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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

What people don't realize about right-of-way laws is that they are there for everyone's safety! This is because predictability is a huge part of traveling safe - for the pedestrians, the bicyclists, the cars. If you can't reasonably predict what someone is going to do, you have an emergency situation that has to be handled.

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Predictability. Thank you so much for mentioning this.

The most-egregious breakdown of this that I have seen is when a cyclist who decides to STOP (and even signals this intent) is then overtaken by another cyclist at near full speed who then suddenly bursts into the intersection without warning.

I don't see it too frequently but I have it seen multiple times. This is simply bad and dangerous behavior but still considered justified by some.

Where I live we have a huge number of sport bicyclers that come in from other areas, especially on weekends.

So the percentage of clueless hotheads on bicycles is higher than average I would expect.

I don't know to what extent that is true, I'm not saying it's not, but I also wonder. Having been in a lot of places where the traffic is unpredictable, I've noticed that people pay a lot more attention to the road and their surroundings and in general drive more defensively than on places where there is an assumption that everyone is following the same rules. This is just anecdotal of course, but I think it would be interesting to look into. I certainly feel a lot safer as a pedestrian in Mexico than in the US for example, even though the traffic is more unpredictable. But again it might be an illusion.

The key with Mexico is that all traffic is unpredictable. The US gets into an unfortunate "local maxima" where the car traffic is relatively predictable so anything that deviates is much more dangerous.

Whereas free-for-alls like India, et al, are predictable in their unpredictability - you can't rest for a moment because everything is chaos.

There's also a tipping point when you have enough crowding that everything slows down.

Yeah I think there is definitely a trade off in terms of speed vs. predictability vs. safety, but wonder what it is. Like is it 3 pick 2?

It's not quite that well defined, I think - I suspect that someplace with those massive "drive with your horn" traffic jams have tons and tons of "very minor" incidents that just happen. Trying to clean that up ends up speeding things up so that the incidents that DO happen become worse.

We even kind of see that with air and train travel - they are almost perfectly incident-free, but when an incident does happen many can die.

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