Don’t be obtuse.
A person collapses into the street and is struck by oncoming traffic - no one is to blame. It is an accident.
A person collapses into the street and is struck by oncoming traffic - no one is to blame. It is an accident.
* The city for making car dependent areas
* The city for making roads that have cars drive so fast by pedestrians, that the pedestrian can die if hit
* The driver for not driving more reasonably
* The city for not having a barrier between the sidewalk and the road, China has these in a lot of areas, a curb with a hedge between the side walks and roads, or a fence.
The pedestrian who collapses is the last to blame in my view.
The objective is not to shift blame from one party to the other, even if its shifting from VRUs to drivers. The important thing is that we emphasize that all car crashes have a cause and known solutions! Nearly all news articles miss this point, and tend to place blame (even inadvertently) on the parties involved rather than discuss how to prevent future incidents from happening.
There are lots of good reasons to make roads safer, lots of methods for doing so, and none of them require making drivers the villains.
Even 5 mph is too fast if the collapse is shielded from view until the last instant.
In other words your statement boils down to "driver can stop unless they can't".
- a driver should be able to brake if a person falls suddenly (streets)
- a person is isolated from/ is incapable of falling suddenly into oncoming traffic (roads)
It's the same reason highways are fenced off, extended to streets and roads. A big part of the problem is America's reliance on stroads: too fast to be hospitable for non-drivers, insufficiently isolated to protect non-drivers.
Or they collapse mere seconds before the car strikes them making the __accident__ unavoidable.
Roads should be designed so that pedestrians cannot accidentally end up 0.1 seconds (or pick your duration) from being crushed by a driver. And drivers, state-licensed machine operators, should face an incredibly high bar of scrutiny when it comes to damaging pedestrians. Yes this probably means very different road designs than the ones we have now, that is one of the end goals of this kind of effort.
The best favor you can do all other traffic is to be as predictable and unremarkable in your actions as possible so that they may reliably plan their actions around yours.
I'm 49 and I've been driving since I was 16.
You can absolutely react to hazards without appearing skittish, which also alerts other traffic to the hazard if they're paying close attention.
Trying to drive like a robot all the time is something that actual novice drivers think makes them better drivers.
My point is you look like a novice in the eyes of the other drivers because the only information they have is that you're having a harder time than everyone else passing the cyclist(s).
>You can absolutely react to hazards without appearing skittish, which also alerts other traffic to the hazard if they're paying close attention.
I agree
In my experience, this is because the other drivers are just rolling the dice and passing on blind curves or passing in the same lane with barely any clearance. It's not an example of good driving ... but it is predictable.
All that other stuff in this thread about safer road design is really about removing the need to think about how to drive. So instead of making it so drivers need to give cyclists room, safe road design would just give them that room. But in the absence of those safer designs, people just need to drive more safely.
Thanks for the strawman. My point is that doing so to an extent that is anomalous compared to other traffic sends up red flags.
That is not the mindset with which aviation arrived at its amazing safety record.
The parent comment didn't even say one way or another if the driver who struck the woman should get any blame...