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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be under the impression that bikes are like cars where you're essentially guaranteed to be dead of at least maimed when they hit you.

In reality the most likely thing to happen to you is that you maybe get so nasty scratches and dirty clothing.

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… unless you’re longboarding around 20 mph and just about to go through a green light when a dozen bikes come flying through at 20-25 mph 5 seconds after their light turned red.

That’s what happened to me. Only reason I didn’t get trampled was because I had a funny feeling and decided to slow down as I approached the intersection (buildings obscured my view of possible traffic).

They had zero sense of self preservation, let alone any regard for anyone else.

I believe that longboarding on a public road at 20mph would be illegal where I live. It certainly sounds pretty dangerous. What's the stopping distance at that speed on a longboard?

Yeah, I never try to time lights like that anymore, I’ve seen so many cars blow red lights. I always proceed slowly and look both ways for one coming at a fresh green, whether on bike or in car.

I’ve had a similar experience walking, I was in the middle of a crosswalk on a four lane road by the time a dozen teenagers blew through their red light, popping wheelies on gold plated BMXs, cars screeching in the middle of the intersection to avoid hitting them. I almost yelled at the first one that went by me thinking they were the only one, but was very glad I didn’t when all the others passed around me. One of the wildest things I’ve seen in a city.

Not OP, but this your "reality" is wrong. For example, three days ago in Warsaw, a cyclist ran over a child (ER took the child to hospital) on a busy promenade on the bank of the river. The cycleway is temporarily moved there because of the roadwork and the space is designated as shared between cycle and foot traffic.

For several days pedestarians complained that cyclists drive like crazy and it's "when" not "if" some cyclist will hit someone. That unfortunately proved to be accurate.

https://tvn24.pl/tvnwarszawa/ulice/warszawa-rowerzysta-potra... [PL]

Meanwhile there's over 2000 deadly car accidents a year in Poland, 20% of which are pedestrians[1], meaning there's more than one pedestrian killed by a car every day.

[1] https://notesfrompoland.com/2021/11/23/road-deaths-in-poland...

I would like to see those statistics normalised by the kilometres travelled. Unless they are, I'd argue those are misleading.

How many of these pedestrian were hit on sidewalk? How many on pedestrian crossing? And how many on roads, outside of crossing?

I would guess that the stats would be radically different, if we took only pedestrians on sidewalks, as was the case above.

Yes, collisions between vehicles and pedestrians happen where the two interact, and the places where they do can be different for different classes of vehicles. What's your point?

See above:

> a cyclist ran over a child (ER took the child to hospital) on a busy promenade on the bank of the river.

Promenades happen to be dedicated to pedestrians. So pedestrian was hit in a place, where he was supposed to be safe.

And then...

> Meanwhile there's over 2000 deadly car accidents a year in Poland, 20% of which are pedestrians[1], meaning there's more than one pedestrian killed by a car every day.

These accidents probably didn't happen on promenades, pavements, sidewalks, footpaths or other places dedicated to pedestrians.

So back to my point: comparing apples with apples. This comparison wasn't it.

There's a rule that says that if you have (and have a right to at all) ride or drive anything on wheels in an area designated primarily for pedestrian use, you have to move at pedestrian speed. It doesn't matter if you are on a bicycle or an electric scooter, or on a garbage truck, 5 km/h it is.

And yet people seem to promptly forget about it as soon as they get onto their killing machines. Must be something in the wheels or saddles causing them a selective amnesia.

Electric scooters on crosswalks are surely a plague. Teens on them tend to ride out of the bushes at their maximum speed and cross roads without ever slowing down, making it quite hard for drivers to anticipate. Yes, you have right of way, dolt, but so has a car that just turned right, after making sure it's clear to go. There is no way to tell that a crazy kid is going to jump out in the next 300ms.

Imagine if during road work they created a "temporarily shared space" between car and foot traffic.

This is still a systemic issue due to poor urban design/planning. The kid was injured because the city didn't properly separate two different modes of transit. Even if it was "temporary"

We could live in a world where treat bike lanes with the respect we treat car lanes and give them proper detours and this wouldn't be an issue.

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