As an aside, I’m raising a 5 and 2 year old a block away from a very busy 4 lane (2x2) street. A few years ago the state awarded our city a grant for a road diet (1x1+center turn). Everything was set to be changed and then our city council was replaced by car-loving candidates sponsored by local big-money. The grant was forfeited and the road remains oversized and dangerous.
The upside is I get to teach my children how dangerous this road is, meaning they won’t have a complacency that otherwise could set in if the road was made safer.
What a twisted logic … ugh!
Some new pickup trucks are so big and have such a bad view of the road in front of them that you can't even see a normal sized car stopped in front out the windshield and they need to have a front camera. A lot of SUVs aren't quite there yet but they are getting ridiculously big/heavy and still high enough that it's hard to see children in front.
The height means that the bumper is positioned in a much worse way and rather than rolling on the windshield you'll just die if you're hit. The weight also increases the risk to pedestrians in a collision.
Also, some other countries are doing much more serious things to reduce pedestrian/cyclist deaths while the US is doing pretty much nothing.
Madness.
There's no way I'd ever ride a bike in those lanes.
I hate the Kriss-Kross when I'm driving, because in slow traffic the bikes often move faster, passing on the right and then Kriss-Krossing in front of you.
The idea that "sharing the road" is possible if only we were all a little nicer and more attentive is a supremely naive fantasy that exists primarily as a justification to not build real physically divided infrastructure.
Painted bike lanes (and crosswalks, tbqh) are death traps and overall fucking terrible fig-leaf concepts. Barriers (and over/underpasses, etc) or nothing.
If you stay attentive when crossing, I think almost all crosswalks are safe. If you aren't attentive when crossing, none of them are safe.
Painted, unprotected lanes aren’t ideal, but they’re better than nothing if they encourage more people to cycle.
There’s plenty of examples where I live where painted cycle lanes have later been upgraded to proper protected cycle lanes (with kerbs, cycle-specific signals at intersections, etc) once they showed the demand was there.
I’d also argue that simply having more cyclists in an area makes cyclists safer because car drivers become more aware of them.
For rural roads a bike lane works fine as there are very few conflict points.
It really is. For decades, US fuel economy standards, emissions rules, and tax breaks and depreciation rules have all been weighted in favor of bigger, heavier vehicles.
Sometimes I think it is a decorative bike lane - there to give the impression of biking, not for actual use.
At best, bicycle and pedestrian topics would get a question or two at local debates, usually along the lines of "Do you walk, or take public transport, or ride a bicycle in the area?", almost always answered along the lines of "Yes, of course, in [some rare situation], but I can't normally because it isn't suitable transportation when working". But as locals would primarily vote based on somewhat arbitrary senses of feeling and intuition, without considering direct local questions or any research, nothing really changed.
The same projects and funding, which out-of-the-way places to add patchwork bike lanes to, and whether those bike lanes should be painted, or maybe just "bike route / share the road" signs on the side of the road, are probably being discussed now, a decade later.
If it weren't so frustrating it would be comical.
This design is absolutely terrible, so hopefully this will change at some point (other countries like the Netherlands have figured out better approaches to how to allow cars to turn when there's a bike lane).
At smaller intersections without signals, the turning motorist is responsible for looking for (and giving way to) cycle traffic before turning across the cycle lane.
Obviously most London roads can't be "expanded", but even reallocating a few parking spaces can often create a lot of space for cyclists and pedestrians.
I think the core problem is that councils are allowed to drag their feet or do dumb shit. CS3 is too narrow to safely passage oncoming traffic and veers across roads, CS7 has a "safety" bollard right after a chicane. These don't seem like the actions of people who view separated cycling infrastructure as a priority.
Same in the Netherlands, not all bicycle and stoplights are equal
edit: Did not downvote, because on point.
But mine is too, in extrapolation.
Nothing "inevitable" about accidents.
Sucks to be the person in the other vehicle though. The end result is an arms race of vehicle sizes.
Car accidents are a question of when, not if. Sooner or later you're going to be in one.
If you somehow get through life without ever being involved in one, you were a very lucky bastard.
Not even intentionally, just some distraction, inattention, miscalculation of my speed, or even sudden technical defect, or health problem.
Though I had countless near misses.
It's called being realistic.
First, think of the stupidest guy you can think of and understand half of humanity is stupider than him.
Second, think of simply how many people and cars are on the road at any given time. Counting would be a fool's errand, to say the least.
Third, understand that driving a car is not something that comes naturally or instinctively. Some might be more talented drivers than others, but we all have to learn how to drive a car to varying degrees of competency.
Fourth and finally: Murphy's Law.
When you combine all of these together, it's a miracle that we aren't seeing several orders of magnitudes more car accidents on a daily basis. The old saying that you're more likely to be in a car accident going to the airport than the chance you'll be in a plane accident is based in reality.
If you get through life without being in a car accident, I reiterate you were a lucky bastard and I would sincerely be happy for your good fortune.
Most of my relatives and friends have been in car accidents. 2 friends of friends even deadly.
Germany, too.
Edit: My active memory is around 50 years.
The USA is likely not to the same degree. (Certainly not at the pace of Paris, which has changed remarkably)
This is the simple, dull solution. Cars inevitably kill other road users because they’re fundamentally unsafe. Remove cars from having any possible interaction with other road users and deaths go down. It’s that simple.
The Americas, as a whole, are a more violent place. Life is just not valued as much.
American apartments suck in every way, particularly sound. Most people in cities go through a phase of apartment living and it sucks and as soon as they can afford they move into a house, but they require cars because even the houses are built poorly and only have a semblance of privacy with big spaces between them.
So most people need cars, any costs added to cars are costs borne by most people, people don't like voting for things that cost them personally. We don't trust the government to execute social change, because both the right and left preach against it (cabrini green, for example).
We have to have some sort of collective trauma that should be worked out.
Also, as is in the article, the punishment for speeding tends to be a slap on the wrist by way of a comparatively small fine. You'd need to be going at least 20 miles an hour over the speed limit before you're in real trouble.
That said, the numbers are still small enough that the average person doesn't really care about it come election day- not in comparison to other issues. And that's if they even care about local elections at all- these are issues handled at the state level, which makes a very tiny percentage of the population who is even remotely interested in.
The bureaucrats are never trusted with even the most minute details by the populace or the politicians. This is a problem of the left and right. If statistics show that BRT will reduce traffic, but if the population thinks that 'removal of a lane' will slow road traffic, then no change will occur. From the location of a train-stop to an affordable income apartment, local politics poisons all efforts grinding all efforts to a complete halt. participation in local politics is good. Micromanaging governance using 2 minute snippets from a tiktok video as inspiration is not.
The left ignores all literature around urban crime management, the science around obesity and effectiveness (or lack thereof) of good-intentions based educational interventions. The right ignores all literature around infrastructure regulation, transit, welfare or coercive religious interventions.
The gridlock means that systems that are in a downwards spiral (urban crime, car accidents, obesity epidemic, drug epidemic, school costs, healthcare costs) continue spiralling. The most radical of either political side leverages this using promises of policies that can never be enacted, while any politician who might have been willing to strike compromises for slow movement towards real solutions is pushed out of their party.
IMO, a center-left or center-right govt. with a Party Govt. (Pres, Senate, House) up & down the ballot with the ability to pass bills would be able to push for useful change, even if it is with policies that are diametrical. The grid-lock is an unstable equilibrium, where a move in any direction will probably make things a lot better than just staying still.
Can you elaborate here? Didn’t mean to get totally off rails but this seems the opposite to me. Social-democrat European cities tend to have less crime than American ones.
Isnt it the right that ignores any literature except like two old books with the theories that are heavily under dispute?
This has to do with the founding principles of the United States.
Remember, the US came about as a result of giving the finger to British governance (read: bureaucracy). All Americans can unanimously agree to hate on politicians and the government, specific exceptions notwithstanding.
This is bullshit. The cry in Boston was "no taxation without representation", not "fuck the government".
Also known as: Fuck a government that just takes our money and then tell us to fuck off.
The sentiment is enshrined in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, and it is the basis for the forever-long American distrust of bureaucracies.
2 things. 1) Covid / social distancing fucked up everyone's interpersonal skills. So if you're driving towards a pedestrian or cyclist, people are like "fuck it, they deserve to die if they're in my way." 2) It's currently the "style" to have pedestrian-killing bull bars on your truck. People think they look cool, but it just crushes the pedestrian you hit into a paste instead of pushing them up and over your hood.
1 is probably hard to fix. 2 should just be made illegal instantly. I get if you drive your pickup truck on a farm, or are regularly participating in high speed chases as a police officer, they might come in handy (?), but if you're driving around in the city commuting to your desk job, you don't need 'em. It just turns "we broke every bone in that poor pedestrian's body" into "he's dead, Jim". Absolutely no need for that; if we want to keep cars around, we need to design them to do minimal damage to the other road users they hit while their drivers are drunk. It might not look cool, but even better than looking cool is not murdering other people.
I'm not making excuses for cars. They are obviously big and heavy and kill people. Rather I'm saying the attitude of "fuck you, I'm going" is ubiquitous, at least in some parts of the USA.
> During the first 9 months of 2020, driving patterns and behaviors in the United States changed significantly (Wagner et al., 2020; Office of Behavioral Safety Research, 2021). Of the drivers who remained on the roads, some engaged in riskier behavior, including speeding, failure to wear seat belts, and driving under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. Traffic data cited in those reports showed average speeds increased during the Q2 and Q3, and extreme speeds became more common.
At https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/58456 :
> Analyses of speeding behavior (driving faster than the posted speed limits) since the start of the pandemic reveal other changes. Cambridge Mobile Telematics (2021) analysis of telematic data suggested that as trips taken decreased by 50%, their measure of speeding risk increased by 45%. Further, they reported an approximate one third increase in speeding above pre-pandemic levels from November 2020 through March 2021.
Or from https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/03/30/as-roads-empty-to-cov...
> “We do have fewer car crashes right now, because there are fewer cars,” said Jacque Knight, a St. Louis-based traffic planner. “But the crashes we do have are likely to be more severe because speed is the biggest determinant of serious injury and mortality — especially for pedestrians. Our hospitals can’t handle that right now.”