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?
