In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from left turns | Hacker News Reader

In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from left turns

saferleftturns.org

The closest calls I've ever had with pedestrians were on left turns. IMO the problem with modern cars is the airbags in the A-pillar. The pillars have gotten so wide that you have to consciously bob your head around back and forth (like a fighter pilot, of course...) to look around both sides of it. Otherwise people can easily vanish into that blind spot. I think a lot of people just forget that there's a big blind spot there because they're used to just looking on either side and inferring what's not visible -- which is usually fine with something as big as a car. But on a left turn, a pedestrian walking the same direction you are driving can be completely hidden as you turn because their motion will be synchronized with the blind spot.

I've been driving in the US for 16 years. The "left turn on green" is still the most non-intuitive part about driving here.

As a driver, when you have a green light, you need to pay attention to giving priority to incoming traffic and pedestrians crossing the street, while also maintaining your calm with cars lining up behind you. It's way more intuitive that when you have a green, you can go.

Adding a blinking yellow left arrow could help.

"blinking yellow left arrow" is the same thing as not having a protected turn at all.

Not quite. Yellow blinking left arrows are always for a protected left turn lane. So when blinking, it does become more like an unprotected 'turn left on green' type of light, but you don't have the straight-through traffic coming up behind you, since you're on a dedicated turn lane. And the yellow flashing arrow is usually timed so that it happens at the safest time to make an unprotected left.

But it cues your brain that it might not be safe to turn left.

this is a change that's already rolling out nation-wide

That's a little confusing, though, isn't it? A blinking regular yellow light means "you have the right of way, but proceed with caution". But this blinking left arrow would mean "you don't have the right of way, so proceed with caution". The distinction may sound subtle, but is quite large.

In a few US cities they have what is called a 'lag left' where the left turn lane gets a green left arrow for several seconds after the straight lanes turn red. This has the benefit of having left turns occur when pedestrians should not be crossing the side street at the cost of some spectacular head on collisions when drivers run the red light.

There are some intersections like this in my city, but I've seen some drivers blow straight through the red light in the straight lanes because, presumably, they are barely paying attention but see a green light in their peripheral.

I have seen that quite often (green arrow after red for straight lanes) and had assumed that was pretty common, but I don't really know for sure.

Regarding collisions due to people running red lights: at least when waiting to turn left chances are very good that you will see the oncoming vehicle since you're already pointed towards them.

That seems much better than being first in line at an intersection when the light turns green; in that case anyone running the light may well be coming from the side. I lived in Dallas for a few years and after a few near misses I learned to always look before proceeding after the light turns green.

You can fail a driving test in Australia if you don't look whilst being first at the lights on a green light cycle.

Of course most drivers might do this for a week after getting their license then ignore it. Like a lot of good rules.

> at least when waiting to turn left chances are very good that you will see the oncoming vehicle since you're already pointed towards them.

That's only true if there are no oncoming cars lined up to turn left in front of you. Even just one car waiting can obscure an oncoming car coming around them to run the light and crash into you as you turn.

Arizona is like that.

NYC and a few pedestrian heavy areas have actually started doing the reverse; delayed lefts.

The idea is that pedestrians, cars, etc. get a headstart so that by the time the left is legal, any people or vehicles crossing will squarely be in the middle instead of to the side where they could be blocked by a pillar.

I think you and the person above you are talking about the same thing.

They're different things.

the parent comment is describing a scenario in which

straight (including pedestrians have green) -> straight gets red -> left gets green.

in NYC's LPIs, this is

all directions have red -> pedestrians get green -> straight + left get green with pedestrians

Not even just lefts; in SF now most[0] lights will show a pedestrian walk sign around 5 seconds before any light in that direction switches from red to green. So pedestrians will have a chance to make themselves seen before cars do anything.

It's also useful if you're a pedestrian going in the perpendicular direction. If your light turns yellow, you still have another 10 seconds to get across (5 seconds for the yellow->red transition, and then another 5 seconds before the opposing light turns green). Granted, this isn't universal (see below), so you still need to pay attention and sometimes hustle across.

[0] Weird that it's not all, but I still see many that turn simultaneously still.

Lefts in drive_on_right jurisdictions are privileged because they cross lanes of traffic. Privileged means they have to have priority on signal change - start and stop. In driver's Ed, it is taught that the first queued vehicle making a left turn can take it even though a light may have just turned to red when the opposing traffic has stopped. Similarly, a left turn signal is activated before the through signal to allow any queued left to turn and provide a gap to the traffic behind it to turn to any right lane if additional cars become queued in front unable to make the left turn. Further, drivers cannot be expected to keep track of and attempt to predict the movements of a crowd of people, only avoid hitting obstacles in their direction of motion. If any pedestrian cannot get across in 5 seconds, then a change to green on the parallel vehicle traffic lane could be mistaken as absolution from liability. The point is to reduce confusion. At crosswalks, pedestrians really only have one rule: Don't run out in front of a car, making it impossible for the driver to stop in time. Any start "delay" along with accelerated stop should occur on the pedestrian signal as people do not move in single file "lanes", but rather as a group that is able to handle a decreased queue elimination time with the expectation that the duration of the parallel through green is long enough for all queued pedestrians to cross.

> Privileged means they have to have priority on signal change - start and stop

Citation needed. Traffic laws vary widely based on the jurisdiction.

> If any pedestrian cannot get across in 5 seconds, then a change to green on the parallel vehicle traffic lane could be mistaken as absolution from liability.

No, if you hit a pedestrian in the crosswalk and they have the green, the driver would be at fault in a jurisdiction like NYC.

In Norway, you Are never allowed to enter the intersection on a red light. If you want to turn left, you move into the intersection when the light turns green, then stop if needed. At that point the light doesn’t matter to you anymore, and you proceed once the way is clear. With heavy traffic in the opposite direction, that often means after the light turns red.

Thats pretty much the same situation as over here, in Austria. Police is perfectly fine if you drive out of an intersection when it is red. But driving into it when it is red, can incur a HEFTY fine.

Also: A arrow on the signal means you can just go, a full blob means you have to be careful about other traffic.

So we have a few intersections where left turns are on a different timer, where ONLY the left turning traffic goes. Usually before the head on traffic gets green. Or where the arrow extends it for the left turning traffic, so they still are allowed to drive into the intersection when straight on wouldn't.

Stop lights will never be smart enough to tell you when you can "just go" until they're good enough to drive the cars for you, and then that choice will be taken from you anyhow.

Drivers must always pay attention to what's going on around them. Trying to simplify their decisions will just end up with more people getting hurt as drivers claim they had the right because the light said so.

simplifying decisions can also lead to extremely inefficient traffic patterns.

Other countries have a green arrow and here we also have a system where the green arrow goes blank when pedestrians are allowed to cross aka ‘give way’.

Not that it stops pedestrians crossing whenever they like or people running reds, but it does take some of the stress out of driving.

Here's a link to some traffic light systems that you can trust most of the time. But nothing is perfect, so you're still required to pay attention yourself too, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knbVWXzL4-4

I agree. Left turns on green are an invention that works great in rural American small towns where traffic volume is low. Most of the places I've lived transition to protected signals as the density of the area goes up, but sometimes it can take years for the funds to be allocated, and in that time it can become a pretty confusing intersection. In a proper city I think they make no sense at all.

Disagree. Left turns on green are a compromise that prevents people from going through the green 50yd past the intersection and banging a u-turn, which is exactly what they'll start doing if you don't let them turn left at the intersection but do let them legally turn left into businesses and whatnot across the street.

Divided roads mostly don't need left on green since they mostly have dedicated turn lanes.

Not everyone would call Los Angeles a proper city, but it's dense and there are very few protected left turns. As thrilling as passing against oncoming traffic on a two lane road.

This is for California, not sure about other states:

Note that whether you have a solid green or a green arrow matters. A solid green means you can turn left, but you might have cross traffic. A green arrow means you're protected and as long as other people are obeying traffic signals, you shouldn't run into other people.

Lots of drivers don't understand this.

Lots of drivers also don't understand a red right arrow (as opposed to a red solid circle) means you cannot turn right on red. Most "no right on red" intersections have both the arrow and a sign (and many drivers ignore both).

This varies somewhat based on locality. In Oregon, for example, there is no special significance to a red right turn arrow. If a right turn on red is not permitted, there will be a sign.

> Note that whether you have a solid green or a green arrow matters. A solid green means you can turn left, but you might have cross traffic. A green arrow means you're protected and as long as other people are obeying traffic signals, you shouldn't run into other people.

This is the same in the southeast, and I assume the rest of the US.

Recently "flashing yellow" [1,2,3] has been introduced to mean left turns must yield to right of way traffic. These are gradually replacing solid green signals.

[1] https://www.txdot.gov/driver/signs-and-signals/flashing-yell...

[2] https://durhamnc.gov/1140/Flashing-Left-Turn-Arrow-Informati...

[3] https://www.penndot.gov/TravelInPA/TrafficSignalsManagement/... (PDF)

This is confusing, generally a blinking yellow when going straight means slow down but you have right of way. A blinking left yellow would be different from a normal blinking yellow.

Yeah, it should probably be a blinking red arrow in order to be consistent. I'm sure some committee decided that wasn't different enough from normal red arrow

isn't flashing red a fail-safe triggered when the light controls fail that should be treated as a stop sign?

In practice that might work, but it's also a conflicting signal.

Blinking red would be a stop and proceed when safe sign. There’s no reason for each car to stop for a lot of these unprotected left turns.

> Lots of drivers don't understand this.

Not sure I believe this. Obviously it's a fuzzy statement but I don't think I've ever once in my life seen someone blatantly ignore oncoming traffic due to having an unprotected left signal.

Any one driver's experience is necessarily extremely limited, a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of all miles driven or traffic lights stopped at. You not having seen that happen should not be expected to be representative at all.

I have seen that happen, though fortunately there was enough time for both drivers to avoid a crash.

I've always thought the differences between the solid light and arrow was too minor for the average driver. I mean, look at the skills of the average driver.

In Washington state unprotected lefts weren't legal maneuvers for quite a while. They were introduced gradually starting at intersections where it would be a traffic benefit, for signaling the state adopted a blinking yellow arrow that then goes solid to signify the 'almost over' meaning of a typical yellow light.

One thing common in Texas is red light + green arrow to indicate a protected left/right turn. I suspect it's a lot easier to parse quickly for most people than green circle vs green arrow.

Is it? I see people sitting stopped at green arrows all the time because the red stop light takes priority in their mind. Presenting clearly contradictory signals at the same time can't be the best option.

Yeah honestly I'm not sure how would I take that. Maybe expect it to be a malfunctioning light? When presented with both 'stop' and 'go' you can bet I'm not going unless I explicitly verify that nothing is coming.

Really? The grandparent says it's common in Texas, but in my experience it's pretty common in all of the US (at least in urban and suburban areas), and shouldn't be surprising or odd to anyone who's learned to drive in the US or has been driving here more than a few months.

But I agree with you that you should verify that no one is coming in that case; that's sound advice for most all situations, really.

It may be a kneejerk reaction combined with me being very rurally located for work for these past 4 years, I think there are 3 traffic lights within a 45 minute drive and none of them will show red and green at the same time except in separate lanes when straight is red and left has a green.

The protected left should be the middle yellow with an associated cutout for the left arrow inside the light, with the normal through yellow turning on both the green and yellow left turn arrow, but likely way too many years of convention to make the change.

Are you referring to the traffic signals that have five options? That is, going clockwise starting at bottom left: green arrow, yellow arrow, standard red light, standard yellow light, standard green light

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8MXdKQHddMk/maxresdefault.jpg

I've lived in multiple states including California, and this is the first I've heard of red right turn arrows meaning no right on red. Good to know.

I believe I've also seen red right turn arrows in Pennsylvania, but they don't have any special meaning there. But I couldn't say for sure.

Huh, interesting. I've also lived in multiple states including California, and I've always understood a right turn arrow to mean no turn on red.

I wonder where the driver education here is breaking down.

Learned to drive (a long time ago) in PA and now live in CO. You’re right it’s all weird.

In PA, red arrow is just a regular red light that happens to be in a turn-only lane. All laws are the same as normal red light, the lane marking restrict your movement.

In CO, red arrow means stop and no turn on red regardless of lane markings.

Just about all traffic control laws are standardized federally except lights. That feels like the most important one to reduce confusion.

> a red right arrow ... means you cannot turn right on red

This varies a lot by state. Several allow turning (after a stop) on a red arrow. Some even allow turning left on a red arrow, if it's onto a one-way street.

https://driversprep.com/red-arrows-permit-practice-test/

That's seems unnecessarily confusing. Why even bother with the red arrow at all then? I guess it could be useful in cases where the straight-through traffic is green, but you want right-turning traffic to stop before turning, but is that common? Or even a useful thing? Like, I feel like if you've set things up that way, maybe the intersection is just designed poorly.

It is definitely confusing. In Washington state, right red arrow does not prohibit turning on red. I learned this after people started beeping at me to go at such an intersection. And yes, that intersection (Queen Anne and Mercer in Seattle) is confusing and poorly designed.

MA allows right on red arrow after stop (absent a sign to the contrary). There are intersections where right on red is prohibited to protect a pedestrian walk phase that’s aligned with the green for straight ahead traffic.

I don't think I've seen many intersections with red arrows unless there is a dedicated turn lane, where green yellow and red are all arrows. If it's a right turn in a right on red jurisdiction, without a sign expressing no right on red, why would red arrow be different than red circle?

> A green arrow means you're protected and as long as other people are obeying traffic signals, you shouldn't run into other people.

> Lots of drivers don't understand this.

This is logical. But, I've seen firsthand in Quebec (the city of Sherbrooke) where that's not the case. A driver may have a green arrow at the SAME TIME that a pedestrian has a walk signal. And in St. Thomas USVI I've seen opposing traffic have conflicting signals too (green arrow at same time oncoming traffic has green to go straight!)

> I think a lot of people just forget that there's a big blind spot (...)

Honestly, I think most people just don't care.

If they cared but forgotten they would be doing some other obvious things like slowing down when they drive close to parked cars or setting their mirrors to cover around the car as well as possible.

But that is not what I observe. I see almost all drivers to drive fast inches from parked cars and I can see the driver's face in their side mirror when in car behind them -- clear indication that they have side mirrors set to the road behind the car rather than cover huge blind spot on the side of the car.

> side mirrors set to the road behind the car rather than cover huge blind spot on the side of the car

I don't know about you, but I have my side mirrors set so I see the side of my car at the inner edge, which is vital when parking, and the shape and geometry of the mirror dictates the FOV I get from it.

Unfortunately, this is wrong (objectively, not subjectively).

Even more unfortunately this is how everybody is taught to drive. I don't know how the exam looks in Czech Republic but here in Poland there is a lot of backing and the driving teachers set mirrors this way to make it easier for learners to pass the exam.

Side mirrors are designed to fill the blind spot on the side of your car. If you see the side of your car your side mirror mostly sees the same thing that your rear view mirror. You don't need three mirrors to show you what's behind your car.

The correct way to set the side mirror is to imagine the cone of the rear view mirror and the cone of your peripheral vision and point your side mirror directly between those cones.

I set my side mirrors so that they point outwards a tiny bit but if I move my head to the side I can see the side of my car.

In my car this is enough to close my blind spot but still enough to observe the side of my car while parking.

I almost always park with my back first because I don't have stereoscopic vision and it is easier for me to judge distances when parking with back of my car first. And I don't have any problem -- I just move my head to the left or to the right as needed. When you park you can move your car as slow as you need and stop if you need more time.

But when you drive at highway speeds you may not have that much time and this is when you need to be able to observe around your car in a split second without moving your head.

I noticed when I almost smashed into a car in my blindspot. I started reading and I found that I have been using mirrors the wrong way entire time. Here, I found an example link for you. https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/lskpl/lpt_how_...

I can tell you it takes a little bit of effort to adjust to new mirror position. You can get used to moving your head during parking (looks silly but you can park just fine).

But you will thank me the first time you merge, especially at an angle and see how easy it is since you are seeing EVERYTHING with your mirrors and your peripheral vision, without needing to move your head.

Those figures at the top show a view pointed much more at the car than a sliver. I'm not sure how much I can interpret from this beyond the general idea. What are the actual viewing angles in a real car?

Also why not make the mirrors capture a slightly wider field so you can have the best of both...?

Thanks to another commenter I found better pic of correct mirror placement: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/road-safety/14154...

The rear and side mirrors overlap but only further behind the car and side mirrors don't show the road far behind you at all.

> Also why not make the mirrors capture a slightly wider field so you can have the best of both...?

Probably because it would require either much larger mirrors or much more curved (and thus making things even smaller than they already are).

There are cars with much larger mirrors. If you notice, in most countries cars/trucks that don't have rear window (and thus no rear view mirror) are required to have larger side mirrors that can also cover the road behind the truck.

Though trucks have other visibility problems that come mostly from the fact of just how high the driver sits.

If that's the correct mirror placement, then adjusting it to barely see your own car is less than five degrees off. If that's a dealbreaker than I'd say it's definitely worth the slight mirror size increase or slight magnification change to make the field of view five degrees wider.

Do following exercise.

Park parallel to a road with slow traffic.

Observe cars coming from behind you as they transition from rear view mirror to side mirror to your peripheral vision.

Make your own decision on what is right or not (it is your safety anyway).

I prefer to have two small blind spots that can't fit a cyclist in either of them than one larger that can fit a small car.

> I prefer to have two small blind spots that can't fit a cyclist in either of them than one larger that can fit a small car.

And I'd rather have only one small blind spot, while being better able to judge where things in my side mirror are relative to my car. And this wouldn't require a big change to the mirror, only a quite small one, if that diagram is accurate. Also, the field of view shouldn't be so narrow that a 4 degree tilt makes a blind spot too big (my head moves more than that all the time!).

If you can see your car at the inner edge you have the mirror set incorrectly.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131074/how-to-adjus...

In my automobiles even with side mirrors set correctly there is still a small blind spot but it's much much less. I thoroughly suggest you try this technique.

For parking you can easily move your head over to adjust the angle the mirror and once again see behind for backing up.

You altered the meaning of their statement by cutting off the defining portion of it so you could go off about something completely different, they're clearly talking about the blind spot formed by the A-pillar, which isn't really a matter of "caring".

And to top it off your point doesn't make sense...

> clear indication that they have side mirrors set to the road behind the car rather than cover huge blind spot on the side of the car.

a) Your mirrors are supposed to be pointed at the road behind you, not showing you the side of your car.

b) How are you able to tell what their mirrors are pointed at from the outside? Every car has different mounting points for the mirrors, the magnification and FOV can vary, the person's seating position can significantly vary, etc.

Yes, I am still talk about that blind spot.

What I mean is that people don't care for other blind spots or risk of kids running from behind a car.

It means they haven't "forgot" about the A-pillar blind spot. They just don't care.

> a) Your mirrors are supposed to be pointed at the road behind you, not showing you the side of your car.

Now, they do not. The rear view mirror is supposed to be pointed at the road behind you. Side mirrors serve vital function of filling your blindspot formed between the cone of rear view mirror and your peripheral vision.

This is different in a truck. In a truck you don't have rear view mirror and so your side mirrors actually need to point at the road behind. But you will also notice they are much larger for that reason.

Here in Poland it is illegal to drive your car with the vision through the rear view mirror obstructed. That only makes sense if the side mirrors are not supposed to cover the road behind you.

> b) How are you able to tell what their mirrors are pointed at from the outside?

How to tell without offending you... it is called physics.

The mirror works reversibly. If I can see their face in their mirror it means they can see my face in the mirror -- a face in the car directly behind their car.

> Here in Poland it is illegal to drive your car with the vision from the rear view mirror obstructed. That only makes sense if the side mirrors are not supposed to cover same angles as rear view mirror.

It's physically impossible for your side mirrors to show exactly what your rear view mirror does (since there's a whole car in the way...), so no matter how your side mirrors are adjusted, your rear view mirror is serving a function and shouldn't be obscured.

And the mirrors work the opposite of how you think:

If you point your side mirrors and your rear mirror at the road behind you, they will show you different views, not the same: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/road-safety/14154...

If you point your side mirror so they show you the side of your car, they will show you an overlapping view of what your rear view mirror does on top of significantly reducing what you see on either side of your car: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/road-safety/14154...

In the EU the driver's side mirror is allowed to be convex which is all the more reason to not waste a large portion of the view on looking at the side of your car. There should be just barely any of your car visible in your driver side mirror

In the haste to prove your (obviously invalid) point you even forgot to read the article from which the image you have linked.

The image you linked is actually an example of incorrect mirror setup (and even has the word "incorrect" in the file name).

Here is the link to the parent article which you conveniently (or hastily) skipped: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/road-safety/168258-eliminatin...

Here is the excerpt describing the image which you have linked:

"Anyway, people have a variety of opinions regarding how to best adjust their mirrors, and almost all of them are wrong. Why are they wrong? They’re wrong because they intentionally create blind spots for the sake of making sure drivers can see things that are entirely irrelevant. Most road users have their ORVMs adjusted like below"

Here is the link to the correct mirror placement:

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/road-safety/14154...

I'm not sure you can read English.

I linked to TWO PICTURES, the first is the CORRECT way with mirrors facing the ROAD, the second is the WRONG WAY mirrors NOT FACING THE ROAD.

If you have eyes, working eyes, look at both pictures. Which picture has the mirrors facing the road, and which picture has the mirrors facing the car? (Hint: Your wrong way is shown in the incorrect picture, where the mirror is facing the car)

You can't even see I posted TWO links and you have the audacity to call my point invalid and claim I'm conveniently skipping things, maybe pick up some reading glasses to go with your newfound reading skills before you reply.

How To Set Your Side Mirrors:

1. Put your head against the side window.

2. Adjust the mirror so that you can (just barely) not see the side of your car.

3. Put your head above the centre console.

4. Ditto for the right mirror.

This is how the mirrors are designed to function, right from their very invention. You will have no/minimal blind spots. Yes, you can not see your car in the mirrors. That is okay: you do not need to see your own car, you need to see other cars.

That is exactly the procedure I am using.

Yes -- as a runner it is extremely common for me to be hidden by the A pillar and almost run over. These are extremely clear-cut situations, e.g. someone rolls up to a stop sign as I'm entering an intersection.

When the car doesn't come to a complete stop, it's easy for a moving pedestrian to stay in the blind spot as both objects move. I watch the whole time and never see their face.

I think the “problem” is your running. I’m an ex-runner, ex-skateboarder (knees gave up) and my close calls were always when moving at high speed.

Drivers are expecting we’ll be a dawdling pedestrian moving at 2-3 MPH, when in fact we could easily be doing 10MPH or faster.

We have street-grade LIDAR everywhere these days (at least in SF). I don’t understand why they can’t make “smart intersections” that flash drivers a warning when pedestrians are predicted to be crossing.

You have a higher opinion of people than I do. I've had someone threaten to kill me because he was trying to barge through a zebra crossing while I was on it, and he felt the need to get out of his car and have a go in person because I was, you know, blocking his car.

People know. They don't care. They'd rather kill someone than slow down.

It's not uncommon for drivers to get a big shot of adrenaline after a near miss, and turn that into anger instead of reflecting on their own actions. Sad commentary on human nature, I guess.

I'm not sure that comment really addresses the high speed crosswalk entry concerns. Sure there are some people out there who behave like your story, but not that many (and should be addressed by losing their license). Even with the right of way, it's in a pedestrian's best interest to slowly enter the crosswalk and check to make sure the vehicles are yielding. Some states make it illegal to run into traffic or cross while distracted (phone use).

So yes, people driving should be going slow enough to avoid someone running into traffic. But then the runner should also slow to safely evaluate and cross.

Most drivers are just dumb. I’ve had two guys and one gal threaten to fight me over the last 10ish years, but many, many more close calls.

Case in point, I had a guy who nearly killed me on a dark, rainy night. He circled around to apologize (pro tip to drivers: don’t do this, I thought he was coming back to fight or shoot me since I let a few profane words slip).

"Most drivers are just dumb."

This sounds like an extreme stereotype.

This is why I practically never run within ten feet of a car's front at intersections. If they've stopped, made eye contact, and nodded or waved me on, then maybe. At least once a week, I encounter a driver who almost certainly would have hit me if I hadn't followed this rule.

One counter-intuitive result is that I cross more often against the "walk" light than with it. If I have the walk light, it usually means the cars next to me also have a green light (which is kind of insane really). Some of them will be turning, and they're far more likely to do so without looking than someone turning at a red. The A-pillar visibility issue also affects them more. It's generally safer to wait for a red light and look for a suitable gap in the cross traffic (plus right turners).

Also, a pox on anybody who tucks a crosswalk fifteen to twenty feet down the smaller street. Yes, it's further out of traffic, but it's also further out of where any driver might be looking. I will always stay in a direct line (and pay close attention to traffic) rather than take the extra steps to destroy my own safety.

The best trick is to avoid running anywhere near cars at all. Find a nice track. Of course, don't drive there, cycle there or use a scooter. What's the point if you are making the world unsafe for others.

Generally better on the joints to avoid asphalt and concrete anyways.

> Find a nice track.

Get used to the idea that not everyone lives in the same circumstances as you. The closest tracks to me are at schools, 1-2km away, and reserved for use by the students during prime outdoor-activity hours. That's probably better than for a lot of people, and even then it's nowhere near an equivalent option.

Oh yeah, also we have real winters here. Streets are plowed. Tracks aren't.

> cycle there

Hardly better. Car/bike interactions are no picnic either, and I'm also tired of cyclists thinking they're better than pedestrians somehow. It's just not so. In this case I suspect they're even worse for safety, adding yet another mismatched speed and cutting into everyone's margin of error by a greater amount. I don't see anything good or honorable about discouraging people from a healthy activity - running on streets and/or sidewalks - that can be done safely if one takes appropriate care.

Sounds to me like cars shouldn't be allowed to drive where pedestrians travel, if they can't really avoid driving people over.

Edit: This Tom Scott video shows how a cyclist can be perfectly occluded by the A-pillar while both are moving https://youtu.be/SYeeTvitvFU?t=55

It's hard enough being a pedestrian, let's not make it harder by limiting where people are allowed to cross (only intersections with dedicated left turn signals).

If you meant limit the cars, obviously that'll never happen, so I assumed the more realistic interpretation.

I meant limit cars, yes. Not that I think it will happen in the US very soon, it's designed around them.

As a European, the concept of jaywalking is so bizarre. Cities are for people, not cars. You can ban people from highways, but shouldn't ban them from walking in their own neighborhood.

Cars don't drive themselves, they are driven by people. The same people who are also pedestrians at times. The solution is not to try and ban cars, any more than it makes sense to ban pedestrians. The solution is to design the roads for multiple modes of transportation so everyone can get where they need to go.

And well designed cities don't need much car usage. Thus my point about removing them. Not really just banning them, but making them obsolete by having better options.

Every time I get into a discussion like this, I feel like I meet a bunch of people who have only ever lived in very dense urban environments. Even in medium cities (using Portland, Oregon as a convenient example), cars make sense. The density just isn't there to support eliminating cars except for a few blocks in the densest area of downtown.

I think this highlights the best path forward. Large-but-not-Manhattan cities should eliminate cars in the densest areas of their downtown, where it makes sense. Jersey City did this in their downtown area, and it seems to be going well.

As people who want to live without cars move to the downtown zone, the area adapts to meet their needs (in terms of the types of stores etc). If the policy proves popular, the city has the option of spreading the "car-less" zone as the dense urban core grows. Similar to suburban sprawl, but inverted, I suppose.

I grew up in a city of 2500 people, with vast distances. Of course people used cars for much, and no public transport. But the city centre was designed such that you parked your care one place, and then walked between all the stores. No having to drive through a big parking lot and crossing a street to get to the next store. I lived about 2km away from school, and biked, skied or walked every day, since it was designed a path for that. That path/road was completely separated from any roads cars would travel. So very safe. No one I know of got driven by cars to school.

Ironically, those making it unsafe for kids to walk to school, are parents driving their kids being short on time.

Point being, I have not only ever lived in dense urban environments. Secondly, that even those non-dense are perfectly viable to make safe for humans, and use less cars.

And I wonder how deliveries (especially furniture), emergency vehicles, and people with disabilities are impacted.

The first two aren't cars, so that's easy. You don't need to absolutely eliminate vehicles. For disabilities it's more complicated but at the very least you've already cut 90% of traffic.

People are addicted to cars and will never consider using anything else if you let them. In Australia this is true also. I have never owned a car here, lived in 4 different cities. Never needed a car. But most others think they need to.

I grew up in a country town. No car = no life.

Now I live in Melbourne. We use the car very little but would never be without one. I have too many friends in the country and without a car you aren't getting to them without hassle and $. And so the balance of convenience vs cost means we keep the car.

There's much more to most countries than just cities, and completely changing traffic rules entirely when going into car-hostile territory will continue to cause suburbia and CBD's to exit city cores.

The US need to look at German or Dutch traffic regulations and road constructions. Optimized in an almost perfect form for both motorised vehicles and pedestrians. But I guess that's never gonna happen

Or we could actually test people. The drivers test is a joke here. Most "accidents" are really the result of someone making a bad choice - to look at their phone, to exceed safe speeds, to run a red light (impatience is probably the biggest in my opinion), etc.

Where I live, getting a driver's license takes a long time, money and involves lots of training. Still have many problems. Maybe the average driver is a bit better here, but what's needed is a systematic change. Can't rely on people behaving better, they never will. Design stuff better instead.

Systemic change could be good, but depends what it actually is.

The original suggestion was complete segregation of pedestrians and cars, which isn't completely feasible (only in relatively small areas and with exceptions).

You know that a car that is on the road has a person in it. Calling a motorist a car is objectifying that person and not recognizing their needs and existence. I'm all for nice pedestrian areas of cities, but the power of cities is allowing people to be able to meet and interact with lots of other people. Cars lets people do that better than any other device we have invented yet. Go where you want, when you want and can carry literally a ton of passengers and cargo, if desired. We just need to make cars work better, not ban them.

I think American pro and anti-car people should join together and support a massive tunneling project for major cities that would reduce traffic congestion by allowing cars, busses and trains to run in them. Convert the huge interstate highways in cities into low speed, one lane roads, separated bike lanes, and strip parks with pedestrian paths. Getting all that high speed traffic underground would be great. We should do that for an infrastructure bill instead of the one we got. Some actual new infrastructure that would help people out tremendously on the scale of the interstate highway system.

And I would agree, jaywalking being illegal is not so great (but it's not illegal on the small roads where peoples' houses are generally).

Same here, most recent close call was about a month ago despite being fully aware of the blind spot but not expecting someone to be crossing on a 'don't walk' signal.

'A Fighter Pilot’s Guide to Surviving on the Roads' has some very good information on this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17900759

For me, it's actually the rear view mirror. I can miss a car at a 4 way stop because of it.

For sure, I've had a few cars like that. Sometimes I could make it better by pushing the mirror up to the limit of travel (while it can still be aimed to see the road behind you). That puts it pretty close to the roof on some cars, reducing the impact of the blind spot. But it's not always doable on every model of car.

This was one of the worst adjustments for me coming from an old car. I think driver testing should be updated to account for it - looking around the pillar should be as mandatory as the shoulder blind spot check when changing lanes/turning.

Modern A-pillar thickness has become a real problem. My biggest fear when driving my modern cars is losing track of a pedestrian, especially in the A-pillar. It's likely time for legislation on the field of view offered by modern A-pillars as many of the thickest pillars are to use lower grade steel to save costs while still meeting rollover and crush requirements. More expensive high strength steel and more compact airbags can bring A-pillar widths back into safer territory. I'm a lot less safe driving my vintage car around, but there isn't any chance I'll miss a pedestrian since the greenhouse is so great.

Ottawa, Ontario just published a guide to building protected intersections: https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/documents/files/protectedi...

A lot of these changes are not particularly expensive and can have a huge impact on safety by limiting how much time a pedestrian is vulnerable and forcing cars to fully turn so pedestrians are in direct vision rather than peripheral.

For higher speed intersections we should be using a lot more roundabouts and things like diverging diamond to eliminate conflict between different travel modes and keep traffic flowing in a single direction.

I think one of the big things hidden in here is that auto makers are allowed to and incentivized to optimize for the safety of the passengers inside the vehicle and not pedestrians outside the vehicle.

Modern cars have a huge lack of visibility. They've removed a lot of the glass so that they can get sturdier frames. However, that makes it harder for them to see pedestrians.

I'd also note it makes it harder for cars behind to see the context of the road as well. I love being behind an old car. I can see straight through its rear window and out the front and see what is going on. I can anticipate stuff that I wouldn't be able to anticipate if I'm behind a newer vehicle where I can't see through the vehicle.

I'd also note that the increasing size of vehicles is presenting a multi-faceted problem. 1) Higher hoods mean impacting pedestrians higher up putting the force into their internal organs and heads. 2) Higher hoods mean that your body will be pushed to the ground where the car can run over you and cause head injuries rather than being hit in the knees and flung onto the hood of the car where you are less likely to have as severe injuries. 3) Taller vehicles mean that drivers can't see what is going on as much. A 5'3" (average woman) pedestrian can be hidden behind a 6' vehicle while their head would bob above a 4'6" vehicle. A cyclist may be riding at 5'5", but they'll be completely obscured behind a 6' vehicle. If you're trying to make a left turn, oncoming traffic may be obscuring pedestrians and cyclists today in a way that it didn't in years past.

I definitely get worrying about losing a pedestrian in an A-pillar. I find that cars are also often losing pedestrians behind other vehicles - vehicles that are tall enough to obscure pedestrians.

We've allowed and encouraged auto makers to optimize for passenger safety. That's meant that they've removed the great greenhouse that provided good visibility and replaced it with more structure and airbags.

Definitely not in Europe, EuroNCAP added a pedestrian test a few years ago, and the test forced automakers to change their design for pedestrians in mind. https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/the-ratings-expla...

In addition to tests, I wonder if anyone has thought about a risk pool where car manufacturers pay in (or are paid out) according to whether their vehicles cause more or fewer pedestrian & cyclist fatalities. That would give them a clean incentive to optimise for reducing risk to others...

I really like this idea, if not just to raise the price of BMWs.

>We've allowed and encouraged auto makers to optimize for passenger safety.

Well we've outlawed all the other options and they're not gonna just pack it in and go out of business so what else would they do?

The automakers are in this[1] situation.

[1] https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/billingsgazette...

They'd be happy to build 75mpg tin cans for the consenting adults who want them but the amount of hand wringing that would cause (were it even legal in any practical sense) would start a fire. I'm already imagining the Frontline intro now "Mrs Soandso's son was driving one of these when he rear ended a semi trailer..."

There exist legal 75mpg tin cans for consenting adults, only they have two wheels rather than four, and the rider gets wet when it rains and sweats when it's hot.

>>>I think one of the big things hidden in here is that auto makers are allowed to and incentivized to optimize for the safety of the passengers inside the vehicle and not pedestrians outside the vehicle

My understanding is that the reason soooo many modern vehicles have such high beltlines and flat front snouts is because of pedestrian safety regs.

https://www.hotcars.com/why-pedestrian-safety-ruining-car-de...

In the motorcycling world oncoming left vehicles are basically the "Jesus take the wheel" scenario.

Go left to avoid them and you're potentially in oncoming traffic, go right and you're trying to negotiate a developing mess with a driver who realizes they've made a mistake, or lastly attempt to brake and you might dump the bike or end up underneath a vehicle.

A couple things I do when coming to intersections is almost always cover the brake, flash hi-beams if I think someone is about to take an aggressive jump, or sometimes point an index finger at the oncoming driver to catch their attention. You'd be surprised how many people subconsciously register that they're being pointed at and it gets them to consciously snap into focus.

> In the motorcycling world oncoming left vehicles are basically the "Jesus take the wheel" scenario.

Years ago I nearly creamed a motorcycle after looking pretty much directly at him. The angles we were converging at meant that he basically disappeared into the background because there was no relative motion. Probably scared the crap out of him, and it certainly scared the crap out of me.

That was when I started moving my head back and forth coming up to an intersection where I'm going to turn, because it introduces enough of a perspective change to make a moving motorcycle stick out. It's exactly the situation described in the fighter pilot article. The human brain is amazingly good at stitching together what appears to be a complete scene while actually losing pretty sizable chunks of it all the time.

The other times I have close calls were 100% coincident with having a full car of passengers. I think we only have a certain amount of bandwidth, and taking up a bunch of it with noise reduces what's left to devote to vision. I also turn down the radio when I'm coming up to an unfamiliar area, or a situation that is obviously going to be complex to navigate.

There is also a phenomenon where drivers (car and truck) just forget about motorcycles coming their way. They see it, they register it's there but then just... forget about it.

Imagine a car wants to turn and waits and a line of cars pass with a motorcycle at the end, then it's extremely dangerous for the motorcyclist. Because our brains interpret dangers relative to us, it sometimes just filters out the not-so-dangerous things. The motorcycle is relatively harmless to a car or truck thus drivers sometimes filter it out as if it doesn't exist.

What happens then is the car driver just waits for the cars to pass and then begins to turn while the motorcycle is still coming up, often resulting in a crash.

There is an easy fix, though: just say "motorcycle" out loud when this situation occures. It's really as easy as that.

> The angles we were converging at meant that he basically disappeared into the background because there was no relative motion.

This effect is demonstrated in this video about a particularly dangerous crossing in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU

Yikes, just 15 seconds into the video, a car absolutely blows through the stop sign.

Yeah its terrifying. As he says "They are reckless & can see the main road is clear", blind spots are scary.

I wonder if it's at least partially because in the UK stop signs are pretty much non existent. I have only ever seen a handful in my life and people don't have this ingrained understanding that you absolutely have to stop at them and look around before moving - it's just a weirdly shaped give way sign to them.

It is a test failure if you do not stop the car and put on your handbrake in the UK. It is made quite clear what you are supposed to do.

People just can't be bothered to actually stop.

Yes, of course, but I think we have to acknowledge that it's a very uncommon sign in the UK, and the fact that you almost never come across it in your day to day driving might make you numb to it - and in like the car in the video, just blow right past it. Maybe someone who interacts with Stop signs every day and has to obey them on a regular basis wouldn't have done that.

I don't know of course, this is pure speculation

They're typically only used in situations where you actually do need to stop in order to adequately see what's coming. In the last city I lived in, there was one single stop sign, and we used to say that it was there just so that learner drivers could be taken past it and tested on it. Now I live in a small village and there is a genuine blind junction with historic buildings right down to the pavement, and there's a very appropriate stop sign there.

Yeah that's terrifying. He didn't mention a roundabout, seems like that would probably be about the best solution there to me.

He mentioned that curving the two sides of the stop-signed road so that they don't meet the main road at the same point anymore is an option, but it would cost £100,000, and there was local conservatism & conservation at play that would nix even that fairly simple idea. A roundabout would cost a lot more and create more change/disruption, so I'm sure that's even less likely to happen, and thus not even worth mentioning.

First comment on the video mentions that the road is gong to be fixed. There are probably a bunch of similar roads with the same problem but not the same publicity that aren't getting fixed though.

This also happens in aircraft. Blind spot and the angle caused this 2019 crash in Alaska. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT1omo5jBqs

Interesting. On my bicycle I sometimes point to where a car should stop when I have priority on a roundabout and am about to exit crossing over where they would enter. Seems to work.

As a motorcyclist I can confirm. Left turning vehicles are enemy number 1. But all SMIDSY's (sorry mate, didn't see you) are extremely dangerous. He's video that talks about how saccades play a role - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x94PGgYKHQ0

> IMO the problem with modern cars is the airbags in the A-pillar. The pillars have gotten so wide that you have to consciously bob your head around back and forth (like a fighter pilot, of course...) to look around both sides of it.

Exactly this problem caused me to nearly kill someone the other night as I turned right around a roundabout (I live in the UK: we drive on the left, driver is on the right of the car). Nearly nailed a guy crossing the road as I came off it because he was hidden by the A-pillar. Fortunately my girlfriend, in the passenger seat, spotted him and yelled, otherwise he'd have been toast.

The car has collision avoidance functionality but it didn't spot the guy either. So, yeah, airbags or not, I am not a fan of thick, heavy A-pillars, and especially because you can't rely on the car's "smarts" to bail you out if you do fail to spot something that's obscured by them.

One of the things I noticed is that as "smaller" participants in traffic get faster, it gets exponentially harder to account for them. Eg. runners are harder to see because you need to be watching a much wider angle that is more likely to be obscured by something or other. Bicycles even more so.

If you are not starting from a stop, my solution to avoid any close calls has always been to hover my foot over the brake on top of making my turns as perpendicular as possible (there are other reasons to do that too: I see cars tilt into the oncoming traffic lane, which slows oncoming traffic down and delays their left turn, making for fewer cars passing at that traffic light and increasing congestion). If there's any potential a pedestrian (think a small child or a short person) is obscured by any other object (a car, a street corner...), slow down even further even if you've got right of way.

I don't get why North Americans have people crossing at the same time as cars are turning.

In the UK almost all junctions have either people crossing, or cars turning, but not both at the same time.

Seems a super obvious idea when you write it out.

And make car drivers wait for precious seconds?? Heresy!

It substantially increases pedestrian wait times though. In a grid city if I'm headed north east, I opportunistically take north or east, whichever is available. So I have no wait time at all for most of my journey, until the part when I have to go only north (say). A grid makes this the typical situation and placing a wait at every light makes the journey very tedious. It also slows down cars, of course. I'm sure this is the main reason it's not done - whether it's worth the risk, I'm not sure.

Here in the NL, all turns are protected with a middle island for pedestrians. You hardly have to wait to cross a busy intersection on foot, at least to get halfway across.

I guess it's more efficient, because at a four-way intersection in the north-american system there are always pedestrians and cars crossing. Whereas in the standard european system, either cars going left are stopped in a dedicated lane, or pedestrians are waiting for the cars that are going left to finish.

obviously that efficiency comes at the cost of a higher mortality :(

I would have thought the UK way was more efficient because you can cross diagonally? In the US system you have to wait for two sets of lights to cross diagonally.

> Whereas in the standard european system, either cars going left are stopped in a dedicated lane, or pedestrians are waiting for the cars that are going left to finish.

We have this in the US as well, but only at more-busy intersections that warrant a dedicated left-turn signal arrow. Pedestrians who could get hit by left-turning cars are given a don't-walk sign while the left arrow is green.

We do have this. We have this all over the country! But either nobody knows about it, or they ignore it.

When the "WALK" sign turns to a flashing "DONT WALK" (or their equivalent symbols) pedestrians are not supposed to enter the intersection.

Pedestrians already in the intersection can safely complete their crossing, but if you're on the sidewalk, you aren't supposed to step into the crosswalk.

It's basically the yellow light for pedestrians.

This is 100% completely ignored everywhere that I have been. Especially in big cities.

Hmmm but I thought a car is usually allowed to cross the pedestrian crossing, especially if turning right, even when the pedestrians are on WALK?

The car is supposed to yield to pedestrian traffic. Which usually means slowly inching towards the walkers in an intimidating manner if they don’t hurry it up.

This doesn't stop vehicles in an unprotected left turning and creaming pedestrians. Unless the signal also has a red turn arrow.

> When the "WALK" sign turns to a flashing "DONT WALK" (or their equivalent symbols) pedestrians are not supposed to enter the intersection.

This is no longer true in San Francisco (and possibly CA as a whole?). Pedestrians are allowed to enter the intersection when the don't-walk sign is already flashing, as long as they are out by the time it goes solid (in practice this means you usually will only do this if the flashing don't-walk sign is accompanied by a countdown timer). I believe this law change happened at the beginning of 2020.

As someone who is a consummate jaywalker, I love this, though I do think it's questionable from a safety perspective. Then again, is it? If someone is already moving in the intersection when the light turns green, oncoming traffic should be able to easily see the person. And they'll just be starting to accelerate from a stop, so (with the exception of idiots with high-perf engines who just need to show them off all the time) the cars will be moving pretty slowly. They can stop again just as quickly if they need to, and pedestrians still have a good amount of time to get out of the intersection.

This "already moving in the intersection" phenomenon is (I believe) what drives a semi-recent light timing change: the pedestrian signals at many intersections now transition to "walk" about 5 seconds before the drivers in that direction transition from red to green. This gives time for pedestrians to get into the intersection and be seen, before drivers start making left and right turns into the crosswalks.

> In the UK almost all junctions have either people crossing, or cars turning, but not both at the same time.

This sounds super strange from a continental European standard as well. Do you mean that cars and pedestrians are never crossing these intersections at the same time?

In any case, the UK also has at least a few cities where pedestrians often have no dedicated signal and are (in these junctions) left to fend for themselves while crossing due to the lack of signals and lack of priority. I don’t understand that situation at all.

> Do you mean that cars and pedestrians are never crossing these intersections at the same time?

Well yeah... because that'd be dangerous if they went at the same time wouldn't it?

No. Have you visited cities in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, etc.? Most larger intersections have several crossings (1-2 on each side) that are signaled appropriately to allow pedestrians, cars, and often trams and/or bicycles simultaneous but separate right-of-way.

In my experience, it’s nearly always clear to everyone where they can go while moving traffic around quite efficiently. The UK system seems to either keep pedestrians entirely separate or throw them into the deep end with car-prioritized signaling.

(However, the latter may only be in the city I’m in at the moment, as I at least haven’t seen this in London.)

Seems bonkers to me to have people and cars in the same space at the same time.

You mention right of way but it's no comfort to me that I have right of way over a car when the car is trying to push through or running me over!

> Seems bonkers to me to have people and cars in the same space at the same time.

That seems pretty unavoidable to me, considering we put sidewalks right next to roads. As a pedestrian, I don't want to wait for both directions of traffic to have their turns to cross before I get mine. Though it can be handy if I need to cross diagonally.

Pedestrians in the UK need to wait until all traffic are red, then they can cross the junction (even diagonally).

This is indeed different from continental Europe, as a pedestrian I kinda preferred the system in the UK, but you could wait quite a long time.

This is sort of the case in the US at some crossings. Crossings where there is a separate signal for left turns will turn on the don't-walk sign on that side when the left-turn signal is green.

Occasionally I do see intersections where there is a signal phase where car traffic is red in both directions, and pedestrians get the walk signal in all directions (which is extra handy if you need to go diagonally across the intersection). But these are pretty rare.

Most intersections don't have left-turn signals at all for cars, so yes, there will be pedestrians crossing when cars are turning. And I guess for right turns it's nearly always the case that pedestrians are crossing when cars are turning.

It's not great, but I think there's a trade off to be made. As a frequent pedestrian in a city, I don't want to have to wait until both directions of cars have their turn before I can cross. I get that the current situation does increase the risk to me, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. (But I also jaywalk through don't-walk signs all the time if traffic is clear, so perhaps I'm not the best person to make this judgment.)

> I don't get why North Americans have people crossing at the same time as cars are turning.

Its the same in Australia as well, the cars wait for pedestrians and then proceed with the turn till the light is green for them.

It's not just that. The number of times I've made eye contact with a left turner and they still pulled into the oncoming traffic lane is uncountable (for 25 years I talked to/from work each day, 3-6 miles).

What's really annoying about this: they almost always get angry at me when they miscalculate the time it takes for me to walk (I'm faster than most) across the street and a car is coming the opposite direction. I've had people yell the f-word and other things to be also uncountable times, in this situation. We have a very car-centric culture.

Maybe we should put a screen on the inside of the a column, so it appears transparent...

I like it, now add "forward vision screens" with cameras down either side of the car and 50cm up off the roof.

That way, when stuck in slow traffic, I can look for oncoming traffic before turning out at all.

Maybe car driving will be the "killer app" for AR.

> which is usually fine with something as big as a car

I had a couple of near-misses at the same spot, with cars hidden behind the A-pillar. The intersection is prone to Constant Angular Velocity approaches - probably as a result of speed limits and layout. Witnessing a whole car appear out of nowhere is something, let me tell you! Fortunately, I had enough time to break on both occasions as I was facing a yield sign. I now have a head-bobbing habit, and haven't experienced surprises since.

While A-pillars are indeed too wide and can create a dangerous situation, in my experience the main problem in LA, at least, is that too many drivers have a habit of looking in the direction opposite to the turn while making a turn. Even if there had been a seamless glass bubble cabin, humans don't have wide enough field of view to see anything over their shoulder while looking over the opposite shoulder. I used to walk to work in LA and was amazed how many people do this. Could be the same in other cities but I've not been walking much elsewhere.

That's information that anyone with a driver's license should have learned and been tested on, both theoretically and practically.

Besides making roads safer, I wonder how long society can go on without re-testing people's competence for moving tons of steel at 60 miles per hour on a regular basis.

There's very few dangerous activities that don't require regular re-certification and training, and driving really shouldn't be an exception.

Some main contributing factors to road fatalities are going too fast for conditions, exceeding the speed limit, failing to look properly (left turns!), reckless driving, and various forms of inexperience.[1] That means it's mostly people who don't know/forgot how to drive safely and mouth breathers who don't realize most traffic laws exist for a reason and are written in blood.

Can't hurt to remind people occasionally and make sure they can actually be trusted on roads.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000145751...

Society wants to pretend the issue doesn't exist because the consequences of taking away a person's ability to drive is so outsized. In some states you can go over half a century without taking an eye test. Though my license doesn't require me to have them, I always wear eyeglasses at night now when I drive even though most of my life I had excellent eyesight. Time simply comes for all of us and our laws don't always reflect that.

Exactly -- furthermore, I wish the US did things more like Germany; getting a license should be both extremely difficult and extremely expensive.

Driving should be considered a luxury, not a necessity, but sadly the entire US is designed around the assumption that everyone has a car.

Yeah, moving from point A to point B autonomously without relying on public transit i.e. sharing space with other people totally depending on other people's whims and fancies should be a luxury.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that you are driving a potential weapon and a dangerous machine. It should be treated as such. Maybe the price doesn't have to be high but unless you know of another way of making people think twice about loosing their license than money I see no other way than a high price. Besides, it isn't that expensive. Nowhere near being a luxury. It's only expensive when compared to the US system where you in most states are only paying for a piece of plastic, not tens of hours of people's time training you properly. Most European countries have the same system as Germany and the amount of traffic deaths and injured says it all. It's simply a better system even if not perfect.

> Another is that you are driving a potential weapon and a dangerous machine.

> It's simply a better system even if not perfect.

Americans also like guns a lot more than is sane so you might not be convincing them. I've heard many people say they prefer big cars because they know if something goes wrong, its the other guy who gets hurt.

> Besides, it isn't that expensive.

Okay, but the argument was that it should be "extremely expensive".

> It's only expensive when compared to the US system where you in most states are only paying for a piece of plastic, not tens of hours of people's time training you properly.

I definitely paid my driving instructor. The labor cost at the licensing bureau was only about 15 worker-minutes.

> totally depending on other people's whims and fancies

Last time I checked trains run on a schedule, not the whims of the engineer, but maybe trains are really weird in your country.

> totally depending on other people's whims and fancies

And that they're not infected with some novel disease...

Public transit was pretty dangerous and way less useful during most of 2020.

I agree that society doesn’t want to touch this issue because it impedes freedom of mobility in a car oriented country. I would be in favor of 5-10 year relicensing requirements and higher license fees to incentivize higher quality drivers.

I'm in favor of this, but I think it's a complete non-starter politically. It would largely affect the elderly, and the elderly love to vote.

The big issue is that many places are not walkable at all nor have good public transport. So, taking someones ability to drive implies taking away their ability to work, ability of their kids go to school, to go get ID or vote and even to go shop for food.

How is this different than not requiring a license at all? It seems as an arbitrary line. Either people have a right to drive or they don't. If they don't it is their problem if they break the law and have their license taken away. If they do there's no need for a license.

i totally agree on more frequent and more rigorous certification, but there's much more to traffic collisions than fatalities, and focusing on speed (a factor in fatalities but not really in collisions) tends to take attention away from the biggest all-around culprit, distracted driving.

distracted driving unfortunately is relatively resistant to testing for rules. we need to create games/simulations as part of that driver certification process where the outcomes of our millions of little distracted driving events become very clear.

This is true but I think simply having drivers think of licenses as something they can lose would be an enormous improvement. Right now even killing people will frequently not lead to a revoked license and everyone knows that. If there was a non-zero chance of losing your license, many people would decide that Facebook could wait.

i don't think this would work because folks will just drive anyway and risk the additional fines rather than, say, miss work and lose their job. unfortunately, driving unlicensed/uninsured happens all the time already, at least in my neck of the woods.

How would you even test this? People will be careful during the test, and then back to typical afterward.

I suppose a yearly knowledge check could help a bit. Could even be automated, so not very expensive to implement.

In California you only need an 80% on the written test to pass. And if I remember right you can retake it the same day.

To phrase that another way, you can be wrong about 20% of the driving laws and still drive. They should raise the bar.

Or if peoples can’t remember all the rules, they should reduce the number of rules while stiffening the consequences for causing a crash.

For example, if you’re at fault you loose a drivers license for life (or perhaps are restricted to operating only motorcycle-class vehicles and lighter).

As it stands we have all these rules that drivers forget or ignore. Then when a crash happens, they receive no consequences. I’d rather have people using intuition to driver safer for fear of punishment vs a set of rules that only increases safety in theory (see the unenforced three foot bike passing law).

The fact that you take issue with people being wrong about the law speaks volumes.

The test questions tend to be fairly simple, which sign is an octagon, how far before a turn should you signal, at a four way stop what happens, basic operational rules of the road stuff that has little to do with the law.

The law questions tend to be stuff about penalties that will rarely if ever have any bearing on you if you drive reasonably.

Go check the state's practice test questions if you don't believe me.

Aren't basic operational rules laws? How are there rules that aren't laws?

The problem is that taking a driving test in the suburbs is generally much easier than in the city, but the license counts all the same. People joke about how driving well in NYC/SF/LA/etc. traffic means you can handle driving anywhere, but that's not a joke, that ought to be the default you expect from every licensed driver.

I took my driving test in Boston, in the snow, and still got involved in an accident in the suburbs in winter. I generally think i'm an apt "city driver" which yes, is a different skill, but really doesn't translate very well to the rest of the roads.

I think in addition to more regular testing, we need more "levels" of drivers licenses.

Driving in a rural or suburban area where there are almost no pedestrians or cyclists, and very few vehicles doing pickup/delivery etc is very different from driving in a dense area with many pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, etc. Should having passed a test in the suburbs with very little traffic when I was 16 really confirm I can drive in the urban center?

This is especially true for the gigantic trucks with poor visibility and handling which a lot of commuters are now picking as their daily driver.

You should need a CDL with regular retesting to drive those in a city because they’re far more likely to serious injure someone when misused. Actual cattle ranchers have the space for that but anywhere shared with pedestrians and bicyclists does not.

Or, Lordy, the old retirees in 32’ RVs, who got their license 60-odd years ago and have never even had a drivers test, much less driver training.

I have memories of being stuck behind those guys in Highway 1 in Central California and wondering how they managed to buy gas without a disaster.

Other facts about pedestrian deaths:

80% are at night.

33% involve a drunk pedestrian.

20% are elderly.

Contrary to these data about SF, most pedestrian deaths (73%) are not at intersections, but at non-crossings.

I try to tell friends to be more careful walking at night, and to not walk drunk (take an uber, it's safer).

https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...

It’s time for pedestrian infrastructure that is safe by design. Most of these fatalities could be prevented by lowering the speed limit.

Lowering the speed limit doesn’t make sense if there are wide streets with wide lanes (more comfortable to drive in) and no enforcement.

In SF it would be preferable to reduce street width in reality or artificially with protected bike lanes, bus/muni right of way, etc on wide streets like Geary or Van Ness .

> In SF it would be preferable to reduce street width

Absolutely. It seems like the best way to reduce speeds in cities is to make it uncomfortable to drive fast in them. Big wide streets make it feel like you're going "slow" at 25mph, so people go faster.

Of course, we could also slowly carve out areas of cities where cars are not allowed, but how will businesses survive if people can't park directly in front of them? /s

It’s funny that in my city, the most active retail area is a pedestrian only street. Anything with heavy car traffic tends to have more intentional destination type stuff.

> Anything with heavy car traffic tends to have more intentional destination type stuff.

Is it possible that the intentional destination is the pedestrian street, to do your shopping ? Remove the heavy traffic lanes around it and people will go shopping somewhere else or go to amazon instead.

In my city that's what's happening, the pedestrian only street used to be the place to go shopping for clothes/luxuries. Now it's impossible to get there so people go to off city malls instead (which are thriving) or online (also thriving), and street stores are slowly dying.

This street has many highrise offices, universities and residential buildings around it so its a destination of a lot of foot traffic from buildings, not so much somewhere you drive to access. There are also multi level parks on the ends, you just can't drive through it.

I really like seeing streets that have seating where parking spots used to be. Some popular areas have whole blocks converted. They really make it hard to jaywalk, and offer lots of barrier between sidewalk and cars. That said, it probably sucks for bicyclists.

The speed limit is 25 mph through most of San Francisco, even some of the major routes (like 19th Avenue which is 6 lanes wide with its own divider) are limited to 30 mph. Narrow alleys are 15 mph by default, Market Street is 20 mph, Van Ness is 25 mph. This city probably has the lowest speed limits I've ever seen, and I've lived on 3 continents.

https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/Map-of-Speed-Limits/tt...

Well, in Spain it's 30km/h max in the whole city, 18mp/h.

Thing is, nobody normally goes that slow, from a point on drivers will start ignoring it and decide on a speed themselves.

My observations in Europe are pretty much opposite to this.

Many EU cities are max 30 kph (18.5 mph) on most roads.

https://qz.com/2056530/european-cities-are-slowing-down-thei...

You have to separate the road from the stroad. Roads in Europe might be up to 60-70 kph even in a city center, but they also have calming intersections with roundabouts and to get on an off regularly or even ramps. Streets tend to be 30-40 kph depending on the place with lots of calming.

The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all over the US & Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

They could have just as easily (easier, even) been avoided if pedestrians followed the law and used the existing infrastructure.

Speed limits are set in part by how fast people actually drive on a street. You need to go further up-funnel and redesign streets so speeding doesn’t feel safe.

In Bangkok the roads are very wide and busy. Every couple hundred meters they have bridges that go over them. It's an interesting solution to the problem. It's nice that you just walk up the stairs and cross, no need to worry about the traffic.

They're all over the place, most of them much more minimal, but similar to this: https://previews.123rf.com/images/ruslan_kokarev/ruslan_koka...

sucks if you're mobility impaired ( wheelchair ) , and with ADA the costs will be too prohibitive for most locales, so they'll just paint some zebra stripes and put up a flashing light

Also sucks if you have a stroller, luggage, pets, small kids, a bum leg, if you're old or just tired.

There are crosswalks on street level, you have to go further and wait though.

Some of them have escalators or elevators.

Why should pedestrians be inconvenienced? Make the cars wait or send them the long way around.

In Karachi too IIRC

signs and fines have minimal impact on driver behavior. Apply treatments to the road that alter driver behavior - the perception of danger is quite a motivator in reducing speeds (tullock's spike for instance).

If the physical design of the street says that it expects to be traversed at 40mph, people will drive 35 to 45mph on it even if the posted speed limit says 25.

This situation offers tremendous benefits to traffic police officers a bit behind on their ticket writing, but minimal benefits for pedestrian safety, because the people likely to notice the sign and slow down were already the people likely to notice pedestrians and drive defensively.

Is this satire?

The speed limit has barely anything to do with pedestrian infrastructure. It's the interaction points between the two where the problems are (intersections, crossings, etc).

Give people (both pedestrians and drivers) the opportunities to get where they need to go without getting in each other's way and 99/100 they'll pull it off successfully.

Is this satire? Vehicle speed is one of the best predictors of pedestrian fatality and injury severity in an accident. When a pedestrian is struck by a driver, almost nothing else matters as much as the vehicle's speed.

> speed is one of the best predictors of pedestrian fatality and injury severity

True, but a total red herring. Speed might be the main factor affecting severity of injury, but it's not the main factor affecting probability in a left-turn scenario. Remember left turns? It's what OP is about. Very few people are going the speed limit while turning left, and that would remain true even with lower limits. Visibility is the dominant factor here - around other vehicles, around the A-pillar, etc. The least severe accident is the one that doesn't happen. "Lower speed limits" is a great hobby horse, but not one that belongs here.

speed limits... doesn't work.

I live in a city where they lowered the speed limits heavily, the result is law abiding drivers constantly almost crashing because they have eyes glued on the speedometer to keep themselves under the speed limit while on roads that "feel" faster.

And the non-law abiding drivers that will happily crash into the rear of law abiding ones, since everyone is same speed, when someone DO obey the speed limit, that person gets rear ended as the other drivers get surprised.

Instead you need better road design. (also, putting speed bumps after long wide straights is just a retarded idea, saw a bunch of times people going airborne on those, including one time where a guy managed to leave his wheel STUCK INSIDE a wall, at the exact height a person head should be...).

That's interesting, though non-crossings seems vague. Are those parking lots combined with people j-walking?

The cited data [0] is presented in a super confusing way - the categories are "At Intersection" (18%), "Not At Intersection" (73%), and "Other" (9%). Apparently "other locations such as roadsides/shoulders, parking lanes/zones, bicycle lanes, sidewalks, medians/crossing islands, driveway accesses, shared-use paths/trails, non-traffic way areas, and other sites," which make up the "Other" category, are neither intersections nor non-intersections.

I'm gonna guess the "Not At Intersection" category refers solely to jaywalkers.

[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

> I'm gonna guess the "Not At Intersection" category refers solely to jaywalkers.

That is absurd guess. Plenty of crossings are outside of intersections.

Plus it is often completely legal to cross when there is not crossing close.

> Plus it is often completely legal to cross when there is not crossing close.

Jaywalking is an act, I don't think anyone in this thread cares about it's legality with respect to the situation. We're just discussing how to interpret the statistics.

The point here is that a majority of these accidents occur at non-intersections which are not covered by "Other".

>Plus it is often completely legal to cross when there is not crossing close.

Though not always, got burned by this as a teenager when I got hit crossing the highway in front of my trailer park. The intersection I crossed from was a private road, which stuck my family with liability on the ambulance ride (which luckily was the worst of it.)

I am a traffic engineer that deals with crash reports quite often. One thing we include at the beginning of every crash analysis we do is a disclaimer that the contents of the crash report are subjective and solely the work of the responding officer. This means that junction/non-junction or crossing/non-crossing can vary a lot. The data are very messy with inaccuracies in location and direction of travel. (Side note, it is super frustrating when the road winds a lot and the eastbound direction is traveling westerly, for example.) The data that are reported to FHWA and NHTSA are even more generalized that those kept by the individual states. Additionally, pedestrian and bicyclist crashes tend to be underreported unless there is a severe injury. This can greatly skew the data to look more rosey than reality.

The quite large homeless population living all along the streets also contribute, although hard to quantify in stats as I don't think they're kept. The number of people who 1) are stoned out of their minds on x (not just alcohol, but things like meth/heroin) or 2) just don't care (they'll see you and step out anyway, and slam your hood when you stop), just suddenly step out in front of you from between 2 other parked cars. You have a split second to react, even at 15mph. Combine that with less than ideal visibility, especially during fall/winter (dark early/foggy/rainy) and it's a recipe for tragedy. I think I see more bike accidents caused by that than cars because the bikes are typically driving on the shoulder between the parked cars and the closest lane, so even less chance to see them step in front of you at the last second. You can see this around any large homeless population living on sidewalks in any large city in the US and it's not unique to SF at all. Just stand on a street corner for 15-20 minutes and observe the road all down the block.

As both a driver, and a pedestrian, I have felt threatened by a lot more distracted, dangerous, and outright reckless drivers, than I have by pedestrians as a driver.

While people stepping into traffic is a thing that sometimes happens in some parts of town, reckless driving is the sort of thing that is happening all the time, anywhere. There's an incredible amount of entitlement that many people feel when they get behind the wheel, which is not matched by their ability to operate one.

I call this dance the "Tenderloin Lurch" (1, not 2, and I think it's often mental illness not drugs). You can sort of spot the folks who look like they're completely unaware of traffic laws and/or reality and predict when they're going to change directions and lurch out into traffic.

The thing is, the driver is always wrong. As a driver in a place with pedestrian, you will always be the danger and are the one responsible for adapting your behaviour.

Certainly the level of "due diligence" is higher for a driver than a pedestrian, because cars present a high level of danger. But to claim that the driver is always at fault is silly. As OP described, it is possible for a driver to be perfectly diligent (drive slowly and attentively) and for a pedestrian to cause an unavoidable accident.

Have you ever had a positive experience with a person who happened to be homeless? My interactions don't seem to depend on the other person lives. Plenty of jerks drive expensive SUVs, Teslas, or bicycles.

The worst problems I've had with pedestrians were in a college town, where the (housed) students crossed wherever and whenever, as if it was a park.

> non-crossings

Which is and should be completely legal provided crossing is not close.

We need to normalize the use of lights at night by pedestrians on roads or multi use paths. I've seen them used by recreational pedestrians (dog walkers, runners) but for some reason never outside of that context. Sometimes I use my phone's flashlight when I find myself in this situation, and I leave a bike tail light clipped onto my backpack for this reason too.

Or you know maybe we should insist that the people driving a ton of steel at high speed use their lights.

Only an American could have written this.

How many times do you notice a pedestrian AS you pass them? After you pass them? Not at all?

Please wear light colored clothes at night. One time I only saw a person because they were wearing white shoes, all of their other clothes were black.

You're not wrong, but it's frustrating that responsibility has to fall on the pedestrian, not the driver. A pedestrian would be perfectly safe walking around with dark clothing if there were no cars around.

I walk and drive in a big city (NYC), I don't get this mentality of being frustrated over self-preservation, yet you're not the first person to share a sentiment like this.

No one exists in a modern city without indirectly taking advantage of cars and trucks. So people should be more enthusiastic about being part of the solution when it comes to pedestrian safety.

I see people get annoyed when I imply they should proactive about their safety as a pedestrian, but at the end of the day we're all shopping at stores stocked by trucks with horrible visibility and maneuverability mostly driving at night...

The same way everyone benefits from the existence of automobiles, everyone should be part of the solution when it comes to their safety while near them.

The best way to be "proactive about safety" as a pedestrian is to pressure your local government into improving the physical layout of roads so that they are safe by design, so that people do not need to do preposterous and undignified things like wear reflective clothing or helmets.

> responsibility has to fall on the pedestrian

Drivers should drive at speeds/times/lighting conditions so they don't hit people, or at least minimize the chances.

Pedestrians should care about their own safety too. There's a reason we tell children not to play in the road.

I've a very pro-pedestrian and anti-car urban dweller who walks everywhere and curses at cars flying by, but i wouldn't blindly step into the road without paying attention to cars around me, especially at night. This behavior isn't because i think drivers should get a pass, its because it'd f*king suck if i died.

> A pedestrian would be perfectly safe walking around with dark clothing if there were no cars around.

Horses? Carriages? Cyclists? Scooters?

A pedestrian is safe around other pedestrians. Safety is always a shared responsibility.

> 80% are at night.

I don't want to blame the victims, but I'll bet the number would be lower if it weren't for all the people who go ninja at night - dark clothing, and not a stitch of anything reflective. That, combined with the increased prevalence of drivers blinding others with their high beams 100% of the time, seems like a recipe for more vehicle/pedestrian collisions.

>I don't want to blame the victims, but

But you basically are.

You're driving a multi-ton hunk of steel around, and the onus is squarely on you to make sure you're driving it safely, which necessarily means proper lighting at night.

The city you live in is the second responsible party, because it's up to them to light streets appropriately, especially at designated crossing points. Most if the time they do it the North American way instead.

> You're driving a multi-ton hunk of steel around

No, sometimes I'm the pedestrian. As such, regardless of whatever anyone else does, I bear some responsibility for ensuring my own safety. I owe it to my family. I owe it to other pedestrians, any of whom could become a victim if a driver avoiding me swerves into them. Drivers failing to see pedestrians in the dark at night happens even with the greatest caution. There's no excuse for being an idiot, or BTW for insisting on such a right. If you have an objection to ducking responsibility and always pointing the finger of blame outward, consider your own statements.

> it's up to them to light streets appropriately

It's not feasible or environmentally responsible to light every inch of roadway even on side/residential streets or rural areas, and I sincerely doubt that happens where you live either. Also, lights fail sometimes. If people want to enter the commons, they have a responsibility to participate in keeping it safe.

>No, sometimes I'm the pedestrian.

Yes, and sometimes I'm the driver. I'm talking about those other times, and the "you" was used in the general sense.

I guess we have a significant philosophical difference about how we see this problem. I approach it in much the same way as a woman would deal with the threat of being raped - sure, one should always take measures to watch out for oneself, but at no point can it be reasonably cast as "taking responsibility", because the responsibility always rests with the guilty party, the attacker (or the inattentive driver whose negligence becomes criminal if someone's hurt).

It's not good enough to say "here are some rape whistles, purrsonal responsibility gals". And it's not good enough to say "shit happens, drivers sometimes don't care, wear some reflective vests, maybe put on a blinking light and a little spinning propeller on your hat to be more noticeable". No. Instead, we should (and some of us do) demand actual accountability for drivers who kill pedestrians through inattention. We don't have that in North America, and as a direct consequence a lot more people die on our streets, and blinking lights or reflective vests don't have squat to do with that.

And we do insist on proper lighting of designated pedestrian crossings, at the very least. Pretty sure walking + more street lights is far more environmentally friendly than driving + no street lights at all.

The responsibility lies squarely with the driver. Starts with the driver, stops with the driver. Lack of proper lighting can be a contributing factor, but it's the driver's responsibility to account for that. And all this muddying the waters, with this "yeah but was your hat blinking", is unhelpful.

> I guess we have a significant philosophical difference

Yeah, if arguing in good faith or not is a philosophical difference.

> we do insist on proper lighting of designated pedestrian crossings

Really? Even when two residential streets (which I specifically mentioned) cross? Nope. Show me the statute or GTFO. Restricting this only to "designated crossings" makes it circular.

> Pretty sure walking + more street lights is far more environmentally friendly than driving + no street lights at all.

This isn't about a future/hypothetical world where more walk and fewer drive. It's about the here and now where the two mix. Another red herring. It would be nice if you or the other "let the little people drive for me" folks could write a whole paragraph without a fallacy.

> I approach it in much the same way as a woman would deal with the threat of being raped

You're seriously trying to compare auto accidents to rape? I already anticipated that bullshit, e.g. by mentioning the third-party risk. An accident is not the same as an assault. Rape is horrible and auto accidents are horrible, but they're different in many ways. That's a false analogy, appealing to emotion rather than reason, and I won't dignify it or you by engaging further.

Yeeesh. Idk if it was intended that way, but this comes off very victim-blamey. So let's get an alternate take:

80% at night - drivers should be forced to slow down at night. They can't see and avoid pedestrians as well.

33% involve a drunk pedestrian - the implication of this is that without constant vigilance, your safety is in great danger. This agrees strongly with the "20% are elderly" stat. You ability as an able-bodied person to actively avoid cars is the only thing keeping you alive.

> You ability as an able-bodied person to actively avoid cars is the only thing keeping you alive.

That is true. One misstep near a busy road can easily result in death. The only way to fix this 100% is separating roads from pedestrian with a physical barrier, or remove the cars from the places where people live. Even at the lowish speed limit of 18miles/h (30km/h) there is around 25 meters/81 feet of stopping distance which can easily kill a person if the cars wheels goes over someone.

Here in Sweden there is a general rule that all roads near places where children are must be 30km/h or lower (school, sports areas, and so on). Maybe it would be useful to extend this to also cover areas where alcohol is likely to be consumed. It won't reduce it to 0 deaths, but it might reduce the number of collisions that has a lethal outcome.

> Even at the lowish speed limit of 18miles/h (30km/h) there is around 25 meters/81 feet of stopping distance

That seems extremely long. I always used the rule of thumb that the braking distance from 20 mph is 20 feet and it’s a quadratic function of speed.

You would need to add a full 2 seconds of non-reaction time to get to 79 feet from 20mph.

I used 2.5 seconds. It is dark, the driver is tired and can not predict the behavior of the drunk pedestrian, and in times like now it might also be snow/ice. Road safety is part worst case scenarios and part about mitigation. It is why drivers here are trained that children will at any point run out on the road during play without them thinking. Children behavior are more unpredictable compared to adults and so it is the drivers responsibility to be vigilant against what they can't foresee.

How often do those missteps happen, as opposed to intentional crossings?

It's odd to me that such a significant source of fatalities is being addressed in a very unambitious way. Left turns are clearly difficult maneuvers in many parts of SF. Why not turn them into protected left turns?

This "just blame the drivers" attitude is really odd. Their response is to tell drivers that they need to take more care and then enforce the care with an obstacle course. Why not do something harder that would be more effective? Protected lefts. Separating walk signals from green lights. Tickets to penalize poor driving. Tickets to penalize anyone walking out of turn. Tickets for anything that makes the left turn more complicated so drivers can focus on the job.

You got me a bit confused by this. You say we shouldn't "just blame the drivers," but then advocate for increased ticketing. That's a contradiction.

Just blame the drivers is shorthand for asking drivers to do better, without any other changes. Rules and laws to penalize drivers are a more effective strategy since people respond better when there are real costs associated with driving poorly (or so I hope; it seems logical but maybe it doesn’t, maybe the laws will be selectively enforced, not sure).

It's a systemic issue drivers are one stakeholder and many are responsible. Vehicle designers & manufactures, Urban Planners etc.

> people respond better when there are real costs associated with driving poorly

The real cost is that driving kills 40,000 people a year in the US.

The mortality rate is an externality to most drivers. Financial penalties or better designs have a more direct effect. Similar to how coal power plants kill thousands due to air pollution but don’t really care until they’re penalized financially or made to design systems to reduce emissions.

People don't react to incentives the same way that corporations do.

Congratulations for adding absolutely nothing to the conversation.

Rather than unintentionally causing a car accident, let's say it was an engineer bringing down production. You are saying Engineers need more negative incentives; they should loose there job for accidentally bringing down production. Bringing down production is obviously because they were personally negligent. This is blaming the engineer, when it is a failure of the system they are operating in.

> The mortality rate is an externality to most drivers.

Not sure what point you're trying to make here. If I killed someone else with my car, even If I don't die, there are real Physical, Emotional and Financial costs.

This is a pretty silly comparison. If an engineer for a medical device fucked up resulting in the death of people, they would absolutely be fired and face legal consequences. Which is why there are very strict regulations around these things (including fines and potential criminal charges).

plenty of decisions that result in the death of people in the medical industry and others suffer no consequences, but it's pointless to debate your unspecified hypothetical.

Not sure how you can possibly look at something that kills 40,000 people in the US a year and chalk it up to personally responsibility of the Driver. I guess you live in an a less complicated world, must be nice.

> Not sure how you can possibly look at something that kills 40,000 people in the US a year and chalk it up to personally responsibility of the Driver. I guess you live in an a less complicated world, must be nice.

If you tried to actually read what I’ve written you wouldn’t be creating straw man arguments. If you just wanna engage in snide personal attacks to placate your fragile ego, go ahead, it’s not really a discourse that interests me.

To clarify the point, the reason for imposing fines to influence driver behavior isn’t to hold them responsible personally for every pedestrian fatality; that already happens when there is an accident with the drivers involved. The point of fines and regulations is to encourage drivers to drive better to reduce the chances of the accidents taking place. E.g. Speed limits encourage drivers to change their behavior so that we have fewer accidents.

> The point of fines and regulations is to encourage drivers to drive better to reduce the chances of the accidents taking place. E.g. Speed limits encourage drivers to change their behavior so that we have fewer accidents.

Driver behavior is a factor, they have some responsibility, and yes you can modify behavior with incentives. But the world and most things in it are complicated systems & processes. The design of vehicles, the design of roads, the design of walk-ways are major factors etc. When you only promote solutions that have to deal with driver behavior, you are absolving all the other stakeholders of responsibility and de-facto blaming the driver.

> The mortality rate is an externality to most drivers.

Killing or injuring someone is not an externality. It's a horrible, traumatic event. Most people absolutely do not want to do it. I don't need fines to deter me - in fact, if it happened, the fine would be of vanishingly little concern.

Also, almost every driver is also a pedestrian and has loved ones who are pedestrians.

> Killing or injuring someone is not an externality.

I specifically mentioned the mortality rate, not the actual event of a driver being involved in an incident.

Peoples driving habits aren’t changed by a statistic (mortality rate) even though unsafe driving directly contributes to that number.

Fair enough, but people don't need a statistic to care about the risks of car accidents; people are averse to them.

I'm sure most people will agree. After it has happened. Then it's too late. Untill it happens it is definitely an externality to most.

> I'm sure most people will agree. After it has happened. Then it's too late. Untill it happens it is definitely an externality to most.

Wow, that's a pretty negative belief about human nature. IME, everyone I know is concerned and serious about it before it happens, though certainly they take more risks beforehand and of course have a much stronger response after something happens (or even after a close call).

Don't think this is the correct usage of externality... It's more that it's an acceptable risk, until it happens. Externality would imply the vast majority of drivers who are never involved in fatal accidents contributed to causing the accidents but did not suffer its consequences.

> Externality would imply the vast majority of drivers who are never involved in fatal accidents contributed to causing the accidents but did not suffer its consequences.

Is that wrong?

If 1000 drivers are being unsafe, are they not all contributing? Surely the one driver that actually causes a fatal accident doesn't absorb the blame from the other 999.

And just about all drivers are unsafe sometimes and/or drive on roads that were designed with compromised safety.

> If 1000 drivers are being unsafe, are they not all contributing? Surely the one driver that actually causes a fatal accident doesn't absorb the blame from the other 999.

1000 drivers contribute to 1 accident ??? No they are essentially independent events. Drivers can cause a bunch of externalities (Noise, Pollution, Traffic) but most are not causing or contributing to fatal accidents.

And I would not solely blame the driver/participants in a fatal accident, you have to look at the system they are operating in (Car Manufactures, Road/Highway designs etc etc)

They're not all contributing to that specific accident, but they're contributing to the rate of accidents.

Getting lucky doesn't absolve you of endangering others!

For a more extreme example, imagine a million drunk drivers getting on the road at the same time to drive a significant distance. Nobody has crashed yet, but many of them will. I would say they are clearly "contributing to causing fatal accidents". Would you not?

> And I would not solely blame the driver/participants in a fatal accident, you have to look at the system they are operating in (Car Manufactures, Road/Highway designs etc etc)

That's why I said "and/or drive on roads that were designed with compromised safety"

> They're not all contributing to that specific accident, but they're contributing to the rate of accidents.

> For a more extreme example, imagine a million drunk drivers getting on the road at the same time to drive a significant distance. Nobody has crashed yet, but many of them will. I would say they are clearly "contributing to causing fatal accidents". Would you not?

It's like you are saying Shark Attacks are an externality of swimming in the ocean. That is not an externality, that is a risk of swimming in the ocean. Someone swimming in the ocean and is fine is completely independent of someone else who swims in the ocean and is attacked by a shark.

Road systems are pretty communal, though. We decide what safety systems to implement and what norms to uphold. I think 'externality' works well enough.

Shark attacks are an externality of having such a strong beach culture, or whatever.

Externality has a specific technical meaning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Now calculate the percentage of drivers that it happens to.

Then reconsider the phrase 'most drivers'.

I'm a little skeptical that people's driving behavior changes a lot when you increase the penalty.

It has been proven in lots of European countries with the ticket system (X times you do something deemed bad enough inside Y years you have to get another expensive drivers license). I'd bet that you could likely pick any EU country and see the difference before and after the system got implemented. Of course a lot of people in the US sees driving a car as a right, not a privilege. Without the risk of loosing your license and it being at least semi expensive and hard to get any system is pretty useless.

The obvious answer is that it’s easier to blame drivers than enact meaningful change, which requires time and effort.

You’re absolutely right though, this is a systemic problem fand needs a systems-based approach to solving it. Speed limits, limiting hours for motorized traffic… there are many ways in which this problem can be alleviated.

Protected lefts require a dedicated turn lane, and many of the intersections where this is a problem simply don't have room for them. Removing parking spaces to make room is unfortunately a fraught process that can take years. So you wind up with training that nobody's going to take

Another option is to make left turns illegal on more streets and make right turns easier.

Protected left turns don’t work well without insanely wide roads. There is not room for protected left turn lanes in most of sf, and too much traffic to do one direction at a time signals.

I've not driven in San Francisco. Are cars allowed to sit and block an entire lane until they can turn left? That is how things worked in the rural town I grew up in, but I can't imagine it working in a city. All the streets in the city I live in now which are too narrow for a turn lane are either one-way (thus have no need for a protected left) or they prohibit left turns.

Many streets have "no left turn" signs that apply during busy hours to prevent this (but of course those are often ignored anyway).

In practice the thing that determines if you can turn left and block traffic is how high your tolerance to honking behind you is.

> This "just blame the drivers" attitude

Where do you see blame? I just see people presenting ways reduce serious harm to others, something I think most drivers would appreciate. As a driver, I'm glad to read it.

There's something called "left turn hardening". This involves minor barriers to channel drivers into making wider left turns. New York City does a lot of this.[1]

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pedestrians/turn-calming....

The linked page describes exactly that - "Left Turn Calming" projects.

> At SFMTA, we’re working hard to help drivers make left turns the right way. We’ve installed Left Turn Guide Bumps at designated intersections around the City, with painted safety zones and raised bumps to remind drivers to slow down and make squarer left turns. We’ll test how well these treatments make left turns safer, with a long-term goal of installing calming project at other intersections where they are needed most.

I never knew that's what those were for. Thanks for sharing.

I know you see a lot of concrete (+ grass) road medians in the South. Do those have a similar effect or do the cones need to extend out to really work?

Mobile, AL has some pretty big left turn channels they dug out the median for. New Orleans tends to make U turns past the intersection.

There’s one of these at 10th Street turning left onto Folsom.

Why US can't simply install left turn signals onto traffic lights more widely?

I noticed how few of them are there in North America.

1) Because pedestrians walk against the signal all the same.

2) Because if it's a dedicated turn signal, you dramatically increase cross-traffic wait time. To compensate you need better signal timing to minimize the number of stops, but that tends to increase speeds, which is not good for pedestrians. If the signal isn't dedicated, it doesn't actually make it easier for the driver to see pedestrians as their attention is still split.

The problem with San Francisco is its reliance on surface transportation, both cars and buses. I live in the city but I can drive downtown 2x faster in a car then if I took the bus, whether there's traffic or no traffic. And while I'd prefer to take public transit, I don't prefer spending 45m-1h in a bus (the "rapid" line) when driving only takes 20-30m. That's an additional hour out of every work day, and an hour spent sitting at that. (I wouldn't mind walking 15m to a subway that would speed me downtown, but that's just not in the cards here. They're even discussing cancelling the Geary BRT project after only building a few bulb outs and painting some lanes, which in actuality saved 10 minutes at the very best.)

As a pedestrian I hate cars. However, in this city I can't only be a pedestrian. To get from one part of the city to another, I need to take surface transportation, which to be efficient needs fast, smooth flowing traffic. (And to be most time efficient for me, that means driving a car, at least to any place where there isn't a direct bus line.)

Doing things correctly requires a comprehensive solution which includes building new infrastructure rather than simply tearing down old infrastructure. Unfortunately San Francisco politics is too paralyzed. One the one hand you have the people who want to tear things down--close streets, etc. On the other hand you have people who don't want anything to change. And on the third hand... well, there is no third hand.

All those examples are honestly still awful. What is needed is traffic/refuge islands so you has a pedestrian only have to deal with the possibility of crossing traffic coming from one direction and no chance of getting stuck in a unprotected position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refuge_island

Those can work on areas with lower speed traffic, but they can be very dangerous on wide roads with faster vehicle traffic. Poorly designed refuge islands give pedestrians very little protection if a vehicle looses control at an intersection. Even if the pedestrian is paying attention, the only escape option is likely straight into traffic.

Good then that I can't remember the last time I saw a bent light pole due to a car losing control. I actually haven't seen it happen in my life. I have seen bent light poles, but I couldn't tell you when or where last.

Escape shouldn't be an option, it won't work on the sidewalk either. Optimizing for that is optimizing for failure.

Anecdotally, I've seen several bent "walk button" poles located right in the middle of refuge islands. When you live in a place that gets snow and ice in the winter, cars slide out of control frequently.

I think that comes down to mandating winter tires, effective snowplowing and drivers education including driving in slippery conditions, if such conditions are regularly encountered and expected. Important is enforcing it also, let people slide out of control in a controlled fashion so they know to be scared of it.

I literally drove all around town yesterday, a nice cool -5C (23F) with about 30-40 cm of snow which came in the last week, no problem at all. No bent poles anywhere (anecdotally). Always fun feeling the ABS kick in at the slightest too hard touch of the brake pedal, even with studded tires.

I think there may be some miscommunication on what I meant by "poorly designed refuge islands." This is the sort of refuge island I was thinking about (apologies for the long link): https://www.google.com/maps/@46.7950288,-100.7944774,3a,61.2...

Refuge islands can be fairly safe, but not in this situation, where the pedestrian is standing a few feet away from fast moving traffic, with no curb and only a flimsy plastic pole for protection.

Ah right, that's an awful one. This is one of the worst examples I find in my vicinity, no new road would ever get designed like this. To thin.

https://goo.gl/maps/8wP7UUb5ZtFm7uu87

Here's a more newly designed one, it should be possible to wait with a bike or a stroller there and still feel safe. See this high traffic and speed intersection without any lights. Would still want completely separated lanes though.

https://goo.gl/maps/uxR3zdMw2w2p6zcE6

As someone who grew up with snow, this is wishful thinking.

> yesterday, a nice cool -5C (23F) with about 30-40 cm of snow

Not sure if you're in US but if you are, and clearly live somewhere with snow, you must know that the snow-treatment budget is always an easy target for cuts.

I'm honestly surprised there aren't more traffic fatalities in San Francisco, especially with how many pedestrians, ride sharing drivers, and narrow streets there are.

Coming from the mid-west, there are status quo norms (laws?) that baffle me:

- Cars can park all down the street, even right up on the crosswalks at either end. It is incredibly hard to see people trying to use the cross walks, when they are behind the cars. Cars parking that close is illegal in many streets where I'm from.

- The amount of cross walks in the middle of high traffic streets (not intersections) that rely solely on visibility between the driver and pedestrian. Again, these streets are usually lined with cars on either side, so it's even harder to see. They could use the electronic, push button signs that light up and beep when a pedestrian wants to cross; which to be fair I've seen around, but not nearly as many as there should be.

I understand the city isn't going to reduce street parking, but at least implement better communication between drivers and pedestrians. The light up cross walks are a good start.

> Cars parking that close is illegal in many streets where I'm from.

That's called daylighting and SFMTA knows it exists. That they aren't using it everywhere is baffling[1].

> I understand the city isn't going to reduce street parking

It should, but given how much push back there is for every change to cities that make them better cities (increased density, prioritizing local movement of people by improving things for transit, cyclists and pedestrians, implementing safer streets) I'm not holding my breath.

[1]: https://www.sfmta.com/blog/daylighting-makes-san-francisco-c...

Completely agree - why daylighting isn't more comprehensive in SF boggles the mind. Someone above blamed the A-pillar. I think parked cars are a significantly worse problem in SF for turning visibility and daylighting is very limited.

> It is incredibly hard to see people trying to use the cross walks

This is only an issue for right turns (on two-way streets, anyway). Recently, walk signs have started illuminating a few seconds before the green light, and I assume it's for more pedestrian visibility. I wouldn't be surprised if the most dangerous thing in this scenario is a right on red while jaywalking. The driver knows they have a red, they look left for oncoming traffic, but not right for jaywalking pedestrians.

This is why I live in a public transit friendly city.

I hate driving, I think most people are bad drivers. Even completely sober, you might just be tired.

In places like LA driving is so essential people ignore license suspensions. Police often don't care, a friend of mine from nonchalantly talked about driving without a license or insurance.

I happily haven't had a car in about 2 years. No tickets, no insurance, no clown kissing my bumper. I'd love for more cities to invest in public transit.

I refuse to live in a city where I need a car! If I ever have to RTO, I'd rather ride a train. I can goof off on my phone, play video games, etc.

> I hate driving, I think most people are bad drivers. Even completely sober, you might just be tired.

It's not just the other drivers. Driving is rarely enjoyable, for me.

There's a big difference between driving in stop-and-go traffic at rush hour and driving on a scenic road with no particular deadline. I guess some of that is "hell is other people", but I really enjoyed a national park auto tour (with audio guide) fairly recently.

Good points and whatever suits you is of course fine.

A suggestion: Try a tour on a bicycle. It's a very different experience: rather of watching from an isolated box, with somewhat limited view, and a bit distracted by the priority of driving, instead you are in it, with a 360 x 360 view, breathing the air, smelling the smells, hearing the sounds (with no engine noise). Also, it's much easier to stop and look, get up close, or go off-track.

I'd probably enjoy that as an individual, but it's trickier with a family.

Also relevant: replacing 4-way's with roundabouts in Carmel, IN: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/climate/roundabouts-clima...

Have you seen roundabouts of this scale in person? They aren’t meant for people to be around at all

Hahaha. Are you joking? It's somewhat rare in Europe not to have a roundabout like this. They are clearly way better for pedestrians. You only have to cross half the road before you get to a safer place.

Compare this intersection which seems to have been somewhat recently upgraded:

From https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9679819,-86.1403832,3a,75y,2...

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9679454,-86.1403837,3a,75y,2...

Notice that there is also now a bend in the road so a car physically has to slow down to navigate it, unlike miles of straight traffic light intersections.

I'm a huge roundabout advocate but the user you replied to is correct. Despite the Carmel roundabout looking safer, when you're there, you don't feel like pedestrians are considered. I've driven through them.

Smaller roundabouts in narrower streets feel safer for pedestrians even if the islands are smaller. It's really the street size that is doing the work and the smaller roundabout works in conjunction with the street size to make cars behave more like they're in a turn and not a road with curves in it.

I'm not sold, yet, on roundabouts improving safety over four-way stops. Pedestrians at regular intersections are pretty easy to spot. But when you come up to a typical roundabout, the road is twisting a little, you're looking to see what traffic is approaching the roundabout, and the crosswalk is usually right in the area where the road is twisting to line up for roundabout entry.

I don't know that I have any suggestion, though, to make it better other than try to keep pedestrians far enough from the roundabout that drivers can easily focus on them and not be distracted by more moving parts.

The argument that you are only crossing half the road at a time is fairly compelling, though. I guess there's a trade-off there.

Roundabouts where pedestrian traffic is expected should have the zebra crossing set back some meters before the actual roundabout, which makes the pedestrians move perpendicularly to traffic in all cases, where their visibility is higher.

https://www.craftontull.com/insights/insight_posts/view/63/p...

The big win as a pedestrian is you only have one direction to worry about at a time..

Roundabout have pedestrian crossing at the entrance - before you meet cars. Plus, they naturally force you to slow anyway.

I cross one frequently and it's still pretty dangerous because cars rarely signal roundabout exit. As a pedestrian it's hard to predict if a car will exit, and drivers are also often distracted at that moment / looking down at gps (did I take the right/wrong exit)?

HN headline is misleading.

Actual claim on site:

> 40% of SF traffic fatalities in 2019 involved drivers making left turns who didn’t see the person in the crosswalk until it was too late.

HN has headline length limit.

Not the issue.

OP made subtle re-phrasing tweaks that weren't forced by length limits and changed the meaning.

I suspect thicker A pillars are also part of the problem. The A pillars have gotten a lot thicker in recent model years. That improves passive crash safety by making the car body stronger and allows for more airbags. But it also reduces visibility when turning. Sometimes drivers literally can't see pedestrians without moving their heads to the side.

For a particularly dramatic example of this, Tom Scott made a video about an intersection in the UK that's poorly designed for visibility:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU

This is a really good explanation.

Does not stopping completely, even if both roads are totally empty, not cause a big penalty in the UK? In Denmark you would get one mark out of three on your license if you so much as creep across that STOP line. It's full stop or risk a ticket (200 euro at a minimum) and 1/3 of the way from a new license (likely 1300-1800€).

While a bad intersection it seems to me that the culture is insanely bad looking at how many dangerous drivers are passing behind him in the short amount of time he is there. I'm shocked,really.

This is a big problem for cyclists and especially e-scooters because they can match speeds much closer to a car approaching the intersection whilst remaining hidden behind the A-pillar.

Definitely. Manufacturers are incentivized (by law and regulation) to optimize for surviving a collision, and less so for avoiding a collision entirely by enhancing visibility. I suppose the amount of attention the average driver pays to the road necessitates the former as a matter of public policy, but...

It would be "trivial" to expand what the government looks at when it comes to safety of vehicles not just by looking at the occupants of the vehicle, but also any pedestrian struck by them. It's not even a revolutionary idea, this is the reason you no longer see new cars with pop-up headlights[1].

[1]: https://thebackroads.co.uk/2019/08/10/the-real-reason-pop-up...

Sort of. EuroNCAP 5 star rating require cars to have automated braking both for in front and passing pedestrians. The amount of times my car have been in emergency mode either warning or actually hitting the brakes because a cyclist seemed to be intersecting with my path I don't know but it is a lot. Not perfect but better than nothing. Especially as many countries tax cars based on safety ratings.

So much this. Day-to-day I drive an older automobile (an early 90s sedan, design-similar to models as early as 1986) and every time I get in the driver's seat of a recent model car I'm reminded of how much more limited my visibility is.

i actually saw one of these accidents a few years ago. a woman a few steps behind her companion got thrown over the hood and to the side (miraculously not seriously injured though). the car started from a stop light, and probably hit her at around 15-20 mph. it was unbelievable that the driver didn't recognize the pedestrians waiting at the light and further didn't look at all when he started moving. that is, until the driver admitted to being distracted (by phone, passenger, and music simultaneously).

the biggest bang for buck here is to reduce any and all distraction in driving (including touchscreen controls), rather than trying to slow cars down further or make cars safer.

Cars and pedestrians simply should not have green light in the same direction at the same time. If they didn't do this (as many countries don't) the driver you saw would have to also run a red light to hit someone while turning. Pedestrians and cyclists should also always have a stop sign far enough ahead of the stop line for cars that you can't miss them (no pun intended). For an example the Netherlands have a lot of these kinds of safety features build in to their roads. Scandinavia too. Lots to learn..

It might be more to do with stop signs, driver training/tests and poor visibility.

SF has lots of stop signs, technically a pedestrian barely has to look. And cars don't expect there to be pedestrians. (Generally, they are so annoying drivers have little respect for full stop signs, and speed up aggressively)

Also the US has notoriously poor driver training and tests. I failed my driver license tests twice in Denmark because for failure turn my head and look out for pedestrians I knew weren't there :) (It teaches drivers when and where to look).

SF also has a habit of allowing street parking really close to intersections. In general street parking is bad for visibility as drivers can't see pedestrians. But in particular around intersections in SF you frequently aren't visible as a pedestrian waiting to cross.

Anyways, that's what I felt was sketchy about traffic living in SF.

In Denmark I do lots of left turns and pedestrians isn't an issue, probably because I know they have a green light. And I've been taught to look out.

We have roundabouts everywhere in France, but in the US, they seem not very popular.

They do removes the need for traffic lights, make priority checking a non issue and avoid left turns among other benefits. Although they prevent you from going to fast locally, they tend to make traffic more fluid on average.

Why are they not used that much in the US ?

There's roundabouts where I live in the USA with stop signs. People didn't know who has right of way and it led to road rage confrontations so the government had to add stop signs to them. People in the area now complain that roundabouts suck. Which they do when you have to stop before entering. So now we get more four way stop signs and traffic lights instead which cause traffic to stop and start, wasting fuel and increasing congestion. Sigh.

On the other hand at least you can turn right on red which is something my home country needs to allow by default since I haven't once seen an issue with it in my years in the USA.

> On the other hand at least you can turn right on red which is something my home country needs to allow by default since I haven't once seen an issue with it in my years in the USA.

> Right-Turn-on-Red (RTOR), in its “Western” version allows motorists to turn right on a red signal after stopping and yielding, unless specifically prohibited by a sign. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of Western RTOR on pedestrian and bicycle accidents in selected jurisdictions adopting the rule in the mid-1970s. The results showed significant increases in pedestrian and bicyclist accidents involving right-turning vehicles at signalized locations following the introduction of Western RTOR. These increases were: 40 % for pedestrians and 82 % for bicycles in New York State; 107 % for pedestrians and 72 % for bicycles in Wisconsin; 57 % for pedestrians and 80 % for bicycles in Ohio; and 82 % for pedestrians in New Orleans. Analysis of police accident reports suggested that drivers stopped for a red light are looking left for a gap in traffic and do not see pedestrians and bicyclists coming from their right. Countermeasure research and development was recommended to deal with this well defined problem which involves between 1 % and 3 % of all pedestrian and bicycle accidents.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002243...

> People didn't know who has right of way and it led to road rage confrontations so the government had to add stop signs to them.

“Yield to traffic in circle" clarifies things just as well, is commonly used, and restates the actual right-of-way rule applicable to an otherwise-uncontrolled roundabout. An amateur generalist politician like most city councilors and mayors I can see thinking stop signs are the answers, but presumably they had a roads department with at least one professional to consult, so one hopes that there was more at issue than people not knowing the rules if they chose stop signs.

Unpopular locally. The Seattle area has quite a few and people adapted pretty well to it, but the few in SF are stop-sign controlled as well, which makes them prettification projects.

They have started to appear in Austin, Texas, where I live, but only in the last 10 years. There are many more places they could be added, but I think when two country roads meet you just make a plain "+" intersection, and as it gets gradually more urban it just never gets rethought as to whether it should be turned into a roundabout. But it is (where I live at least) slowly starting to get adopted.

You have roundabouts in the middle of Paris in areas with lots of pedestrians? Please show me. Certainly not any parts where anybody would think, hey, this is a great bit of infrastructure for people traveling on foot.... Roundabouts may be great for vehicular traffic, and yes, I believe they should be far more widely used in the US, but not in dense urban areas where pedestrian safety is meant to be a priority.

Yes, we do.

Even if paris is probably the city with the least roundabout because it's the oldest, you can use google map and zoom to see the little circles:

https://0bin.net/paste/xL8ni-vJ#Sv-WUYiKnM2WuRDTCBX0iHfLCWDm...

We even have to giants ones on Nation, Arc de Triomphe, etc. The later is actually dangerous, since priority is reversed, and the cars entering the roundabout should be given way.

I've driven in places that use them regularly; I've never felt comfortable: Trying to change lanes and turn, while going around a curve, with traffic behind and in front of me going around curves (reducing visibility and judgment about position and speed), and also reguarly changing lanes and entering/exiting.

Are you comfortable with it? How do you do it? (Empty roundabouts are fine, of course.)

We are train to do it when passing the driving licence, so it's second nature. In fact, I can do it without thinking, which I can't do with a crossing: too many variables.

The hard part is the signaling (it has very specific rules), and you can see that the older drivers don't use their blinkers properly because they have never been taught to do so.

However, it can becomes dangerous if it's overused.

E.G: Nantes is a city famous for chaining roundabouts, to the point they sometimes have double-roundabouts, which are awkward even after years driving around them. I hate those with a passion.

> We are train to do it when passing the driving licence, so it's second nature.

> The hard part is the signaling (it has very specific rules)

That is a revelation! I never had that training or even knew it existed, and roundabouts are occasionally deployed where I live without implementing any training. The training seems an essential component?

Any suggestions on where this training might be found (in English)?

> That is a revelation! I never had that training or even knew it existed, and roundabouts are occasionally deployed where I live without implementing any training. The training seems an essential component?

Like for any part of driving a car, training is important for 2 reasons:

- you don't have to think when you are approaching a roundabount. You know where to look, you know what speed (and gear if applicable) you need, you know where lane to go and what signal to use. Since it's a situation with a lot of information, it makes your decision process relaxed and accurate.

- socially, if most drivers are trained, they will behaved consistently, and hence, produce a stress and surprise free experience, but also letting you identify easy the drivers you need to watch out for.

> Any suggestions on where this training might be found (in English)?

I have no idea, it's part of all french drivers training automatically, anywhere you go.

It’s really rather easy. The UK had lots of roundabouts so you’ll find lots of English language media. Here’s one https://youtu.be/koK_a4KYs-E

It’s all very common sense so you should be able to switch the directions around pretty easily.

>E.G: Nantes is a city famous for chaining roundabouts, to the point they sometimes have double-roundabouts, which are awkward even after years driving around them. I hate those with a passion.

Get on Swindon's level:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)

I used to live in Michigan, where we have a thing we call the "Michigan left". To turn right at an intersection, you continue straight through the intersection, then take a left turn at gap in the median to return to the intersection from the other side of the boulevard and proceed to make a right turn.

I'd be interested in what the trade-offs are. I imagine space usage is a big one.

If that's hard to visualize: https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/tctimes.com/con...

That's very helpful. Thanks!

> To turn right at an intersection

Pretty sure you mean 'to turn left'

> To turn right at an intersection...

You mean to turn left, correct?

I've seen this technique used by people as an optimization. Some lights have very long wait times for left turns, so people will do what you describe rather than waiting in the left turn lane.

Looking at the diagram [0], I'm dubious if this is a good "authoritative" solution. The problem with left turns is collision with oncoming traffic moving straight through. Especially at yellow lights where the turning vehicle is trying to make it out of the intersection before the light turns red and they feel like they are blocking 90-degree traffic [1], and end up colliding with oncoming vehicles running the yellow.

This design seems to shift that problem 100 meters down the road, but the challenge of crossing oncoming traffic remains (I guess without the pressure of trying to get out of a turning Yellow Light situation).

So it's definitely an improvement, but isn't there a simpler one called "Dedicated Left Turn Signals"? If both directions had an "advance left" light where both could turn safely, and there was a dedicated light for turning (i.e. no entering the intersection to turn except in a dedicated Left turn sign), this solves the problem, no?

Dedicated Turn lanes and signals need space, so they're not always possible in dense urban environments, but the Michigan setup doesn't suffer from a lack of space. So i feel like the Michigan solution is useless for San Francisco, and also not as good as the alternative for Michigan

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_left#/media/File:Mich...

[1] Which, incidentally, FEELS unsafe, and inexperienced drivers panic trying to get out as soon as possible, but isn't actually - these vehicles are starting from 0 and accelerating - they are unlikely to accelerate INTO you. In rushing to get out before the light turns red, they are more likely to collide with an oncoming vehicle trying to run the yellow.

The major concern in the OP seems to be left turns hitting pedestrians. Eliminating the left turn over the crosswalk removes this problem. I would argue left turns to cross over the median aren't crossing oncoming traffic, they're merging into traffic going the same direction.

Dedicated left turn light phases solve the problem too, but there's a cost to intersection throughput since there's an additional light phase (during which only left-turners on one axis can move).

There are certainly a lot of trade offs to be made here with regards to space, cost, and safety.

Probably one of the safest ways to turn left as you have no bi-directional flows to compete against. When in a city and it is a grid I would just do the UPS right turn to make a left. One extra street down, right, right and straight.

I feel like (in Manhattan, pre-covid) that would add at least 5 minutes to your trip. More doing rush hour.

Well yeah... I wouldn't drive Manhattan funny enough.

This sounds like a weird way to implement a jughandle turn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jughandle

It is sort of a jughandle, but the diagrams on wiki don't really do it justice.

These exist on major thoroughfares where the destination road is divided. So you make a right and go to the far left lane, then go into a u-turn in the median where you can make a left turn in the desired direction without worrying about crossing oncoming traffic.

Here's a link, and if you look at Telegraph Rd. just north of Maple (a few hundred yards from where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen alive), you can clearly see the traffic flow: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Telegraph+Rd+%26+W+Maple+R...

Also very common in New Orleans.

Brit living in Canada. I hate left turns in North America. Often you can't clearly see oncoming traffic, pedestrians have right of way which can leave you unable to complete a manuever and a lot of judgment is put on drivers to turn at the correct time.

There's a technical solution to this problem. Dedicated left turn lights which appear to run in some places only during peak hours.

Of course far better than just begging drivers to square up their lines would be to simply ensure that anyone who tries to cut off their turn destroys their car in the process. It's quite simple to put a rigid object at the point of the centerline to protect pedestrians.

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.3625432,8.5339337,3a,75y,196...

I don’t understand why oncoming traffic and pedestrians all have a green light the same time as when you’re green for a left hand turn.

Here in the Netherlands almost all traffic light intersections are set up so that when you’ve got green you’re good to go unless specifically indicated otherwise by signs.

Not to mention roundabouts completely bypass this problem, though those might not have the traffic throughput needed in a city centre.

What is also dangerous are pedestrians who see a car turning or proceeding, look right at the car/driver, and then walk into the crosswalk, assuming car will slam breaks on. Or the pedestrian can’t be bothered to look up from their smartphone or stop their podcast to hear what’s going on around them.

Pedestrians have some responsibility to co-exist as well.

I've been driving for five years now and left turn still stresses me out in downtown LA

Recently visited LA with wife, not the first time, but I had to joke, "This is a city where the weak can't drive - only the strong-willed will survive and make it to their destination!"

FWIW I did make it to the hotel, though emotionally scarred.

To test your strength, try Paris, France. Especially around the massive roundabouts without lane markings and intermingled with various extra red lights.

When you have graduated from this. You can afford a detour to Milan, Italy. Over there, traffic signals are superseeded by your skills at honking.

I was told driving in India is many time worse!

Haha, I grew up in Seoul so I'm no stranger to traffic hell. (Though I also heard that India is at another level.)

At least, in Seoul, I could avoid driving 99% of time. Harder to do it as tourist in LA ...

Why don't we have an X prize for incremental self driving around collision mitigation & safety?

So much interesting research on the advent of "Automatic Braking Systems" and its introduction ->

- eg in China researchers demonstrate the potential of saving thousands of lives per annum - "fatalities could be reduced by 13.2%, and injuries could be reduced by 9.1%." (1)

- and when using data from insurance claims - ". . front-facing automatic emergency braking systems can cut the frequency of bodily injury liability claims by nearly 25%. A similar study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) involving police-reported crashes — typically the most severe type of collision — found front automatic emergency braking reduced "front-to-rear" crashes by 50%. Often referred to as rear-ending another vehicle, these crashes can be deadly, particularly when the car responsible for the collision is moving at high speed. " (2)

- Or when outfitting large tractor trailers with the tech - "Equipping large trucks with forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems could eliminate more than 2 out of 5 crashes in which a large truck rear-ends another vehicle, a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggests." (3)

I recognize that we'll see "trickle down" safety improvements from the self driving groups, but how do we just ensure every 2025 model or what have you has some basic automatic braking system in place that includes pedestrian recognition?

(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7037779/

(2) https://www.jdpower.com/automotive-news/report-automatic-eme...

(3) https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/study-shows-front-crash-pre...

Or you know, don't have left turns and pedestrian crossings at the same time. A simple software fix of the traffic light pattern would eliminate almost all of these fatalities.

Sequence should be

- Pedestrians in all directions including diagonal

- Traffic in horizontal direction, no pedestrians

- Traffic in vertical direction, no pedestrians

Repeat

You just doubled the expected wait time for pedestrians at every crossing.

OK then

- Pedestrians in all directions including diagonal

- Traffic in horizontal direction, no pedestrians

- Pedestrians in all directions including diagonal

- Traffic in vertical direction, no pedestrians

The current status quo in south bay is at least 4 states per light cycle:

Horizontal straight (vertical pedestrians

Horizontal left turns (no pedestrians)

Vertical straight (horizontal pedestrians)

Vertical left turns (no pedestrians)

So the proposal increases the time a given pedestrian can use the intersection from 25% of the time to 33%.

Many simple south bay intersections have 6 states, and I’ve seen one where they’ve added a 7th state to the cycle so the bike lanes can go straight while cars have a red right turn arrow.

The south bay is a car-choked hellscape that should in no way be used as a baseline or reference for pedestrian design.

Agreed, being from the UK this confuses the hell out of me that left turns are allowed while pedestrian crossing is green in the US. It's clearly not green if cars can also travel!

how do we just ensure every 2025 model or what have you has some basic automatic braking system in place that includes pedestrian recognition

The step preceding that would be to determine whether this is the most effective way to spend resources for the expected benefit. The marginal car buyer who will have to wait in order to buy one of these more expensive cars might have been able to upgrade sooner if this safety equipment hadn't been ensured.

Oh that would be an easy prize to win: limit the car speed at the speed limit. There you go, lots of lethality and stupidity outright removed. Electric kick scooters can do it, I'm sure we can manage that for cars.

To any Product Manager or developer working on Android Auto, CarPlay or Waze.

Please add a "Avoid left turns, unless they're protected" option!

It'll save lives and reduce overall stress for drivers!

Back in times of WinCE navigation devices, there were many route settings like Easy/Short/Fast which presumably modified pathfinder weights. It seems they disappeared with GMaps and other smartphone apps.

I wonder how much of this is because SF rarely uses left-turn signals.

This forces drivers on streets like Guerrero or Valencia St who need to make left turns to do so against oncoming traffic. When that oncoming traffic doesn't give you a good opportunity to make that left turn, you are forced to take bad opportunities. This usually involves dashing across the oncoming lane quickly at the last second. I can't imagine that this is safe for pedestrians.

Maybe a more interesting question: How does this compare to other US cities, and what do those cities do differently?

Between the density/congestion, the street layout in much of the city, the hills, etc., I'd say SF is generally more difficult to drive in on average than most US cities.

My first time in SF was... interesting. Where I'm from (Ireland), a red means stop, not "only stop if you might be driving into traffic", which is what it seems to boil down to in the US. Let's just say I got a _nasty_ surprise when I discovered turns on red were a thing.

It's without a doubt one of the most pedestrian unfriendly bits of law I've come across.

Even when they have a dedicated signal and plenty of time, I'm surprised at how terrible most drivers are at turning left (US/Canada perspective here).

The standard approach seems to be, as soon as they enter the intersection, to point their car at the lane they're heading into, and then at the last second attempt to correct the fact that they're entering that lane diagonally. That usually means either cutting the corner of the oncoming lane or swerving into the adjacent lane/bike lane/shoulder (or both).

This is easily remedied by proceeding straight into the intersection for roughly a car length before starting the turn. This lets you maintain a roughly constant turning radius and sets you up to enter the destination lane more or less straight-on. A bonus is that it's safer (it's easier to see people in the crosswalk) and more comfortable (than the sudden-jerk-at-the-end-of-the-turn that the typical maneuver requires).

FTA: “40% of SF traffic fatalities in 2019 involved drivers making left turns who didn’t see the person in the crosswalk until it was too late.”

If there are traffic lights, there should not be anybody on those crosswalks. Neither should there be “incoming traffic, including bicyclists”.

Good junction/traffic light design avoids having streams of traffic crossing each other (“conflict free intersections”). See https://beyondtheautomobile.com/2020/08/11/signals-for-chang... and the (linked from there) video https://youtube.com/watch?v=knbVWXzL4-4

I've thought a bit about roads and it seems to me that having 2-way streets is a poor choice at the highest level. When you're driving north, the LAST direction you'd want to go is south. Yet the closest thing to you at all times is the southbound lanes. To go west - which you want to do more than go south - you have to cross those lanes. As soon as you decide to make all the roads one-way, a whole set of other issues come up, but having to stop and wait for half of your turns goes away.

The EPA drive cycle for city driving has an average speed of ~20mph and that turns out to be close to what I experience even when posted speed limits are 45mph. Traffic lights are a plague, and IMHO traffic circles are not much better. All I can say with certainty is that it's complicated.

The tradeoff with that is that you end up with more than one lane per direction, which works fine with signalized intersections, but is unsafe at non-signal-controlled crosswalks.

Without a traffic light, a car in one lane will stop for a someone waiting to cross, and a driver in the other lane (or who pulls around to pass the first car) might not realize that there is a reason for the car stopping, and hit the person crossing as they enter the other lane.

In a lot of delivery companies drivers are forbidden (or discouraged) to turn through oncoming traffic, I knew that about RoyalMail and DHL, but here is an article about UPS:

>UPS have moved away from trying to find the shortest route and now look at other criteria to optimise the journey. One of their methods is to try and avoid turning through oncoming traffic at a junction. Although this might be going in the opposite direction of the final destination, it reduces the chances of an accident and cuts delays caused by waiting for a gap in the traffic, which would also waste fuel.

https://theconversation.com/why-ups-drivers-dont-turn-left-a...

The amount of left turns that exist in Canada & the U.S where you're yielding to 3 or 4 oncoming lanes of traffic, 1 or 2 of which could also be waiting to turn left, is absurd. Now try doing it while you're learning to drive manual. People should be afraid of cars.

As with COVID-related outcomes, focusing only on fatalities ignores other meaningful negative outcomes.

Based on personal experience after living SF/Oakland ~ 10 years, I'd also take measurements like "in pedestrian cross-walk" with a grain of salt.

Anecdotally, 1st-degree friends have been involved in:

* Pedestrian killed by a MUNI bus, intoxicated and just out of the cross-walk, the bus driver deemed not at fault.

* Cyclist killed by a delivery truck, while biking in a bike line on Folsom.

* Cyclist in bike lane on Valencia hit by a truck, dealing with TBI and anxiety years later but with no visible damage.

* My Uber driver, turning left onto Valencia, hit a pedestrian holding a red cup. A police officer happened to witness the incident, saw the red cup, and sent the driver on their way in under a minute.

Maybe we should turn some of these left turns into a protected "arrow" signal? Or separate the pedestrian right-of-way with the "red human" signal?

insert boardroom meeting getting thrown out the window meme

I recall many years ago that I had almost been run over by a police officer in the bay area making a left turn too short (and drove into the left lane of oncoming traffic). My bicycle was destroyed but fortunately I had survived unscathed.

I've noticed unless there's a car in a left lane, drivers often will cut into the oncoming left lane to prevent going too far right. I think it would be beneficial to add some sort of bollard between lanes so cars do not overcorrect, and could save lives from that implicit blindspot.

This is a solved problem. Roundabouts.

Even when accidents happen in Roundabouts, they're generally not "T-bones" or hitting vehicles at 90º or head-on. They're more glancing-typing collisions.

Much safer.

And Michigan lefts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_left

Very cool! Almost like a mini clover-leaf?

Roundabouts are great for roads between towns and cities and other population centers. But urban streets where lots of people are walking should be designed for pedestrians first, not cars. Roundabouts are actually quite complicated for pedestrians to traverse safely.

Or even better, just ban left turns. Forcing drivers to take 3 right turns is such a simple solution, I don't understand why Americans don't adopt it everywhere.

Tragic to read. The biggest thing imho is that drivers are making left-turns at speed. They should come to a full stop. Drivers are extremely extremely inconsiderate and selfish. When turning left, drivers are generally looking into the opposite lane where the cars are coming, looking for that gap, and then _gun_ it, so they can make the turn. Scanning for that gap in traffic is the only thing they care about, iso of _also_ looking for pedestrians or cyclists at the actual street they're turning into.

Not surprising. Anecdotal, but I was once hit by a cab while crossing the street. They were making a left turn. Yes, it was 2AM and I was wearing dark clothes but still, there was plenty of light at that intersection and it's not like I jumped out of nowhere (I had already walked more than halfway across the street before I was suddenly on the car's hood and then of course on the asphalt). Luckily for me I didn't suffer any injuries (that I know of).

So why can't Google Maps eliminate stupid left turns from its vehicle directions?

If they have information on traffic lights, then they could stop telling people to make a left out of a side street where there's no light.

But if that's too difficult, they could just have an option for making routes with only right turns, like it's rumored delivery companies do.

I was so hopeful that somewhere in the depths of their Maps API there was a way to customize the routing logic, but it appears not. Google knows best.

I wonder how many accidents and fatalities are due to poor layouts (that are hard to fix), inadequate signage, and unique designs that are "safer," but add enough mental overhead that you're paying more attention to where you should be so you're not in a bus-only lane rather than looking out for pedestrians. Driving in SF can be complicated when you're not familiar with the streets. Intersections feel like multiple clever solutions stacked together.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/SMIDSY

Does anybody know why bike paths are always on the left of the street? Looks to me that most problems come from that.

in the US, they’re always on the right. ie, in the direction of traffic

It doesn't say if it includes left turns from one way street to a one way street on red light. Which is legal in California.

I'm very anxious about left turns for that reason alone and move my head around the left column to see if I'm missing someone like trying to watch a movie with a taller person sitting in the front. It's amazing that we think we can take on self-driving before we can take on not killing pedestrians on left turns.

Well it is a lot easier to put a camera in a blind spot than an eyeball. Human hardware isn't going to get better any time soon; my money is on safe self driving long before safe human driving.

Given that there is a light and camera at many intersections where this would occur, would it be feasible for us to have some indicator if a human is in the crosswalk? We have cars that are able to detect many different types of objects in far more complex environments.

Has any city tried combining those HAWK Signals (flashing amber on crosswalk) triggered by a camera looking for pedestrians (/ cyclists etc)? I think that would be a cost-effective combination by making the pedestrians much more obvious.

I don't really understand the video on the site. Why would pedestrians have a green light when left turning cars also have a green light?

surely the entire concept of traffic lights exists so that you DON'T cross each other?

As bad as the traffic fatalities are in SF, I hope the city also puts a similar amount of thought and care into crime prevention. That and outdoor defecation are the two most visible things effecting quality of life in SOMA.

Instead of installing bumps and doing a marketing campaign, why not actually fix the problem and install roundabouts? They're safer, cheaper than lights, and more environmental because they keep traffic moving.

What percentage come from right turns? Is it less than a third of ledt turns, and thus three right turns is safer than one left? Probably more efficient: should map software offer a “limit left turns” option?

this seems to put all the onus on drivers. in my experience driving in SF, i'll be in the middle of the intersection waiting to turn left (its unprotected) and light will be yellow turning red. And i have a shot to go left but then an idiotic biker or pedestrian will walk even though it says "dont walk". leaving me to be stuck in the intersection.

people often ignore those pedestrian lights completely and dare you to hit them.

dont get me started on bikers who ignore all lights and zip out in half a second

Watching dashcam footage I started saying "Left Turns Are Always A Mistake". If a left turn is possible in a dashcam video, it almost always the source of the incident.

It's been well recorded that something like 70% of motorcycle fatalities are left-hand turns. I don't think this is somehow endemic to SF versus other cities.

New Jersey has eliminated most left turns, especially on major roads.

What happens when you add NJ and SF together? More flight to other states?

Hi.

Left turns where the pedestrians have a green light, or oncoming traffic does, are batshit crazy. Kill them before they kill more people.

This website makes me really dizzy. It scrolls horizontally and diagonally as you scroll down?

Wouldn't we expect, say, 40% left turn, 40% right turn, 20% head on?

Would the studies have the same results in Right hand drive countries?

I wonder if you could replace most of these with roundabouts...

A left turn traffic light would fix this problem.

What percent are on right turns?

Not everyone is an ambiturner

Maybe making the streets narrower would help

Tesla FSD 10.X will increase this number. The left turns I have seen the system try to take on Youtube are downright terrifying.

Clearly need to correct for selection bias: we don't watch YouTube videos of non-eventful Tesla turns.

It is hard for me to take percent statistics like this seriously.

How does the overall fatality rate compare to other cities? What are the total death counts?

Where would we rather have 40% of the pedestrian fatalities occur?

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