Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkaiju | Hacker News Reader

Getting rid of RTOR is such a low hanging fruit, we should absolutely do it. Currently our roads prioritize vehicle speed over all other considerations.

View on HN

I don't think that's something the roads prioritize. That's something that the drivers choose to do. A better word might be that roads afford or allow drivers to prioritize speed. I've been in cities where drivers don't prioritize speed. It's nice driving in such cities. People are civil on the road. It's really nice.

It was absolutely the intention for traffic/urban planners to prioritize motorist travel times, which is why you see long delays on "beg buttons" at intersections, or making peds wait for a cycle or more of the lights, and so on.

Some cities like Cambridge, MA integrate a default pedestrian cycle at all phases of the lights, sync the lights to not provide a "green wave", and have an extensive arrangement of one-way streets to discourage drivers from using residential roads as shortcuts.

Instead of penalizing those nice cities with RTOR rules designed for reckless cities, we should step up enforcement in areas where the drivers choose to speed, until they also become nice.

"Nice cities" ? Mind elaborating? Sorta sounds like youre implying some cities are just 'nice' based on like personal choice and not other variables like urban design. If so thats naive...

It doesn't matter if your city is nice because it only has cobblestone streets, because it's populated by the Amish, or because police lasers zap speeders. Once it becomes nice you should get to reap the benefit by enjoying safe right turn on red.

Vehicle speed is a valid priority. The time we would collectively lose waiting at red lights likely far outstrips the years of life lost from hitting pedestrians.

Camera technology will soon be able to detect pedestrians flawlessly, eliminating most of the risk of RTOR. We need to make sure not to ban RTOR before that happens, because it will be too hard to unban it.

Super interesting that you equate waiting at a red light, with time to pause and breathe, as lost time in the same way not being alive anymore is indeed lost time.

You might be horrified to learn that human life is assigned a monetary value in social considerations. You can't run a large society successfully on feelings. There is an economic cost to lost life, and there is an economic cost to people waiting in traffic, and it may be very well that the latter exceeds the former in this case (though I have not done that calculation).

Holy cow thats both extremely inaccurate and messed up. This sort of reductive economic realism is why people like you fail to understand sufficiently complex topics, like ecology, society, basically anything that isn't currently effectively quantified by the 'market.' You treating an 'economic' cost like that, as if its some cosmic truth whose validity comes from beyond humans, is just as nuts as any religious cultist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com