If you cross the street "near" a red traffic light, that costs you 5€ in Germany. If you admit that you did it intentionally, the ticket price doubles. Happened to my wife some years ago when walking to a bus stop on the other side of the street. How did the cop know that it was intentional? She remarked that there was no car in sight, neither left nor right, on a straight road in town.
Oh, and what's the definition of "near" you may ask? While in Germany almost everything is regulated in detail, the definition of "near" is up to the cop.
ObJoke: it's midnight somewhere in Europe and no car in sight, but some people are waiting for the traffic light to turn green? You can bet that these are Germans ;-0
As many other aspects of the German ethos, this seems to be dying away. I live near Stuttgart, jaywalking is rampant, and nobody cares; in two years, I haven’t seen a traffic cop anywhere except for accident sites.
The law in the UK has just changed to explicitly give priority to pedestrians already crossing the road, particularly in the context of a car turning off a main road and finding pedestrians crossing the road.
In Germany pedestrians also always have priority over turning cars when crossing at an intersection, no matter if there is a pedestrian crossing or not.
I was interpreting GP as talking about "who is supposed to go first" not "Can I run them over intentionally."
The latter is not allowed anywhere in the US. However, I have seen cops giving a pedestrian a ticket for crossing right next to a giant "No Crossing" sign as they were being loaded into an ambulance. At that particular section of the street the assumption was that the driver did not intentionally hit the pedestrian as there was a blind corner.
Also, I don't know if you saw the footage from a few years back of the self-driving-car hitting the pedestrian in Arizona while the safety driver was on their phone? Without the dash-cam, the driver likely would not have been found at fault, as the cops are likely to believe a driver that says they didn't see a pedestrian crossing in the dark at night until too late.
I really wanted to test this idea last weekend at a crowded festival in a town center. I had been waiting for a spot since parking was basically impossible to find. As I was halfway into the spot, a woman ran up and placed herself an inch from my front bumper while calling her friend four blocks away to tell them she had a spot. I was still blocking the travel lane partially and she refused to move even when I closed that inch down to mere millimeters. I may have even tapped her slightly.
If I hadn't been 1500 miles from home I would have gladly continued moving forward at idle speed or just left my car where it was and gone on my way but any legal hassles would have been extra painful having to travel back and fight it. As it was after about 5 minutes of this, a spot opened up two spaces over and I was able to slide over and grab it.
Crosswalks near High Schools tend to be rather bad as well; the other day I saw a teenager start crossing (walking, not running) when there were 3 seconds left on the countdown. Then one of her friends called out to her from behind while she was in the middle of a travel lane that, by this point, has a green light. She stops, turns, and has a good 15s of back-and-forth conversation before completing walking across the street.
In NL (IIRC, it's been twenty years since I've had to learn the laws of the road): crossing pedestrians on city streets have priority over cars, except within 30 meters of a crosswalk. The rationale being, if a crosswalk is that close a pedestrian can reasonably be expected to detour and take the official path. However, elderly people/people with disabilities have priority everywhere.
In the case you're describing, a car turning off a main road encountering crossing pedestrians, isn't considered a special case in NL: straight traffic always has priority over turning traffic, and if a car encounters pedestrians while turning that implies the pedestrians were going straight ahead so they already had priority by default.
Good luck finding a UK driver that knows this, or even a pedestrian! I've had people shout at me for legally crossing a junction while the driver of a vehicle decided I was at fault, because... vehicular mass?
I had a woman literally skid to a stop in front of me to tell me I was running on the “wrong” side of the road. I was running against traffic, and she came from behind, which means that yes, she was actually on the wrong side of the road while delivering her belligerent explanation. Doesn’t have to make sense, I guess.
I'm regularly finding that people don't seem to understand the "already crossing the road" part. On several occasions I've had people start to cross a few feet in front of me when I'm indicating and have already started turning, causing me to stand on the brakes and risk a shunt from the car behind.
While I "jailwalk" pretty much all the time (in Europe), nighttime is when I am the most reluctant to do so. Poor visibility and higher chance of meeting a drunk driver.
hm interesting.. I didn't know that it was illegal. I've been living many years in Germany and always jaywalked, or more precisely always looked at the car traffic typically ignoring the traffic lights (as it's common everywhere else in the world outside EU+US).
And I've never been fined, while I'm sure it already happened the police had seen me. But I will admit that Germans are happily waiting while there is no car in sight - until they see people crossing by red, and then they join ...
I think Germany is the only country in the world that has fines as low as 5€. Also parking your car without paying the parking fee can be ridiculously cheap as 15€.
There is value in a society that upholds norms even if you don't agree with them, even if nobody is watching.
I will wait in a ghost city for a green light, ridicule away.
While I too agree with norms in general, there is such a thing as common sense.
And common sense might tell you that waiting at a lone traffic light in the outskirts of a town in the early morning, sun rising, no car in sight for some hundred meters in each direction, does not add value to society?
It adds reliability, unconscious adherence to rules, a reduction of friction. I don't want people to jdrive in pedestrian only zones, just because nobody is up and about. Chaos is a mental taxation, ditracting from endavour.
There is no chaos to jaywalking because jaywalking should be the default. Only in non-pedestrian cities is jaywalking taxing.
I come from a city where people jaywalk(Stockholm). Jaywalking makes the city extremely walkable, and quite frankly I suspect it was designed with jaywalking in mind. It is obvious when someone is not from Stockholm - they wait for the signal.
I don't get the ease of jaywalking in many other large cities I've been - Zürich comes close. In the UK, even crossing at a green light feels dangerous.
I've seen this at night in Finland as well, looking out of my hotel window at a snow covered street. Not a car in sight (or even tyre tracks in the snow) but still there were people waiting to cross.
Automakers are also directly and/or indirectly responsible for the destruction of American local mass transit and the dysfunctional regression in urban planning* towards inefficient suburbanization.
* It wasn't unplanned. It was the purposeful design of city planners who failed to take into account unintended externalities including gridlock, pollution, and cost.
Car-centric urban planning has massing (mostly hidden) negative externalities:
1. Cars are discriminatory: only licensed 18+ (and not too old) can drive. A whole demographics of children+teens+disabled have lost their mobility independence.
2. Cars robbed children of they street. Street should be a social place for humans, not a car storage space and a race track for rat runners.
3. (UK) 50% of car tripes are less than 1 mile. If these motorists had the option of cycling, everyone (pedestrians,cyclist,motorists) would be better off.
4. Much more....
Cities should be for people not machines. Cars should be treated as guests in our social space, not first-class citizens with cyclists and pedestrians having to tiptoe around cars.
Don't forget how transportation has been one of the key areas of conflict for racial integration and has been used again and again to ensure that black and brown people did not have access to certain areas of cities.
Robert Moses being the most egregious direct example, but Plessy v Ferguson enshrining racist segregationist laws around transportation which then provided precedent to spread to other segregationist laws.
In India, we have segregation based on cast. In cities, the caste based segregation is not very visible though local politicians usually have much better idea. The government used to do income based segregation or its employees: low income group or LIG homes, HIG homes, etc.
Is racial segregation was by design (100% non Whiltes) or just happed due to economic factors (majority of non whites happens to be in this category)?
Racial segregation was literally in law for a long time. When it became illegal, none of the underlying things that had become inherent disappeared overnight.
As an example, banks refused to lend in minority neighborhoods, so unlike for white Americans who used loans to bid up houses owned by white Americans and got wealth that way, Black Americans actually experienced negative housing wealth growth. Those areas are still poor, but now banks don’t lend in them because they’re not profitable, even though the reason they are not profitable is that they were never lent to in the first place.
When Black people managed to build parallel financial systems and economies to provide them wealth, usually they got their properties burned down or firebombed for their trouble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
I’ve heard several times but never verified that trees aren’t planted on boulevards anymore because of automaker lobbying. Something about drunk drivers might hit them. As if driver preference, even drunk drivers, should supersede the public interest.
The same is the case with islands between lanes. The lanes aren’t actually smaller, but they feel smaller because the space looks like it’s contracting.
And they’re much nicer in a neighborhood than speed humps
Can you point to a book or other resources that support this claim? Interested in learning more. Always looking for another reason to hate cars as a New Yorker
I'm reading "The Geography of Nowhere" right now, it covers much of this in a reasonably entertaining fashion, although its not chocka-block with references.
It does make some predictions that haven't dated well though (like hitting peak oil in 2023)
1152. Crossing at other than crosswalks.
(a) Every pedestrian
crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or
within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right of
way to all vehicles upon the roadway.
(b) Any pedestrian crossing a roadway at a point where a pedestrian
tunnel or overhead pedestrian crossing has been provided shall yield the
right of way to all vehicles upon the roadway.
(c) No pedestrian shall cross a roadway intersection diagonally unless
authorized by official traffic-control devices; and, when authorized to
cross diagonally, pedestrians shall cross only in accordance with the
official traffic-control devices pertaining to such crossing movements.
So what's criminalized isn't crossing the road - it's crossing without checking. Which seems like a good idea to me. Looking on the other side of the spectrum, Wyoming's law is:
(a) Every pedestrian crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles upon the roadway.
(b) Any pedestrian crossing a roadway at a point where a pedestrian tunnel or overhead pedestrian crossing has been provided shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles upon the roadway.
(c) Between adjacent intersections at which traffic-control signals are in operation pedestrians shall not cross at any place except in a marked crosswalk.
(d) No pedestrian shall cross a roadway intersection diagonally unless authorized by official traffic-control devices. When authorized to cross diagonally, pedestrians shall cross only in accordance with the official traffic-control devices pertaining to the crossing movements.
Which is similar, except for (c), which only matters when you're close to a crosswalk - and almost certainly, on a busy road.
I think you've misunderstood the law you've quoted. It's not about "crossing without checking", it's about the pedestrian "yield[ing] the right of way to all vehicles". It's hard to imagine from a modern perspective, but until laws like this were passed roads were not, as today, universally perceived as places for cars to drive.
In cities in much of the developing world the pre-jaywalking regime remains: road users with cars, carts, bikes, trucks, or on foot instead are in a delicate and complex (and often dangerous) dance of theory-of-mind and courtesy (or a game of chicken, depending).
The "right-of-way" dominated way of thinking about roads is hard to argue with when you look at most roadways in the developed world (cars zooming around on multiple lanes with few pedestrians in sight). But the idea that every pedestrian must yield right of way to every car is much more questionable in dense cities like NYC, on small, residential streets, where one car trying to go from point A to point C is effectively given total preference over all the people trying to live their lives (and cross the street) in B.
Of course not, but the same right-of-way concept applied to horse and buggies sharing the same street and streetcars on rails, not to mention railroads, which certainly zoomed by pedestrians in many urban areas.
If you want it back to the old way of chaos on the streets, then you'll have to admit that horses would regularly shit all over the street and pedestrians would have to be far more careful in another sense as they crossed busy roads of buggies, streetcars and early autos zipping around with no lanes or traffic lights.
The modern system evolved because it made sense given the demand load and traffic. Cars have to follow rules, too, and have to stop at intersections, yield at crosswalks, obey speed limits, etc.
> "pedestrians would have to be far more careful in another sense as they crossed busy roads of buggies, streetcars and early autos zipping around with no lanes or traffic lights."
In the old days if an early auto hit you and killed you, it would be the driver's fault. Pedestrians were pushing back on cars because they were so deadly; from the article: "The November 23, 1924, cover of the New York Times shows a common representation of cars during the era — as killing machines. (New York Times)". It was automakers who deliberately propagandised and lobbied to shift public perception of blame from the person in control of the heavy machinery in a public place, to victim blame the pedestrian.
> "The modern system evolved because it made sense"
No, it evolved because it was profitable (to the automakers) and beneficial to the rich (more likely car owners) and powerful (white / preferred a country residence and a drive into town, but didn't like a streetcar letting poor black people out to the suburbs). Automakers colluded to tear up Los Angeles' electric streetcar network - the largest on the planet - and scrap it. They were found guilty in court and fined ... $1. That's not because it made sense, that's to make people more dependent on their products.
> "Cars have to follow rules, too, and have to stop at intersections, yield at crosswalks, obey speed limits, etc."
Yet they still put out fumes which affect the residents of the area they drive through, while not affecting the driver inside the car. These fumes kill a 9/11 equivalent of people every 9 months in the UK[1]. They put out noise pollution which worsens the education and health of those around and the noise pollution effects kills someone in Denmark every day or two[2], but the driver is insulated from it. They could have had to be routed around pedestrian areas, living areas, and yield to pedestrians at all times, mandatory park and ride on the edge of urban areas with bus and tram and metro transit in the pedestrianised centers - which would have made sense in various ways and been beneficial for the majority, but inconvenient for the wealthier minority of car drivers. Cars don't obey speed limits in a lot of situations; people drive some combination of the speed others are driving, what they think they can get away with, or what feels safe for the design style of the road.
The USA is up to a 9/11 of car accident deaths every two weeks.[3] Compare the response to that, to the nationwide implementation of the TSA and changes to air travel after 9/11.
One of the reasons the Dutch transportation system is so radically different is because there was strong backlash to rising child deaths from motor vehicles - aka Stop de Kindermoord.
In the Netherlands in many residential areas, the streets are primarily for walking and bicycling; drivers must yield to everything else, because they are the greatest danger on the road. There's extensive, comprehensive separated cycling infrastructure. There's a presumption of fault, not innocence, if you hit a cyclist or pedestrian with your car.
In the US, guns have only recently overtaken motor vehicle related deaths (which have been declining) as the top killers of children.
Unfortunately, the Dutch are weaponized against cycling infrastructure elsewhere. "Well, you can't have bicycles in the streets until you have comprehensively education of children in how to cycle", for example (despite plenty of evidence that, around the world, cyclists do not break traffic laws more than drivers.) Or defeatist nonsense like "there's no point to legal protections for cyclists in the street, we must only work for separated infrastructure."
In any shared transportation space, you need rules for right of way. When two modes of transport want to occupy the same exact space, someone has to be given a priority for the space at any given time. Almost all right of way rules require that the smaller and/or more maneuverable vehicle gives right of way to larger less maneuverable vehicles. Examples of this: Trains have right of way, always. On water, jet skis must give way to boats which must give way to larger boats which must give way to ships. Every rule I've seen on cycling requires pedestrians to give right of way to bicycles.
And more generally they almost always require the vehicle most able to prevent a collision to yield right of way to all other vehicles. Cars turning across or into traffic must yield to oncoming traffic. Cars making U-turns must yield to cars turning into traffic (to my understanding because a U turn crosses 2 directions of traffic, where a turning into traffic crosses 1). A car making a turn at a stop must yield to pedestrians already in or entering the road, because a stopped car merely needs to stay stopped to avoid a collision while a moving pedestrian must stop moving and clear the way first.
Designated crosswalks by their very existence imply "this is an area you should be especially aware of pedestrians", which by nature makes it easier for a driver to avoid causing a collisions. If cross walks have been provided, it only makes sense to require pedestrians to use them if they want prioritized right of way.
This is not how it works in the UK. There is no such thing as "right of way" on a road in the way you have described it. It does not refer to any kind of legal priority of one kind of road user over another. You will sometimes hear irate motorists complaining "you can't do that, I had the right of way!" but it doesn't mean what they think. The "right of way" simply means that the public has a right to use the way, by whatever lawful means -- on foot, on a bike, on a horse, etc. So, "having the right of way" is the tautology that you happen to physically occupy some chunk of public highway; it has no bearing on whether you were in the right.
If the term meant what people thought, motorists would never have the right of way, since driving is not a right, but requires a license, and the ability to travel on public highways in cars is a creation of statute, not common law.
Recent revisions of the Highway Code put about a hierarchy of road users, but opposite to the one you have put across. Smaller, slower, more vulnerable road users have priority over larger and faster vehicles.
>Designated crosswalks by their very existence imply "this is an area you should be especially aware of pedestrians", which by nature makes it easier for a driver to avoid causing a collisions. If cross walks have been provided, it only makes sense to require pedestrians to use them if they want prioritized right of way.
This begs the question. You only need specially designated areas where pedestrians might be, if it is otherwise dangerous for pedestrians to cross the road. Why build roads to be dangerous to pedestrians in the first place? Why should pedestrians have their freedoms curtailed because of the actions of motorists?
In the UK, pedestrians are not required to use zebra crossings, nor are they even required to obey a red light at a pelican crossing (it is merely advisory). Britons have the absolute freedom to cross the road wherever and whenever they please, so long as it's not on a motorway. You are simply allowed to use your own common sense and situational awareness. And we have far fewer traffic fatalities than North America, so maybe we are doing something right.
>Every rule I've seen on cycling requires pedestrians to give right of way to bicycles.
As a cyclist I find this idea appalling. What you are describing sounds like the Law of the Jungle.
>Recent revisions of the Highway Code put about a hierarchy of road users, but opposite to the one you have put across. Smaller, slower, more vulnerable road users have priority over larger and faster vehicles.
Should we take this to mean that pedestrians may enter the flow of traffic willy nilly and drivers will always be found at fault in a collision? I assume not.
To me what I've been able to find sounds an awful lot like pedestrians are required to exercise due caution, and like basically less strictly worded versions of most US laws. Like for example from these rules https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-for-pedes...:
"D If traffic is coming, let it pass. Look all around again and listen. Do not cross until there is a safe gap in the traffic and you are certain that there is plenty of time. Remember, even if traffic is a long way off, it may be approaching very quickly."
Or rule 8:
"If you have started crossing and traffic wants to turn into the road, you have priority and they should give way (see Rules H2 and 170)."
Which certainly seems to imply that there are times when the pedestrian does not "have priority"
Or this rule, which sounds an awful lot like the rule quoted from New York: " Where there is a crossing nearby, use it. It is safer to cross using a subway, a footbridge, an island, a zebra, pelican, toucan or puffin crossing, or where there is a crossing point controlled by a police officer, a school crossing patrol or a traffic warden. Otherwise choose a place where you can see clearly in all directions. Try to avoid crossing between parked cars (see Rule 14), on a blind bend, or close to the brow of a hill. Move to a space where drivers and riders can see you clearly. Do not cross the road diagonally."
This one sounds an awful lot to me like cars have "right of way" when the amber light is flashing and a pedestrian has not yet entered the cross walk: "Pelican crossings. These are signal-controlled crossings where flashing amber follows the red ‘Stop’ light. You MUST stop when the red light shows. When the amber light is flashing, you MUST give way to any pedestrians on the crossing. If the amber light is flashing and there are no pedestrians on the crossing, you may proceed with caution."
Even from H2 which is the main new thing I see citing the higher pedestrian priorities has "Pedestrians have priority when on a zebra crossing, on a parallel crossing or at light controlled crossings when they have a green signal.", which again certainly seems to say that when not on such a crossing or crossing against the lights that they do not have priority anymore.
>This begs the question. You only need specially designated areas where pedestrians might be, if it is otherwise dangerous for pedestrians to cross the road. Why build roads to be dangerous to pedestrians in the first place?
And yet, the UK is littered with pedestrian crossings. As near as I can tell you have an entire bestiary of different crossing types with different rules and regulations for each. Seems like they should be unnecessary if pedestrians have absolute priority over all other traffic right?
> In the UK, pedestrians are not required to use zebra crossings, nor are they even required to obey a red light at a pelican crossing (it is merely advisory).
"(2)Without prejudice to the generality of subsection (1) above, regulations under that subsection may be made—
(a)prohibiting pedestrian traffic on the carriageway within 100 yards of a crossing, and
"
So that sounds like you absolutely can be compelled by law to use a crossing where one is nearby.
> As a cyclist I find this idea appalling. What you are describing sounds like the Law of the Jungle.
Why? To me it sounds like a law reflecting reality. You could say a pedestrian has the right of way but when a pedestrian tries to occupy the space a bicycle is already or will be within the time that they are unable to safely stop, physics says the pedestrian will lose that fight. That doesn't mean cyclists can ride and just slam through joggers. Everyone is still requires to try to avoid collisions.
It really feels like you have a misunderstanding of what "right of way" means here. This isn't some absolute authority where cyclists may mow down pedestrians in front of them, and cars may mow down cyclists in front of them, and busses may mow down cars and trucks may mow down busses. It's trying to resolve who needs to yield when a collision is likely to occur. As a general rule like I said, the person most able to prevent the collision in the first place is given lower right of way. A car already in a lane has right of way over a car trying to merge into the lane. That isn't carte blanche to simply ram people merging into your lane out of the way, it just means the person wanting to merge has the responsibility to do so safely and not cause a collision, and if they can't merge without causing a collision, they're the one that has to wait.
>Should we take this to mean that pedestrians may enter the flow of traffic willy nilly and drivers will always be found at fault in a collision? I assume not.
Pedestrians may enter the flow of traffic whenever they like, and the law will not punish them. If there is a collision, the driver may or may not be found at fault, it depends entirely on the circumstances.
>To me what I've been able to find sounds an awful lot like pedestrians are required to exercise due caution, and like basically less strictly worded versions of most US laws.
Pedestrians are encouraged to exercise due caution. They are not required to by law. You are confusing a common-sense recommendation with a legal obligation. Drivers should never assume pedestrians will behave as they "should". Pedestrians include children, the elderly, the blind, the deaf, drunk people, the mentally retarded, and so on: people who may not be able to sense, judge, or move in the normally expected way.
You will never be arrested for "reckless walking" in the way you might be arrested for reckless driving.
(You might counter with "pedestrians should not assume drivers will behave as they should" -- quite so! The distinction I am making is: if a pedestrian uses the road carelessly because he thinks drivers will always act properly, this is stupid, but not illegal. If a motorist uses the road carelessly because he assumes pedestrians will always act properly, this is both stupid and illegal.)
The specific thing you are quoting is the Highway Code, which is not law, but a series of guidelines.
>This one sounds an awful lot to me like cars have "right of way" when the amber light is flashing and a pedestrian has not yet entered the cross walk: "Pelican crossings. These are signal-controlled crossings where flashing amber follows the red ‘Stop’ light. You MUST stop when the red light shows. When the amber light is flashing, you MUST give way to any pedestrians on the crossing. If the amber light is flashing and there are no pedestrians on the crossing, you may proceed with caution."
You are incorrect. Cars do not have "the right of way" when the amber light is flashing, because as I said there is no "right of way" to be had, in that sense you describe. A pedestrian may legally step out into the street while the lights are green for cars. It is usually a terribly unwise thing to do, but idiocy is not against the law. Sometimes it's safe, such as when there's a traffic jam. I saw many people doing it this morning during rush hour -- nothing bad happened to them because the risk was objectively low, and they would have nothing to fear from any policeman who happened to see it, because their actions were not against the law.
For cars it is different: cars must stop when the light is red for them. That is a legal requirement and there can be fines or other consequences for breaking it.
>And yet, the UK is littered with pedestrian crossings. As near as I can tell you have an entire bestiary of different crossing types with different rules and regulations for each. Seems like they should be unnecessary if pedestrians have absolute priority over all other traffic right?
You misunderstand. I never said there was no danger -- of course there is danger! Crossings are a necessary evil in many places. As a matter of common sense, they should be used. But as a matter of law, pedestrians are under no obligation to use them. The police cannot fine you for not using them.
>So that sounds like you absolutely can be compelled by law to use a crossing where one is nearby.
This is only on A-roads, and only under specific circumstances, which local authorities must opt into. It is not a blanket ban on crossing the road, like the "jaywalking" concept is. I have hardly ever run into any such marked restrictions.
>Why? To me it sounds like a law reflecting reality. You could say a pedestrian has the right of way but when a pedestrian tries to occupy the space a bicycle is already or will be within the time that they are unable to safely stop, physics says the pedestrian will lose that fight.
This isn't about the laws of physics, it's about the laws of England. Yes, a pedestrian might end up in the hospital if he jumps out in front of me before I have time to brake. But he won't end up in jail. Why is this so hard to understand? You don't need to make something illegal for people to recognize it's a bad idea.
>It really feels like you have a misunderstanding of what "right of way" means here. This isn't some absolute authority where cyclists may mow down pedestrians in front of them, and cars may mow down cyclists in front of them, and busses may mow down cars and trucks may mow down busses. It's trying to resolve who needs to yield when a collision is likely to occur.
>It really feels like you have a misunderstanding of what "right of way" means here. This isn't some absolute authority where cyclists may mow down pedestrians in front of them, and cars may mow down cyclists in front of them, and busses may mow down cars and trucks may mow down busses. It's trying to resolve who needs to yield when a collision is likely to occur. As a general rule like I said, the person most able to prevent the collision in the first place is given lower right of way. A car already in a lane has right of way over a car trying to merge into the lane.
Priority rules for traffic is a different concept to the hierarchy of road users. The former is about on what the road users are doing, the latter is about what the road users are. We have the similar rules about which vehicles need to give way to others when it comes to merging and turning and so on. But a car will always be a car, no matter what lane it is in, and hence the driver has a greater degree of responsibility in circumstances where conflict with pedestrians is likely.
The UK has never had such a law (except on motorways), yet pedestrians know to stay off the roads because it is dangerous.
In those developing countries the reason that there is chaos is because traffic rules are not enforced. When traffic rules are enforced vehicle speeds increase such that pedestrians avoid roads by their own volition.
Been to Tbilisi recently, there is such strong preference for cars in the center, pedestrians need to walk ~10 min on average to find a crossing and then wait ~10 min for the green light.
> where one car trying to go from point A to point C is effectively given total preference over all the people trying to live their lives (and cross the street) in B.
That's a very simplistic view - it was never questionable and no one was "given preference". It was simply a practical decision in order to allow cars to use the road.
The car took a few seconds to stop from even a pedestrians walking speed. The pedestrian takes a few hundred milliseconds to stop from a walking speed.
Giving the pedestrian the right of way would simply result in a lot of dead pedestrians.
It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield.
The physics didn't allow your preference, and that turned out to be an incredibly good thing as the automobile was one of the biggest drivers of trade and industry the world over.
We all benefited, yourself included, from having those early laws on the books.
> It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield.
Alternative no-brainer - the new entrant to street traffic that doesn't have the handling or control to safely co-habitate the street with existing users shouldn't be allowed onto streets. They should instead be restricted to specific and limited long distance routes that actually take advantage of their ability to travel many miles an hour on an artificial fuel source - with an allowance within streets to allow emergency vehicles of course.
In short, walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town.
You gotta give it to the auto-makers. Probably the greatest propagandists of the modern world.
The fact is that cars make places suck. They are dangerous to other road users, the roads built for them create dangerous microclimates, monopolise what was once shared infrastructure, and they enable evils such as the supermarket.
I think you may have misinterpreted what the person above you said. I think the person above you is actually not as car brained as you think. I read their suggestion not as "everyone should use a car to get everywhere" but instead as:
> Cars can't safely be on streets with pedestrians, so we probably shouldn't allow cars onto roads where pedestrians could walk. Instead the only place where cars should be allowed are roads meant for long-distance driving, like interstates, as that's the environment where a cars advantages shine. Once off of an interstate, you gotta park that car in a dedicated car-storage facility and then walk or use public transit to get around. If you want to drive a car, then "walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town."
you lost me with the supermarket... lots of people in NYC walk or take the subway to supermarkets that have little/no parking... people like a big store where all the food is in one place.
Up here in Vancouver we have a Costco that's in the middle of downtown and trivially subway accessible - it also has a parking structure and Costco in particular is a rather difficult shop to do on foot... but grocery stores with a wide variety are still useful to make trips on foot to if you only need niche ingredients and can pick up the bulk of your food at veggie markets and butchers.
>In short, walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town.
What does that have to do with what I said?
Without allowing vehicles on roads (and the jaywalking laws that came with it), deliveries to the high-density places where people live , or to city centers, would be limited to what can be drawn on a horse and carriage.
Those laws specifically benefited those people who live without cars.
The high-density car-free life you dream of would never have been possible had your "no-brainer" alternative been adopted - you can't transport that much goods, that quickly, and that often, and that reliably with horses alone.
I have no objection to commercial delivery vehicles, mass transit vehicles or emergency vehicles - I solely object to personal vehicles being assumed to have a right to directly access to every store front in a city. If we shifted out cultural view to looking at these vehicles as borrowing the public space of streets - instead of viewing streets as zones prohibited to pedestrians we'd probably all live longer lives without compromising on our deliveries. You can also look at European cities to see how last-mile deliveries to addresses that aren't on car-width roads are handled with cargo and motor bikes.
> You can also look at European cities to see how last-mile deliveries to addresses that aren't on car-width roads are handled with cargo and motor bikes.
High-density living requires much more cargo space than motorbikes can handle.
Just moving into the area alone requires an automobile (you're not moving 3 beds, 5 couches and everything else on cargo bikes). hundreds of thousands of eggs, loaves of bread and litres of milk alone is delivered in a large high-density metro per day. you aren't going to fit 100k cargo bikes into the train station.
My point is not that we need to keep autos, my point is that the high-density living we have now would not have been possible if automobiles were not allowed on roads.
We're lucky that it was allowed, because it enabled a rate of progress that would never have been possible without it.
Global population wasn't at the scale we have right now either. However, London had several million inhabitants in the late nineteenth century, before any cars were around.
>>>> We all benefited, yourself included, from having those early laws on the books.
then reinforced with
>>> The high-density car-free life you dream of would never have been possible
then reinforced, again, with
>> Because technology like the automobile was not around to support the high-density living that we enjoy now.
I thought I was being clear that I was referring to the dense car-free cities we now enjoy, or we expect to have, not overcrowded and unsanitary slums[1].
So you claiming that a dense car-free city is possible is irrelevant to "the car free city we now enjoy", because the car-free cities we now enjoy does not have millions of people living in overcrowded and unsanitary slums.
> While the city grew wealthy as Britain's holdings expanded, 19th-century London was also a city of poverty, where millions lived in overcrowded and unsanitary slums.
Overcrowding and sanitation are orthogonal problems to delivering goods to millions of people in a city. London for example was unsanitary because we didn't even have an understanding of germ theory at the time. People however didn't starve because no trucks where around to stock the shelves.
I'm seeing here a lot of conflation between "street" and "road." In historical usage, a road is the surface you drive on, and a street is a pathway with buildings on either side.
In people-centric culture, a street is a place for people. This is the way streets worked for millenia. Horses and horse-drawn carriages were usually allowed on the street as well, which are more dangerous than a person.
In car-centric culture, a street is simply a kind of road, and all roads are the primary domain of cars. There is no logical reason that this must be so - cars could, for instance, only have right-of-way on non-street roads, like highways.
Also, your assertion that cars (even old cars) cannot travel at a low enough speed to have a safe stopping distance around pedestrians is simply not true. Even a collision between a pedestrian and a car at "walking speed" (if the car completely failed to notice the pedestrian) rarely results in a fatality. Which you can easily look up yourself, but the numbers I'm seeing are less than 1% fatality rate for collisions below 10mph.
Jaywalking laws, independent of how they are implemented only make sense if you start from a prior that the roads are specifically for vehicular use snd it’s pedestrians that are making exceptional use of them.
The article is pointing out that belief was a specific policy choice driven at least in part by automakers.
It wasn't just automakers, it was also the car owners. The first cars were owned by the 0.01%, and those sorts of people don't like being held responsible for mowing down smelly, dirty plebians.
So, they paid for cartoonists to draw cartoons that made pedestrians look like careless idiots, got their newspaper-owning friends to write editorials, the car companies joined in, and boom, jaywaying laws.
Not even motorized vehicles could cross the road either, mind you. I'd argue that in artery roads, there are much more people that use the road through it rather than crossing it. In those roads, by democracy, ones crossing it should give way.
It's important to note that while many states have the fairly common sense exceptions you mention, they also allow municipalities to implement and enforce more aggressive policies that don't have such exceptions. For instance, even somewhere like New York City where jaywalking is wildly common doesn't have the "shall yield right-of-way" language:
(c) Restrictions on crossings.
(1) No pedestrian shall enter or cross a roadway at any point where signs, fences, barriers, or other devices are erected to prohibit or restrict such crossing or entry.
(2) No pedestrian shall cross any roadway at an intersection except within a cross- walk.
(3) No pedestrian shall cross a roadway except at a crosswalk on any block in which traffic control signals are in operation at both intersections bordering the block.
The Wyoming law seems to implicitly assume that a) intersections are spaced close to each other and b) each intersection with traffic lights also has pedestrian crossings.
I assume b) is simply enforced by some regulation, but a) sounds like it could lead to lots of unintended problems. What if there's miles between two adjacent intersections? A person standing in the middle would have to know if by chance both the intersection to their left and right have a traffic light, and then walk to the closest one if that's the case (or find a marked crosswalk).
Not sure where the law says "crossing without checking" is illegal. It clearly states that crossing outside certain defined areas areas is illegal. That alone is massive issue since crossing area are far and few in between especially if you are trying to cross midblock in NYC. So much for "making more sense when you read them"
Fifty or sixty years ago in Denver it was called the "Barnes Dance" after the traffic commissioner who instituted it. My recollection is that only downtown intersections had the necessary signals, but then it has been years since I have been back.
There are a few 4-way stops in San Francisco, mostly in the financial district. One at 4th & Folsom.
In general, I routinely jaywalk here, traffic permitting. If nobody's coming, I just walk. In over 20 years, I've never heard of anyone getting a jaywalking ticket in SF.
First thing I taught my children about roads was to always give right of way to any vehicle. Especially at marked crosswalks and regardless of traffic lights. Still, one of them got hit at the pedestrian crossing recently (she is 26 now, needs refreshment lessons it seems).
To clarify: under the laws linked above, jaywalking is categorized not as a crime or misdemeanor but as a traffic infraction, just like breaking the speed limit or failing to signal a turn.
it doesn't need to be an "offense" at all. in the event of a collision, it's enough to have a strong prejudice towards the person who had the legal right of way.
Where I live in the US, people simply do not stop at pedestrian crosswalks. It doesn’t matter that there’s a large fluorescent sign, and bold white stripes on the road, and a person waiting to cross. I’ve even had a police officer drive straight through while I was waiting to cross.
But it seems like they’re respected if you install large flashing lights that the pedestrian can activate.
Courtesy crossings are usually made of bricks or paving or raised above the level of the road. A courtesy crossing is not an official pedestrian crossing, but to be polite, you should stop for people on the footpath waiting to cross. You must give way to people already crossing.
AFAIK we don't have jaywalking laws (certainly the word "jaywalking" is not locally recognised except as something that is foreign/American).
Our cops are pretty busy - you would have to be pretty unlucky to get a ticket. But also the social norms in NZ are to be polite - drivers tend to be more forgiving towards pedestrians than some other countries. The justice system is definitely very unforgiving towards anyone that actually hits a pedestrian.
> The justice system is definitely very unforgiving towards anyone that actually hits a pedestrian.
I have to disagree. Where I live in NZ a local elderly couple were run down by an impatient driver turning into a quiet side street. One died, the other was critically injured. The same driver had recently accepted fault for hitting and injuring a motorcyclist.
The sentence? 250 hours community work, $15,000 to the family as an emotional harm repayment, attend a defensive driving course, and disqualification from driving for nine months.
I might add that the driver was a very wealthy businessman (so the monetary amount is likely insignificant).
> But it seems like they’re respected if you install large flashing lights that the pedestrian can activate.
I live near one of these and not even the strobing yellow lights are always enough to get drivers to yield. I've never once been able to cross when cars are present without fairly recklessly walking in front of them.
I like to act like I'm about to start crossing and only stop at the last possible moment in these cases. That way at least 50% of the time they or someone else in the car freaks out.
I hope it teaches them. Even if you can't see anyone, if there's a pedestrian crossing, especially in an urban area, just slow down in case.
“
Precedence of pedestrians over vehicles at Zebra crossings
25.—(1) Every pedestrian, if he is on the carriageway within the limits of a Zebra crossing, which is not for the time being controlled by a constable in uniform or traffic warden, before any part of a vehicle has entered those limits, shall have precedence within those limits over that vehicle and the driver of the vehicle shall accord such precedence to any such pedestrian.
“
The point is that simply waiting to cross you are not “on the carriageway” and therefore the driver of the vehicle is not required to stop (by some reading of the law).
Common custom is that you do stop for people waiting to cross but sometimes you really do have to stick a foot into the road to make people stop for you and allow you to cross.
During my driver's license exam, the examiner scolded me for stopping for a pedestrian who was waiting to cross... (saying something essentially like "you might get read-ended")
This was in Switzerland, in the late 80s, and yes, drivers did not tend to stop for pedestrians waiting to cross.
Yeah, I've found pedestrian crosswalks, particularly at intersections, to be death traps. The I've been hit by a car once and almost hit a dozen times, always at a cross walk. Far too many people zipping around corners or simply ignoring the cross walk all together.
> But it seems like they’re respected if you install large flashing lights that the pedestrian can activate.
What's the point of that? At that point just turn it into a proper traffic light that's always green (or off) and when activated turns red for cars and green for pedestrians.
My neighborhood was built pre-cars, and it shows. The sidewalks are narrow, so everyone walks in the street. If you’re a lucky motorist, we might move over and let you pass. If it’s dark, or snowy, or raining, or the pedestrian is wearing headphones and doesn’t notice you behind them… forget it. You’ll have to drive slowly until the pedestrian reaches their destination or turns out of your path.
Many streets in parts of Asia (Korea and Taiwan for example) are similar. A majority of the "side" roads just don't have sidewalks, and people walk on the road. I was a little nervous the first few times I encountered it (having grown up in very car oriented suburbs and then lived in Canadian downtowns after that), but it definitely grew on me.
Holy crap! That article is full of low-level facistic quotes:
> “I was approached by a couple of citizens asking if there was anything we could do about certain people walking around at night riding their bicycles,”
"Certain people"
> “The curfew would more or less be at the officer’s discretion,”
Cool, so you're explicitly giving cops a legal reason to harass people if the cop thinks they looks suspicious. I can't see how any subconscious or overt bigotry could come into play here.
> “The chief noticed a big influx of bicycle traffic during the night and people walking around, [...] It’s not usually a good thing when that happens."
> "Louisiana is a stop-and-identify state, so that ordinance is not really to hurt anybody it’s just to stop these people walking that have no reason to be walking,”
Yup! Sure doesn't hurt you at all for your existence to be criminalized and your mere presence on the street to be probable cause for the cops to harass you.
> "There’s a fraction of people that believe that is infringing on people’s rights, but at the same time, I think people can sit back and put a little perspective on the situation and agree that the good simply has to pay for the bad right now,”
Something, something, possibly apocryphal quite about trading freedom for security and deserving neither.
> "that ordinance is not really to hurt anybody it’s just to stop these people walking that have no reason to be walking,”
Sir! Step back and lie on the ground! Your feet are a threat to the State of Louisiana! I'm going to need to confiscate them and you along with them.
Fuck these fascists and the spineless politicians who enable them.
> Cool, so you're explicitly giving cops a legal reason to harass people if the cop thinks they looks suspicious.
That's how it's been for a LONG time. Loitering laws are explicitly that. They are often ruled as unconstitutional, as a result, law makers keep trying to find different ways to empower cops to remove "undesirables". Be it anti-camping laws, curfews, or whatever.
On January 1, 2023, jaywalking became legal in California with the Freedom to Walk Act, reversing what was once one of the strictest laws against this practice in the country. Now, pedestrians can cross the road at places other than intersections and crosswalks without penalty.
Worth pointing out that "jaywalking" is not a universal crime. There are jurisdictions in the USA where it's legal. And it's legal here in Canada. Even the term stands out -- I'm familiar with "jaywalking" but you only use a term for it if it's illegal. We just call it "crossing the street", or "impeding the flow of traffic", depending how you do it. (It's not exactly a free for all: in Ontario there is still a requirement for pedestrians to use pedestrian crossings, and to follow stop lights, where those are installed.)
There are too many cases where it's perfectly safe and reasonable to do that I see any sense in making it illegal. But it is, to be fair, very dangerous in some cases. It's hard to judge how fast a car is moving, sometimes you simply don't see one coming at you. Toronto Police call this a "mid-block crossing", and in the city, they account for a significant % of all pedestrian fatalities, particularly at night, and in busy traffic.
> Worth pointing out that "jaywalking" is not a universal crime.
When I first moved from the UK to the USA, I assumed that "jaywalking" was a made-up thing that you warned tourists about, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_bear. How could crossing the road be _inherently_ illegal, even if done in a safe manner!?
I mean it's also frowned upon for a car to cross red light, even it's "inherently safe" currently. Unless you thought that drivers can use their own judgement to cross red light (I also thought so, mind you), it seems consistent.
I've only seen people getting ticket for crossing in Prague if they
* disregarded any safety measure (arrogant crossing red light while cars are present)
* were crossing red light in front of a Police station
Prague has such a shortage of officers they stripped the education requirement and basically anyone who passes psychological evaluation can become one. It is a rare sight to see one in flesh.
There are tons of traffic laws that make things technically illegal even if they're perfectly safe ("no U-turn"), for the purpose of keeping traffic flow orderly and efficient. Not sure why this should be any different or why pedestrians should not be expected to follow traffic laws, or why the law should allow pedestrians to step into traffic whenever and wherever they want.
> for the purpose of keeping traffic flow orderly and efficient. Not sure why this should be any difference
Because I'm saying that the act of crossing the road _itself_ should not be illegal - merely the act of crossing it unsafely. By definition, this is not disruptive to traffic flow.
> why pedestrians should not be expected to follow traffic laws
They should. This is begging the question - I'm saying that the law itself is flawed, not that a law should exist and be flouted.
> why the law should allow pedestrians to step into traffic whenever and wherever they want
This is a strawman. Pedestrians should be allowed to step into _roads_ (not into traffic) whenever and wherever it is safe to do so.
U-turns are not perfectly safe. Last week I saw a U-turner almost a hit a biker as they backed up after not being able to complete the turn in one pass. Can they be done safely? Sure. But that's not the same as perfectly safe.
Cars also hit bikes when cars are backing up, making turns, driving above the speed limit, driving below the speed limit, when the driver opens the door. Really, many varied circumstances that have nothing to do with making a U-turn.
Perhaps the phrase “perfectly safe” is wrong. Maybe “otherwise intrinsically safe” would be more accurate. Having said all that, I do wonder if we have U-turn accident statistics.
In Boston (and maybe Massachusetts as a whole), jaywalking is a crime but the fee is literally $1.
There was a Boston globe article about this, where some journalist spent his day intentionally and blatantly jaywalking everywhere, including right in front of cops. He didn’t get a single fine.
It does vary. I'm not saying that in cities like Boston and New York, literally no one would ever get a ticket, but people pretty much will take whatever they can get away with for the most part. Historically, West Coast cities were considered to have at least a modicum of enforcement but I expect that's very scattered these days.
So, yeah, there's technically a crime of jaywalking but in practice it's mostly limited to whatever you feel you can get away with absent being run over.
Yes, not obeying pedestrian signalling is one of the exceptions. I'd say that's fairly reasonable -- if people cross freely against indicators it messes with the flow of traffic. I've only seen this actually enforced with examples like in the article, outside a busy transit station.
Even the concept that the flow of traffic is more important than the pedestrian's flow is indicative of the change in attitude. Somehow the car has come to be most important while the pedestrian is a nuisance. Both own and pay for the road but the pedestrian is a second class citizen (obviously some people will moan on about road tax and fuel tax, but these taxes don't come close to paying for the road infrastructure, I doubt they would even pay the rent on the area dedicated to roads in one major city - say NYC).
"Even the concept that the flow of traffic is more important than the pedestrian's flow"
Is it? It seems like in the example, both parties are following a signal. Cars must yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. Sure, some places have jaywalking laws when not in a crosswalk (in some cases including implied/unmarked crosswalks), and most require impeding traffic as a component. A few places could move towards common sense of adding impeding traffic as a requirement. Nothing I've seen says pedestrians are second class. It's like saying that one should be allowed to run a red light. Everyone can wait their turn.
Look at the amount of road space, infrastructure, resources devoted to cars vs. pedestrians. The typical way for pedestrians to cross a busy highway for example is via a bridge - the pedestrian has to put up with going up and down the stairs. Pedestrians typically have to go out of their way to cross streets even at level. Traffic lights have “beg buttons” for pedestrians to use, god forbid they interrupt the flow of first-class car drivers for a minute more than necessary.
Pedestrians are totally treated as second-class almost everywhere.
"The typical way for pedestrians to cross a busy highway for example is via a bridge"
I'm not sure where you're from, but I have seen very few of these. Usually the ones I've seen are over a very busy road with few to no intersections and a lot of foot traffic. These are beneficial to the flow of both car and foot traffic instead of using long cycle times.
“beg buttons”
I'm sorry, but that is some extreme spin. What do you think happens at traffic signals? Those signals use sensors to identify when cars come up to them. These sensors don't work for pedestrians lacking large amounts of metal to trip the fields. So yeah, they have a button to tell the machine they want to cross. Usually, the lights change just as fast if not faster than if a car pulls up at a red light.
When in a shared space, everyone must wait their turn. If you don't, you end up with people steeping out in front if cars and people running red lights. Taking turns is part of a functioning society.
Pedestrians are second class in most crossings though (at least in the UK).
For traffic lights that are always green except when a pedestrian wants to cross we do have the “beg button” but the problem is that there is usually a reasonable delay before the lights turn red to stop the cars.
Obviously there needs to be some sort of delay between sets of red lights otherwise someone could just spend the day pressing the button and crossing all day whilst the traffic backs up. But the delay is front loaded. There doesn’t need to be such a long delay before the lights turn red if the lights have been green for a long enough period prior to that. Poor implementation.
I’m sure there’s a study somewhere where they decided to go with the pre-delay for some reason, but I’ve never found anything.
> I'm not sure where you're from, but I have seen very few of these.
Well I’m not sure where you’re from but I have seen tons of these pedestrian bridges :) wouldn’t it be better to inconvenience the car by building an overpass? The car has an engine and doesn’t get tired.
On beg buttons: I did not invent the terminology. Look it up.
Please be more charitable. I legitimately looked. All I found were biased pieces calling them beg buttons. I'm asking for an unbiased source calling them that. It seems the real term is a pedestrian call button.
I’m sure you’ll find a way to disqualify that also, but well. By the way this was like the fourth result on a ddg search, there are many more if you care to actually look and read.
Oh now I know you are a troll. It would be cheaper to build level intersections with traffic lights. Why then are billions spent on wide freeways, exchanges, overpasses when it’s road over road but when it’s about pedestrians then sure, do whatever is cheapest because they’re already on foot, how much of a hurry can they be in?
Neither. Both cost significantly more to build and maintain than at-grade intersections. That's part of the reason more and more grade separated highways are being demolished and replaced with surface roads.
Yes they cost more than at-grade. At-grade is the most common. I'm talking about high volume areas for both traffic and pedestrians, usually involving 6+ lanes of traffic (even if the roads are at-grade) or a need for foot traffic to cross an interstate where no road intersections exist. These are scenarios where at-grade crossings would be extremely inefficient and probably cost more in wasted time, fuel, etc than the infrastructure cost of an elevated foot bridge. Some places like Vegas have the money to erect elevated foot bridges on the strip even though the intersections are at grade. Of course many places don't need dedicated foot bridges when existing overpasses exist with sidewalks, such as with 676 in Philly.
At high volumes of foot traffic the high cost of sending pedestrians up over a footbridge is greater over the lifetime of a bridge than doing the same to cars.
Consider the physical risks pedestrians takes vs cars over a bridge, the lost time on each journey for cars vs people going over a bridge, fuel costs from additional car trips vs additional fuel cars expend going over a single bridge etc.
Even relatively modest levels of foot traffic pay for a cheap bridge that’s going to last ~50 years.
Not to mention speed limits. Around here almost all traffic exceeds the speed limit, yet plenty of drivers still complain about pedestrians not adhering to the rules.
The designs of most cities in the U.S. absolutely treat pedestrians as second class citizens compared to automobile traffic. I'm currently working on a project that demonstrates exactly this (among other things) in Dallas. It's both sad and amusing how true it is.
The best example is that even your curious question comes with a car-minded implicit assumption that it's the pedestrian who is crossing, not the car. In a pedestrian-centric design, cars are the ones who cross. See https://youtu.be/_ByEBjf9ktY?t=690.
Pedestrians have to ask to cross the road by pressing a button, so that the usual signal cycle for cars is interrupted, to let them cross. Cars don't have to ask. That means the crossing inherently prioritizes cars, and pedestrians are a second class user.
Cars do have to ask - there are sensors in the pavement to manipulate the signal. Some lights have no sensors and merely time it for each group. Some one way streets are designed to use the same light as the cars to signal parallel foot traffic as well.
How can you explain pedestrians as second class users if they have the right of way and do not have to wait at non-signaled crosswalks?
There seems to be a mix of who gets priority based on things like volume and efficiency, demonstrating that neither pedestrians nor cars are a lower class than the other.
The Library of Congress has a great film taken from the front of a cable car in pre-fire San Francisco [1]. It's absolutely terrifying to see how unsafe the streets were. It wasn't just cars either: horse-drawn carts dart in and out of traffic just as cars did, pedestrians cross at-will in front of all vehicles, and at one points kids mess about jumping on the back of vehicles.
It's obvious major regulation was needed, and not just for pedestrians. Pretend cars didn't exist on that street for a moment and think about the changes needed to make it safe: carts needed lanes and rules for changing lanes, cable cars needed dedicated lanes, intersections needed a system to allow traffic from multiple directions, and pedestrians were being a bit too free with their judgement calls.
Looks fine to me. I think the unsafe thing is speed. Top speed of a cable car is 9.5mph. No vehicle appears to be going over 15mph. There's a cyclist pretty casually keeping pace with the cars. https://youtu.be/uINgSqEU26A?t=153
"Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph. The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph."
Slower speeds mean a collision is less likely to occur. We're pretty good at moving in crowded conditions without frequent collisions at low speeds. See also NYC sidewalks.
Also, it appears the video is slowed down. I played at 1.5 speed to make my estimates
A lot of car-centric people conflate “I don't know exactly what's about to happen next” with “danger!” What's actually dangerous is the hubristic trance people fall into when they believe they do know exactly what's about to happen next. When that happens at car speeds in a world that is inherently unpredictable, it's often deadly.
Very interesting video. Thanks for sharing. It looks a bit chaotic but honestly not _that_ unsafe to me as everything is going quite slow. It reminds me a bit of the idea of "shared space" which is a recent concept that is actually claimed to make streets safer.
> It reminds me a bit of the idea of "shared space" which is a recent concept that is actually claimed to make streets safer.
It's a 1990s concept from France. It was implemented in the 1990s on Theater Way in Redwood City. CA, and did not work well. One side of the street has a curb, but the other side does not. Vehicle traffic was allowed, and people could get out in front of the movie theater. The other side of the street, with no barriers, had cafe tables.[1]
This worked badly. The cafe tables kept creeping outward. Some auto traffic was too fast. During COVID, the outside seating kept growing into the roadway. Plastic bollards were erected to discourage non-delivery traffic. Overpowered electric bikes zooming through became an problem. Police cars were sometimes deployed to block the
roadway. Then plastic Jersey-type barriers were set up at one end, but not filled with water, so they could be moved for deliveries. Currently, one end of the street has been torn up for installation of some kind of raiseable barrier.
I think it comes down to things like speed. If we accept that the road is a place to be able to quickly move a lot of vehicles, then that just isn't a safe place for pedestrians.
If we go back to lower speeds then maybe it could be manageable in a same way.
But as it is actually used now for 3000 pound vehicles to zoom about in, it makes no sense for pedestrians to be intersecting and sharing the space at all. Just due to the physics of collisions between a person and a vehicle.
I don't think slow vehicles is a good solution because we do need to get places.
I think an actual good (but very expensive) solution is for new cities to be designed differently in several ways. One of which is for roads to be only for small autonomous vehicles and entirely separate from pedestrian paths. To make that reasonably practical you need some other core assumptions to be changed. And also a totally new development probably.
Bingo--this argument (like many others) is one that doesn't require us to speculate or to invent new ways of building cities. We just need to look around the world to cities that have dealt with this problem successfully, and learn from their examples.
The American mindset is not. I swear that a huge portion of people in the US have been propagandized to believe that the car is king and that any idea to the contrary is heresy punishable by death under the front bumper of a Ford F-250 jacked up 3 feet higher.
> But as it is actually used now for 3000 pound vehicles to zoom about in, it makes no sense for pedestrians to be intersecting and sharing the space at all. Just due to the physics of collisions between a person and a vehicle. I don't think slow vehicles is a good solution because we do need to get places.
Urban design talks about street vs road. You can have places for vehicles to zoom about in (roads), and you can have places with shops and businesses and homes for people to use (streets), but you shouldn't try to make the same place serve as both. So in cities and town centres you need to prioritise pedestrians and cyclists: low (and enforced!) speed limits, narrow streets that naturally reduce speed, car-free zones. It doesn't need radical new development, you just need to break the assumption that cars are entitled to go full speed everywhere and everyone else has to deal.
> ... new cities to be designed differently in several ways. One of which is for roads to be only for small autonomous vehicles and entirely separate ...
As I understand it, this vision does not compute. The number of movements of people in a dense city is too large for everyone to move in a car, autonomous or not. Cars take a lot of space. They need to stop someplace for someone to get in and out, merge in and out of traffic. Streets cant be designed in a way that accomodates this at the scale of a city like NY.
Similarly, in spread-out suburbia, autonomous cars would still get stuck in traffic jams if everyone has to use them to get to work. Making cars autonomous makes things a bit more efficient, but not by orders of magnitude.
Mass transit, combined with walking and biking, is simply way more efficient for moving people in cities and is a proven model that does scale.
Characterizing that as terrifying is a bit hyperbolic. It looks like Europe in the present day. If cars were moving slower it would be much easier to be a pedestrian safely
> It's absolutely terrifying... Pretend cars didn't exist on that street for a moment
You can easily experience the scenario you envision, practically average 1905 San Francisco roads, by walking or biking through JFK street in Golden Gate Park, which is closed to all vehicles but food trucks and shuttles.
It's so crazy fucking nice, fun and safe so I have no idea what you're talking about.
It's chaotic, but not terrifying or likely that dangerous given the speed / injury/deaths are very unlikely at such low speeds[1]. Vehicles are moving at near-walking speeds, and even with the added weight of carriages/cars, there's a lot of reaction time.
More of a meta-comment, but somebody working with AI to upscale/enhance images/videos ought to take a crack at making that picture quality better. Would be fascinating to generate a reasonable audio track as well of what it would have sounded like, especially as cars/motors accelerate, people shout things, etc. Certainly not an easy task, but would be super cool
As a Brit, ‘jaywalking’ is so alien to me. I once jaywalked in front of a police car who stopped and waved/signalled me across the road! Whenever I’m overseas, crossing anywhere when the road is clear is second nature to me and I have to remind myself not to. Conversely, you can always spot a foreigner in the UK: they’re the ones waiting for the signal at a deserted crossing at 2am.
I'd say the most common rule across Europe would be "you can cross anywhere as long as you're not within X meters of a crosswalk". As in if there is one within your line of sight, it's there for a reason and you should use it. If there isn't one, cross away.
In the US this is very regional. In NYC, you never weight a light. In places like Seattle (just as one example) and lots of other places, it's considered very rude to not wait.
And thank goodness someone did. Although, my boss getting ticketed for walking across an empty downtown LA street just shows it's still ripe for abuse. And the most ironic part was the cop running his car up onto the sidewalk to jump out and write the ticket.
"Starting Jan. 1, the Freedom to Walk Act officially becomes law, allowing pedestrians in California to jaywalk without fear of a ticket, as long as it's safe."
Also, most people including police misunderstand how jaywalking works, or is intended to work. Nobody should be expected to walk a mile out of their way simply because that is where the only crosswalk is. Jaywalking is technically only possible near a crosswalk, so if the pedestrian was near a crosswalk but didn't use it, then that would be jaywalking. If the pedestrian is say half a mile from the nearest crosswalk, they are free to cross so long as they yield to oncoming traffic and don't cross dangerously.
As a European I never really got what "jaywalking" is. We just cross the streets whenever we want and whenever it's safe. It's not allowed on motorways off course, but they usually have fences, so you can't do that anyway. In some countries you need to use a pedestrian crossing if there is one within 20-50m.
If there is are traffic lights and they are red, you're not allowed to walk. Germans really seem to care about those rules, in many other countries people also walk on red lights if there are no cars coming, and nobody cares.
If you don't like this law, then come to Baltimore. Civil disobedience is practiced widely. Car drivers are constantly under threat of random people walking right in front of them without looking.
A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)
While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications ... how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet, as we explained in paragraphs 59-76, all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence. [21] The same process will continue in the future. Take genetic engineering, for example. Few people will resist the introduction of a genetic technique that eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent harm and prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements taken together will make the human being into an engineered product rather than a free creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on your religious beliefs).
Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only one direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back, but technology can never take a step back—short of the overthrow of the whole technological system.
How quickly we forget history. Horses were also lethal. Look at the number of people killed by horses, either being thrown from them, trampled by them, or run over by carts pulled by horses. Streets were not some utopic garden of pedestrian safety prior to cars. There were no jaywalking rules because society had evolved over thousands of years being rather acceptive of horse-related dangers. When the new device came around, no matter its relative danger, then new regulations were needed. There were once almost zero regs regarding candles, objects that killed thousands almost daily by fire. But soon after electricity came along then we suddenly needed rules to manage the new "dangerous" thing despite its use preventing untold thousands of deaths.
No other country has anything to teach the USA. The USA is unique and special for a large number of reasons and so foreign methods won't work here. If I recall they even drive on the other side of the road in the UK, that will never catch on here.
Might I point out that driver testing is more stringent in most of those countries. This can also partially explain lower vehicle fatalities as well, even on higher speed roads like the autobahn. Road design and other technical factors can help, but at the end of the day, ignorant or stupid people will still make stupid choices.
Edit: why disagree? We should be focusing on education and testing for the best improvement as it will be beneficial to multiple problems.
Germany always is doing super well in these rankings. Yet 2/3rd of the highways have no speed limit at all. It's of course unsurprising: all cars are driving in the same direction on the highway so head-on collisions on the highways are extremely rare.
Also pedestrian deaths on the highway: the number is so minuscule it doesn't even register.
However, crossing the autobahn on foot is actually forbidden (§ 18, Absatz 9, StVO), so there is a "jaywalking" law in Germany that probably helps reducing pedestrian deaths on the highway.
>> head-on collisions on the highways are extremely rare.
And they aren't as dangerous as many would think. Cars have done lots to improve such collisions (airbags, crumple zones). A head-on collision between cars is still two relatively lightweight objects. Hit a concrete wall, overpass support, cliff or tree and you are going up against an object that makes a care look like tinfoil. The head-on seems bad, but it is more survivable than having your car bisected around a tree trunk. Or get pulled under a big truck.
In terms of the physics involved, a head-on collision with a similar vehicle traveling at the same speed as you is equivalent to hitting a concrete wall.
Yes, in the classroom physics lesson. In reality, vehicles never hit perfectly square on to each other. They are slightly offset, causing them to rotate/spin around each other during the collision, spreading a single impact into multiple smaller ones. Or the taller car climbs over the shorter. It is very rare to see two cars squished into each other head on as would happen against a perpendicular wall.
Only for red traffic lights and marked pedesteian crossings. Everything else is fair game, as it should be. One has to love the fact that in the land of the free one cannot cross a street where one wants.
The land of the free has 50 states with various laws. Luckily mine is freer than most and we have no jaywalking laws. However, the pedestrian must yield to traffic but is allowed to cross when it’s safe. I suppose a city could enforce their own traffic law and make it illegal.
"Automakers accept the responsibility for the thing they've created and attempt to improve safety outcomes in a patchwork regulatory environment dominated by gridlock and disagreement."
I've noticed that people who don't drive usually don't have frame of reference of what cars are capable of, and usually don't understand all of the simultaneous requirements that must be fulfilled by drivers. So you get pedestrians who don't understand what the stopping distance of a car is, or pedestrians who don't recognize dangerous situations that they create.
In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians.
I've noticed that people who don't walk or bike usually don't have frame of reference of what cars are capable of, and usually don't understand all of the simultaneous requirements that must be fulfilled by pedestrians and cyclists.
So you get drivers who don't understand that they need to look both ways even on a one way street, because someone might be using the sidewalk, drivers that don't pay attention to walk signals at intersections, drivers that speed down low traffic streets, or drivers who don't recognize dangerous situations that they create.
I own a car, but I bike and walk a lot. The person driving the mutli-ton machine should carry the responsibility of operating it safely. It is a big responsibility, but it is their responsibility to not hurt or threaten others.
I understand the reasoning behind wanting this to be some kind of David v Goliath story, but this is the real world.
Cars don't stop as fast as feet. Everybody is a pedestrian sometimes but not everyone is a driver. You can say accountability belongs to one or the other but one is gonna walk away and one isn't. Personal responsibility should take precedent over right of way.
You cannot regulate or control others, but you can regulate yourself.
I'm fine with cars having the right of way. They pay for the roads with sales tax, excise tax, gas tax, registration fees, inspection fees, insurance that pays for all kinds of things, and the car itself which is a huge investment into the economy. Quite literally it is the drivers who pay for the infrastructure used by everyone on the road. They earned it.
> You cannot regulate or control others, but you can regulate yourself.
However, we are subject to the regulations of the people who came before us, who set up the street and road system to prioritize car transit over other forms of transit.
You can't simply ignore that existing system of controls away and claim the main issues are "personal responsibility" and self-regulation.
Not after over a century of explicit laws that shaped the very way you live and how you judge what is normal.
> They pay for the roads with sales tax, excise tax, gas tax
"Nationwide in 2011, highway user fees and user taxes made up just 50.4 percent of state and local expenses on roads. State and local governments spent $153.0 billion on highway, road, and street expenses but raised only $77.1 billion in user fees and user taxes ($12.7 billion in tolls and user fees, $41.2 billion in fuel taxes, and $23.2 billion in vehicle license taxes).[3] The rest was funded by $30 billion in general state and local revenues and $46 billion in federal aid (approximately $28 billion derived from the federal gasoline tax and $18 billion from general federal revenues or deficit financed)."
An estimated $597 per U.S.household per year in general tax revenue dedicated to road construction and repair. That's a $597 donation from every non-driving household to every driving household, annually.
Presumably all those people have their food delivered from the farm to their house on foot? If they ever have a heart attack they will call EMTs to run to them with a stretcher and walk them to the hospital? And they built their home and furniture with trees felled on the lot they live on?
The (false) assertion was "Quite literally it is the drivers who pay for the infrastructure used by everyone on the road. They earned it."
The comment you replied to points out that it was false.
You are correct that there are secondary advantages. However, the advantages you listed don't require the extensive and expensive road system the US has. Furthermore, there are secondary disadvantages you must also consider.
> Presumably all those people have their food delivered from the farm to their house on foot?
You are viewing things through a century of laws meant to encourage vehicle transport over other forms of transport.
In places where there are much stronger limits on vehicle transport, you still have truck transport to local grocery stores, but they may be limited to morning delivery hours, or using streets where pedestrians always have the right-of-way over cars.
You're probably wondering how people get to the stores. Historically there were corner stores within walking distance, where you would go for essentials, and larger stores you might visit once a week or less. These were replaced by supermarkets, with a larger selection, on the assumption people could drive there and buy many things at once. This lead to Wal-Mart and other big box stores, on the edge of town where land was cheap, and which could only be reached by cars. Public taxes subsidized the road system to get to these larger stores, and made it harder for local stores to compete, leading to an inter-dependency which is hard to break.
Furthermore, during COVID our local stores started offering home delivery service, and they've continued to do so. Having one vehicle deliver to 50 homes means fewer cars on the streets, and less need for parking, so less need for driving infrastructure.
> If they ever have a heart attack they will call EMTs to run to them with a stretcher and walk them to the hospital?
> And they built their home and furniture with trees felled on the lot they live on?
Even if personal vehicles were banned - which isn't going to happen! - there's still the 50% of the road budget which comes from taxes. That is enough to maintain a road system which can provide delivery, construction transport, emergency services, and more.
In any case, why should the law be that transport and construction vehicles require right-of-way over pedestrians even in the middle of a city block?
As for the secondary effects, why do we have so many paved roads when gravel roads would do? Building and maintaining paved roads is more expensive. But drivers can go faster on paved roads, and traditionally US roads were optimized for drivers.
Why do we have city road lanes which are 12-feet wide when 10-foot or 9-foot is safer and takes up less space from other uses? But drivers can go faster with wide lanes (which makes any collisions or crashes more deadly).
Why do they need to go faster? Partially because of post-war sprawl, enabled by cars and ideas of zoning purity. Cul-de-sac layouts, which are meant as a way to be safe in a car-dominated community, end up re-enforcing that car dependency, as they are hard to live in without a car.
Furthermore, the larger plot size of suburban living means city utilities like power, water, and sewage, are more expensive per capita than more compact pre-war areas.
I see plenty of people who are drivers also clearly incapable of meeting or understanding all the simultaneous requirements that must be fulfilled by drivers.
Looking up from their phones being at the top of the list.
> In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians.
A great example of this is pedestrians in San Francisco. I've never seen more entitled oblivious assholes that pedestrians there. They seem to have no situational awareness and blithely jump out in front of cars. One of my favorite stupid pedestrian tricks is them jumping out from between parked cars crossing without so much as turning their heads to look for cars.
Thankfully I don't have to deal with SF pedestrians very often. The city very obviously hates cars but is decidedly dependent on them existing. The pedestrians there act dumber than a deer in the rut.
Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed.
These are not environmentally friendly alternatives. They are Chinesium E-waste with low quality batteries. They will be driven for one or two years then put in a closet and forgotten about. When they do get used they typically cause more greenhouse gasses from regular cars that have to yield to them, or stop busy intersections so they can cross.
As an avid dirt bike rider it is especially frustrating because these are usually the same people (yuppies) who would call the police on me if I took my 17 year old 200cc dirt bike down the same trails.
"Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed."
Wait, where is the place e-bikes should be in your opinion, then?
At least where I live, the laws are quite clear which type of vehicles are allowed where. The laws here generally allow a pedal-assisted ebike to ride whereever a non-electric bicycle may ride. The pedal-assist is important.
So yeah, you probably can't ride your motorbike down a pedestrian path ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nowhere but private property or registered OHRV trail. Same as a 4 wheeler.
They are bad for the environment. Worse then small motorcycles. Most of the time when you see them they are crossing 8 lane intersections with the walk signal and there are 25 cars idling waiting for them to GTFO the way. If that person were riding a conventional motorcycle they would be part of traffic and contributing financially to support the infrastructure they require. Rather they are leeches. Slowing everything down and giving untrained motorists unregulated motor vehicles.
They are made to last 2 years tops and will need new batteries shipped from China. Chances are the owners will outgrow them or get bored. Then they will end up in a land fill instead of a junkyard like normal motorcycles that get recycled almost completely.
Same with the oil industry and `reduce, reuse, recycle` nonsense. Like I wouldn't need to be concerned with that if your product didn't individually wrap every item I can purchase in a store.
Reduce, reuse, recycle isn't nonsense, but good sense. What is nonsense is how the fossil fuel industry uses it as a shield to avoid taking responsibility for the damage they do to the world.
Except for the speeding laws. And the red light/intersection/right-of-way laws. And the drunk driving laws. Those laws placed plenty of the responsibility on drivers.
Maybe I’m just thinking outside of the box here, but how exactly do 3,000 lbs pieces of metal and glass become safer for people crossing the street in an addressable way by auto makers, when it’s the buyers demanding larger and larger vehicles?
On segregated bike lanes, I’m afraid to tell you, cyclists don’t use them anyway, so why on earth should anyone focus on putting them in?
Cyclists very much use segregated bike lanes. The problem with most cities, mine included, is that the “segregated” bikes lines are segregated by a strip of paint on the ground. And have cars darting in and out all the time. Or people park in them, or put out their trash, or have major potholes.
Or, if they are actually separated, they don’t go everywhere people would need to go.
The safest 3000lb piece of metal and glass is the one that doesn’t exist. Car companies need to stop advertising fairy tales to buyers to get them to buy bigger and bigger cars, and need to start advertising (lobby) to cities to have them start banning cars out of. Ore and more of the city.
As long as our cities stay designed with the primacy of cars in mind, we’ll at best be duct tapping solutions for everyone else.
And finally, “in an addressable way by auto makers, when it’s the buyers demanding larger and larger vehicles”.
A) this is not inevitable, it is North America that’s dominated by a want of giant cars. And why? Because the roads and culture are designed specifically to accommodate them.
B) the car manufacturers are still responsible for making them, and it’s not like they’re sitting around saying “darn, well it looks like people want big cars, guess we will have to make some bigger cars”. No, they are actively pushing and advertising bigger cars.
Oh cyclists do use segregated lanes, they just have to be done properly. Primarily they need to be safer than sharing the road with heavy vehicles, something that most bike lines spectacularly fail at.
My dash cam filled with video of cyclists riding in a car lane beside a protected bike lane, and otherwise ignoring signage (stop and yield signs, signs stating road exceptions where bikes must use and share the sidewalk with pedestrians instead of the road) is definitely not ridiculous.
Also hilariously “why do cyclists not use the bike lanes” is a top alternative question result when searching bike lanes. Clearly this is not some random anecdote. Cyclists frequently do not use the bike lanes, and I am absolutely not anywhere near the only person to observe this frequently.
Never mind that:
-Protected bike lane implementations often congest and slow traffic, which increases idling and carbon emissions no matter how many people say they’ll bike if it was safer. They won’t get their fat ass off out of bed 40 minutes earlier. You’re kidding yourself.
-in colder climates, they’re useless for 50% of the year and exceptionally increase carbon footprints
-some cities don’t actually observe reduced injuries from protected bike lanes (often because cyclists are extremely prone to ignoring the rules of the road), and cyclists disregard their own safety and get slapped by a turning vehicle, for example. We often see the excuse that “cars should pay more attention” and they should, but also, motorcyclists have built a sentiment that you have to “ride like you’re invisible”, whereas cyclists tend to “ride like you’re the king of the road”. This is not just a car problem, but an arrogant community with a lack of self preservation problem.
Okay, are you talking about protected (physical separation) or unprotected (paint on the road) bike lanes? The latter are unsafe [1][2][3][4][5] and therefore unused. It's usually safer for a cyclist to ride in the middle of the lane (primary position) than to use the unsafe unprotected bike lane.
> Protected bike lane implementations often congest and slow traffic, which increases idling and carbon emissions no matter how many people say they’ll bike if it was safer. They won’t get their fat ass off out of bed 40 minutes earlier. You’re kidding yourself.
As this goes against everything I've ever seen and read, I'm gonna have to request some citations. Induced demand has been well understood for decades, and yes, the more (safe!) biking infrastructure gets built, the more people bike and the fewer cars end up on the road.
> -in colder climates, they’re useless for 50% of the year and exceptionally increase carbon footprints
> -some cities don’t actually observe reduced injuries from protected bike lanes (often because cyclists are extremely prone to ignoring the rules of the road), and cyclists disregard their own safety and get slapped by a turning vehicle, for example. We often see the excuse that “cars should pay more attention” and they should, but also, motorcyclists have built a sentiment that you have to “ride like you’re invisible”, whereas cyclists tend to “ride like you’re the king of the road”. This is not just a car problem, but an arrogant community with a lack of self preservation problem.
No, it's an infrastructure problem. Safety must be built into the transportation system by design. Cyclists ignoring the rules of the road are irrelevant when they barely have to interact with cars in the first place (rules of the road only exist because of cars).
Buyers buy what's available and automakers comply with regulations. It's the regulations that need changing.
Apparently in the US, it's easier for automakers to meet the efficiency requirements by increasing the weight of their vehicles instead of actually making them more efficient.
Moreover, crash testing does not include crashes with pedestrians.
The results are predictable - the rise of big, heavy, wall-like-bumper, limited visibility pedestrian killing machines.
> Automakers passed the responsibility on to people who don't even drive.
We have roads. They are shared by all users and taxpayers for common purposes. The responsibilities are likewise shared. The available technology changed. We can't expect to force the prior status quo to continue to exist in the face of available technological changes.
This article points out that attitudes like your similarly existed at the time and contributed to the apparent delay in creating a reasonable solution.
Okay.. so what if they skipped gasoline and built electric from the start? That's "sustainable" according to some modern definition. What should we have done then?
Meanwhile.. take a look at the way life was 120 years ago. Are you eager to go back to the rural life of farm labor that implied for the majority of Americans?
I immediately thought of this as well (horse sleigh scene in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment comes to mind, I mean, neither of us has experience with horse-first transportation, I assume).
I just arrived at a different conclusion. To compare the number of people killed by automobiles and their infrastructure, compared to the numbers for people killed by horses (I can't give precise numbers for either, I'll admit that) - that comparison seems absurd to me.
In other words, relative to the population in urban areas, I'd be very surprised if horses causes as many deaths as cars+roads.
Well, the "village idiot" was usually one not because he was born this way and his parents cared for him until adulthood, but because he got kicked by a horse/cow and survived, albeit with brain damage.
Actually, it wasn’t new technology — the 20th century saw a massive shift in expectations around health and safety and it reverberated through every part of life, regardless of whether new technology was involved.
It had more to do with secular humanism almost fully supplanting diverse traditional value systems at the government level, and with capitalism’s insatiable hunger for living bodies that can produce and consume widgets.
As a motorcyclist I wish jaywalking was a crime in my country. Here people step out in front of you out of nowhere. A collision with a pedestrian would ruin my year at least if it didn't kill me.
My issue, as a driver, is that more and more pedestrians walk wherever and whenever they want with complete disregard for their environment. I’ve had to hit the brakes pretty hard on several occasions when I had “right of way” (right turn light, for example) and a pedestrian stepped off the curb with their face buried in their phone.
I see the fines for jaywalking as a function to encourage safety rather than criminalizing sensible behaviour (ie crossing a completely empty street probably won’t yield a fine but crossing a busy street while holding your arm out to stop traffic will, and should).
My issue, as a pedestrian, is that more and more drivers are driving with complete disregard for their environment. I've had to jump or run out of the way on several occasions when I had "right of way" (crosswalks or stop signs, for example) and drivers accelerate right through with their face buried in their phone.
This problem also exists when cycling on shared bike gutters where oblivious drivers veer out of their lane into the bike lane, roll through stop signs, or are just generally unaware that they're sharing the road with people not surrounded by 1 ton of steel.
A pedestrian stepping into the street isn't going to kill other people with their negligence - the burden of caution should not be placed onto them.
Here in Vancouver, I see bad drivers, cyclists who don’t abide by the rules for cyclists, and pedestrians that are also a careless.
I don’t disagree that there are bad drivers, but unfortunately it’s the cyclists and pedestrians who pay the highest price for either their or a drivers negligence.
So if I’m a pedestrian, I’m going to make sure the cars are stopping before I step into traffic. Doesn’t matter if I’m right or not, I don’t want to be dead.
The difference is that you’re cocooned in a tonne of steel, hurtling along at speeds which kill pedestrians. The onus is on both parties to be vigilant, but it’s more on you as a driver. As soon as you get over this entitled view, like the road is your own little go-kart track, it’s so much easier to drive safely. I used to hold the same view until I started walking regularly and could understand how much the game is tipped towards cars. Their environment is unescapable and every time you interact with a road as a ped. there’s a huge chance you might die. There’s nearly no chance you’ll die by hitting a pedestrian as you drive. Just drive slower and pay more attention. It’s just not that bloody hard at all.
Contrary to your characterization of me, I’m a cautious driver. What in my post led you to believe I’m entitled?
> Their environment is unescapable and every time you interact with a road as a ped. there’s a huge chance you might die.
I’m not excusing bad driving, but when I walk, this is plenty enough reason for me to be doubly cautious. I don’t trust any driver until they’ve stopped.
They’re complaining about pedestrians not being vigilant. I’m saying drive slower and more carefully, fully expecting that peds will carelessly cross the road, and there will be fewer issues.
We agree that you did make up the "go-kart" nonsense.
On responsibility - each party has one. Don't stumble across streets glued to your phone; don't drive recklessly. There's no point pretending one is the real responsibility. It just adds noise.
If you find yourself having to hit the brakes hard frequently because a pedestrian stepped off the curb while being distracted, you probably also need to pay more attention while driving.
My general experience is that in practice, in most areas, most drivers don't yield enough and most pedestrians yield too much because the pedestrian has a lot more to lose. It's also important to remember that driving is a privilege specifically granted by the state, walking is not.
Then again, the only reason that that's particularly dangerous is because of the car. Such behaviour in front of a bike, for example, would ve annoying but not really dangerous.
Nonsense. How much do you think bike parts cost? Basic pads for a bike are about $10-15, depending on rim or disc brakes. With most rim brakes you only an allen key. Most cars need a tool to depress the piston, not to mention you have to lift the car and remove, remove lugs, etc. Compared to a disc bike, you can compress the caliper using only a tire lever, and most bikes have quick release hubs or worst case 2 nuts to remove per wheel.
> Most cars need a tool to depress the piston, not to mention you have to lift the car and remove
mechanics do it for 50 euros here.
And I can change my brake pads, everybody could do it, it's just that people are unaware of how easy it is.
They mostly are unaware of how easy it is to change brakes on a bike too, that's why bike shops make more money than car shops compared to the amount of work required.
Plus one on the huge gulf between how easy the job actually is and how hard people think it is.
I’ve shown about 5 friends how to do it. I don’t think any have continued to DIY additional work, but I tried and at least they know a bit more about their car now.
> Maintaining a bike is cheaper and easier than maintaining a car.
but very few do it, given that they are not forced to keep it functional, unlike here, where I live, where your car has to pass a state mandated safety inspection every 2 years.
of course: this is the largest bike parking in the Netherlands (6,000 bikes) [1]
You can see by yourself the kind of the average bike and its maintenance state
notice: I deliberately chose the Netherlands because it's the country with the most bikes, the best infrastructures for bikes and with the best kept bikes, so Imagine that 90% of the bikes in Europe are in much worse shape that those you can see in the picture.
That's the thing. If it weren't for the prioritization of auto traffic, crossing the street at arbitrary places and times would still be "sensible behavior".
Everything you think you know about cities and the role of pedestrians is wrong -- a distortion introduced by auto companies to diminish walking and public transport and encourage automobile purchases. We are currently radically rethinking our cities and imagining a greatly diminished role for cars in them.
> That's the thing. If it weren't for the prioritization of auto traffic, crossing the street at arbitrary places and times would still be "sensible behavior".
That's not really correct.
Even if all types of traffic (cars, pedestrians, bikes, etc) had the same priority you will often get much better flow for everyone and improved safety by requiring traffic streams going in different direction to cross to certain points, and in higher traffic areas requiring some kind of turn taking at crossings.
This is often even true when you've only got one type of traffic.
He said it was at a right turn light. That suggests an intersection where there is a specific traffic light for controlling right turns.
Those are usually synchronized with the walk signals controlling the crosswalks that the right turns will cross, so that the car does not have a green at the same time the pedestrians have a walk signal.
This is like saying automakers destroyed the trolly system. It was the people that did this by popular opinion. Most people in the US use cars, like the convenience of cars, and will vote in a car centric manner. Blaming automakers is just absolving the people of blame.
I am all for a pedestrian focused city, BUT cars will likely never fully disappear for emergencies, shipments, and people with disabilities.
In this particular situation I feel like while the Automakers had ulterior motives it was ultimately a net good. Pretty sure we know who will win in in a car vs a human body.
Also as much as I do believe in pedestrian focused cities, that isn't the norm in the US and likely will never be and will instead of smaller pockets (I mean it just makes sense given how large the country is). We should have more car free zones, but where we have to share the space it makes sense.
I am not going to sit here on a high horse and say I don't jay walk. But I do it knowing the risks.
In other places cars are supposed to stop for pedestrians even on non crossings, in practice the penalties for hitting and killing them are way lower than killing a person in another situation.
In California it was the same. A pedestrian is the vulnerable party in any interaction with a motor vehicle, so it makes sense that the pedestrian always has the right of way. But, it was still illegal for a pedestrian to "jay walk". So, if you, as a driver, hit a pedestrian crossing outside an intersection, both you and the pedestrian could both be cited. This year, "jay walking" was decriminalized in California-- and, it turns out pedestrians still try to avoid being maimed/killed by cars even without the threat of fines.
Even with right of way, and decriminalizing "jay walking", the pedestrian can still be assigned some portion of fault in an accident, which e.g., may prevent the pedestrian from successfully suing the driver to pay for medical costs.
Pedestrians should also take responsibility for acting dangerously.
To me it's the same if a driver cuts in front of me and then slams on their brakes, there was nothing I could have done about crashing into them no matter how safely I was driving.
If a person runs in front of a moving vehicle it shouldn't be the driver responsible if they basically cut the car off. A car can't stop on a dime.
Drivers should be held responsible if they were clearly driving in an unsafe manner, but we have the share the space somehow.
If you can't "stop in a dime" somewhere you might expect pedestrians, either the speed limit is too high or you're speeding.
You mention drivers cutting in front and pedestrians running out into the street, but not drivers who aren't paying due attention or who think that amber lights are advisory at best and a signal to speed up at worst. I'm one of those saps who actually crosses at pedestrian crossings even where there's no obligation for me to do so, and I make a habit of counting how many cars run an amber light when I come to traffic lights. I've found that you can guarantee at least one will, even if the speed limit is low enough that they could literally "stop on a dime", and more than likely, you'll get up to three doing the same.
And then there's the number of times I've seen people run reds, including at a pedestrian crossing where I wouldn't be alive if I didn't trust drivers.
So, I'll have more sympathy for drivers when they stop running lights, and until then I'll continue to turn my head towards oncoming traffic when I cross so the driver who might end up killing me has my face seared into their brain.
That sounds like a you problem. Why is it up to the pedestrian (who may have never driven a motor vehicle) to anticipate the performance characteristics of this large metal vehicle in the street ?
The UK already has designated areas with no pedestrians ("Motorways" ~= US highways [?]) and it has expended considerable resources closing or diverting at-grade crossings of railways (which obviously have a more extreme version of the "can't stop on a dime" problem). You aren't allowed on most airstrips at all, without special permission, in a vehicle or otherwise - so that mostly leaves cars hitting pedestrians, seems robustly like that's actually always the car driver's fault even if (as we see for "Jay-walking") they'd prefer to pretend it was not.
> Why is it up to the pedestrian (who may have never driven a motor vehicle) to anticipate the performance characteristics of this large metal vehicle in the street ?
Because we have to share the space?
Replace car with bike, and while the risk to the person walking is far less than with a car it's the same idea.
Just pay attention and realize that you can stop on a dime (at least if your walking) as a human and something on wheels cannot. If you are a teenager and older and you don't know that a car can't stop on a dime and you run in front of one I don't know what to tell you, you should wether or not you have ever driven a car before.
Ignorance is not a defense in my opinion.
Edit:
Also I am going to point out that any of our opinions on who is at fault, laws, or whatever has zero impact if your in the hospital or dead because you did something stupid as a pedestrian.
"That sounds like a you problem. Why is it up to the pedestrian (who may have never driven a motor vehicle) to anticipate the performance characteristics of this large metal vehicle in the street ?"
That is a pretty absurd take.
Knowing that a ton of steel moving fast can kill you is a necessary knowledge in modern civilization, much like knowing that an enraged mammoth can kill you was a necessary knowledge in the Stone Age. And normal parents teach their children how to be safe(r) in the street long, long before they could possibly become drivers themselves.
We are arguing about the burden. Right now, the burden of preventing accidents is placed on pedestrians and kids. Everyone on foot needs to look carefully, and only step on the road when it is safe
We could revert this burden. The cars need to drive in a way that, if a kid appears at a distance of X meters, they can fully stop without touching the kid. This would mean slower speeds and perhaps better breaks.
Instead of parents afraid for their kids, we could get drivers afraid of jail, losing cars, heavy fines.
There is no question that, when a car is allowed at absurd speeds (like 20 miles per hour -- see the graph in https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds) then the motorist has no time to react and incurs a risk of killing people. If we manage to restrict the speed to 20 mph everywhere a pedestrian might be reasonably expected, then the driver can (physically) react.
What you are saying is basically: I want to drive in a monstrous speed so that it is impossible for me to prevent accidents, so you should prevent accidents. The problem is not the fact that the speed precludes your ability not to murder children (we agree it does!) but that you insist to be allowed to drive at those speeds anyway.
What "burden"? You might not even be alive today if it weren't for cars and all they've enabled.
You're basically saying we should make cars uselessly slow, because "think of the children!!!1"
It's trivial to look for cars when crossing the road. If you think otherwise, that's just your misguided ideology. Even animals know well enough to not put themselves in danger; and for the ones which don't, Darwin wins.
No. I've had enough of these insane ideological battles.
I am interested. You seem to be espousing a belief (that I hope I don't get wrong): "driving above 20mph in a city environment gives significant economic benefits, and should not be curtailed".
In roads, between cities, the benefits are obvious (or at least, I agree with you that they are substantial). So I expressed the belief you seem to hold with an added hypothesis of 'city environment'.
Do you agree with the belief as I quoted? Was I fair?
If so, why do you think so? I just tried some different paths in my city (currently with very low traffic) in google maps. The greatest average speed I was able to find was 26 mph. The city seems to work fine and have good economic development.
I used
>>> distance_in_km/((time_in_minutes)/60) * 0.62
(is this wrong? I don't think so)
Might be the case that I just lack intuition, but the advantages of much higher speeds inside the city limits do not seem obvious from an economic standpoint.
I would indeed hesitate if I believe that this would have any significant economic cost. A small reduction in productivity can be very costly in human suffering.
As to 'my side', I am not saying only that I want to reduce accidents. I am saying that I want to reduce accidents while increasing the amount of time people can safely spend outdoors and while increasing the activities that they can do outdoors.
The idea that a significant part of our cities must be (or simply is) high speed road is a choice, and I think it merits discussion.
> To me it's the same if a driver cuts in front of me and then slams on their brakes, there was nothing I could have done about crashing into them no matter how safely I was driving.
It shouldn't be. The risk to you is much greater if you hit another car, than if you hit a pedestrian.
Addtionally, while you are right that a car can't stop on a dime, speeds have a large influence on the size of coin needed for a car to come to a complete stop. And I think we both know that they are not linear.
Over the decades, posted speed limits in North America have only increased.
> It shouldn't be. The risk to you is much greater if you hit another car, than if you hit a pedestrian.
True but the idea to me is the same for this particular situation, it is something running in front of a moving vehicle with little to no chance to do anything about it as a driver.
You are right for speeds and too many people drive too fast in an urban setting, but even a reasonable driving at 20-30 mph can still cause damage.
All I am trying to say here is everyone take responsibility for their own actions and don't assume that just because you are a pedestrian that cars are going to get out of your way since they may not physically be able too. Same for drivers, don't assume you have the right away because you are in a car.
Oh, and what's the definition of "near" you may ask? While in Germany almost everything is regulated in detail, the definition of "near" is up to the cop.
ObJoke: it's midnight somewhere in Europe and no car in sight, but some people are waiting for the traffic light to turn green? You can bet that these are Germans ;-0