in faraway places. In short, it provided us physical and economic mobility.
We didn't know the damage we were doing. And even if we did know, we probably would have done the same thing. But passing the blame doesn't solve anything.
Car support was pretty ubiquitous in rural areas where you really needed a horse to get around anyway and it really did radically improve life to get a car.
But car support in cities was quite tepid before the late 20’s, and a significant concerted effort of government and industry together ramrodded them in and sold it through a long propaganda campaign that eventually was accepted.
There’s a book about this early history called Fighting Traffic, by Peter Norton. The US came fairly close to banning cars in a number of cities, and to requiring mechanical governors to a 20mph limit in many others. A bunch of places installed memorials and monuments to “all the children slain by drivers” and so on.
It’s really interesting history that the auto lobby has worked hard to obscure.
Having grown up without a car in a country with good public transport, I never had trouble vacationing to beaches and parks, visiting faraway families, or pursuing work in faraway places (well that last point didn’t apply to me, but certainly did apply to e.g. my parents).
Now, having lived in the U.S. for many years, I still hate driving, but I’m basically crippled if I don’t drive.
You're just passing blame away from the people who are directly responsible for the excessive usage of cars to the users of cars, which solves even less.
If you want systemic change you need to approach systemic levers. Focusing on individual action is much less effective than focusing on the people who have power to change laws and reach the minds of consumers.
living in a big city in europe i was able to live without a car easily, but when i got a job in the US i fully expected that i'd have to learn to drive and get a car to get around.
BUT, i managed to get an apartment 10 minutes walking from the office. this was in san diego, of all places, a city which is very spread out. a few months later i moved in with friends and we found a place far north. most of my roommates had a car, but i took care that i had a bus going directly to work. it ran only once in 30 minutes, so missing it occasionally was a pain, but it was fine otherwise. it also provided for some memorable displays of humanity. another few months later the company moved to los angeles, and again i found a place with a direct bus to work.
i figured that if i can manage to live in sandiego and LA without a car, then i can do that anywhere. sure enough, a few years later i achieved the same in auckland. another city that is quite spread out and has a lackluster public transport system that rivals the US in lack of options.
not everyone is going to be able to achieve this. as a young programmer i could afford the higher rent in the areas close to the office. (i was a stone throw from hollywood boulevard, and crossed it every day on my way to the office :-)
As a European I was really surprised at how cycle-friendly San Francisco and Palo Alto (especially Stanford campus) are- its much better than you might expect. Room for improvement, but no worse than many cities over here.
As a resident of Copenhagen this was not really my impression. Yes, Palo Alto is cycleable, kinda in the same way any small town in the world is cycleable - low amount of traffic and comparatively wide streets. San Francisco is cycleable because it is 7x7 miles large so not that much space to sprawl but cycling infrastructure is basically completely absent.
What surprised me though is how overall passable public transport in San Francisco was. MUNI and BART are pretty okay for getting around even if locals don't believe so. Unsurprisingly whenever I was in trams, they were full of other European tourists.
MUNI's shortcomings are visible during rush hour due to system collapse, and off-hours / on secondary routes due to missing runs or too-infrequent scheduling.
Moving around the most urban cores outside of rush hour, you typically won't see the worst of the warts.
from what i hear about copenhagen, no city in the world can compete with how cyclefriendly it is. even dutch cities struggle to keep up. so naturally, you won't have a good impression of any other place. i don't blame you. i am jealous. :-)
In Munich, where I live, for example, we have bike lanes on the sides of most streets throughout the town, and dedicated bike paths in the countryside. It's wonderful - cyclists can drive safely the speed they'd like to, without interfering with neither cars nor pedestrians. I use my bicycle almost exclusively for anything up to 20km.
Bike lanes on the sides of streets present problems for cyclists where there are frequent intersections. At those intersections, cyclists need to check for traffic overtaking them and then immediately making a right turn in front of them, traffic entering the roadway and encroaching in the bike lane, and oncoming traffic making a left turn across the bike lane.
I am also interested in moving to Munich at some point, could you tell me more about the state of the biking infrastructure? Is it practical to use cycling as your main transportation method around the city? What about recreationally - i.e. biking outside the city, to a nearby village?
Don't trust your feelings. The problem with the way cyclists and cycling transportation have been used politically is that it is now impossible to have any serious conversation about it, it's just like climate change. The experience of cyclists riding on roads have been quietly dismissed so that the establishment can get away with their bike lane agenda.
It is possible, but it is a challenge. When I was in San Diego Car2Go helped a lot (short one-way car rentals), but they're gone now. I cycled from Clairemont Mesa to South Park regularly and that was brutal.
While you could get between pre-selected points reliably (home and work), how was your experience living in LA carless when it came to going anywhere outside walking distance? The sprawl is massive and the busses/trains only go so far
if i wanted to go somewhere i planned ahead (most of the time). LA wasn't half bad in that regard. it has busses going on all major streets east-west and north-south. for many places i wanted to go to, a single transfer was enough. for example: go east first to the street that you want to reach, then transfer and go south.
i don't remember ever to having had to take a taxi. i got a few rides, but then it was friends who went to the same place anyways (like a linux user group meetup)
well, i did claim that if i can live without a car in san diego i can do it anywhere. dannyw does have a point about places like montana likely being a lot worse.
i can't think of any places like that in europe. european cities are simply not that spread out. so unless you live on a farm far from everywhere, you should be fine.
Germany is kind of a mixed bag here - situations are getting weird quickly if you search for Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg or Stuttgart, they get somewhat acceptable when you consider Berlin (but listen to them complaining about rent!), and in some areas, living is almost free (most of the Ruhrgebiet).
Also consider that if you are reading HN, you are likely to work in IT, which gives you a skewed idea on average income levels.
fair point. i did go by gut feeling, and haven't actually done any thorough comparison. and yeah, i can totally see that working in IT won't let me feel the pain of above average rent.
berlin is indeed interesting, one would think that with it being the capital city, the demand would rise, but i guess that east berlin is less popular, and that berlin also suffers from the overall reputation of east germany.
Where I live there is not a signal at every intersection. In some places there are not even any marked crosswalks anywhere nearby. However, every intersection that's not signaled/marked has implicit "unmarked crosswalks" and according to the law drivers must stop for pedestrians in these crosswalks.
The vast majority of drivers seem to be ignorant of this law, or they just don't care. Enforcement is nonexistent. When I step out into the road, I'm sure most of the drivers think I'm "jaywalking". More often than not they do not stop. I am not "jumping" into the road, nor am I generally walking about in low-visibility conditions.
Maybe fancy urban planning can help, but it's a band-aid on a deeper problem, at least where I live: drivers are ignorant and have bad attitudes not suited for the responsibility of operating motor vehicles. I guess it makes sense that enforcement is nonexistent, because "ignorant and have bad attitudes" is also an apt descriptor of police in America in general. Of course, I have been stopped for jaywalking... because obviously that is so much worse!
>Maybe fancy urban planning can help, but it's a band-aid on a deeper problem, at least where I live: drivers are ignorant and have bad attitudes not suited for the responsibility of operating motor vehicles.
Which is more likely?
a) everyone is irresponsible
b) your definition of "responsible" is not in line with everyone else's
Given my observations of how frequently and flagrantly (and objectively) drivers (and other road users) break laws put in place to keep all the users of our public infrastructure (including themselves) safe, I'll have to go with a). If your definition of being responsible explicitly allows for breaking such laws, you may want to re-evaluate it.
I'm not interested in hearing the word "anecdotal", either. Check out DUI statistics if you want bite-size proof that vast swaths of the population are fundamentally unfit to be driving, or show me data to back up your own point that the roads are not full of irresponsible drivers.
Average people can drive in an average manner and go years or often decade, sometimes entire lifetimes without screwing up badly enough to attract law enforcement attention or get in a crash. We as a society have determined that is mostly good enough. Most people are satisfied with the current level of risk/reward of driving and unless improvements come with minimal trade-offs people are for the most part not interested. Society at large does not demand the same religious adherence to traffic rules as you do.
More people were killed by fires (a hazard that most people would not consider to be a Big Problem(TM)) in 2016 than in crashes related to distracted drivers.
Your point has regressed from "most drivers aren't irresponsible" to "most drivers are irresponsible but it's fine". If you can support the former with hard data, great, let's see it. The latter is an opinion; it's one I do not share, and it's not something I'm interested in discussing because there is zero chance of that discussion bearing any sort of fruit.
I am telling you, your definition of "responsible" (and by implication irresponsible) is not shared by society at large. I have told you this in several ways. Since apparently my last way of phrasing it wasn't easy to deflect now you're trying to straw-man me.
What sort of citation do you want? You said ~3k people are killed by distracted drivers and implied that it's a regular occurrence and a Problem(TM). I pointed out (with citation) that that's about the same number killed in fires, something infrequent enough that it's generally considered Not A Problem(TM).
Make no mistake, preventable deaths are tragic but preventable deaths as a result of motor vehicles are not the epidemic you portray them to be.
Of course further discussion will bear no fruit. Your mind is made up and will not be changed.
Pro tip: projection and strawmanning aren't good substitutes for reading comprehension skills, critical thinking skills, and the ability to form cogent responses in a discussion.
It is my sincere recommendation that you work on the latter three, or possibly on your ability to simulate them when you aren't arguing in good faith.
According to Wikipedia [0], the number of MV-related deaths has been right about 10 or 11 per 100,000 per year for the last ten years. Which makes the opening claim "Americans are condemned to lose friends and relatives to traffic violence" seem particularly overwrought.
And while the legal system may have been of some help, I rather suspect the main reason cars took over is because they give the user a tremendous amount of freedom and agency.
If you live in a small town of 100,000 people, that means 11 of your neighbors will be killed by drivers crashing their cars every year.
And that doesn’t account for the deaths and health costs caused by road pollution, by inactive lifestyles forced on communities due to car-centered infrastructure, etc...
Given the car-oriented status quo, perhaps it’s true that cars give owners tremendous freedom and agency (at the costs outlined above, plus tremendous financial cost). But it’s also true that many of the most desirable and productive parts of our cities are that way despite cars and not because of them.
> If you live in a small town of 100,000 people, that means 11 of your neighbors will be killed by drivers crashing their cars every year.
True. But for comparison, if we live in this small town of 100k people, then 192 people will die from Heart Disease, 178 people will die of Cancer, 47 people will die of Respiratory diseases, 43 people will die of Stroke, and 16 will die from the flu (influenza or pneumonia) every single year, according to the CDC. "Motor vehicle accidents" are not even in the top 10 causes of death (they're 13th, using 2016's data).
> the most desirable and productive parts of our cities are that way despite cars and not because of them.
Which is a strong argument for cars. Cars make things drastically more affordable for people. If you remove them, you increase the costs for everything (food, transportation, housing, healthcare, education, etc), to heights no regular person could ever afford. That also carries tremendous costs and even carries it's own death toll.
Paradoxically, making things "more desirable and productive" makes them worst for real people (because that value will be captured in a pricetag, and real people will never be able to afford it). Paradoxically, too much safety can actually be less safe overall (that safety will be captured in a pricetag, and real people will never be able to afford it, and will be forced into less safe alternatives) - https://local.theonion.com/neighborhood-starting-to-get-too-...
More people died from suicide (45k in 2016) in the US, than died from all automobile accidents nationwide (37k in 2016). The tradeoff here is not as simple as people often imagine it to be.
> Cars make things drastically more affordable for people.
In "Energy and Civilization A History" by Vaclav Smil he points out that, once you factor in the time spent earning money to pay for the costs of car transport, you are doing no better than if you walked.
The time that the car seems to save is spent working to pay for the car.
Thing about car crashes is...they are the #1 most common cause of death for young people from age 5-25.
If you look at the population-wide stats, things are dominated by diseases of aging because more old folks are dying overall.
Every death at age 25 has robbed us of more than double the number of years of life than a death at 50.
As for the rumination about productivity, desirability and cost - I really don’t understand your argument.
How do cars make life more affordable in communities that are well-equipped to live a car-free life? (Well-equipped meaning with density of services, walkability and transit.)
The paradox you describe is just a function of how rare these dense, people-friendly communities are in our landscape of endless exurban development crisscrossed by 6-lane expressways where you have to wait 5 minutes to cross the street while walking your dog. If we built more of these high-demand, people-centered communities, the price differential would not be so great.
>Which is a strong argument for cars. Cars make things drastically more affordable for people. If you remove them, you increase the costs for everything (food, transportation, housing, healthcare, education, etc), to heights no regular person could ever afford.
So why is it that the US has the most expensive healthcare costs in the world, and also extremely high food and housing costs?
I also live in a city of about 400,000 - and I have thousands of neighbors. Of course I don't know them all personally - I am familiar with different groups, communities, leaders, families. I know about what's important to them, what their goals are, what they are up to in our shared community. I care about them. Do you care about the health and wellbeing of people who are not your 10 immediate neighbors?
Here's another way to look at it. This link (https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/) says "traffic crashes [...] account for 2.2% of all deaths globally." Which means that out of your 50 closest acquaintances, one of them is likely to die in a car accident.
Motor vehicle-related injuries are the leading cause of death for people ages 5 through 34 in the United States. Also, the injuries are substantial. In the US, 2.7 million emergency department visits from motor vehicle accidents each year. I am not suggesting we eliminate cars, but the US has gone way, way overboard and thus actually "reduced" our freedoms. Congestion, car dependency, and lack of alternatives is not freedom.
Imagine if someone invented cars today? Hey everyone, we want to make you use this killing machine, that kills a million people every year around the world directly, many more indirectly. We just need to clear out the parks currently around your houses to turn into horrible bleak roads, so they can bring the pollution directly to your door.
But in exchange you get to go anywhere in America. You aunt in San Jose you haven't seen in months because it's a day's horse-ride. Well you can pop over for lunch, and be home for dinner. You can go see Yosemite and Tahoe in the same day. Your groceries will be 10 mins away.
No. If someone invented cars today, he'd be considered a hero. We'd talk about him in history books.
I doubt your groceries would be more than 10 minutes away even if no cars had been invented. Zoning practices would change to allow more shops distributed across residential areas. That would make more sense than requiring people to ride an hour on horseback.
But yes, the supermarket would be much less 'super' with a much smaller selection of goods.
mass transit will never be capillary enough. you know what they did in old European cities when the started blocking city centers to public transit? they introduced 8 seater autobus to have enough and be capillary enough to get people where they needed to. mass transit can't do that, unless at some point you want very very tiny trams and tramways everywhere instead of roads everywhere
or would you prefer to live in a city where the job and housing market develops near a handful main connected roads and everywhere else you travel more than you work?
> [safety concerns]
on a side note, imagine the amount of deaths from not having ambulances or fire trucks and the price gouging of transit company to reach major productivity center.
if someone invented car today those would still be great selling points for them
Mass transit + bikes or scooters is pretty good. Millions of people in cities don't own cars. It's good enough for many people and there is still lots of room for improvement.
It's a great thought. Just to make it more fun, let's fit the cars with tanks of inflammable liquid and then drive them really fast, like say 60mph, along the same roads in opposite directions at the same time!
The "car-tel" didn't just make a legal victory, it made a political victory.
It's nearly forgotten how much anger and resentment that Americans had against the railroad companies back in the day. Back then, railroads could decide if they would build a stop at your town, or even decide to build a new town on land that they owned somewhere along the line. Railroads were perceived as a vast private taking from the commons.
The car on the other hand involves public ownership of the roads and distributed ownership of the vehicles. That leaves a strong majority of the population feeling that the status quo benefits them and encourages them to keep it that way.
Another result of this culture that I wish the author would have addressed is how cars have changed how we raise our children. We are forced to keep our children inside because all our houses are surrounded by rivers of death. Why are we surprised that young kids spend all their time sedating themselves with screens? What choice have we given them?
We have designed our living spaces to be ideal for cars, not humans. It is hard to acknowledge because it has been that way all our lives but it is a trade-off we are making.
I was aware of this in the abstract before I had kids. Now that I have them, it can be really terrifying. We go for walks even in places with big wide sidewalks and they are oblivious, they would jump out in the street at just about any moment if we weren’t holding hands and teaching them constantly to be afraid of cars.
It’s really sad. Kids nature is to want to run around and burn off energy, and right outside our door it’s safe for adults to do that, but it’s still not safe for young children because you still have to stay in the limited pedestrian zone and carefully cross streets.
I’ve wondered a lot about trying to build a car-free neighborhood with a commuter bus to downtown. I wish that existed, I’d move there.
That's certainly the case in the densely-packed public-transit-friendly cities where the only option to being inside is either a sidewalk or the street. Out in the less-public-transit-friendly suburbs, kids can (and do) run around in their front/back yards or even the street if it's not too busy.
> Those who walk or bike to work receive no commuter tax benefit
Its all about incentives. And the government is in the driver's seat. I would love to get paid to bike around - that is a brilliant idea. Not to mention the health benefits of having a population exercise to get to work.
I live in NYC where the city was designed for cars. I find it a travesty that prime waterfront property on both sides of Manhattan - really all around the island - is a highway. If Robert Moses had prioritized non-car means of transport, we would have a very different city.
"Yet the most prominent way of setting and adjusting speed limits, known as the operating-speed method, actually encourages faster driving. It calls for setting speed limits that 85 percent of drivers will obey. This method makes little provision for whether there’s a park or senior center on a street, or for people walking or biking."
This statement causes me to question the veracity of the rest of the article.
Practically every municipality bends over backward to slow traffic near places where children, the elderly, the blind, or even just where too many accidents occur.
"Operating-speed method" is only really used for high-speed, high-throughput, limited access roadways.
Municipalities do not do much to slow traffic. The might put up a slower speed limit sign, and post traffic copes - but the cynic who says this is about revenue not slowing traffic has a good point. There are plenty of real ways to slow traffic known in traffic engineering circles, but they are rarely implemented.
You are not in Southern California then. Traffic circles and road humps are quite endemic.
This is sufficiently common that I could use road humps as a proxy for "Am I going the correct direction?" back before nav systems. Maybe you weren't going the completely right direction, but a road hump (or traffic circle) meant you were on a road sufficiently useful that it needed a traffic calming measure.
Cities with winter have extra considerations, though.
If you follow the link to the actual research paper you find that it's 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5
That is, not "emissions" in general but particle matter specifically.
This makes sense because modern cars have efficient engines and particle filters so that few particles are emitted from the combustion engine itself. The remaining sources are the tyres and the brakes.
Electric vehicles will bring about significant changes.
As said, and as your quote highlights, this focusses on particles. But the main emission of internal combustion engines is CO2, and other nasty stuff like CO, NOx, hydrocarbons, etc. These are eliminated by electric vehicles.
They are moved by electric vehicles to some remote place (where they might also be more efficiently handled), but even as an electric car driver, I don’t think of them as eliminated.
That's a secondary effect. Primary effect I had in mind when commenting was the movement of the emissions from the local tailpipe to the electric plant (which is very far from 100% emission-free today).
OK, I'll play along. Suppose I drive my electric car an additional 450 miles. That will consume an extra ~100kWh of energy from the battery, which will require me to buy an extra 115kWh of energy from my electric utility, which will require them to generate (or procure) an additional 125kWh or so.
Are there any emissions associated with that additional 125kWh of consumed electricity? If so, where? If not, why not?
PM2.5 emissions were only 1-3% lower for EVs compared to modern ICEVs. Therefore, it could be concluded that the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Non-exhaust emissions already account for over 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 emissions from traffic. These proportions will continue to increase as exhaust standards improve and average vehicle weight increases. Future policy should consequently focus on setting standards for non-exhaust emissions and encouraging weight reduction of all vehicles to significantly reduce PM emissions from traffic.
> Even so, 85 to 90 percent of toxic vehicle emissions in traffic come from tire wear and other non-tailpipe sources, which electric and hybrid cars still produce.
First of all, this person meant to say "particulates" [1] and so we are not talking about CO2 at all. Secondly, the source that he links to has this table in it for PM10 (the table for PM2.5 would be analogous) [2]. Almost all of this argument is based on "resuspension". Basically, the car's slip stream. Seriously?
By the way, these values are (virtually) calculated all on acount of EVs being heavier. Well done I guess for assuming that braking in EVs won't have PM emissions <nod to regenerative breaking>.
It's a pity that an argument based on traffic accidents and cars has to reference such a random and irrelevant article. I agree that Americans like cars too much.
I drive an electric; wife drives a gas ICE; I maintain both. No way is electric brake wear 1% or less of a conventional car (what it would take for it to round down to zero in that table). I'd put it at around 5-10% of an ICE, making the total particulate emissions higher.
Even if it's 20 percent or more it won't make much of a difference. The table is rediculous to start off with. Almost all of the particulates are due to "resuspension" which is literally the wind / slipstream created by the car. These are not emissions; whatever is on the road is just blown up in the wind and based on this argument they claim that electric cars have more particulate emissions than ICEs.
Unless you happen to have two of the same car in ICE and electric you're going to need to do some math to account for different brake pad volume and vehicle weight. There's a pretty substantial number of variables that would go into it. I assume you're using the same product line for all your pads.
Laws follow practicality, so the first thing to do is make sure drivers pay their full costs on a per-mile basis. Things like gas taxes being earmarked for road construction-- when I buy other miscellaneous stuff I pay a general sales tax that can be spent discretionarily by the government. Not applying that to gas is an inappropriate subsidy to cars. Where autos own the road (most everywhere) road funds should pay for sidewalks; where highways divide communities, there should be liberal allowances for pedestrian bridges. Finally, public transit needs to be professionalized in order to provide a fuller alternative, in the sense that transit organizations can't be run with a 'politics as usual' approach-- the point of the system cannot be simply to kick the can down the road on historic pension obligations. If government wants to require public transit to be better in certain respects-- handicap access and perfect safety come to mind-- these desires should be evaluated against the counterhypothetical of, "if you make the system less useful by only opening one set of doors at the stop (for safety) x number of people will die as a result of being forced back into cars."
The increasing legal requirements for crashworthiness are self defeating: making vehicles to withstand more energetic collisions requires making cars more heavy — more heavy cars then cause even more energetic collisions.
There's a pretty good book on the origins and consequences of the car culture called, not surprisingly, "The Car Culture by James J. Flink.
It was written in 1975 so doesn't speculate on the future of self driving vehicles but part of what made that book interesting is it took an oil shock to really get some attention on the problems.
(let's not forget that one enormous benefit of automobiles was that they cleaned up the cities which used to be full of horse manure. Of course we know now that they pollute in other, destructive, ways).
People drive cars because they are the most efficient mode of transportation. Laws and policy followed. Anything else is a moronic conspiracy theory.
Let's just take the two examples in the article. First single family zoning. I would argue that before cars (and cities) people lived on farms and ranches. Cars were not to blame. The trend has been towards smaller living areas, not larger. Second, parking requirements. I think parking requirements came after cars, not the other way around.
They aren't the most efficient mode of transportation, depending on your definition. In terms of carbon, energy utilized, or even time, in many places walking/biking will beat cars. It's not a moronic conspiracy theory to suggest that bringing a 2 ton wheel-chair everywhere we go is inefficient.
In very few places in America is walking/biking more efficient than cars. The author is not saying autos are inefficient, which is a valid argument, he is saying there is a conspiracy ("automobile supremacy") to supplant other forms of transportation with the automobile. This is simply foolish.
It's also our values system that allowed the legal system to do it's thing.
Cars are also a product of values that focus on "me and my personal needs".
You can pay for transit with pretax dollars but not for biking. There used to be a $20 per month commuter benefit but it was killed as part of the Republican tax overhaul. Even before it was killed, you couldn’t use both the bicycling and transit benefit if for example you rode to a park and ride transit stop. You can take advantage of both the parking and transit benefit if you drive to a transit stop.
Is that in a theoretical sense, or is it something I could do now? If the latter can you be more specific - how do I use pre-tax dollars to pay for my bus fare?
It sounds shocking if you only travel in car as it doesn't affect you as much but if you ride a bike it's a fact of life in many areas.
For example if you wear lycra, you will probably find that a percentage of people will regularly try to "punish" you because they think you "look funny".
The mildest form of punishment will be them driving as close to you as they dare. That could be 50mph 12"s away. That's like standing on the other side of the do not cross line in the subway as a train comes past.
That's my anecdotal experience but a quick search Youtube will turn up many examples of this. Action camera manufacturers specifically design products to document this.
Worse though, you'll probably eventually have someone be more directly aggressive to you. Maybe throwing something at you or trying to drive you off the road.
In that context I think that the phrase traffic violence is fitting. If someone is using a vehicle as a weapon what else would you call it?
To counter your anecdote, cyclist deaths have risen lately in NYC to the point of public protest:
> Aster Ryan, 25, of Wingate, said “this summer has felt especially dangerous.” In addition to the three cycling deaths that took place within a week, Ryan said she was hit while riding her bike a little more than a week ago on Dean Street, and also watched another rider get hit by an opening car door recently.
These problems are caused by riding in areas where one is not visible to drivers of other vehicles (e.g. filtering to the right of other vehicles that are preparing to make a right turn) and also riding too close to parked cars. A secondary cause are laws that require cyclists to use bike lanes or keep as far right as practicable within the lane.
Speaking personally I'd like to know what those factors are.
Is it just location? Is it the type of bike or the clothes we wear?
There was this study https://helmets.org/walkerstudy.htm which has some interesting conclusions but the sample size is a bit small to be statistically valid IMHO.
Oh and I'd add, if it's not clear already, that most drivers seem to be very nice and considerate people. It's just that there are percentage of aggressive people and when they're in cars they drive aggressively.
I'd say a lot has to do with cyclist behavior. Hugging the curb does not help, it invites motorists to pass even when it is not safe to do so. It is much safer to take the lane, occupy the middle of it, so other vehicles coming from behind know that they either have to wait or change lanes to pass. Segregating cyclists into cyclists-only lanes do not help either. As they usually force them to ride as if they where hugging the curb or in any case give the impression that it is not safe to take the lane. Plus of course all other problems caused at intersections.
Cyclists seem to want to be treated like a car only when it suits them. I have never seen a cyclist stop and wait his turn in a line of cars at a red light. They always hug the curb and pass all the cars so that they have to pass him again.
You’re incredibly fortunate then. Count your blessings but please don’t discount the experiences of those of us who have been victims of abuse by drivers on the road. Thank you.
I had two drivers within the last 12 hours taking my right of way by illegally driving onto a cycle path when turning from a side street into a main street.
Both claimed that they couldn't see into the main street if they didn't drive over the cycle path first, but somehow while both of them were perfectly happy taking cyclists right of way, they did not want to take other motorists right of way by driving directly onto the main street.
I was in Switzerland recently and was very impressed with how good the public transportation system was - trains, trams and buses. To top it, the water in the lakes and tap were all 100% drinkable.
I'm vacationing Ireland at the moment, and it really hits me how car-centric it is, and I found the Scottish Highlands be very similar. Quite narrow roads, with hedges or stone fences and very little space for a pedestrian or cyclist.
Southern Germany too, although at least they usually don't put hedges/fences right up to the edge of the road.
I would hate to walk or bike on those roads, despite the beautiful landscapes on display.
Initially I thought there was a pressing need to widen the roads, but then I realized that the real problem is the size of modern cars and how fast most people drive.
While car ownership and driving is currently vital to a lot of rural communities, we need to reclaim the roads for shared usage, and break the imagined car/driver ownership and privilege over them.
I've always figured that the narrow roads over there were (much like the ones in the older European cities) created long before cars, when people relied on horses or horse-drawn vehicles for transport. Roads designed after cars became common tend to be much wider.
That's sort of my point. cars are way too big and go way too fast for a lot of roads, and there is often no room to widen them. So we let the cars squeeze in anyway, to the severe detriment of pedestrians and cyclists.
Did this happen in other countries too? There are varying degrees, but cars are king the world over. I’m suspicious of the idea that it was due to laws or government.
This is generally how I think self-driving will squeeze out human-driving, through regulatory capture. Don't love it for many reasons, but there is precedent.
I'm extremely interested in seeing micro-mobility options expand. The more forms of transportation we have that aren't cars and buses, the more seriously the public will consider things like taking one lane of traffic and dedicating it to bikes, scooters, trikes, quadricycles, golf carts, and the like. If we can make it easier for people to get around this way, we can slowly push cars to the fringes of cities, and maybe with the money we save, even eventually replace them for inter-city transportation.
Not just the legal system but also the city planners who designed all sorts of things like suburbs, malls, etc. that favour cars and are pretty much copy-pasta all over each city on the whole continent. All these people want bike lanes, I want my horse lane.
Let's not forget that, at least in the case of New York, mass transit was deliberately pushed out, in pursuit of some kind of elitist pipe dream. The more I read about Robert Moses, the less respect I have for his legacy.
Your comment makes me think of the premise behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Judge Doom: Several months ago I had the good providence to stumble upon this plan of the city council's. A construction plan of epic proportions. They're calling it a freeway.
Eddie Valiant: Freeway? What the hell's a freeway?
Judge Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.
Eddie Valiant: So that's why you killed Acme and Maroon? For this freeway? I don't get it.
Judge Doom: Of course not. You lack vision. I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.
Eddie Valiant: Come on! Nobody's going to drive this lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car for a nickel.
Judge Doom: Oh, they'll drive. They'll have to. You see, I bought the Red Car so I could dismantle it.
Today, San Francisco only has trains along Market Street, fingering out into a half dozen neighborhoods. Most of the city is served by buses. Originally, many of those buses were, in fact, trains:
> ...as SF's rail network was removed or replaced with bus lines in the mid-century, it went from 16 rail lines to five...
The reason we still have the trains we do is because they were the lines that used tunnels, so they couldn't easily be replaced by buses.
The World's Fair, which also brought us the Palace of Fine Arts, spurred the construction of many of those train routes. You used to be able to get to the Presidio by train! Imagine if, instead of spending effort digging up the tracks to replace them with buses, they buried the tracks and built an actual metro system: you could get around the city without a vehicle.
In my country (India), there is hardly any planning -- empty land == lets buy and build a building. No regulation even on buying cars, keep on piling and spend an hour or two for a 8 KM ride home from your office.
There is no incentive to use public transport. There is no special lanes for public transport. No one follows the "lane rules" either. They(us) got enough money to buy a car but no sense on how to use them properly.
And note that cars much costlier in India if you consider PPP. Its horrible.
No incentive to use public transport is exaggeration. More than half of India is reliant on public transportation in some form or another. If the Delhi Metro or the Mumbai Local shuts down, there’ll be riots within an hour. Just a couple of weeks ago a 1km stretch of Delhi metro on the yellow line shut down and the whole south of the city was gridlocked in 30 mins in the afternoon (when it usually isn’t). Even in rural areas, a vast majority of people are still dependent on public transit in the form of government buses, private buses, taxis, tempos, autorickshaws etc.
Public transportation is the backbone of India. I can only agree to the point is that it’s uncomfortable and overcrowded to use.
> No incentive to use public transport is exaggeration
There isn't a single person in India who will not buy a car if they have the money to. How many of these 'rich' people really use the Mumbai local and Delhi Metros?
Suburbs, sure, but do malls really favor cars? Where I grew up, the mall was the only place where people would walk from one store to another instead of driving. I’ve also been in plenty of urban malls that have excellent public transit connections and are situated on busy pedestrian streets.
So are suburban train stations. It’s the natural byproduct of places where people change their mode of transport from cars to something else. Malls are one of the only high-density land uses that people in the suburbs accept, and the surrounding carpark is a necessary buffer between the low- and high-density development. I contend the problem isn’t with the mall itself, but with the low-density development surrounding it.
Terrible maintenance costs for ventilation, plant vehicle access, widening (e.g. temporarily for roadworks), poor kerb access for deliveries/emergency vehicle access, plus a firetrap in the case of a burning vehicle
At least that's what I've worked out from Cities: Skylines.
I've concluded the opposite: leave the cars where they are. What I want is a separate pedestrian level to the city - a skyway system (though I'm fine with it being underground). Let the humans walk in air conditioned comfort while not cars to worry about. This is much cheaper than the underground roads.
Underground roads are orders of magnitude more expensive, so it isn't worth creating them (with some exceptions). With unlimited resources we could create as many as we want, but I have better things to do with my time/money than build roads.
Skyways are significantly cheaper than bridges. It would still be cheaper to make the ground level of your city a building, but not having to support the mass of cars and trucks means skyways can be significantly cheaper.
In the modern world trucks and buses are far too useful to ban completely from cities where people live. People need their stuff delivered, and need to get longer distances once in a while. Thus I'm saying reserve the ground for those uses and get humans away from them. It is a compromise, but I think it is a good one.
“Given New York’s lax enforcement record, the Freakonomics podcast described running over pedestrians there as “the perfect crime.””
I was driving in Oakland when the car in front of me didn’t slow down for a pedestrian in the crosswalk. The pedestrian disappeared in front of the car. I stopped my car, got out, found the struck young woman trembling and bleeding in the street.
The speed limit was 30 miles per hour. I don’t think the driver was going quite that fast — maybe 20, 25 at most.
The woman driving the car was elderly. It’s tough to gauge her age — pushing late 70s, maybe 80? She said she didn’t notice the girl in the crosswalk.
I was upset. I stayed the entire time, talked with the cops at length, gave a statement. I wanted to see the lady’s license taken away. Or a ticket at least. Or heck, even a talking to about if maybe she’s no longer fit to drive.
The cops let the old lady drive away. No ticket. No talk. I was stunned. Surely if you hit someone with your car at that speed, in fucking crosswalk, you at the very least need to prove to the DMV that you’re safe to drive. Especially if you’re an elderly person. But nope. They said they had no grounds with which to take any action at all.
Still bothers me. I hope that lady hasn’t killed anyone.
In Europe if you strike a pedestrian on the crosswalk you'll definitely loose your license and be looking at manslaughter charges too while your insurance company will murder you after paying the victim's medical/disability/court bills.
I have hit a pedestrian. Instead of using the nearby crosswalk she walked in between the cars and when she walked in front of me it was too late for me to brake. She flew a couple of meters and landed on the crosswalk. In the police report is was stated that I hit the person on the crosswalk as I couldn't prove otherwise. The woman was taken away in an ambulance due to a broken leg.
I was 16 at the time. Really shaken up about what had happened. But after collecting myself and fixing the dangling headlight I was able to drive home. I got a ticket for not giving way to the pedestrian (€45 I believe) and insurance covered everything regarding the woman. Didn't even get a letter other than one that they would take of everything.
Here when a pedestrian is in the crosswalk and gets hit and knocked outside the crosswalk, the police blame the pedestrian for crossing outside the crosswalk. It’s like they don’t grok the very obvious physics of a small object being hit by a larger and faster moving one.
It does, mostly because Europe is not a country. In Spain you can't drive until you're 18 and they'll take your license away if you're found to blame, even though not forever.
I.e. you weren't driving a car and you were underage.
I'm not saying that the legal system in The Netherlands is unreasonable or anything, but I feel like your case doesn't really represent the kind of case people are thinking of in this thread.
Why you are being downvoted is strange to me as it is a valid point to make. Low velocity hits with a pedestrian and a bike or moped without serious injuries are not something to give heavy fines to or involve the legal system as basic injuries are covered by general insurance and in this case the pedestrian was at least partially at fault. And otherwise the cost to society would be bigger than the medical and administrative. The parties have been helped and punished, don't make it worse than required.
Be aware though that this is not always the case. For instance if you are driving next to a playing field you are expected to watch out and brake for children who can always show up on the road and not doing so has consequences.
There's some major PTSD that happens when you get hit by a multi-ton metal object with a fairly unempathetic operator.
If you ask a person on the street why they don't exchange a quick car ride with riding a bike or walking, they may tell you that they're scared of getting hit by a car - and this is probably before getting hit by a car.
I can't really quantify the emotional stress riding bikes costs me now each, and every time a car almost hits me (which is a regular basis), but it's something I have to now live with. And I friggin' love riding bikes.
So if someone hits someone in a car and they are just minor injuries we should’t involve the legal system? The method of injury ought not matter: car, bike, scooter, whatever — breaking road laws should be enforced and injuries should result in further charges.
In Europe, if you strike a pedestrian outside a crosswalk, the same might happen to you depending on the jurisdiction. Pedestrians create their own right of way, practically speaking (if not judicially). :-)
A relative in France hit a pedestrian outside of a crosswalk, the aged man died after a few days at the hospital.
It was night time, rainy and the victim popped out from the space between two parked cars and ran just in front of the motorbike to quickly cross the road.
There was automatically a trial anyway for manslaughter and my relative was not found guilty of anything. I think it's a good thing to automatically have a trial anyway. The rule here is "the driver must be in full control of its vehicle at anytime". It basically means that if you could have physically avoided a pedestrian (factoring in response and braking times..), you'll be found guilty even if the pedestrian was outside of a crosswalk for instance.
What do you mean by "full control"? The average driver does not have the experience nor the training to maintain full control at all times.
For example, consider a situation where the driver has to correct understeer, or lift-off oversteer, both relatively easy to achieve in cold, wet conditions.
You're never supposed to operate your vehicle outside of your comfort zone where you know you'll be able to react correctly and optimally. If the conditions are sub-optimal and you think you might not be able to handle your car correctly in case of emergency you should drive slower or not drive at all.
I won't pretend that I've always been a perfect driver, quite far from it actually, but I don't think the law should find me excuses. If I drive too fast and find myself unable to avoid a collision I definitely don't expect to get a pass for my reckless driving because it was at night and raining.
Hopefully in the not-so-far future we'll finally get those self-driving cars we were promised and we'll be able to leave all of that to the past.
>You're never supposed to operate your vehicle outside of your comfort zone where you know you'll be able to react correctly and optimally. If the conditions are sub-optimal and you think you might not be able to handle your car correctly in case of emergency you should drive slower or not drive at all.
This all sounds ok in theory, but as the article makes a great case for, this is totally impossible in America because it's impossible to get around in most places without a car. You can't just not drive when the weather is a little wet, for instance; you'll lose your job, you won't be able to get home, etc.
One big problem is that most people just have no training for bad conditions. How many people even here on HN know what "lift off oversteer" is? Or how to correct for it? I do, but most don't and would wreck. The regular barely-educated driver? Forget about it. Drivers should get far more training than they do. But even then, many people wouldn't be able to master this stuff; they just don't have the aptitude.
In Germany, people have to pay thousands to take driver training that does cover much more than what Americans are required to learn. However, it's not that hard to get around in western Europe without a car if you suck at driving or can't afford car ownership.
I agree, but it's largely academic in the real world. People drive to work in bad conditions because they fear if they don't they'll lose their job. People drive in bad conditions because someone they know has fallen ill and they need to get to the hospital.
Most people drive to their limits, or their comfort. Some people do stupid things and drive beyond what is safe, but dependent on where you live this may or may not be in the minority.
What fascinates me is that we are not giving drivers the skills they need to be able to avoid accidents should the worst happen. Instead we say you shouldn't drive at speed X or in condition Y.
My argument is that we should be teaching drivers these skills not only so they can correct their mistakes, because at the end of the day we are all human and make mistakes, but if we also show drivers how easy it is to lose control of a vehicle they may just respect the road a little more than they do already.
Well for example, in the U.K, neither understeer nor oversteer is taught when learning to drive. Whose fault is that? The 30 million drivers who have never heard of it or practised it, but have otherwise satisfied the legal requirement to drive; or the legislation that mandates the procedures that must be taken to pass a driving test?
In The Netherlands, you're not taught those things when learning to drive either. What is taught, is that wet and/or especially cold conditions can cause unsafe road conditions that can lead to loss of control over the vehicle. As a reasonable person, you're supposed to know to adapt to this. This isn't specifically mentioned in the law, but it follows from one of the most basic articles of our traffic law that states that it's "forbidden to act in a way that causes or could cause dangerous road conditions or causes or could cause traffic to be hindered"
The unfortunate truth is that people are human and humans make mistakes. You could drive to work on the same back road every day. Except one day it's particularly cold and you don't see the ice patch on the sharp right hand corner you've taken 100s of times before. The rear of the car steps out, but you don't know what to do as you have never encountered this before. You panic, naturally stamping on the brakes and end up off the road in a ditch.
The alternative: drivers must complete separate examinations for front wheel drive and rear driven cars, like how automatic and manual are separate licenses.
As part of that drivers must learn how the drivetrain affects how the car breaks traction both under power and under non-power conditions (i.e. coasting), and the appropriate corrections for both.
Let's come back to our scenario. We can assume the driver is operating a front wheel drive vehicle. Instead of slamming on the brakes, the driver has experience of lift off oversteer from their test. They apply 1/4 turn of opposite lock, then unwind the lock. The driver then applies power to the front wheels to straighten the rear.
Thanks to good training and examination driver has successfully avoided ending up the ditch.
> The unfortunate truth is that people are human and humans make mistakes.
That's true, it's also going to stay true no matter the amount of training. That isn't to say that I'm advocating against more training, but I think the training is prohibitively more expensive (even in a context where driving isn't as much of a necessity as it is here) for a gain that I perceive to be largely negligible unless linked to stricter training and re-certification in general (which is certainly prohibitively expensive).
Honestly, you should never drive as fast to get under- or oversteer in normal traffic. The only exception would be icy road, but then you shouldn't drive more than walking speeds.
So step number 1. is not to drive as fast that you exceed the limits of your full control.
I just completed a new driver course in Quebec. They specifically space out the in-car sessions over a whole year to ensure this kind of practice. Yes, my instructor and I went on a highway while it was snowing with bad visibility.
We also get taught to inspect the car before getting in in case (for example) the exhaust pipe is blocked.
Perhaps not the best translation. It means that you have to adapt to the conditions and also for instance that driving with one hand because you have a cup of coffee, using your phone or having to manage a naughty pet that jumped to the front seat is not an acceptable excuse
IMHO, this means the average driver shouldn't be driving in cold, wet conditions.
If you're going to use something that can kill people if mishandled, you take on a lot of responsibilities, one of which is to maintain attention / control.
Same goes for many such objects, really: power tools, guns, industrial machinery, medical equipment, etc.
In India if you strike a pedestrian anywhere, you can yell at him for being a nuisance and be on your way. Pedestrians have 0 value in terms of life in India.
Aren't there some videos of some drivers in China doing reverse to make sure the person they hit is dead to not having to cover medical bills? People can do horrible things once money get involved.
This may be true in Western Europe. In Russia, the de facto law is that cars have the right of way, a holdover from Soviet days, when only politicians and top bureaucrats were afforded cars.
Hah, nearly obliterated some teenager that decided to cross in the middle of the street and in front of a large truck. The light was green and my lane completely empty and it was a 55 mph road and I didn't have a need to slowdown. Until she darted out from in front of the truck and nearly died, there was no way to see her early because of the truck AND no way to expect someone would be so retarded on a 55 mph road NOT to use the crosswalks.
It's like the article states - it's actually unusual for a non drunk driver in America to face charges when in any incident with a bicyclist or pedestrian even with a death unless there is a LEO watching or LEO victim. It's a common topic on blogs about cycling in the USA.
In parts of Europe, any motor vehicle accident where a pedestrian or cyclist dies is likely to result in a charge of manslaughter for the driver, unless the pedestrian or cyclist was obviously at fault.
Often in more formal writing the phrase "peace officer" is used, at least in part this is because in the US there are so many different types of cop and so many jobs that have some level of cop-like authority that saying cop or police officer is insufficient
Ha. I’ve seen cyclists get hit by cars that aren’t watching before they turn and the cop who saw the whole thing still blames the cyclist just for being hard to see.
I’m certain that the police officers the original commented mentioned actually said that they had no grounds even though it is completely incorrect just because the United States is so heavily built around people driving everywhere (and that public transit is for poor, distasteful people).
Older people losing their cars is often the start of a decline unto death because there’s so little you can do with driving in many neighborhoods (which commonly won’t even have sidewalks) and relatively few people have the resources to hire someone to replace that lost autonomy. I remember when an older driver killed someone by backing over them in the church parking lot near here and so many people framed it in those terms when talking about whether she should lose her license, largely ignoring the person who no longer had to worry about it.
> Older people losing their cars is often the start of a decline unto death because there’s so little you can do [without] driving in many neighborhoods.
The solution is to replace their car with a vehicle that's less dangerous for others like an electrically assisted tricycle. That can serve their local transportation needs and won't cause nearly as much damage if they hit someone or something.
Also to invest in things like public transit, sidewalks & protected bike paths for ebikes & trikes, mobility services which will pick you up, etc. Unfortunately we’ve lost our way nationally about funding infrastructure and in many areas the sprawl density is low enough that these are more expensive than, say, much of Europe.
Those lead to problems at poorly-designed intersections. I would prefer the answer be to design them correctly, making sure that some users aren't neglected.
The problem is that putting cyclists moving at 10 to 15 mph (14 to 22 feet per second) at the pedestrian position results in situations where neither the cyclist or the motorist see each other until the last second and that results in a collision. This isn't as much of an issue for pedestrians because they're moving slower 3 to 6 mph (4 to 8 feet per second). Also, pedestrians are able to stop much faster than a cyclist.
Second, these intersections place a much higher burden on cyclists. That is, they have to check for traffic coming from behind to see if they're going to make a right turn and avoid getting hit. They have to watch for traffic coming from the side to make sure they don't get hit. And they have to watch for left turning traffic far to the left to make sure they don't get hit.
If they're riding in the standard road position (center of the lane) instead, then it's much easier to see traffic and it's easier for traffic to see them as they approach an intersection.
> The problem is that putting cyclists moving at 10 to 15 mph (14 to 22 feet per second) at the pedestrian position results in situations where neither the cyclist or the motorist see each other until the last second and that results in a collision
This is why I specified correctly designed: what you're saying is an artifact of a poorly-designed intersection which does not have good visibility or clear traffic flows.
Even the NACTO (National Association of City Transportation Officials) design guide states:
>> Driveways and minor street crossings are a unique challenge to cycle track design. A review of crossing facilities and design practice has shown that the following guidance may improve safety at crossings of driveways and minor intersections:
>>
>> * If the cycle track is parking protected, parking should be prohibited near the intersection to improve visibility. The desirable no parking area is 30 feet from each side of the crossing.
>>
>> * For motor vehicles attempting to cross the cycle track from the side street or driveway, street and sidewalk furnishings and/or other features should accommodate a sight triangle of 20 feet to the cycle track from the minor street crossings and 10 feet from driveway crossing.
The distances quoted should make it evident that, at least in the US, even the guidelines aren't going to lead to "correctly designed" intersections.
> Older people losing their cars is often the start of a decline unto death
I'm not sure this is just because of the way neighborhoods are set up. It's also a lack of social structures to catch this. The richest country one earth, has Uber, yet can't keep healthcare costs low enough to keep the elderly alive longer.
It’s definitely not just that but losing the ability to travel is a big multiplier since it affects your ability to see other people, eat well, exercise, etc. along with getting medical or legal assistance.
I mean, ability to do those things isn't really endemic to "the ability to travel" is it? More like a function of how your area is setup whether or not you need to travel far to do these things or just leisurely amble over.
That's the point of the article: currently, large parts of the United States are setup assuming that everyone has their own car and drives to perform each of those functions. For many people, there's a huge hit in convenience and budget if they switch transportation modes — e.g. where I live in DC, many of the suburbs were intentionally designed after Brown v. Board not to support pedestrians or transit users (presumed to be poor and brown), so there are no sidewalks and significant distances to get to anything other than houses even if you do take your chances on foot / bike. Someone who can't drive might find they have a 40+ minute walk to get to a library, pool, shopping center, etc. when you add up all of the street crossings and circuitous routes.
It's not like this in the UK unless you're extraordinarily reckless. Especially if you hit a cyclist. Generalising about "Europe" for things that aren't in the remit of the EU isn't great.
This is a story from oakland a city where the citizens do not like the police and protest against them. As a result it is crime ridden and the police are ineffective. At one point, oakland was the murder capital of america and murder was also a non punished crime.
In most parts of the country, I doubt this story would have played out this way
I’m not really sure the above comment is an accurate representation of the US. In my City an elderly lady stuck a child at a bus stop and killed her.[1] This lady had the audacity to try and get her license back after they took it but before the trial.
Your one example incident involved a stopped school bus and the death of a child back in 2009. That you recall the result as being extraordinary ten years later should reenforce the representation.
How often do you think this happens within 2 miles from your house? This is my example locally.
The GPs comments were implying it wouldn’t happen in Europe without manslaughter charges and the US it they wouldn’t be charged. It can happen in the US with similar charges, vehicular homicide. My comment is valid.
> How often do you think this happens within 2 miles from your house?
How often do I think what happens? I live in Boston. So depending on what you are asking, the answer is probably too damn often, which is the point. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403831
In Russia you are also guaranteed (unless you have friends in power) to spend some years in prison if you hit a pedestrian. Even if the pedestrian was crossing the road at an inappropriate place where you couldn't even see them. But this doesn't help much, Russian drivers still are crazy.
The same thing in the United States. The parent comment, while I don’t doubt the truth of the story, it doesn’t represent what actually happens. People that hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk are going to be cited and if there are injuries, potentially charged with a serious crime.
You know what, as I think back to that night it’s possible the lady did receive a citation (a ticket) and I didn’t notice it. I was there the whole time, and listened to everything, but it’s possible I missed it. Also, the cops didn’t say they gave a citation when I talked to them, but perhaps they were following a privacy policy or something.
Also the young lady who was struck turned down an ambulance ride and got a ride home from another bystander. Injuries were not apparently life threatening. (I’m also betting the girl didn’t have health insurance.)
>People that hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk are going to be cited and if there are injuries, potentially charged with a serious crime
Nope, you're wrong, this is largely untrue unless the driver fled the scene or the driver was drunk. "Whoops I didn't see them" is usually a completely valid defense and everyone shrugs and says "Oh well, accidents happen" rather than "slow down, pay attention, and learn to control your car."
>The majority of drivers who killed pedestrians between 2010 and 2014 were not charged, according to Star Tribune analysis of metro area crash data. Those who were charged often faced misdemeanors — from speeding to careless driving — with minimal penalties, unless the driver knowingly fled or was intoxicated at the time of the crash.
>Lenient laws and a culture of tolerance for traffic violence means that unless you were intoxicated when the crash occurred, the official word is most likely “accidents happen.” Even an investigation into a collision that caused life-threatening injuries might be too much to ask in a lot of jurisdictions. Streetsblog recently found that fewer than 1 percent of drivers who kill or injure pedestrians and cyclists in New York City are ticketed for careless driving, much less charged with a crime.
>Sixty percent of the 238 motorists found to be at fault or suspected of a crime faced no criminal charges during the five-year period, CIR found in its analysis of thousands of pages of police and court records from Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco counties.
In most of the US if you lose your ability to drive you lose your ability to be a functional member of society and outside a few cities with good public transit even the poor drive. Europe has good public transit and their regulations increase the cost of driving to the point where mostly only the middle and upper classes do it. Losing your license in Europe is not as big a deal as losing it in the US.
You can't generalise Europe like that. Most people from a working household in the UK (outside of London drive). From supermarket workers to executives. Approximately every rural part of the UK has public transport but it's unsurprising if it is infrequent and doesn't get you to a population centre in time to work.
And in France outside of Paris most people drive. It would be impossible to live in the countryside without a car. Even within larger towns, the big supermarkets are outside of the city center.
Of course there's exceptions. That's kind of inherent to all generalizations. I can and did generalize most of Europe like that. The fact of the matter is that a smaller percent of the population drives there for a variety of reasons so losing one's license is less crippling on average.
As a pedestrian (or cyclist), you should always give way to cars, even being prepared to jump out of the way when you have the right-of-way. Unless the driver is intoxicated, they get inconvenienced with higher insurance premiums for a little while at worst, while you get stuck with life long injuries and pain at worst.
Even a professional athlete would have difficulty “jump[ing] out of the way” of a vehicle (or anything, for that matter) traveling at 25 miles per hour.
It is unrealistic to expect pedestrians and bicyclists to avoid automobiles by yielding to them.
Then cities have to radically change. I don't know how people can ever commute from the current urban sprawl to their place of work without them. Cities would need to build massive bus and rail infrastructures at the cost of billions or similar amounts are going to have to be spent to increase densification.
I chose where to live because of a desire to be able to commute easily - the bus is 10 minutes, walking is about 25 - but I paid for it, both literally and figuratively.
I've had three jobs where I commuted from 10-30 miles over public transit. All those long commutes were either suburb to suburb or from city to suburb via reverse commute. There’s no need to drive a car if you’re commuting to a fixed location and you live in the burbs or the city.
People will pay a lot for the convenience - I think of all my coworkers who need to go pick their kids up from school to take them to soccer practice after work - that's really hard to do commuting.
Is it? Robust transit systems are efficient and don't take much more time. If it's substantially longer, maybe we need to look at our work attendance policies to account for the increased transit time? (We already needed to do that anyway, considering how little of the average workday is spent on actual work, and how much less the average labor hour is worth today compared to a few decades ago.) And how old are the kids? Alien as it is to suburbanites, city kids often get around by themselves (often in groups) by the end of elementary school.
True. And even with public transit, activities like taking kids to soccer practice / music school requires carrying some equipment along. Not really convenient lugging duffelbags if there is more than one kid.
The kids need to be picked up in a car partly (largely?) because there's no alternative. Given increased public transit, they may be able to get themselves to soccer practice.
Simple: they need to bulldoze most everything and start over, building cities the way they are in Europe with high density and public transit lines built in (and under). Add in either closed roads for anything except delivery trucks (you can't deliver goods to the supermarket with a subway), or huge tolls/taxes for personal vehicles to keep people from driving there and causing gridlock and get them out of the suburbs. But in addition you need to have lots of construction of residential units (in high-rises) so that housing costs stay affordable.
...no, but it bears remembering that many cities in Europe were effectively bulldozed by two world wars, not to mention centuries of smaller wars.
Just because you can raze entire cities, displace their populations, and embark on "clean slate" urban planning projects doesn't mean you should. That's the civil engineering equivalent of rewriting the entire codebase from scratch.
>That's the civil engineering equivalent of rewriting the entire codebase from scratch.
And yet, "refactoring" is definitely a real thing in software engineering and is not uncommon, for good reason: many times you really do need to throw everything out and start from scratch.
Is there a version control for reality so you can rollback if things go horribly wrong? How many lives are ruined if the refactoring fails. That's an incredibly poor metaphor for actual, physical, events.
No, you're right - but to say it's simple is ridiculous. That will take the entire city being willing to be displaced for years - millions of people without homes - what does the political will for that look like?
Well you don't need to do it all at once, and you don't really need to bulldoze every building and road. It would be more realistic to just "upzone" as the other commenter said, and stop accommodating car transport so much and start aggressively redeveloping after adding public transit infrastructure (which would be a lot cheaper and easier if you bulldoze along the routes so you can do cut-and-cover instead of digging tunnels).
While you do that in the core, the outside of the city still grows, and that's all car based - there's no way around a city expanding and not building it for cars, unless you get the bus infrastructure out there before the people show up, which would appear to be a monumental waste when every city in the world's focus seems to be cutting taxes.
The cities in America grow because there's various incentives for them to do so, and nothing really constraining that growth in a way that favors cars.
Don't build new roads to the core, maybe even take out, restrict, or slap huge tolls on the existing roads, and you'll keep people from wanting to commute in by car. Also remove rules requiring parking spaces, and even encourage replacing parking lots with buildings or parks or anything else, to make car driving the most miserable experience it can possibly be
There's lots a government can do to make people stop driving cars so much, and stop moving out to the suburbs. There just isn't political will (in America) to do so.
Er, you definitely don't need to bulldoze everything. You "just" need to upzone everywhere and build lots of public transit. Upzoning has negative price (since you get more tax income). Public transit is expensive, and building new subway lines is even more expensive, but it could be less expensive if the US could build transit lines as cheaply as they are built in Europe.
It is hard, but it's mostly hard due to a population of motorists who have confused the privileges granted to them by the state with rights.
Pedestrian culture in that area is weird. There's a general region which I think centers on Berkeley, but definitely includes Oakland, in which pedestrians have right of way (in some cases legally, in others just culturally/in expectation).
It makes driving pretty stressful because it makes people much less predictable. When I commuted to Berkeley I would often joke/not joke that Berkeley pedestrians were trying to make me kill them with my car.
But a different weird thing is that being a pedestrian in Berkeley turns you into one of those people who is trying to die by car. I was more cautious than average (read: acting like a normal pedestrian somewhere else), and it was annoying and maybe dangerous for everyone else.
That may not seem clear, but it's analogous to someone being "nice" at a 4-way stop and letting everyone else go even if it's your turn. It's not "nice," because it delays and confuses everyone who now has to cautiously navigate a potentially dangerous situation instead of just following a simple procedure.
Similarly, cars stop for people in Berkeley. That's how it goes. If you act like they don't, then you get awkward standoffs between people and cars each not trusting the other to go first, all while traffic piles up behind the cars, and other pedestrians are now interleaving in between the cars in the jam. If you're on foot, you should just step out into road and cross it, after a perfunctory check, otherwise you're gumming up the works.
I don't like it, on either side, but it's not possible to unilaterally do better. You just have to go with it.
Are you talking about outside of crosswalks? Because in all of California the pedestrian has the right of way at any crosswalk and even at unmarked intersections.
Pedestrians have the right of way in our state in general, but in most of the state they still wait until it's safe (i.e. no cars immediately arriving) before they cross. In Berkeley, especially in the two-lane roads immediately surrounding the university, pedestrians often walk out blindly wherever they please in the assumption that cars will stop. Getting through some intersections takes freaking forever because groups of pedestrians simply ignore the signals, causing traffic to snarl.
It may feel super cozy and normal when driving a car around– but the reality is that it's a metal multi-ton piece of heavy machinery. I'm sympathetic to your plight but.. really it _should be stressful._
Especially in a pedestrian-heavy center where walking should be (and thankfully is!) the norm like in Berkeley.
It seems like absolute common sense that as abilities degrade as you age you should have to retest for drivers licenses periodically. Perhaps with greatly increasing periodicity with increasing age. However, any politician who proposed or approved such an idea would be immediately voted out of office, because old people are very reliable voters. So it's not going to happen.
There's no way to pass such a law without it seeming agist - because it would be.
It seems to me, probably naively, that the easiest way around this would be to require yearly tests for everyone. You're driving a huge honking piece of metal at 60+ miles an hour down the street; a yearly verification of your ability to do so doesn't seem excessive.
Ageist is one of the isms with an annoying literal legal doublespeak worthy double standard - it is only ageist if you are an elder. If you aren't then it is "reasonable assumption of your capability".
It isn't unreasonable but it is clearly a matter of power given the uneven application. Guess who has an interest in not being restricted now or in the future? Those who pass the laws and judge them.
Cognitive decline happens to everyone the longer they live, if that's ageism then I'm afraid it's also reality. Testing everyone yearly would be prohibitively expensive.
Hopefully, self-driving cars will eventually render these discussions redundant. But that still seems to be decades away at this rate.
> Testing everyone yearly would be prohibitively expensive.
I reiterate that we're driving huge pieces of metal at nearly a hundred miles per hour. Let's stop sacrificing people's lives for the privilege, and start sacrificing time and money.
Every society has to make some kind of sacrifice of compromise in usage of resources. Testing everyone yearly is a massive waste of time and resources and money, and won't achieve any benefit, whereas testing old people will.
I don't care if that's "ageist". It's a biological fact that older people suffer from cognitive decline, slowed reaction times, etc.
Is it also "sexist" to claim that only women are able to get pregnant?
I propose greater enforcement of existing traffic laws (instead of just speed and DUI); and a heavier hand when it comes to revocation. This would target those who need to be retested the most regardless of age and the burden of doing so can be put on them through fees.
I think every two years would work, just like the FAA requires Flight Reviews every two years. For those driving bigger vehicles like commercial trucks, they can have an annual “proficiency check.” If getting a car license were more like getting a pilot license, we’d all be a lot safer.
Then you look for a Bundeswagen rating course after your Rugby car breaks down. (brands are deliberately kept fictional) And you find out Bundeswagen model Z is not a so common type rating, and look for yet another successor of Rugby model B.
My old (first) croatian driver's license issued back in early 2000s had an expiry date in 2040-something I think, basically until retirement. The new one is only 10 years, so I have to renew it. I only got the new one because it's a plastic card that fits in my wallet (unlike the old booklet).
My license expires after just 6 years I believe, but it can be renewed without retesting or anything, so unfortunately expiry doesn't solve the problem (at least in the US).
I believe mine expires every five years, but the first time I renewed it I did it through the mail. The last time, I only had to retake the eye test (at ten years). And the DMV made me wait a long time, with the eye test at every window clearly visible (and I think the same one, but I could be remembering incorrectly). I can see fine, but it would have been trivial to memorize it. Even if you can't see it while waiting, take a picture on your phone and zoom in. Memorize the lines you can't see. Plus, I'm not sure the employee was even listening to me as I rattled off the letters.
In my old state they had a machine you looked into. I had a harder time with that one, I'm guessing due to my mild astigmatism. But no chance to memorize it, because you don't see it until your face is in the machine; and all the lines were the same size, so you could have gotten any of them.
When my wife renewed her Washington license via mail, her eye test was checking a box on the mail-in form that effectively said, “yeah, my eyes are fine.”
According to this, people 60-69 are the best drivers. 70+ are decent across the categories ("All crashes", "Injury crashes" and "Fatal crashes") except those 80+ kill themselves at an exceptional rate (but not passengers or others for some reason).
First time I visited my cousin in Illinois, they took me into Chicago for dinner at a pizza place and then to show me the rest of the city. During dinner, my cousin told me not to slow walk when you cross the street. As soon as the light changes, cars will barrel right into the intersection, so be careful.
Sure enough, I went to cross and my cousin tried to grab my arm and not let me cross. The light was green, but the timer on the crosswalk light was going down from 5. I figured I was good to go.
The light turned green for the cars and I was just about across the street when two cars who clearly had seen me, raced into the intersection. I had to nearly dive to the curb to get to safety and in the process both drivers shouted at me to get the F out of the street.
I turned around petrified and saw my cousin and uncle were laughing hilariously at my introduction to being a pedestrian in Chicago.
I'm sure there are still many cities where cars will (wrongly) always have the right of way; regardless of whether there are people in the crosswalk or not and don't care if someone gets clipped or run over in the process.
There is a wide berth between prosecution and no pentalty whatsoever.
For example, In many states, you can lose a license without being prosecuted. Indiana is one of them.
Alternatively, a prudent measure would be to require the driver to get a medical clearance to drive again. This, in my opinion, would be the wise choice.
How is it possible that we don't have mandatory driving tests once you reach certain ages, ie 80, 85, 95+? I just heard the other week that my friend's great-great grandma (98 years old) is still driving. If someone that old can still drive safely, good for them, but there should be a mandatory test to check that.
From this, 60s is peak age range for driving safety.
In the 70s people are still good.
80+ are still pretty good in the "All crashes" and "Injury crashes" categories (a little better than people 25-29, a little worse than people 30-39), but they are really bad in "Fatal crashes" -- even a little worse than 16-17yo.
Digging into the fatalities, the spike in deaths caused by old people are themselves and not passengers or others.
So I guess the motivation for driving tests for old people would be to protect them from themselves and should apply to people 80+.
If we want to protect people from bad drivers generally, we should really want to do something about 16-17yos (just pushing back the driving age might not do it because inexperience is probably a significant factor). Actually something like more monitoring/training/tests for drivers, say, 16-24 would be the best place to start. (Drivers 25-29 are also a problem, but presumably if you improve younger drivers the older age range will take care of itself as the good young drivers age.)
So the parent established that, in his case, a crash took place but was not recorded by the police. Police are known to give the benefit of the doubt to certain classes of people, leaving incidents that they cause outside of formal records and review. Is this a widespread phenomenon that could skew the data presented in your citation? I think that's worth investigating.
My late mother-in-law's neighbor drove until something over 90, which pretty much nobody thought was a great idea. I don't think the boomers of Pennsylvania did anything to enable this except leave the laws unchanged.
you're in command of a few tons of steel, and your priority is to get to some arbitrary location. Your second priority, I assume, is to not murder anyone.
Here's what you know about the environment :
it is populated with (harmless fleshly) people who are also going about fulfilling goals 1 and 2.
You know with high probability that at any given moment one might quickly cross the path of your vehicle - it is normal (80-90% of people do it) to behave this way.
You can:
- reduce your speed, knowing that accidental collisions are likely. This slightly penalizes your first goal, but greatly increases the outlook for the second.
- Blame 80-90% of everyone, for not taking the cost onto themselves to ensure you can get to your goal quickly without much effort.
I guess it also boils down to your views on responsibility:
"I shouldn't be accountable when the risky situations which i knowingly entered materialize into accidents. Especially because these risks mostly apply to others."
or
"I am personally directing a large amount of kinetic energy for convenience reasons and am responsible of where it ends up. the onus of carefulness befalls me and not the other unwilling participants as they are handling much less kinetic energy and therefore by themselves orders of magnitude less likely to cause the death or injury of others."
After watching hundreds or even thousands of accidents on Youtube it could be said that there typically are two parties that could be blamed for the accident. One is officially at fault but there typically is somebody else who did not pay enough attention or did not slow down at intersection or did not do one of the many things that careful drivers would be expected to do.
Drivers (or pedestrians) with certain attitude that I would describe as expecting everybody to follow the rules but at the same following the rules only selectively and not giving anybody any margin for error are people that I think cause most of accidents.
Everybody makes mistakes and it is in human nature to miss a sign or occasionally misplace attention for a second or two. If everybody was driving defensively most of the time it would take two people to make a mistake at the same time which would cause accidents to be very rare. On the other hand if drivers give no margin for error it only takes a single person to make a mistake.
I have an uncle who thinks he is a good driver. Yes, he can drive fast, precisely, he knows rules and knows how to not be the driver at fault. But while he is not officially causing accidents over the last decade he took part in around a dozen accidents. He is not giving anybody any margin for error and this attitude is what I think is more damaging than people that make mistake from time to time.
An interesting concept in this area is the naked streets concept, where by the streets are stripped of the usual trappings of lights, signs and lane markings.
Since no one then feels like they are just "in the right" everyone tends to be much more attentive.
The reason the number of accidents got suddenly smaller is because people were used to markings but then they had to re-learn how to function when the markings were removed. When you learn to drive or when you are in unfamiliar place you tend to drive slower and be more attentive.
But this is only temporary effect. After some time people adjust and same problems show up.
Still not convinced? What about south asian countries which tend to have little in the way of traffic signs? If lack of markings makes people behave more carefully how do you explain relative lack of safety in countries like Vietnam, Thailand, etc?
I disagree with it being so black and white. Higher speed travel saves time and energy. 55mph is generally considered optimal for vehicle fuel consumption. Slowing speeds pretty directly affects climate change and pollution.
I’d like to see a direct comparison of loss of life vs mph including figures on deaths from increased air pollution and other climate considerations.
I think one could also argue time lost in transit as a “loss of life” but that’s understandably too far for some.
Spark ignition ICEs experience something called “pumping losses”: There’s a physical impediment (the throttle) that the engine has to work against at low engine speeds. So while drag increases with speed, it’s also true that at lower speeds you’re still converting hydrocarbons to waste heat at the same rate. The truth is that fuel economy is a delicate balance between rolling resistance, aerodynamic drag, gearing, and the engine power curve.
“55mph is generally considered optimal for vehicle fuel consumption.”
For a while I did experiments with this and the most efficient speed was much slower. 55 is more about safety I would think or it’s possibly totally arbitrary.
Completely incorrect. Rolling resistance is largely independent of speed, and drag is quadratic in speed. 55mph represents a speed where drag dominates rolling resistance.
I see no point in wasting words seeing how differing viewpoints are received here. Somebody has even bothered to go over my comment history and downvote everything.
I think you'd see it in a very different light if you were living here. I am honestly very worried for my friends and relatives who drive, most of whom do it very, very carefully, and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children.
BTW, didn't I say I don't have a driver's license?
> I see no point in wasting words seeing how differing viewpoints are received here. Somebody has even bothered to go over my comment history and downvote everything.
I understand how you feel. However if you are right and I am wrong - then your words are not wasted, even if they are not well received, as long as they are read.
> and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children
I guess our road safety practices and status-quo should not bother to extend as far as guaranteeing the well-being of the feeble-minded. Children playing in the street are fair-game.
To be fair, I understand that your viewpoint is economically efficient, to an extent. I can accept that favoring cars has significant economic benefits, and I understand why society has done it at the expense of quality-of-life at the ground level (children shouldn't play in the street, the area around your appartment/house is not for you to enjoy but for commuting strangers, etc), and personal safety.
But is it really necessary to hold on to this so dearly and for so long? Especially when other cities/countries have shown that alternatives are possible and attractive?
Any transition from here to there on the scale of transport and land use policies is going to take a holistic and well-communicated strategy, durable commitment to that strategy, and multiple decades to play out.
I'm not sure the first of those pre-conditions has been met and I doubt our ability to commit as a nation to the second.
Shouldn't the same logic apply to a pedestrian? I mean his goals are getting to some arbitrary location and arriving at that location intact.
Why should only the driver carry the responsibility? Driving slower than average increases the driver's chances of getting in an accident.
Also, lower speeds aren't guaranteed safety. I know of an accident that occurred around 10-20km/h right next to a hospital, which resulted in instant death. Pedestrian was crossing on red, behind a car parked at the traffic light and flew right into a path of a vehicle, trying to pass the car parked at the semaphore, this bounced him just enough to fall and crack his head on the curb. Ironically, according to policemen, was that had the driver driven faster, he might have bounced pedestrian harder, and not kill him on the spot.
Because your life, as a driver, is shielded by a huge metal can. Pedestrian life is not. Pedestrians can't put your life in danger, while you can put their life in danger.
That's why, in "normal" countries, it's always the driver that needs to be questioned by default, not the pedestrian. If the driver proves that he did all he could to avoid the accident, he faces no consequences. If not, he faces them.
This really isn't that complicated. It's okay for the pedestrian to not respect all the rules because he's not in the position in which he can put other people's lives in danger — only his own. Drivers are willingly putting themselves in a situation in which they can put other people's lives in danger, so the burden of proof is on them.
By disregarding the laws, and forcing you to accommodate their behavior, they can still end up putting your life in danger.
E.g. you drive on a road designed for relatively high speeds say 80-100 km/h. They decide to cross it, despite it not being a safe zone for crossing. You hit the pedals and swerve off the road injuring yourself (or you get rammed by a vehicle behind you).
Oh yeah, poor endangered drivers. Why does nobody think about them?
Injury =/= death. If you swerve off the road, you have airbags. If a car behind you hits you, again, you have airbags. You have tons of metal shielding you from a collision, insurance that is supposed to take care of the situations that can't be blamed on you, and airbags and seat belts that are supposed to reduce the consequences of a collision.
Pedestrians have none of that. Where I come from, this (alongside first-aid skills) is the very first thing you learn on your way of getting a driver's license, before road signs and traffic rules are even mentioned.
Reducing your speed increases the likely hood of collisions because pedestrians tend to no care about their safety at all if they can shave off 2 seconds. They don't wait for your car to pass. If you are on the left lane and the right lane is free then they will walk onto the street and anticipate that you will pass them by the time they have reached the left lane. If you reduce your speed then their guess turns out to be wrong and you risk driving over them.
In that case you are gonna see them. Aren't you going to slow down if somebody tries to jump in front of your car?
A behavior like that should be illegal for both party. The driver is at fault of causing the incident and the pedestrian is at fault of being inconsiderate and a danger to the vehicles (one collision can cause many other collisions) independently from whether the accident actually happened.
>The driver is at fault of causing the incident and the pedestrian is at fault of being inconsiderate and a danger to the vehicles
I think you have it backwards. The pedestrian that darts out into traffic that cannot stop in time causes the accident. The driver who does not travel slow enough to reasonably hedge themselves against a pedestrian darting out is being inconsiderate.
in the considered case and assuming a left hand driving system the pedestrian is crossing from the right side and the driver is on the left lane near the middle of the (supposedly two way road). This mean that the driver had very good visibility. Moreover the pedestrian was planning to let the other car pass (as it was considering the case where lower speeds can be dangerous) so the pedestrian is not dashing.
I agree with you in your (arguably more common) case, but in this case the driver must have had good visibility and enough reaction time.
> Do you think more drivers or pedestrians are harmed by incidents involving both?
pedestrian obviously. This implies to me that regardless of the law, pedestrian should be careful when crossing the streets. From the legal side I believe we should adopt the regulations that are more likely to decrease the number and gravity of incidents, this is heavily dependent of local customs.
I'm saying we shouldn't be satisfied with "that behavior should be illegal for both parties" when one party is much more likely to be injured or killed than the other. Pedestrians should be careful regardless of the law, but the law should focus on drivers, specifically.
> when one party is much more likely to be injured or killed than the other.
the focal point to me is: "When one party's mistake are much more likely to endanger people (both others and themselves)"
Where my intention is to focus on how the car is the dangerous element of the equation rather that on how the pedestrian is the one at risk. I personally find it a more solid building block.
There is a threshold where the speed will likely injure, not kill. It's prudent to keep below or near that speed, so you have at least time to bring your car down that speed when braking, if not managing to come to a halt.
Based off your parent poster's description of the situation, it sounds as if the pedestrian had the right of way.
However, if the driver was half their age, all else equal, would we say the DMV should assess if they're competent to drive? The primary cause of the accident could be independent of age.
For a pedestrian it doesn't matter whether you have "right of way", because you can be right a hundred times over and still go to a mortician. That's all I am trying to say. If you are crossing the road, please wait for the cars to stop, or make absolutely sure there aren't any nearby. Cars are multiple-ton steel monsters, it takes a lot of energy and space to slow them down.
Just bringing some perspective from a country with a lot of idiots (that's what they are -- idiots) needlessly risking their lives.
You've used the word "Idiots" a lot to describe people who walk into the street, but I think it's idiotic for pedestrians to follow the same intersection rules as a 2 ton vehicle.
You want to take out your air-conditioned garbage-spewing box out to race across the city without a single care for anyone else using the streets? Well I think you're an idiot for advocating towards that selfish goal.
If I understood correctly in this comment unwrap was simply stating that if the street are factually dangerous you should treat them as dangerous. unwrap was not defending drivers that kill people.
> but I think it's idiotic for pedestrians to follow the same intersection rules as a 2 ton vehicle.
I mostly opt for having rules on the pedestrian side. But each person should be careful about their own life and constantly be aware of the current risk.
> If you are crossing the road, please wait for the cars to stop, or make absolutely sure there aren't any nearby.
Recently I've had to take some "defensive pedestrian" tactics and strategies at certain crosswalks at certain corners at certain times of day. It's a little more than the usual common sense for when walking around in an urban environment, but it's helped.
Yes, it's a little bit better in US than in some other countries. On the whole (especially in smaller cities where people have 'time'), people generally stop cars for pedestrians, slow down near intersections and zebra-crossings etc. (Can't say the same about bigger cities like Boston/Chicago etc. however)
Yet another fantasy article that tries to suggest roads were built for "the car loving 1%ers of the 20s" and not for public transport and all kinds of other infrastructure needs, including the army's.
What public transport used roads (not streets) in the early twentieth century of the US, when much if them were built? According to [1], by 1929 the private car was doing 175 billion passenger miles, while the bus was doing just 7. As they write, "Although intercity bus travel climbed from nothing to over seven billion passenger miles in 1929, it was always the choice of a relatively small number of people."
And of course, trains don't use roads. What other public transport is there?
Roads before the car were mostly dirt. Humans can walk just fine on them. If they were paved it was probably cobblestones where are again fine for walkers but too rough for cars.
It isn't clear if bicycles or cars drove paved roads in the early days though: both need smooth surfaces to be useful. Bicycles started it first, but it isn't clear how much success they had.
The army's needs of roads came last. The Civil War was fought around railroads (and boats) for long distance travel, and horses for the rest. Only after WWII did the army really realize the advantages of cars and switch to that mode in their plans.
Im fairly sympathetic to the overall aims of this article. I think a transport system more similar to those in the Netherlands makes for better urban landscapes.
But... this habitual style of treating everything as a conspiracy, built around a personified enemy ("They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year)... this way of thinking isn't doing us any favours.
In day-to-day political conversations and articles, it's mostly just formulaic and lazy. Name the conspiracy, point to vested interests that have been influencing policy, find a link to established personifications of evil.. big oil and segregation, in this case.
I'm not saying we should never think in abstractions... but there is a formulaic pattern here that's old, paranoid and harmful.