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Comment by rpearl | Hacker News Reader

On Friday I decided to count the number of drivers running reds, since everyone gives cyclists a hard for doing so.

My commute in San Francisco involves crossing 16 streets. It's not very far, about 2.5 miles.

On Friday I observed 35 cars run red lights--not even "it's yellow and time to speed up because drivers don't give a single flying crap about safety" but literally the cross traffic lane is green.

Cars are a terrible unsustainable mess, ruining the environment and ruining city livability. It's not surprising that the risks they impose on the rest of the world are resulting in less people willing to bike

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I live in San Francisco, and get around the city as a pedestrian. I have to cross about 10 streets each way of my commute.

If I had to guess, I'd say that I've seen at most 35 cars run red-lights in the last year.

Am I just not noticing them? Are we counting "running a red-light" differently? I'm having a hard time figuring out why our numbers are so different.

My commute is down market st, 4th to Castro, which is particularly bad. I bike. What happens is that at _every_ major market st crossing, cars will run their red (actual red, not yellow), and then stop just before the crosswalk due to pedestrians beginning to cross. They'll remain stopped in the middle of cross lane traffic for essentially the entirety of the light (Hey, if they didn't get to go why should anyone get to?!) , though sometimes they'll try to wedge themselves through pedestrian traffic, because driving a car turns people into assholes and necessitates neglecting the safety of others. It is possible that pedestrians might not notice this nearly as often, due to being much less impacted by it. It's also a significantly worse problem during typical commute hours.

Due to the number of aggressively awful drivers in the city, I've ordered a dashcam for my bike, so I'll likely have some footage to demonstrate this soon. (Well, I hope not, but.)

Articles [0][1] cite a study [2] that people driving cars and bicycles admit to breaking the law at the same rate. I've just now found the study itself, so will be reading it's additional findings.

[0]: https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-18/survey-finds-bicyclis... [1]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/03/16/busting-the-myth-of-t... [2]: https://jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/871/875

Even if you don’t contest the results of those studies (I don’t) you have to admit the consequences are dramatically different.

Exactly. One of those types of vehicles cause hundreds of deaths per day. The other causes a miniscule fraction of that. Further, when running a red light, one of those vehicles has greatly-reduced visibility, and greatly-increased consequences for being wrong.

The question is: shouldn't one of those vehicles be held to a higher standard?

Strange. Here in the low lands (Netherlands) almost no cars cross red lights. Ever. Unless they are half asleep perhaps, but it just doesn’t happen.

The Netherlands is generally the best or second best place in the world to get around, though, is it not? I've considered moving there just for the bike infra (Utrecht comes up a lot in conversations with my wife, and Zwolle).

My daughter is 1. By the time she starts school I want her to be able to ride a bike to school without dying.

Utrecht is a really nice city with a great atmosphere. Give me a PM if you'd like to know more. I am from Amersfoort, which is a bit smaller, but still a nice city. Taking the bicycle from home to work is 20 minutes (7 km) straight into the centre, with 90% separated bicycle lanes. The remaining 10% is really safe to drive as well.

It's the same in the UK although they do all drive above the speed limit.

Definitely not the UK, but there's enough cultural similarity between the UK and Ireland (where I live) that your comment shocked me. People don't care _at all_ about red lights here and run them constantly. Taxis are especially bad offenders. They also park on the footpath, blocking prams and wheelchairs.

Where in the UK is this? Not my experience from the North that people respect red light.

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