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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

It's quite insane that your society puts the onus on the pedestrians not to get hit, and even makes it illegal to cross the road. It should be the licensed drivers' responsibility to not hit someone. And in the middle of a campus cars should of course yield to pedestrians. Such a car-centric world.

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In the same vein, you could find through experimentation that the speed at which you can finally get hit by a car without someone claiming it's your fault for being too quick on your bicycle is to be approximately stationary

But not so stationary, because then you were not visible enough

Schrödinger's cyclist, both too slow and too fast at the same time. When behind on a road: "you're holding up traffic with your slow cycling!". When later causing an accident for not yielding to a cyclist "he came out of nowhere in a reckless speed!".

Well obviously then you should have been wearing a high-viz vest and a full Christmas tree's worth of blinking lights. Then when a driver hits you they can say they were distracted by all the visual effects.

It's a little more complicated than I've laid out here. There's not a hard boundary between the MIT campus and the rest of the city, in contrast with Harvard Yard on the other side of Cambridge, which is surrounded by high brick walls. Cambridge is an old city and MIT is, for a New England university, fairly young--not to mention that for the first few decades it was at a different location than today, in Boston proper. I'm pretty sure the road was there long before the first university building.

Harvard used to have kids getting hit going from the yard to the science building. So the lowered the road and put a park over it.

That's a funny area, I'd always wondered why it was laid out like that.

Assume that laws gave people the expectation that they could just step out in front of a 3,500 pound moving vehicle and it would instantly stop. The world would probably be a lot less safe for pedestrians than it is today. The laws of physics come into play to at least some extent.

would you say the same for trains?

and if not why?

* Train tracks does not take up 70% of cities.

* Trains are not constant, they come more seldom

* Trains are _extremely_ predicable. Cars are the opposite. This is why trams in i busy inner city are more safe than cars. You know exactly where that tram is going and at what speed.

Yes, and on top of that if there were a train line on campus with any high speed train traffic it would be surrounded by tall fences and the pedestrians would be provided with off-level crossing. (One or more tunnels and/or bridges)

This is exactly the case a little ways away at Tufts University in the city of Medford. There's a busy train line that runs through the campus and it's fenced off. Students do sometimes find ways in there and use the right-of-way as a shortcut. Sometimes they get killed doing this--which is why the fence is there in the first place.

Not for trains - there's a shared expectation that pedestrians should not access the track.

Similarly, not for a freeway.

Where some feel the balance is wrong, is at local-level streets. Today the assumption in most places is that cars have total right of way, and pedestrians must keep clear. It doesn't have to be that way. In a residential area, it's quite feasible to say all road users have equal right to use the space. And in that circumstance, put the onus on the car user (wielding a heavy, dangerous weapon) to not hit other road users.

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