Luckily I got hit by a car
stevenwaterman.uk
stevenwaterman.uk
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
Which is why useful regret is forward-looking. It makes no sense to entertain a regret like “if only I’d left the house one second earlier,” because there’s no systematic connection between leaving the house slightly sooner and not getting hit by a car. It really is just wishing you could redo a specific dice roll. There’s no actual lesson.
But a regret like “if only I’d noticed the warning signs” is different. That’s a functional, forward-looking regret which you can learn from. You don’t have to want to get in a time machine and redo your life from that point, and you can acknowledge that you simply didn’t have the experience needed to make the right decision at the time. But the feeling of regret can still help you to internalize the systematic relationship between that decision and its outcome.
We are, as you say, pining after the chance to re-roll every event since that point in history, in a futile attempt to try and fix one small problem today.
I think there definitely are situations that would warrant the desire to re-roll your entire life. But I'm nowhere near that point today.
Your point about forward-looking regret has definitely given me something to think about.
(This also happens about more serious circumstances like domestic abuse, where most partners aren’t abusive but due to experiencing abuse in the past suddenly normal things are warning signs of oncoming harm that isn’t actually happening.)
Nowhere in the article does it mention that someone was driving the car. It's just an inanimate car with no driver. It absolves any responsibility to the human behind the wheel.
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Luckily I got hit by a driver.
Luckily I got hit by a car.
I got hit by a driver on Sunday
I got hit by a car on Sunday.
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No less catchy. It's why there are media guidelines around reporting on collisions.
But it's also not as simple as driver hits pedestrian.
Two drivers were involved. The resulting wreckage slid into us. I am reasonably confident that one of those two drivers is at fault - distracted or not paying enough attention and straying into the wrong lane, but I have no idea which. Maybe I'll find out eventually, when the police finish investigating.
If I was reporting on the crash, then sure, maybe "a driver slid into me after crashing into another car in a collision that was maybe his fault" would be a better title.
Humanity has collectively decided cars have more utility than bikes. It’s possible to completely isolate bikes and cars onto separate networks that don’t overlap but humanity decided it’s generally not worth the investment. Thus you’re given the freedom to take risks, but the general assumption by juries etc is you’re partially at fault in any collision.
Disagree and downvote all you want, but that’s simply reality whatever you or I personally prefer.
Not humanity only the planners of unwalkable/uncyclable sprawling towns with bad public transportation...
I guess you mean because you suffer more, rather than legally? Because I'm pretty sure if you hit a cyclist with a car in the UK, you're almost definitely at fault (in the car).
Not that it matters if you're heavily injured. Similarly I hate being a pedestrian in the US. It's terrifying with the turning on red, even though I know I'm in the right, I don't trust the car to stop.
I have to admit that personally I find there's literally no topic like bicycles that gets people to jump from logical arguments to just spewing hatred (or total disregard) and your comment is just the precursor to the literal dehumanisation that cyclists face on roads.
The possibility of doing so in any but the most limited situations is currently unthinkable by most people. If I could wave a magic wind I would ban all cars and Taxi in NYC, but that’s a seriously minority opinion.
But different regions will have different laws and public opinion.
Even within cities it's pretty normal to have a 10+ mile commute each way. My commute would be about that far and include crossing 2 bridges, one of which would be a not insignificant climb (350ft). And I live relatively close to the office relative to many of my over-30 peers.
My wife & I both have our parents "nearby" or at least, relative to most of our friends.. nearby. That is to say, 75 miles away. My siblings live 200mi away in different directions, about 400mi apart. Etc.
Just a big place, some stuff works different. :shrug:
Cities are expensive and not building enough housing
People move further out due to cost
(it's because it's illegal. Because of parking minimums, density maximums, and level of service rules. Which exist because of cars. Which you need to go 10 miles because everything is so far apart. Because of those rules. Because of cars.)
The law may not make a distinction, but prosecutors and juries definitely do.
No, humanity has collectively definitely not decided that. Bikes have utility, so do cars. Their domains of utility superficially overlap ('transportation') but both serve well in different contexts. Where it goes wrong is where faulty reasoning such as this is used to prioritize one kind of traffic over another, which especially given that it is nearly impossible for a cyclist to kill a car driver but trivial for a car driver to kill a cyclist (or indeed any other user of the road) is kind of bizarre.
The road is a shared resource and traffic rules and infrastructure should be 100% based on inclusivity and safety for all participants. And if one class of participants routinely endangers the others then they should be held accountable, no matter what the perceived utility.
To speak for all of humanity is ridiculous, humanity isn't that homogeneous and besides you can be a driver today and cyclist tomorrow or the other way around.
That doesn’t make anything in your response less valid about how we actually should treat these resources.
Also, it’s a bike friendly thread. I am well aware of the audience reading the post, the point was to encourage discussion rather than unthinking reflexive action.
Also there are a few bike friendly areas inside the US, it’s just uncommon.
There’s awesome bike trails near them but they have no way to get there safely on their own.
However, the rationalizing I see from some cyclists is like "just world fallacy" level stuff to me. I've seen enough stupidity on the road to understand that using a bike in mixed traffic is an extremely at-your-own-risk situation, and regardless of what the laws are, it doesn't matter if you're dead. Drunks/distracted drivers and random accidents don't care what the law says.
NYC has a half decent (especially in North Brooklyn) network of concrete barrier protected bike lanes, and yet I still see a tremendous number of cyclists going wrong way, and/or on unprotected roads literally 1 block from the pristine protected bike network, helmetless, playing with their phones, etc.
As someone who occasionally drives in the city (in order to exit/enter on weekends), the reckless disregard for their own lives is.. to me, poor risk management. And my driving is all of 1-2 miles to get from my parking garage to the nearest highway onramp (which some activists want to abolish.. which would leave me to.. drive locally, further, in more mixed traffic, for longer? lol).
I operate in the world as it is, not in the world as I imagine it should be. Cyclists are too small a minority of road users in US, even in most dense urban cities where it could/should work, for us to upend the entire transport infrastructure for them.
It reminds me as well of the Zoomers who only want climate change solved if it overturns the entire socioeconomic order away from capitalism, lol. Cool story, but do you want a solution or to be mad?
I don't think this can be taken at face value. Cars make the road (or stroad more often) worse for biking and walking, so more people drive, in a self reinforcing feedback loop.
I shouldn't have had to move to the Netherlands to be able to ride my bike for my daily needs and feel safe.
Humanity has not "collectively" decided to prefer cars over other modes of transit. Other countries, most notably the Netherlands, do in fact prefer a much more multi-modal transportation system over a car-centric one like in the United States.
Moreover, your comment ignores the contentious history about this decision in the United States, which was very much imposed on many communities without their consent and to the advantage of a select few who benefited from private automobiles over public transport and other modes of transportation like bicycles. I suggest reading historian Peter Nolan's book "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" if you are curious.
As to the decision making process, it’s very true that humanity doesn’t hand out power equally. But, while we can strongly disagree with the system that doesn’t actually change what currently exists without action.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
But a lot of kids are alive who would be dead without their efforts.
The difference is how much kids where biking, which has a lot to do with the utility of biking in a flat high density country.
Utility -> Use -> Risk -> Deaths -> Change
https://www.walkbiketoschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/...
""" In 1969, 48 percent of students in grades K through eight (ages 5 through 14) walked or bicycled to school.1
In 2009, only 13 percent of students in grades K through eight walked or bicycled to school.1
In 1969, 89 percent of students in grades K through eight who lived within one mile of school usually walked or bicycled to school.2
In 2009, only 35 percent students in grades K through eight students who lived within a mile of school usually walked or bicycled to school even once a week. """
From an American perspective the temptation is to bring up suburbs etc, but being bike unfriendly is a global thing. It’s really about the physical effort to travel X distance and therefore the reasonableness of biking such distances to see a friend.
This reminds me of how every driver thinks they are at least above average and most people think they are even an excellent driver.
I guess the same applies to cyclists.
I’m probably not going to attempt to draw any policy or broader conclusions from this.
Even at, to guess, 10 mph, I don't recommend it. Wrote off my bicycle.
But yeah, small samples are bad to draw conclusions from.
It looks like there was one pedestrian death caused by a cyclist in around the last 10 years.
If a cyclist hits a pedestrian, they have failed in that duty.
If a car driver hits a cyclist, they too have failed.
But cyclists also do incredibly stupid things, and I witness this almost every time I ride. I’ve had to make extreme evasive maneuvers on my bike to avoid a serious accident caused by inattention or dangerous choices made by other cyclists.
One day, I was driving my car, and after stopping at a stop sign, began to make my way through the intersection.
A moment later, a cyclist landed on my hood. They had - at full speed - gone the wrong way around a roundabout covered by dense foliage in the middle, and exited the roundabout the wrong way down a one way street, where my car was just beginning to roll.
Maybe this circumstance doesn’t fit the “if a car driver hits a cyclist” criteria (the responding police officer and later, the insurance company agreed), but every collision is unique, and the cyclist plays a part.
Cars are overwhelmingly at fault in most cases. Cyclists often contribute to or directly cause extremely dangerous interactions.
I find I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for bicycles. They're small, fast, and often not where they are supposed to be.
Also there is a lot of talk about cars but in my extended friends groups I know of a number of non-car related accidents. And a couple of cyclist hitting other cyclists. And I think we don't keep statistics on those.
My take is the system wasn't set up for bicycles and it'll take a lot of time and money to fix that.
See also:
> Before the labor movement, factory owners would say "it was an accident" when American workers were injured in unsafe conditions.
> Before the movement to combat drunk driving, intoxicated drivers would say "it was an accident" when they crashed their cars.
> Planes don’t have accidents. They crash. Cranes don’t have accidents. They collapse. And as a society, we expect answers and solutions.
> Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by dangerous streets and unsafe drivers. They are not accidents. Let’s stop using the word "accident" today.
* https://crashnotaccident.com
* https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/travel/safety/road-users/crash...
That would fun to deconstruct....we've got the driver of the vehicle, (possibly) people that may have agitated the driver contributing to their carelessness, their parents for raising them the way they did, the driving instructor, those who design and oversee training/testing for drivers licenses, the same for enforcement of laws, nosy (or not) journalists who keep all of these officials on their toes, all of us for complacency with how all of this complexity is run....tricky business, maybe too much work to even think about when one can just blame the driver and be done with it, "close enough".
It's pretty straightforward for me. You hit me, I sue you. Not your driving instructor. Not the license administrators. Not your parents.
I sue you.
Side note: I truly do not mean to be flippant or victim blaming in any way, but honestly, OP, how did you get hit by a car? I’ve never even come close to getting hit by one, and I’ve changed tires on a freeway during rush hour. I mean to receive a genuine explanation here, because my children are young and I want to teach them how to be safe around roads. (I’m assuming this was a pedestrian-vehicle incident because the article is light on details)
"Assume that everyone that can see you wants to kill you."
It's not bad advice elsewhere, either; but its the only realistic attitude on public streets.
The author is saying that everything in their life is shaped by the events they have experienced up to this point. It doesn't matter whether or not the individual event was good or bad at the time, because we ultimately can't know what impact it will have on our future.
The parable in the article is also used at the end of Charlie Wilson’s War by the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
You go to the bank, there is a heist. Somebody get shot in his left arm. The unlucky will think: "Why so much bad luck? Went to the bank and got shot!", lucky people will think: "Just a few more inches and I was dead! How lucky am I?".
Perhaps unlucky people tend to concentrate on the negative aspects of the events and think about how the outcome could have been better. Lucky people tend to see the more positive side of things and reflect upon how the outcome could have been much worse.
I mean your partner could be leaving you because you can't go to the bathroom by yourself because you are permanently disabled for the rest of your life? You'd live to 90 but unable to move by yourself?
So yeah I guess you could have a brain chemical imbalance that tells you pain is lucky because it could be worse or permanent and you might get away with it being temporary?
Somewhere between overly positive and depression is the right balance.
A collision occurs - a twist of fate's dance,
But let us embrace the hand we've been dealt,
With gratitude and contentment deeply felt.