Pedestrian deaths spike in U.S. as reckless driving surges
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It does feel like the one-two punch of [Trump + pandemic] has led to people feeling more entitled to let their rage and impatience out in public. I don't know how we recover from this as a society?
For a time, I might have been inclined to put it down to people just weren't driving and had "forgotten" how. But I think that's hard to argue for at this point. I've nearly got run off the road on a merge or had a horn blown at me followed by a pass on the shoulder because I was apparently only going at the speed limit multiple times in just the past month or two.
Boston area driving has been quite aggressive forever. But I don't think I've seen it this actively bad/dangerous as it has been the past year or two. (And a number of people I know have said likewise.)
This doesn't sound very square to me.
I'm totally amazed at how some cities do not have protected left turn signals. During high traffic times, this means you can litterally never have a gap. Which leads to the situation where once the light turns red, 3-4 cars wanting to turn left run the red light. LA was the worst of the places I've experienced this.
Left turn arrows tend to be eventually installed at the worst of the unprotected lefts. (Or left turns are just prohibited.) Locals just learn to expect a couple cars to do a left on red--and for another 2 or 3 to turn as soon as the light turns green.
It is legal to enter an intersection (i.e. cross the white line) when your light is not red. Therefore at least one car can turn left legally per light cycle. Agree completely that this isn't good enough.
These people have little reason to got Lowell/Leominster/Worcester/Fall River (one ring outward) or Providence/Hartford/New Haven/Springfield (one ring further still) so Boston is just what they complain about.
If Lexington or Sudbury is your frame of reference then Boston is a f-ing zoo. If Lawrence is your frame of your reference Davis Square (or Kelly Square) is same shit different day.
I don't know what its going to take for half the country to finally wake up and realize it can't continue along this course and the philosophy of selfishness has failed.
In podcast form: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/driving-went-down-fataliti... In article form: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-d...
Based on my recent experiences, I sort of agree - but more so as a negative control. My area does not have much bumper to bumper traffic, and never has. I have not noticed additional increase in speeding.
The thing I have noticed is bad decision making or inattentive behavior. People pulling out when they shouldn't (possibly due to misjudged speed), or looking at their phone and drifting from their lane.
Possibly the result of the other drivers being able to drive faster, thus giving less space to pull out?
> or looking at their phone and drifting from their lane.
This one is much easier to connect to lower traffic levels. As the complexity of the environment decreases with the drop in traffic, drivers feel safer to do things like be on their phones. Being on your phone is very similar to higher speed in that it is a higher-risk response that many drivers would rather engage in if there is no apparent downside.
I find this explanation to be consistent with the way people respond to weather by slowing down (and do so differently in different locales depending on their familiarity with that weather), or how , when I used to drive up to the SFO airport for Friday night red-eyes, it was rare to encounter cars driving less than 100mph on the pristine, nearly-empty freeway.
Not that I have seen. I have had numerous people pull out in front of me and my habits haven't changed. I'm even one to go 5 under when approaching two intersections that ate notorious for people pulling out at. Also, at the one intersection, people sit back instead of pulling up further, meaning the have to traverse an additional 15 feet, which they don't seem to amount for when pulling out.
"This one is much easier to connect to lower traffic levels. As the complexity of the environment decreases with the drop in traffic, drivers feel safer to do things like be on their phones."
True, i think this could account for some of the more urban areas. The traffic in this area hasn't changed and I've still noticed an uptick. Maybe carryover from habits developed on those urban roads, but maybe something else.
Magical thinking is pervasive. Is it ironic that the subject himself seemed to engage in the same?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking
https://www.npr.org/2017/01/22/510655254/trump-crowd-size-es...
The rules of the road were put in place as a system to protect people. Things like signaling a turn can be very important to pedestrians crossing a side street. I get that people want to remove pretextual stops to stop bias. But perhaps we should move towards uniform/consistent enforcement rather than simply ignoring the laws.
The use of law enforcement discretion to charge some people but not others leads to the bias. This is on more than just driving laws. Then you end up with a minority population being negatively affected while the majority remain in ignorant bliss. If it affected all equally, then the population would be mobilized to remove bad laws from the books (on the basis that they or someone they know were affected by it).
Well the fact that you're seeing what you're seeing in a very expensive Boston suburb seems to point in the other direction. Shouldn't that be the place in the country that sees the most pro-social behavior as a result of the pandemic and has the fewest people seeing Trump as something that should be emulated?
From my perspective, Trump acted as the human incarnation of rage and impatience for a substantial fraction of the US population, and he fed on and encouraged public displays of bad behavior. Setting that type of example from the White House can't be inconsequential.
Pandemic fatigue is a real thing here too. Just because we have an above-average level of mask-wearing compliance doesn't mean people aren't heartily sick of the whole thing.
All bad things I don’t like are caused by X group is a poor way to look at the world.
Letting your biases creep so far into how you make simple evaluations like that is a red flag and it might be time for some deep introspection.
So less about Trump and more about Trump's effects on liberals.
1. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
It's an uptick despite reduced driving.
A 45% increase in deaths per mile driven is no joke.
Further, you're also ignoring advancements in medicine, emergency services, healthcare systems, rules (e.g., cities in the US have drastically reduced max speeds), safety focused street design changes, etc. that mean that the odds of a pedestrian dying have reduced in general.
Comparing broadly to 50 years ago is not very useful.
Record pricing for used cars suggests that there's a car shortage.
Ironically, less cars and less driving could lead to
1. Faster driving because of clearer roads, and
2. More walking.
Combine those and it wouldn't be surprising to get more auto-pedestrian accidents.
One test would be to compare changes to car accidents with changes to pedestrian accidents. Reckless driving should bring both up. More pedestrians should only bring the latter up.
The book,Confessions of a Recovering Engineer(1), talks about this.
The point being, when possible, you should walk facing into traffic. I see people, often enough, walking in the road with traffic. Experienced walkers tend to know this.
Please do not recommend this reckless and often illegal behavior.
If walking in the street, one should walk with traffic when possible.
Drivers and other forms of traffic merging into traffic do not expect pedestrian traffic coming from the wrong direction.
Salmoning causes other dangers, too, for example, by making it difficult to impossible for traffic to avoid collisions by stopping.
Either guidance and some laws have changed since I last was educated on this topic or my memory is faulty.
Perhaps it’s about observing inattentive drivers before they present immediate danger or establishing eye contact?
In any case, I stand corrected on the legality of pedestrian salmoning, though I’m not convinced of its advisability.
If you work the field at an AutoX course, you'll know that it is quite possible to dodge them. The chances of dodging a car when paying attention are substantially higher than if one is not.
It wouldn’t necessarily increase the number of people walking or fewer cars on the road. The net effect is a shift to newer and more expensive cars among drivers.
Though, the "salience saturation" concept sounds like one of the reasons for which people in the MIL world take up smoking.
A little searching suggests that in the latter quarters of 2021, traffic fatalities fell (https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-fatalities-esti....)
Before we jump to the explanation of angrier drivers (harder to verify or disprove), can we explore the simpler possibility?
Anecdata, and all that, but it's interesting that so many people are noticing this.
In other countries the pandemic + less driving has resulted in less deaths, as one would expect.
The bigger safer cars theory seems like a valid one to me. There is data supporting this theory in general, that when people are given safer cars they drive more recklessly. Also there is a significant measurable difference between the US and other countries in the size of cars.
I too was thinking this was caused by the lockdown but now I'm not so sure. My state never locked down too hard in the first place and we've been largely "fully open" since last Spring - yet the driving has gotten worse. I was talking to my insurance agent about it and they said the number of accidents is skyrocketing. Great - so we have increased insurance premiums to look forward to which of course will be blamed on "inflation."
The high rate of pedestrian deaths is a result of policy regarding road design, pedestrian infrastructure and lenient criminal charges. The driving culture is also to blame. Driving is a god given right. Cars equal freedom, and the bigger the better. Pedestrians are a nuisance and cyclists are the enemy.
Vehicles sold now are too fast for their intended purpose. You can buy a Toyota Camry with 300 HP and a 0-60 time of 5.1 seconds. Twenty years ago that was Porsche 911 territory. The upcoming Hummer EV touts a 3.0 second 0-60 and weighs in at 9000 lbs. Insane
If he were driving a legal registered pickup truck, and didn't flee (and wasn't impaired at the time) it would probably be a moving violation.
It also seems to me really rare that a hit-and-run driver is ever caught. It pains me to say it but it almost seems rational to flee the scene if you were drunk.
Good acceleration makes driving safer, because taking over other cars takes less time (although 40-60 acceleration time matters more here).
Also, "sports" cars, designed for high speeds usually have better suspension, braking, tires, all of which make them safer again.
Cars are just tools, you cannot blame them for recklessness of some drivers.
I do wish more emphasis were placed on teaching drivers the situations where hard acceleration is actively harmful, though. We are seeing some EV accidents already from people not realizing the differences between expected behavior and their behavior.
It's amazing we don't have more deaths. And disgusting we don't do better at designing safe roadway for all people.
For example, I have no problem with 55 mph roads along farm fields, even with bikes or buggies sharing them. The idea is that drivers should be slowing and waiting patiently to pass. Many drivers don't even know that the law requires a minimum of 4 feet separation when passing a bicycle. Just like many bicyclist either don't know or don't care to stop at stop signs or walk their bike across a crosswalk when using one (at least slow to walking speed).
Yea, but almost none of those things have changed in the last two year - so does nothing to explain the spike in the last two years.
What has changed in the last two years? Police being told not to police, not to pull people over for minor infractions, police departments being defunded or having their budget's cut - or being threatened with being defunded or having their budgets cut. Can't have to both way folks - like it not, the threat of being ticketed, towed or arrested has an effect on many peoples driving habits.
My state has targets for acceptable rates of annual pedestrian deaths when designing intersections. I find the fact that we elect to sacrifice lives in order to bump up vehicles-per-hour stats rather disturbing. Again nothing new but helps explain why the US is an outlier.
Do you have any data showing this causal link at all? Maybe broken down by place so we can see links like the pedestrian death increases match the places that did those things. Since you actually list several causal things, it can be broken down by places that limited enforcement for covid reasons vs those that defunded vs those that didn't do those things? Bonus points if you bother to break out the overly broad "defunded" category into actual policy change groupings, there were a lot of reforms that got lumped into that term, many of them having nothing to do with money to enforce laws.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cities-vowed-2020-cut-po...
There has also been a push to do away with pretextual stops, which includes a lot of traffic law. Not sure that has been wide spread enough, and may also be too recent, to impact these numbers.
It won't shock you to know that people are aware of all of this, and drive accordingly.
[0] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/02/10/city-hall-condemns-de...
In any case, anecdotally, the hit & runs tend to happen a night, late at night. I often wonder if the pedestrian and/or driver were under the influence.* Or, at the very least the car's headlights were off (as I was nearly hit a few months ago because of lack of headlights on).
* afaik, drug and alcohol usage has increased in the last two yrs "due to Covid."
So, some cars are too fast, but that efficiency and power also has a lot of practical purpose in many vehicles. Anyhow, I agree with the thrust your statement, but most people are responsible enough to not drive a powerful car recklessly.
Are car manufacturers, knowingly or not, selling a reckless lifestyle?
Most car guys love their cars and are well aware of the power and dynamics that can destroy it (or have it seized). But that's just my experience.
"Are car manufacturers, knowingly or not, selling a reckless lifestyle?"
If they are, it's across the board. Any vehicle can be dangerous - civics, F150s, mustangs, minivans, etc. Many people don't understand vehicle limits, dynamics, and their own limitations. A lot of this is because people have rarely experienced situations that would require, for lack of a better word, extreme actions. Things like autocross can give people some understanding of these, provided they aren't the personality that would use it to create false confidence.
If drivers were to face high consequences no matter what, would a possible result be that more pedestrians and cyclists die because more motorists would fail to stop and render aid/call 911?
"face no criminal charges or loss of driving privileges as long as they stop and dial 911."
I don't think this is necessarily true. Criminal charges generally require some form of intent. That could be recklessness. Most driving doesn't constitute reckless driving (per case law and customary enforcement). The police do investigate. I would imagine that many of the fatalities include drivers following the law and exercising reasonable care (as based on society's expectations), as well as pedestrians and cyclists not following the law. I would love to see the data to show the breakdown one way or the other.
We've got extremely low expectations.
We actually have a very high tolerance for vehicles breaking the law (but then whine endlessly about that bike we saw blowing a red light).
I'd argue that if you wind up killing anyone that you were necessarily negligent in your driving and someone killing someone else when they were actually taking due care is extraordinarily unlikely. Pedestrian deaths should really be automatic negligent homicide charges unless it can be proven that the pedestrian just ran out in the road and got hit or something through their own negligence.
This I why I'd like to see the stats/breakdown. There are more laws that apply to pedestrians than many realize. Like walking on the left side of the road, jay walking, not obeying traffic signals. This could be seen as negligence or recklessness.
There are a ton of irresponsible or unknowledgeable drivers, and those same people are also likely to be pedestrians at some point and exhibit similar actions.
Since vehicles are moving so much faster, with more limited reaction speed and with massively higher kinetic energy they should be held to a higher standard.
And I've been driving for near 35 years and never once come close to hitting a pedestrian, no matter what kinds of mistakes the pedestrians have made.
Walking is a necessity, driving is a privilege.
And the laws show that (cars are obligated to try to avoid it even if they have the right of way). The question is what qualifies as negligence or recklessness. In civil law there is the idea of contributory negligence. Meaning if the pedestrian breaking the law by being there then they contributed to the situation through their negligence. This may be enough to prove that the driver wasn't at fault through negligent or reckless behavior if they were following the law.
"Walking is a necessity, driving is a privilege."
Driving is a privilege. Walking may be a necessity. However, performing illegal acts is not a necessity. This is crucial in the discussion of negligence and recklessness. Especially if the activity is reckless, as they know the risks of their illegal activity and accept them by doing it anyways.
"Pedestrians inherently move a lot slower and are more predictable"
Slower, yes. More predictable, no. People can change direction more quickly and erratically (no turning radius, etc). Cars can be very predictable because of the constraints their mechanical nature provide. You also have to see them to be able to predict, which could be difficult if they throw open a car door from a heavily tinted (illegal in my state) car parked on the side.
So, to get back to the original topic... we could assume that the act of hitting a pedestrian is de facto negligent unless proven otherwise. But what would 'proving otherwise' mean? Here I'm saying that if the pedestrian was negligent or reckless, then that could provide evidence that the accident was the fault of the pedestrian. This could absolve the driver if they were following the law.
And let's not forget that there are people who will throw themselves on cars for the payout. Upsetting the current balance could exacerbate this issue.
And if you're worried about someone throwing themselves on your car, have a dashcam and/or get security cam footage. And I live in Seattle where we get a lot of people jaywalking indiscriminately who one way or another don't seem to care about their own safety and I've never come close to hitting any of them either.
There's a real simple tactic to avoiding issues like that which is that if you see someone do anything erratic that you slow down and don't assume that just because you've got a legal right of way that you don't need to react at all. I've seen some videos of truly unavoidable accidents involving vehicles, but I don't think I've seen any unavoidable accidents involving pedestrians, other than the people who hurl themselves on the hood of stopped car to try to insurance scam. Those people aren't dead though.
And I don't see where you've offered any evidence that we have an issue with pedestrians being irrational and you seem to be very transparently trying to flip the blame without any evidence. Find that evidence if it exists. I doubt any traffic safety experts will agree with you though. Most will cite speeding, distracted driving, drunk driving and size of vehicles as the predominant factors behind pedestrian deaths. Everything else is pretty much whataboutisms unless you have evidence and not argument. You don't have the default position here, the default position needs to be that car drivers need to change.
Depends on your definition. They don't need to be treated equally, but if the system isn't "fair" then what's the point of anything? Nobody will follow a system they don't believe in and that doesn't make sense. Cars aren't treated equally, and are held to a higher standard.
"And I live in Seattle where we get a lot of people jaywalking indiscriminately who one way or another don't seem to care about their own safety and I've never come close to hitting any of them either."
If the police enforced the law, then perhaps we could protect those people from themselves. That's the way the system is designed - to have all parties be alert and responsible so as to reduce the probability of two irresponsible parties meeting, resulting in an accident.
"And I don't see where you've offered any evidence that we have an issue with pedestrians being irrational and you seem to be very transparently trying to flip the blame without any evidence."
Do you have any evidence of me flipping blame, or are you just attacking me now? I'm not trying to "flip" blame. You can look up contributory negligence if you'd like. You can look up just about any city you want and you will see a significant number of accidents show at least partial fault on the part of the pedestrian. Now, we could look at redesigning infrastructure to be safer, but as it stands pedestrians not following the law account for a large part of the problem under the current system. Simply changing the system to shift the blame around, as you propose, is not going to result in a safer system (you've shown no proof). Link at bottom
"You don't have the default position here, the default position needs to be that car drivers need to change."
There is no "default position" here, and to assume one is uncharitable and detracts from the discussion.
My position is that we need stricter testing for drivers. It's also in opposition to assuming a driver is guilty of manslaughter - I believe in innocent until proven guilty.
In an effort to explore your position, I've repeatedly asked for what proof would absolve a driver under your proposed system of guilty until proven innocent, yet you haven't provided any. We need criteria.
I've given examples of when pedestrians could be at fault by breaking the law. It appears you are the one engaging in whataboutism since my statements are backed up by law and fact, yet you have provided neither.
https://www.treehugger.com/why-are-percent-fatal-accidents-f...
It’s going to be interesting to see how it effects accident numbers, I’m worry it may actually make accident numbers go up.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-highway-code-8-change...
A contradiction leads to uncertainity, which leads to accidents
"Crossing the road anywhere" is quite dumb, I think, and I guarantee you'll see a spike of pedestrians getting hit for a while. Just because you can legally do it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Wrong. It's the very opposite. Research shows that drivers increase their attention when they know that there can be obstacles and/or the road is not wide and straight.
The changes in Highway Code really just say that cars should give way to pedestrians that are crossing minor roads, while walking down a major road.
I.e. the general rule is that all traffic going down a major should wait and give way to continuing traffic, regardless of if it’s a car, bike or pedestrian, when they enter or leave the major road to/from a minor road.
There’s is still an expectation that all road uses take care and respect other road users. You don’t ever have a “right of way” only the obligation to “give way”.
That was always the case, see Rule 182 from the 2006 version for example
https://web.archive.org/web/20060418012127/http://www.highwa...
"turning at road junctions; give way to pedestrians who are already crossing the road into which you are turning"
The change was you now had to give way to those about to cross the road too
Obviously cars should always give way to pedestrians in the roadway, the alternative is running them down. I don’t think we need a Highway Code rule to make it clear why that’s a bad idea.
The police nor council do anything about it.
> I don’t think we need a Highway Code rule to make it clear why that’s a bad idea.
While the UK is far better than the wild west of the US (pedestrians killed per million people per year. UK=5, New Jersey=22, New Mexico=47), there's still about 1 pedestrian a day killed by drivers, and 10 per day seriously injured.
20 children are killed or seriously injured every week for the "crime" of walking, almost all in towns where there is no need to be traveling more than 15mph (2 miles to get out of town or onto a major artery road, at 30mph that takes 4 minutes with no traffic lights, at 15mph that's 8 minutes)
> and I guarantee you'll see a spike of pedestrians getting hit for a while.
I guarantee the UK has a lower incidence of traffic collisions than the US, per capita or per miles driven.
Can't imagine getting a ticket for jaywalking in New York although the city has cracked down on cyclists running lights from time to time.
Yeah, nice one. Blaming the pedestrians, not the drivers. If the drivers can't see the pedestrians at a crosswalk, they simply need to drive slower.
The former will almost always lead to more issues, no matter what the change is.
It's worse for bicycles: almost nowhere in the USA are drivers punished for killing cyclists, despite what's written in the vehicle code.
The cars are still obligated to stop to avoid hitting someone. It just allows a pedestrian to be ticketed for impeding a vehicle's travel (which is dangerous) while not being in an established crossings (which I believe includes implicit ones at intersections, but unsure about that part).
I'm not sure what an implicit crossing is. In California every street intersection is explicitly a pedestrian crossing per CVC unless otherwise marked.
Frankly, almost no law is enforced as it's written. Law enforcement discretion and judges legislating from the bench are extremely common in all areas. That said, if you hit someone, you will be investigated (how thoroughly depends on the circumstances).
As an avid jaywalker, in what situation do you think you should be legally prioritized over a car on the road? If the car can stop in time sure but otherwise you're the one causing a problem.
Everywhere else...I don't believe cars should be allowed to drive as if they have the right of way. Sure, it's bogus to leap out from being hidden between parked cars, but that's a corner case akin to sticking a fork in a power outlet.
A hard example is the unprotected rail lines that run through residential neighborhoods with no fencing or other separation between the rail road and kids. These aren't just in the Central Valley -- you can see this right in Redwood City. Even at a glacial pace a train full of cars can't be expected to stop on a dime.
What style of street are you thinking of? Stop sign streets? Main streets with stoplights? Are just wanting to literally walk across any road without looking and force all traffic to stop?
Is walking down to the nearest stop sign/traffic light really that inconvenient?
Essentially, yes. Roads are for people, and of course drivers and passengers are people using the street too, but they don't deserve top priority over other uses, especially as the effort for them to get around is low (they are using external power to move themselves; the other users are not).
> Is walking down to the nearest stop sign/traffic light really that inconvenient?
Depends on how far and if it's safe to walk there. I live in a town with walkable footpaths on every street, and even between some streets, but neighboring towns are not so accommodating. There are plenty of places where the footpath simply ends in the middle of the block.
Anyway it's less convenient than being pulled to the intersection by a motor.
So, yes, I think you're right, casualties are more likely to increase since few drivers are going to be changing their behaviour any time soon.
I think we need to get much more proactive about revoking licenses. I am also heavily considering getting a dashcam to start recording and reporting violators.
Taking away licenses is not a clean and easy thing in the US, because you basically make someone the ward of someone else, or an outlaw. People can't get by without vehicles, and much of the time they just have to risk it. Best case scenario someone else has to babysit them.
I definitely agree we need to make it easier for people to get by without their cars. I just can't stomach making people second class citizens, which is what these laws do. I'm only in favor of them in really egregious, repeat violation situations. Like people that refuse to stop drinking and driving; the ones that just keep doing it over and over. Even then, I'm willing to talk about options in the grand scheme of things like ignition interlock systems (actually not even available to many repeat offenders in my state)
It varies by city/state, as some other comments noted. In any case, in a few smaller towns I've been to in the UK, there are numerous crossings that seem incredibly unsafe to me from both a US and western European perspective. In much of the latter regions, marked crossings that aren't full-on zebra crossings with pedestrian-priority are incredibly rare, while these crossings (in which pedestrians yield to vehicles in a marked path) seem the norm here. With neither a pedestrian signal nor a priority marking, I find them rather alarming and pointlessly confusing given that vehicles sometimes have a signal for these same intersection, leaving pedestrians to just... guess?
I've slowly grown accustomed to accepting the priority of vehicles over pedestrians here compared to in the US and continental European cities I lived in, but London seemed far more pedestrian-friendly and there are certainly US cities that are even worse than the above.
Unfortunately, the opposite often happens due to political pressure. People know that a blind curve is dangerous for pedestrians and demand a crosswalk and signs/ signals, which only encourages more people to cross at the unsafe location. (Even if it now has lots of paint on the pavement and flashing lights.)
Yes, the big picture solution should be to minimize places where it's dangerous to cross via road design, but that isn't always possible or practical for various political or engineering reasons.
The typical US laws are mostly misunderstood: Even where vehicles have the right of way, they have an obligation to yield to avoid hitting a pedestrian, just as having right of way doesn't permit you to intentionally cause a wreck.
And unfortunately, there isn't a uniform set of rules between states to make row for pedestrians clear, but there has been a trend to at least give pedestrians right of way at all marked crossings, and in places that don't have a marked crossing within ~a block.
Worth repeating.
BTW I'm not saying whether those laws are right or wrong either way. Just clarifying what the status quo actually is.
Speaking as a UK driver (and pedestrian) - no, that's not really the case. At least not that pedestrians have right of way. I mean cars will hit the brakes to avoid killing you but I wouldn't recommend relying on that. The only place they changed the right of way recently is at turnings with 'give way' markings as shown in your link.
Here in Dublin, Ireland the few weeks immediately after the lockdowns where horrendous for driver behaviour and aggression. It took a while till behaviours were back to the norm. It was almost as if people needed to get reacquainted with it.
They don't respect traffic laws, including red lights. And the pandemic has really increased their numbers.
An the companies sending them will have no repercussions if the police will stop the delivery guys - making the companies care less and even encouraging this behavior.
Cousin was a city cop. If he told them to move, they'd seriously just ignore him. Now ask yourself if you're going to ticket this guy and possibly suspend his livelihood when everyone else is doing it with virtual impunity?
It's a messed up system.
Also cellphones. 5g = better connectivity on the move = more distracted people driving/walking = more accidents?
People buying old cars and putting money in them is yet another recent trend everywhere that even I've participated in. It's fun to pass time trying to fix older cars.
So it's a cycle that makes cities ever more built around cars. We need more trains, light rail, subways. As those become more entrenched, the city reshapes itself around them. Train stops become areas of development, which brings more things closer to people without needing cars.
I'd argue we simply need more walkability, and to place shops and destinations closer to people. Public transit is great, but is not an effective way to fix our auto-centric land use.
In Strong Towns this is discussed. Transit should come to enhance and solve the transportation needs of already great, walkable places. Transit should not be created to try to induce great places.
Train stations are generally planned for places where people are already going. The development that happens around them is a natural result of them being there. Unlike bus stops, train stops are not easily moved and generally have more people passing through on foot. That makes it a good bet developing around there.
If your business relies on foot traffic, a bus stop is a risky place to set up next to. The service could move or shut down the bus stop without much effort. Not so with a train station. Buses also use roads, which take up much more land per traveler than trains do.
If you want a walkable city, you still need to get people in and out of it. Simply blocking off roads will give you a wide moat of parking lots around the city. Trains are necessary for walkable cities.
It seems so many people in America are so fat now they don’t imagine people would ever walk, so they drive without regard for pedestrians and active hostility towards cyclists and park in the way of sidewalks, making walking or riding bikes to school seem so scary and unpleasant that few kids do it anymore, leading to more fat Americans who would never imagine walking. It is really depressing.
I honestly don't even feel comfortable wearing earphones when I'm walking in the woods much less on a city street.
It’s a vicious circle, too. If everyone else has an SUV, you also want an SUV so you’re not crushed by one in a crash.
The most likely candidates (again, in my opinion) are:
changes to driver psychology somehow due to the pandemic (empty roads, then full roads again, greater anxiety or stress related to traveling back and forth to work, or something like that)
changes in enforcement of driving laws (the protests of 2020 caused changes in police budget allocations or how police enforce minor laws like traffic laws OR staffing issues due to the pandemic with law enforcement agencies, or both)
A near universal change in how drivers are certified / licensed (could be due to changes in the pandemic or some other factor?)
OR this is a statistical fluke someone hooked onto and we are all drawing far-reaching conclusions from.
Fwiw, many groups are attempting to build self-driving cars it would be easy to produce cars that drove at sensible speeds as an intermediate step. That this hasn't happened says something about how a society values drivers', and drivers rights to break the law versus those of the innocents they routinely kill or maim as result.
It really is not just that. The netherlands didn’t fix their traffic by telling people to drive better (in fact they did relatively little of that), but by redesigning the entire driving conditions around the results they wanted.
Properly incentivising, and taking advantage of human psychology for other reasons than exploitation, is much more reliable than scolding people.
Getting stuck on “it’s people!” will be largely ineffective, because it’s not how people work. Though if your only goal is to have something to moan about, carry on, that’ll certainly keep.
Normalisation of dangerous driving is a global phenomenon where car culture reigns.
anyway, there are many ways to calm traffic.
This works especially well combined with pedestrian and cycle passthroughs and such, including to avoid “drive-through” neighbourhoods without having to make the neighbourhood entirely impassable and a pain in the ass to residents.
I suspect that Google Maps and the like have worsened the level of driving through residential neighborhoods as they route you through a maze of residential streets to save (in theory) two minutes.
But that’s the point of traffic calming, they make trips take longer in real time so the route becomes less attractive as traffic avoidance, while not being a huge issue for “normal” local traffic.
Sinking roads and giving all surface level to pedestrians would be an active improvement, though obviously not a cheap one. The great bit is when you remove the cars you can backfill the dig and forget about it entirely.
I would like to see a lot more of this. In Chicago, people have always blown red lights at speed right in front of parked police cars because they know police won’t do anything (and I’m not even sure if the police are allowed to do anything—allegedly they can’t chase suspects unless they believe they are a threat to society, and I’m not sure that includes “reckless driving”).
The article didn’t mention it, but I also wonder if this (like the surge in violent crime) is driven in part by changes in policing following the BLM protests (e.g., police make fewer traffic stops for fear of finding themselves in an incriminating situation).
The problem is, it doesn't scale, especially in a city as big and violent as Chicago. It only works so long as police keep their foot on the gas (so to speak); they minute they let up on traffic enforcement (because of competing priorities) things will get worse again.
If one person speeds, that person is an idiot. But if everyone speeds, the road engineer is an idiot. A systemic problem like this is a result of poor road design, not individual deviant drivers. Police should not be burdened with the responsibility of ensuring safety in a system that is unsafe by design. The roads need to be redesigned so that drivers naturally feel unsafe at high speed.
> A systemic problem like this is a result of poor road design, not individual deviant drivers.
In many cases, I agree that there is a systemic problem at play, but these cases tend to be highways (i.e., no pedestrians) and the issue is politicians setting speed limits which traffic engineers understand to be unsafely low for the road’s design (the safest speed being that which 85% of drivers would naturally drive if unencumbered). And it hardly matters how engineers design the road because politicians will always respond to a vocal minority who argue that the limits should be lower.
However with respect to streets (i.e., places where pedestrians belong) rather than highways, the issue is only systemic with respect to enforcement—many other parts of the country (or even the same places with different enforcement) have similar streets but drivers are better behaved. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t room for improvement everywhere, but only that the issue isn’t “Chicago has stupid street engineers”.
Why would you need active policing to enforce traffic lights and pedestrian crosswalks?
I don't like them either, but traffic camera work.
In most places in America walking is not a practical mode of transportation because of distance; it’s miles from your house to the grocery store, for instance. If you live in a city this might not be obvious to you but half the country lives in the burbs or rural areas.
Separately, it would be nice if we had more sidewalks, but they are financially unsustainable in low density areas.
Separately, the US does have an obesity problem, and exercise would help, but the biggest issue by far is dietary sugar/carbohydrates.
What makes sidewalks expensive to maintain, relative to roads?
> the biggest issue by far is dietary sugar/carbohydrates
This is not clear. See this highly fascinating series on the obesity epidemic: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p.... Other suspects are HFCS and seed oils.
Yeah, Somewhere Else is ultimately the same place, but homeowners don't see it as personally flowing out of their own pockets.
But having to pay for it directly sounds extremely counter-productive.
And even the first part is dubious really: there should be sidewalks most everywhere including non-residential locations or the like, which the city would almost certainly have to clear alongside the roadway. Surely in that case it’s more efficient and simpler to just clear everything uniformly?
In my town, for the most part the neighborhoods without sidewalks also have extremely little car traffic, and pedestrians walk in the street without issue. The drivers also tend to behave themselves.
Changing anything that requires substantially raising the city budget is hard, because the state makes many of the rules for city budgets and taxes. Adding a large seasonal workforce and equipment for clearing sidewalks would be a tough nut to crack. They do clear the sidewalks around parks, schools, and the like. There's also a matter of the preferences of residents. For instance I don't want a ton of salt poured onto the sidewalks in front of my house, and am happy to keep it clear of snow. Every 3 or 4 houses, somebody has a snowblower that rarely gets used.
Otherwise, what you describe is not normal. The bill would be paid by whoever issued the PO. If it wasn't me, I'm not paying. If it was not on my property, then not my problem, and if it was, you have also trespassing on top.
So the only alternative that occurs to me that you are a part of some community, with common maintenance of shared property and where the bill is footed by members.
These measures are common in urban areas in the US.
Another way of thinking about it is that the notion of "ownership" is limited in a variety of ways. We also don't have mineral rights or control of the airspace above our house.
In most cities single family neighborhood sidewalks are "owned" by the property owner, not the city. However they are an "easement" which means the property owner has no control over the property, or ability to limit access to the property but assumes all costs in maintaining, and all liabilities for injury or other city ordinances (like snow removal, grass cutting, etc) basically all the downsides of ownership with none of the upside.
for some people this makes sidewalk undesirable
Doesn't this actually imply that it's the low density that is financially unsustainable, rather than the sidewalks? I mean if your settlement pattern can't even afford a place for people to walk, what the hell are you doing?
I grew up and lived in rural/suburban Florida (god-awful weather) and I never learned to drive. I walked everywhere (no sidewalks). People whose lives revolve around cars just can’t imagine a person walking longer than the distance from the parking lot to the front door.
Nearly everybody wishes they could drive less but nobody will actually drive less.
- Safer than running on the street (crappy streets, ignorant drivers, etc.)
- I can concentrate on running, not on staying away from getting creamed by cars.
- They've got TV, I could get my garbage news fix (I don't read/watch news regularly)
- They've got bathrooms, running makes me shit sometimes, if I go out in the morning.
Of course, I stopped going to a gym because I do have an erg at home, and I don't really want to go to a large indoor location where people are huffing and puffing right now.
Which is because we’ve specifically built everything such that there are large distances involved which necessitate cars. You’re taking this as that natural order of things instead of a deliberate decision, which it was. We could have just built towns and cities with the right level of density instead. Even where there aren’t “large distances” involved such as the suburbs where the grocery store and doctor’s office have to be built a half mile or so away everyone has to drive because surprise surprise we’re stupid and made it so that you’re crippled and have to drive to go any distance, not just actual long distances.
> Separately, it would be nice if we had more sidewalks, but they are financially unsustainable in low density areas.
All the roads and highways are unsustainable too, more so, in fact. The difference is the government subsidized these instead of subsidizing sidewalks or more density to create the illusion of progress. Can’t be stagnating as a society if there’s a new road!
Why? Because do not want to incur the costs of maintaining them, nor the liability that comes with them from either a city stand point, or injury standpoint
If sidewalks where maintained by the city, including snow removal, and repairs, then maybe. but the fact is in most location they are an imposition on the property owner that comes with large costs and liabilities.
The other issue here is that you still pay for the roads, maintenance, police patrols, rest stops, expansion, environmental degradation, snow removal, insurance for cars, gas infrastructure, and all of those things related to roads but since you don’t get a specific bill in the mail with the line item for roads that you don’t think you’re paying for them or a huge cost for them. How much does it cost to have car accidents as the leading cause of death of teenagers? Who knows. But it’s gotta be more expensive than shoveling your sidewalk off.
OK And? I fully admit I am anti-social.
>>The other issue here is that you still pay for the roads, maintenance, police patrols, rest stops, expansion, environmental degradation, snow removal, insurance for cars, gas infrastructure, and all of those things related to roads but since you don’t get a specific bill in the mail with the line item for roads that you don’t think you’re paying for them or a huge cost for them.
The cost is not the problem for me, and I would prefer to get a bill for every single one of those items. Honestly if city employed people to remove the snow from the sidewalks and sent me a bill like they do trash collection I would have less of a problem with them. That is not what they do though...
>How much does it cost to have car accidents as the leading cause of death of teenagers?
Solve that problem by getting teens off the road.
I'm not kidding - the other day some kids walked by and asked if they could shovel my sidewalk and driveway before I got the chance to do it myself and I just paid them to do it. How cool is that? Why do you need the city to solve your problem here? If money isn't the issue... I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill.
> Solve that problem by getting teens off the road.
How can you do that when they have to drive everywhere? Do you not see how circular this is? Once they grow up they become adults, and then they die on the road too as yet another leading cause of death.
The last home I had with sidewalks the city would fine you if they were not cleared in 24 hours, contractors would come 3-5 days later
>How can you do that when they have to drive everywhere?
never said it would not create other problems, I solve the teens dying problem the same way everyone solved the COVID problem, just lock down. it "worked" then right ;)
I bet since I oppose Vaccine Mandates I am also an "anti-vaxxer" as well right? even though I am vaccinated from every illness for which there is a vaccine I am eligible to get including COVID.
If you do not support authoritarian government you must be anti-science, this is an amazing timeline..
I call bullshit.
The smallest 50 people village in the Netherlands has sidewalks. It’s not that it’s unsustainable, it’s that nobody wants to pay for it. Or that americans build too friggin big.
For a start, the build quality can be a lot lower - a sidewalk doesn't need to support lorries with 13t loads.
As for maintenance, the damage to them is far less, and repairing a sidewalk would usually be a small diversion rather than the drama of a road closure.
I'm not quite sure why anyone would think sidewalks are an unthinkable burden.
Here's Virginia's cost guidelines for roadway[1] (2000, so the numbers are surely higher now). Even at $350k/mile, sidewalk is 2/3 the cost of a paved suburban road.
1 - https://www.virginiadot.org/business/resources/gasb-roadway_...
(European here; but I've spent some time in US. You seriously underestimate the distances in US).
There's no good reason these suburbs can't be more walkable, it's mostly adding sidewalks that link to other places. And possibly smaller schools (and the 4000+ pupil high schools we get are a whole different problem).
Low density is caused by car culture pushed by car manufacturers and oil companies.
As I’m not American, I don’t know if this is or isn’t how y’all use the word, but I did assume it was just the American term for a public footpath, and those don’t need to be beside a road.
e.g. the north-south paved footpath between 11 and 65 Southbrook Rd: https://goo.gl/maps/JpoTcarePZZ7Neij9 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/50.84552/-0.98156
And if that isn’t what being discussed here, it ought to be, because the value is in being able to get around on foot rather than specifically to duplicate the road network.
(Likewise, I don’t think it would be valid to say “ahh, but each end connects to a road”, because that’s like including the cost of the M25 in the cost of the A111).
My wife and I are a one car household. On a typical day we both alt commute - I run or bike 7 miles to work and she runs/walks 3-4. We walk our daughter to and from daycare - even in the rain. These are choices we are barely able to make because we live in the near burbs of a pedestrian focused US city.
The US built infrastructure isn't just 'cheap' on pedestrian safety it is actively hostile. There are neighrborhoods that resist sidewalks for 'safety' reasons where safety means - only poor people walk and poor people are criminals. When I used to live in Phoenix Arizona, It would take me both hands to count the number of times i was stopped by police while walking because I was 'suspicious'. I would say I have a scary experience at least once a week alt commuting.
My bike lane to work goes from no bike lane to physically separated rails to trail to protected bike path to just suddenly ending and dumping me into traffic. It is ABSURD. I was once physically talked off my bike by a driver because I yelled at them for driving in the bikelane. The police who responded threatened to cite me for disorderly conduct.
I could go on.
I watch the youtube channel Not Just Bikes as a form of catharsis. I thought I had it good until I saw just how good places like the Netherlands have it.
I live in the Netherlands and the cycling and pedestrian infrastructure is indeed better than anywhere else I've been. Apart from maybe Denmark, I doubt there's anywhere that comes close to the Netherlands, so comparing the US to it is pretty useless.
There's still plenty to improve, and plenty is improving, to be fair. In the last few years, I've seen quite a few impressive changes in Amsterdam's cycling infrastructure, which was already amazing. Streets getting redesigned now are taking cycling very seriously.
There's also Bicycle Dutch on a similar note to Not Just Bikes, but less polished.
There seems to be actual thought put into how space for moving people is, should be, and will be used. It doesn't begin with an assumption of building a road and then work from there. That change in planning assumption is enormous. I'm hoping the pandemic does something to shift the US culture of infrastructure building but I am not hopeful.
That is complete nonsense. Sidewalks are not a significant additional expense to the road it’s on, even at a much lower level of build quality / complexity require very little maintenance as the only damage is environmental (pedestrians and cyclists do 6 or 7 orders of magnitude less damage to the surface than sedans do, per unit of distance, add 4 for a loaded truck).
Depends on your definition of significant and sidewalk. It does add cost, so it's not insignificant (you can observe it with confidence). For states that are already struggling with infrastructure costs, it would not be feasible (look at PA and it's bridges).
Most states or municipalities actually have codes that the sidewalk has to follow. So it it's not legally possible to build something low quality. Technically a sidewalk doesn't have to be paved at all. In many places, you have a 3-6 foot right of way on the sides of the roads - aka a sidewalk - that does not have to be paved. This can vary by state and municipality though.
What a bad-faith definition you're using here. By this definition if you reimbursed a road worker for a penny they dropped during their shift building the road it'd be a significant expense.
Do you have any actual data to support the idea that sidewalks for all roads are a feasible goal?
Whether that is worth it or not to you is up to you to decide. But you've just found another excuse for driving when walking is possible (not possible for everyone, but possible for some).
That seems like a problem that could be solved through zoning. Solutions that by your definition inherently put people at risk seem an easy thing to re-evaluate.
"No way of preventing this, says person in only country where "this" happens."
That said -- I was born, raised, and have spent most of my life in rural UK and it would be absolutely preposterous if those areas didn't have pavements.
Let's change this to a proactive mode.
How far is too far to walk or cycle?
What would it take for you to increase that distance?
Which is 100% our own fault. We could build suburbs with walkable shopping and schools, but we don't. Hell, even in my sort-of-walkable suburb (Reston, VA) sidewalks and bike lanes are both a bit of a bodge. It's on in the last year that there's a continuous sidewalk from my house to the school complex <1 mile away (but the neighborhood was built in the early 1970s). And despite that continuous sidewalk with zero major road crossings, there's still public school bus service (which actually takes longer to get kids home than walking because of the way it loops around). But, kids and parents sit patiently at the top of the street instead of walking a few blocks.
Separately, it would be nice if we had more sidewalks, but they are financially unsustainable in low density areas.
They're less expensive than roads by an order of magnitude. The only place they aren't feasible is true rural zones. But, the vast majority of Americans live in cities or suburbs - there's no good excuse for not having sidewalks in these areas.
That is true to an extent, but it is equally true that there are lots of areas that could be quite walkable, but aren't due to lack of infrastructure. My friend lived less than a mile from the mall, but it was impossible to walk there since it was cut off by a 4 lane road with no way for pedestrians to cross. My grandparents lived in a gated community that was literally across the road from a Walmart, but the only way to get there was to drive 1 mile up the road, turn around, and drive back.
I am not making a judgement about the desirability of sidewalks. Indeed I said that more would be nice.
To the latter criticism, I say, yes, we did, but it doesn’t change where we are.
To the former, I say that government monopoly on infrastructure (which means that taxes pay maintenance) combined with sprawl have led us in the US to a place where literally in many places the money does not exist to maintain the infrastructure that was already built, much less build new infrastructure.
There are lots of essays on this; here’s one: https://fee.org/articles/the-unbearable-truth-about-infrastr...
No matter how many concessions are made, most people are just unable to get over the lack of inertia and start cycling. Even if we allow for a hypothetical safety utopia, comments here will cite sweating as a deal breaker.
I understand and empathize with beginners who are not acclimatized to cycling on a busy road. However it doesn't change the fact that you have to start somewhere and build your comfort levels. Pragmatically, this is the more important self-fulfilling dynamic. If you don't start building your skills and instead blame drivers...
There are hostile drivers out there. After decades of riding (sometimes wildly irresponsibly) I can only count on one hand motorists who were actively trying to run me over. In those cases the sentiment was mutual and we had already exchanged words or otherwise escalated. Would have been easy to avoid. Contrast this to the cultural/class rhetoric against pickup-truck drivers.
As a self-appointed expert in the domain, this doesn't ring true for me. It fits better with the theme of Internet hyperbole and media alarmism.
In turn, this makes it "necessary" to wear special cycling garb, change, and shower when you arrive at work. Vanishingly few workplaces provide a convenient place to shower and change.
But I ride my bike to work year-round in a city that gets (for instance) about 10 degrees hotter than Amsterdam, and I manage it.
I don't see how this is a good thing? I've been riding my bike since I was a little kid (in the Netherlands) and I've had zero people actively try to kill me, I'm not sure why any nonzero number is not a big deal.
https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7878268,-117.8588114,3a,75y,...
Here is an example comparable to yours: a 4-lane major road intersecting perpendicularly with a 2-lane minor road. Pedestrians have controlled crossings across the major part, and protected islands so they never have to cross more than two lanes in one go:
https://goo.gl/maps/MYbcyPgQZD1PMAL69
This design is standard everywhere. And it isn't even optimal (it doesn't accommodate cyclists very well).
*If you searched high and low across the country you might find a counterexample or two, but the fact remains that this kind of junction is thoroughly alien to the British built environment.
The only thing that will slow drivers down is when they feel unsafe themselves, or have a risk to their vehicle.
Adding signs or automatic fines doesn't do anything. You need narrower streets utilizing actual traffic calling techniques. It's such a sad sight to see signs with a "traffic calming zone" sign, but absolutely zero traffic calming done. It'll be a wide open street, we'll paved, no trees right against the road or bollards in the middle or speed bumps.
Watching this video feels like an alternative reality that never happened and it seems great.
As a fat person and I think I can take the liberty to speak on behalf of other fat people, you are absolutely correct.
So be sure to please get out of the way and stay out of the way.
Another good option is to go to the city council and have them rope off areas of the town for pedestrians only, if you want to be safe.
I imagine most people don't know the law this well, but... the vehicles don't have to stop unless you have at least one foot in the crosswalk in most states. So they could just be assuming you are letting them go, or they're jerks.
It's got nothing to do with obesity. The personal auto is the US government-dictated and subsidized default transportation method. Anyone not using a personal auto is "less than". In other words, if you're walking, you're a subhuman.
One time, a couple of coworkers were riding single file in the generous shoulder of a wide nearly empty multi-lane road in the early morning when they were both run over from behind in a hit and run. One had to have his spine fused. I still saw the same attitude of contempt, even from coworkers who otherwise liked them.
I switched to mountain biking after that.
What if poor US urban planning has led to sedentary lives where walking to places like grocery stores, parks, or transit is unpleasant, inconvenient, or impossible.
So we sit on our butts and drive our cars everywhere, which means more lanes and more parking lots which in return keeps things farther apart and less walkable.
People who are never pedestrians perhaps have reduced empathy for being one, and being in a big metal car vs passing in-person on the street leads to less personable reactions (ie road rage). And car-focused infrastructure decisions lead to more dangerous interactions between fast traffic, pedestrians, and cyclists.
The tiny bit of time I have spent in some dense european-style walkable neighborhoods left me feeling much more a part of the neighborhood and like I would be a much healthier person in general living in such a place long term.
Which I think leads to lax driver training and enforcement. Suspending someone’s license is potentially destroying their livelihood.
Whatever the cause, our driver training, enforcement, penalties, and general respect for piloting a vehicle in a safe manner seem lower than many European countries.
Raised crossings[1] or deliberate narrowing [2] forces people to pay attention and slow down.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raised_Crossing_In_P...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5376862,-0.1105682,3a,75y,19...
In my experience the mentality that drives this is "the road is for cars, you should not be here at all". You see this not just in the US where the infrastructure is extremely car-centric, but also in e.g. New Zealand.
With smaller roads people seem to instinctively understand that it needs to be shared, but with larger roads this understanding seems to go away.
I really don't know a solution aside from moving to a country that's better designed. The US seems too far gone.
The researchers found that motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of child deaths in the United States, comprising about 20% of all deaths among children in 2016. The chief reason for the crashes was cell phone use by drivers and pedestrians, the researchers found.
Firearms were the second leading cause of deaths among children and adolescents in 2016, according to the researchers. Overall, there was a 28% relative increase in the rate of firearm deaths among U.S. children, likely driven by a 32% increase in firearm homicides and a 26% increase in firearm suicides, the researchers said. They found that the odds of a child being killed by a firearm are 36 times higher in the United States than in other high-income countries.
About 16 children per 100k die each year in the US
https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/22-child-deaths...
In the UK for comparision it's about 10 per 100k
https://stateofchildhealth.rcpch.ac.uk/evidence/mortality/ch...
I'm not convinced the US focuses on either gun violence or deaths from cars
Jason Slaughter of NotJustBikes also pointed out that in NL they at least had an entire generation or two of people who remembered a different way of living, without being car dependent. All those people have died out in the US now, and even people in their mid-80's came of age when the US was going whole hog on car dependency.
I want better for the US but I'm not optimistic. A new city built of whole cloth (maybe culdesac.com can do it?) might have a chance.
And anecdotally, I've met plenty of bonkers female drivers, too. Including two who tried to run my bicycle off the road because they felt that cyclists should not be on the road (in both cases, I was in the cycle lane).
I believe this was already in motion under Trump. He himself exemplifies antisocial selfish behavior. It's his entire gimmick. His election and his words/actions as president affirmed the validity of those feelings in people. The pandemic just accelerated the phenomenon.
I think people might even see antisocial selfishness as a kind of individual affirmation of freedom, a personal protest against the perceived tyrannies of modern life. And I don't think it's limited to specific political or cultural groups, because there are antisocial selfish people everywhere.
And so this manifests in people being rude to servers, blowing traffic lights, etc.
I think it's the same reason people buy SUVs that aren't specifically work vehicles for rugged terrain. It's a conspicuous and continuous self-aggrandizing affirmation of one's individual greatness and strength.
Not to be too dramatic, but it seems a bit like we are regressing as a society to animal kingdom behavior. Politeness is dead!
Maybe aggressive driving is part of that elevated adrenaline addiction: as you go about your day you need little doses from other places like the gas pedal.
Hey, on behalf of my animal brethren, I resent that! ;-)
Seriously, while nature can seem cruel --- red in tooth and claw --- there also exists in nature a definite "politeness", i.e. the context for aggression is well defined (for example, predator-prey, maintenance and challenge of group hierarchy, defense of territory) and outside of that context violence is generally avoided. Humans, both primitive and civilized, are among the more aggressive of animals and in particular display aggressive behavior with less reason or provocation than most species. To some extend civilization actually makes this worse; it's easier to act aggressively when the aggression is less likely (because of existence of laws and police) to turn into deadly violence, and violence is less likely to be deadly because of hospitals and antibiotics.
Otherwise I agree completely with you. In particular, I also suspect that Trumpism has done more harm to polite civilization than Covid.
This question baffles me because where I'm from, hitting a pedestrian or biker with your car, the car driver is almost always 100% liable. And it works. Cars don't want to hit cyclists or pedestrians because they don't want to pay, and cyclists/pedestrians don't want to hit cars because they want to stay alive.
Do they? Where I live, at night, no one ever wears reflectors, save a few cyclists. It seems like people don’t think about this at all. You’re walking around at night and someone driving a car doesn’t see you until it’s too late. I think there is some merit to asking the question about how pedestrians can be safer. I’m happy to practice what I preach and wear reflectors at night but it seems that pedestrians are ignorant about their visibility. You can only be so safe driving a car, it’s not feasible to drive 5mph everywhere you go.
Infrastructure needs to be build around pedestrians and cyclists. The youtube channel "Not Just Bikes" shows how it can be done.
See also: all of these bright yellow illuminated retroreflective bollards that should have made themselves more visible:
https://waronthemotorist.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/new-road-s...
They can get around just fine, they just don't want to walk further to get to the crosswalks, which is fine, but I think it's reasonable to ask people to wear reflectors as a trade off. I also can't exactly expect drivers new to the area to intuitively know where someone might decide to cross at night. Thus reflectors. When I see someone walking on the sidewalk, I slow down (even though it's not necessary given the amount of space between the road and the sidewalk). If I can't see that anyone is on the sidewalk at night, how am I going to know to do that? I want people to wear reflectors so I can give them a lot of space to feel safe not because I think it's their fault if they get hit.
>If pedestrians cannot get around at night without wearing ridiculous fluorescent outfits because of the danger of cars, then the problem is with the cars, not the pedestrians' fashion choices.
Yes, but saying this doesn't just magically make the problem go away. I also think people should wear reflectors at night regardless. When I'm walking around at night, in low-visibility areas, people seem to appear out of nowhere and I'd prefer to keep my distance.
Exactly. So it seems to me the pedestrian would want to avoid the 4 ton vehicular machines and the law here differs from common sense in my opinion.
Seems to me... by virtue of being a 4 ton death machine...the auto should have the right of way in almost every case against a small fleshy pedestrian.
Extremely valuable places have lots of people interacting. Low value-per-acre places accommodate cars well. When there is a conflict between the two, the higher value-per-acre use should be expected to win because, by the mechanism that we use to allocate the space (money), the higher value use is, by definition, better.
Also, from a perspective of what was there first (another principle of ownership): unarmored, walking people are the default state of humans. Armored 4-ton 65mph people are a recent change and a very expensive change, at that. So it stands to reason that we prefer the pre-existing state (though not by the US American traffic engineering system.)
There is also an ethical principle deriving from Judaism, and expanded by Christianity, which says that all people have intrinsic value and by extension should not be killed. This intrinsic value is accepted in western culture and is taken to apply to all people, whether they are too disabled to drive a car, too young to drive, too old to drive, or too poor to drive.
I know this is just a small sampling of the answer to your question, but I don't want to get too tedious here.
So the pedestrian should really be the one avoiding the auto.