Collision Course: a type of road junction that is dangerous for cyclists (2018)
singletrackworld.com
singletrackworld.com
I like this as an example of a problem that can be solved by engineering far more easily than by changing human behavior.
https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-th...
I don't recall the colors on the pavement.
Constant Bearing, Reducing Distance, mentioned farther down, is a naval concept, and if memory serves this is part of the protocol for lookouts (people standing in different places have different CBRD blind-spots).
I've seen this with my partner a few times, where some object is not exactly behind the A pillar but just close enough to it and maintaining a constant bearing, meanwhile she can't understand why I didn't see them coming (once in a while the shoe is on the other foot, and I yield for someone that she didn't see until the last moment).
The alternative route round works out at 5 minutes longer but in a national park that's pretty good, and the lives saved should be worth it. Map view here: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Ipley+Manor+Stables/@50....
(I've seen a lot of cardboard cutouts of police officers at various petrol stations in recent years. They do make you think twice when you see them out of the corner of your eye.)
It's bright red!
I'm not saying it isn't.
But in the UK most junctions are yield, so drivers don't approach junctions thinking 'I might have to stop' they think 'I'll have to yield', so if they aren't paying attention their default is to yield.
The MUTCD version: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/MUTCD_W3...
If you add multiple (large) signs ahead of the actual control device, you'll have higher compliance, since the unusual sign doesn't appear out of the blue.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=car+hitting+roundabout&t=vivaldi
Yes, the drivers should stop for the stop sign but they clearly don't. It's a UX problem. The junction should be fixed not the user.
For this reason, efforts to detect asteroids heading toward earth by detecting their motion against the background sky will fail over short time spans. That's because the ones on an actual collision course will not appear to move against the background for a few days prior to impact. An impactor will seem to come out of nowhere.
Our motion within the Solar System is relatively small if the asteroid is a very long way away; it's easy to find scenarios where a fast moving asteroid will appear stationary over a 6 month period.
Long story short, I was an idiot cyclist thinking I had calculated everything[1], when in fact, I hadn't. Someone in a car going northbound at about 60mph on Sansome had to slam on their brakes to save my life as I crossed from the right bicycle lane to chestnut. I was super lucky they were watching, and their brakes worked, and that they had enough reaction time.
From then on I have never ran stoplights. The problem is that, as they say, the first one is free. You might start out as a cyclist running a simple stop sign on a dead street. But as you get more comfortable, the temptation is to run ever more complex street lights. In my case, I only did it when I didn't see any cars. The problem with intersections like this is there are cars you cannot see.
[1] - Things to calculate:
1. Southeast bound car traffic on Embarcadero.
2. Whether there were southeast bound muni trains on the Embarcadero dividing route.
3. Whether there were northwest bound muni trains on the Embarcadero dividing route.
4. Cars behind you on northeast bound Embarcadero ( I had to cross from the bikelane on the left )
5. Northbound cars on Sansome. This is what I missed.
There is nowhere you gotta be that is so important that you should be committing moving violations to get there. The rules of the road apply to you ever bit as much as a car, and you have absolutely no moral authority at all if you won't even follow the goddamned traffic laws.
You are not only risking your own life, you're making the rest of us look bad, and creating hostile drivers that other people have to deal with.
In places, this recognition has actually been codified into law (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop).
It’s If a bicyclist and a driver approach a four way stop and the driver runs it, he can kill the bicyclist. If the bicyclist runs it, the driver can kill the bicyclist. While the risk is not symmetrical the outcome is the same.
One would think that the party with more risk would be less likely to run the stop sign but in my experience (which is probably not typical world wide) in the Bay Area the opposite is true. Although admittedly it seems the law just isn’t enforced here. Maybe unequal laws would more likely be enforced and some combination of personal risk plus enforcement would achieve the desired outcome.
Additionally many bicyclists are also drivers. So it might be prudent to penalize them for the behavior equally so that it discourages the behavior in general and removes dangerous drivers more easily; assuming their behavior on different vehicles correlates.
Another imo. important part of this is the (perceived) risk of running a red light. If I run a red light on my bicycle I yield for everyone, i.e. my speed is low and I only have to watch for cars that go straight through the crossing which are easy to predict. Basically no need to interact with anyone, simply watch out for cars. Following the lights is the opposite, my speed is generally higher and I have to interact with turning cars. All crashes involving cars that I've been in have either been cars that should have yielded when turning or cars that are blowing through stop/yield signs. This is generally how bicyclists get hurt and I mainly see it as an infrastructure issue. The problem is that infrastructure is relatively expensive to change and so the blame often seem to focus on the cyclist for "not following the rules" or "not wearing a helmet" and nothing really seems to change.
I'd also worry about bicycle-vs-bicycle collisions. Maybe density is too low to make this terribly likely, but it doesn't sound like a scenario that would go well either.
And when there are pushes for regulations to make cycling safer, they roll their eyes and vote against it, even when they're simple, effective, cheap measures.
The seemingly widespread belief among cyclists that they don't need to follow the rules of the road is, in my opinion, a large part of the reason Americans are so opposed to changing said rules to make cycling safer. There are a very large number of Americans who believe the primary reason cyclists get hurt is because the cyclist was doing something dangerous.
They also see many more cars flagrantly ignoring the law on a regular basis. On a normal late afternoon, I can stand outside the local supermarket and see 20+ cars jumping red lights, obstructing junctions, sitting on pedestrian crossings, etc. within half an hour.
> cyclists would rather throw themselves into oncoming traffic rather than dealing with the inconvenience of having to stop at stop lights.
Yes, as do a lot of car drivers.
Specifically, the issue is with Amber lights. The highway code says:
AMBER means ‘Stop’ at the stop line. You may go on only if the AMBER appears after you have crossed the stop line or are so close to it that to pull up might cause an accident
Observing car driving habits in London, an average of 2-3 cars break this rule every time a light cycles from green to red. This behaviour is legally the same as jumping the light on red. Cyclists are far less likely to break this rule (they're slower across the junction and are aware that that puts them in danger from the other lights going green).
If you factor in all those cars into your assessment, you'll probably find that cyclists are not worse than cars at obeying the law around traffic lights.
Normally end up with a bus in the bus lane and 3-4 cars sat in the junction across the pedestrian crossing on every light change at peak time.
Well there is your loophole big enough to drive a truck (lorry?) through even on an amber light!
/devils advocate
The loophole for a cyclist is that they could swing their leg off the bike and magically become a pedestrian, cross the stop line, get back on, and legally ride away across the junction regardless of lights. Given that swinging your leg off the bike makes no reasonable difference to anything, why get annoyed if they don't bother with that part?
Isn't it just like claiming a general exemption on all amber lights because doing anything might cause an accident?
* Some cyclists blatantly run a red light in the middle of the cycle, oftentimes out of nowhere. Overall, perceived as unpredictable behavior.
* Some drivers tend to run the yellow, and sometimes pass through the intersection a bit after the red has been on. It just happens that the red cycles overlap a bit, then the other drivers are still stopped, and alert for the road to clear. While annoying to lose 500ms of the start, it is fairly predictable and rarely leads to sudden brake slamming.
I have seen 3 accidents and maybe 100 near misses involving cyclists and have been in a few myself. In all of them, it was the cyclists fault.
Cyclists may have higher risks, but that doesn't seem to stop us from doing stupid dangerous things all the time. Although in fairness most near accidents I have seen are vagrants crossing a busy intersection without waiting for a green, seemingly with the intention of being run over.
I do that because I want to get out of this life without maiming or killing someone. I'm old enough to know it's long game and to know people that have accidentally killed people. And you don't want to go there. You might think that if it's not your fault it won't fuck with you. Trust me it will.
In the end it's the doors that got me, and it wasn't even the parked cars. After that I cut my losses and don't cycle any more.
In Japan, blowing a stop sign and killing a cyclist would be a "dangerous driving causing death" charge, which would result in a prison sentence, loss of your license, a fine, and ~$1,000,000 in compensation to the family of the person you hit.
While in general this system works fairly well, there does seem to be a lot of pressure to share blame as much as possible. The only person I know how got 100%/0% was T-boned by a driving going through the middle of a red light.
Also, cars are often judged to be be much more at fault than cycles. Perhaps this is why bicycles can often be very reckless on the roads: taking blind corners without slowing down, cycling on the wrong side of the road against traffic etc.
https://www.metafilter.com/137440/If-you-want-to-kill-someon...
In western cities I've noticed people are instead antagonistic, everyone is actively looking for something to be angry about. If they could help someone by moving a little bit, they won't, because it's their lane not yours.
If you move around stopped traffic to get to a safer spot on your bike, you'll get yelled at, sometimes the argument is that it's "Unfair", like children arguing over who gets the front seat. I feel like it's the car-centric infrastructure that leads people to think the city is for cars.
You don't see this attitude in foot traffic only areas like foot-malls and public transport, where people are seem more likely to help eachother, and you could liken parts of Osaka and Japan to a city-wide foot mall with some allowances for cars.
I also visited Sapporo and whilst there were still lots of bikes it was clear it was a more car focused city, and you could feel how much more difficult it was to move around the city because of it. More time waiting for cars to do their thing before you could do yours, instead of the other way around. So, I'm happy to put the blame squarely on the automobile.
I’ve stayed down the road from here (East Boldre) on a number of occasions so I’m familiar with the junction having both driven and cycled through it. I’ve even cycled through there with my kids in a bike trailer, which makes me feel a little sick.
A number of comments are suggesting larger engineering endeavour to fix the issue so it’s probably worth pointing out a few things about the environment, as it’s a fairly unusual place. This is a national park that’s been fairly untouched for a long time. There are a lot of large animals wondering around but rather than being fenced in, they mostly roam freely. They often just have reflective collars to help stop collisions at night where they frequently congregate on the road.
Furthermore, in the Uk in general, intervention seems to be strongly discouraged. Certainly compared to NZ, where I grew up, over here there seems to be more of an expectation that people should do the right thing without being nannied. I was told that when it comes to road intervention, it’s only post incident that changes will be made to prevent future situations from occurring.
Another anecdote. Where I worked in south London there was a junction on a hill where traffic coming down the hill wasn’t allowed to turn across the traffic coming up. There was a sign, but it wasn’t especially obvious. On a weekly basis there was a surveillance van with a camera that sat the fining people (later, through the post) if they broke the no turning rule. We complained to the council a number of times about it because we often saw near misses. It wasn’t until the day a motorbike went through a car windshield that a change was implemented. And, even then, it was only a chance to the signage.
Maybe if varies by state, but I grew up in a rural area of California, but every intersection I can remember has had at least one road required to stop (either a two-way stop sign, four-way stop sign, or traffic lights).
I get that stop signs are nearly illegal in the UK and some other parts of Europe, but that is the problem. In the US a driver on the minor road has to stop, look both ways, then proceed. It is to much safer than the driver on the minor road getting in the habit of not stopping and just plowing through a road that has the right of way.
If a cyclist on the minor road had a clear view, slowed down down, and looked both ways, they wouldn't need to come to a complete stop. A cyclist treating a stop sign like a yield sign is pretty only endangering themselves. A motorist plowing through a yield sign that should be a stop sign, or plowing through a stop sign, that is dangerous to other people.
I Could Do That in a Weekend https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23019816
Asking why the cost is some number is very different from claiming you could do it yourself for cheaper.
Is the biggest cost tearing up existing things, bringing out the heavy machines, the raw materials, the labor, or something else? How many man-hours are needed anyway? There is nothing wrong with asking why it costs a certain amount. The average person has zero expertise in the cost structure of laying paved road.
£100,000 sounds cheap. Two people already died. If I was a family member of a third victim, I would've wanted the government to pay £100,000. I would be asking government officials if it was worth it.
(Approx 125,000 USD at today's exchange rate)
"We are working with partners at New Forest District Council, the National Park Authority, English Nature, The Verderers, The Forestry Commission and the police to explore what can be done longer term and are currently carrying out a review of the junction, which we hope to finalise in the new year. The land beyond the paved road surface is Crown land and this will require permissions to be granted to us for any realignment of the road to be carried out."
Crown land (part of the national park, presumably) means it "belongs" to the queen, so that shouldn't be an issue.
Other comments on that discussion say the same offset junction has been done in many other places.
The best thing is probably for anyone who lives in Hampshire to write to their MP.
Scary looking link to guidelines.
https://fhwaapps.fhwa.dot.gov/hsipp/Attachments/aa343eab-2cb...
That said I looked at the intersection on google maps. Here it would have have had a stop sign at least or fixed decades ago.
> And secondly, significant movement of the head will bring previously obscured sections of road into view.
I've been doing it ever since, always translating and rotating my head quickly on crossings.
The point is that a crap-ton of these would serve as a useful warning to the wise.
>Speed bumps are a reasonable idea in terms of being a low-cost intervention, but regulations permit their use only under street lighting, so they cannot be used here.
Right-of-way isn't going to bring someone back to life.
So, even though the cars are approaching from behind the cyclist, they may see the cars approaching. And just like any right of way situation, they assume the cars will stop. Just like how you don't slow down just because you see someone waiting to go right on red.
Note: the OP intersection has gained stop signs over time to help avoid collisions.
If I gamble like you're saying, I would have been in some bad accidents. To prevent that, I just keep an eye on them, take my foot off the accelerate if necessary, lightly apply the brakes if necessary, etc. It's a dance, and it's not hard to avoid.
Edit: I don't cycle, but it's just as applicable to cars. The same blind spot problem is even applicable to planes. If you're a pilot, move your head! (My second paragraph is about some terrible curved highway merges.)
Difference is when this assumption is proven false in a car, it's generally more survivable than when you're on a bike or motorbike.
In all my decades of driving I have never seen anyone drive that way. I think I'd believe it with dashcam evidence only.
Better than driving ten over and assuming everyone can see every stop sign.
(Note also that all-way stops are rare outside of NA; it’s far more common to have roundabouts or clear priority, but you always keep an eye out.)
As a biker, this all applies doubly so, because one mistake like this can pretty frequently be fatal. Be paranoid or you risk death, there's no alternative.
Remember, only three cyclists have died at this intersection over the last six years while being a popular bike route. Not every cyclist is getting eliminated here. But it doesn't take many deaths to make you go "hmm, how can we design this intersection better?"
My point is that the answer to "why don't cyclists look to see if a car is running through the yield?" is probably "most of them do". That's why there were only three deaths in six years. It's a weird question to ask because even though you could scold those three people for not driving more defensively, the signage could simply be improved (and it was).
I don't believe I ever asked, or implied, that question.
I'll just add that there's a saying amongst motorcyclists that "there's no point being right if you're dead" - sure, the car _should've_ given way, but they often don't, so you have to ride like everyone will fail to give way, to ensure you have the best chance of survival.
You can take steps to be seen - put yourself in a cars sightlines and watch carefully for signs of not slowing down. But ultimately you are moving at a speed which means if someone absolutely guns it out a junction, or changes lanes without looking, you will be hit.
Watching carefully for signs of not being seen reduces the risk, sure. Often to acceptable levels. But it's always there.
Can you imagine that? A Tesla is stopped at a red light just before a pedestrian crossing. The Tesla can go from 0-30 mph before I can cross its width at walking pace. The walk light is on. I have the right-of-way. But considering the Tesla could go from 0-30 mph in the time I could pass it, your suggested course of action is to just wait until a slower-to-accelerate car stops at the intersection?
I'm not saying everyone can do that, and I think we agree that people shouldn't have to do that. Situational awareness, constantly coming up with alternative plans, and always making sure an "out" is available has kept me alive in dangerous situations. Anyway, that's how I live. People are wired diferently.
A Tesla is stopped at a red light just before a pedestrian crossing. The Tesla can go from 0-30 mph before you can cross its width at walking pace. The walk light is on. You have the right-of-way.
To answer your question, it's like I said: situational awareness. Is the driver only looking at oncoming traffic, or do they look around? It's rare, but I have waited at crosswalks with the walk light on because it wasn't safe. I have also walked out of the way or not walked when a driver still saw me and went anyway.
After all, situational awareness doesn't bring people back to life.
That would be a poor deduction.
It seems like you have a bone to pick. I don't care to facilitate or engage in such behaviors.
But, yes, a car with that much acceleration has no business on the public roadways.
Defensive driving simply means to not assume drivers are going to take an action until they give evidence of it.
If a driver is going to stop at an intersection, they will slow down before they get to the intersection. A defensive driver approaching a crossing with other cars approaching will look for evidence that the other cars are slowing down before assuming that they will stop.
If a car is stopped at a pedestrian crossing and a defensive pedestrian is looking to cross, they will look for evidence the car is about to accelerate into the crossing. They don't assume the car will suddenly accelerate for no reason, because there is no evidence that they would! Evidence that they may suddenly accelerate includes things like looking down at their phone, or not looking at pedestrians. If the defensive pedestrian sees that evidence they approach the crossing with caution, ready to take evasive action or not enter the crossing if needed.
Right-of-way tells everyone who has the right of way, it makes the expected behaviour clear. Assuming that everyone else will do what you expect them to do is extremely dangerous, as even without malice or carelessness it's very easy for each invloved party to have different assumptions about the expected bahviour.
So, to be defensive it's important to
- have a well informed understanding of what you think should happen
- look for evidence that all parties are acting in accordance with what you think should happen
- be prepared to change your actions if any party does not act in accordance with what you think should happen
I don't read it charitably because of the sanctimony involved in not reading an accident situation with the Understanding Human Error strategy, thereby leading to a bunch of low-quality comments about how people should just be better, involving poor understanding of public health and traffic engineering principles.
It's true, I probably shouldn't engage when the nth accident analysis by a HNer is "Why didn't the pilot just not crash into the mountain? When I see a mountain I just avoid crashing into it". No one is likely to get anything from that.
It was a stop with a right turn only onto a one way street with fairly fast (45 MPH) traffic. A large hedge abutted the sign, making it hard to see more than ten feet of sidewalk.
I looked right as I was pulling up to stop, sidewalk clear. I look left and see it’s clear for just enough to get into tragic. I don’t complete my stop, I’m doing less than 5 MPH and decide to punch it and I hear a scream just as a woman on a bike enters my vision passing right in front of me. She yells at me that she had right of way.
I try to tell her that riding 15 MPH on the sidewalk against traffic requires defensive riding skills. Right of way or not she shouldn’t have ridden in front of me when I was clearly looking the other direction. But before I can finish, another biker going with traffic on the road tells me she’s right and to shut up.
And I do, because I am embarrassed that I did California stop and that contributed to nearly running her over. I was also in the wrong. But people California stop all day long and as a biker I always assume they might.
If you’re going to ride a bike on the sidewalk you should act like a pedestrian, for everyone’s safety.
If there is a bike lane/acceptable shoulder, you should be riding on that.
Because of the layout of the junction the cars are actually approaching from behind the cyclists.
Of the vehicles in the video we see traversing a stop sign, I count 5 cars that come to a stop and 5 that do not. (One bicycle crosses: it comes to a complete stop).
Stop signs are so rare in the UK -- I can only think of one in the area I grew up -- that they're taken seriously. Or at least, I thought they were.
"Until 2016, each stop sign had to be individually approved by the Secretary of State for Transport.", though that requirement has been removed.
You don't know how many times they recorded the intro.
I'm not trying to imply Tom Scott is being dishonest. We just don't know from the video.
I loved the visual presentation of the problem, but it's hard to fathom the objection to "stop" signs as a solution. At least here in the US, I regard every four-way intersection that doesn't have stop signs or lights as inherently dangerous (and I do indeed slow way down when encountering one).
Had a friend once from a Middle Eastern country, and he described their protocol thus: When two drivers approach a four-way at right angles, they look at each other. The one that looks away first has the right of way. :-(
A car which is on a collision course at Ipley Cross with a cyclist who is obscured from the driver’s view by the front pillar will approach the cyclist from behind.
So if the cyclist doesn't do a shoulder check, the cyclist won't see it. If they do do a shoulder check, the car will appear to be stationary to them. (It is surprisingly harder to see an object with no apparent motion.)
Actually, I'd like to see that last part put into place at any hazardous intersection, in case a driver misses seeing a stop sign or red light.