Why Did the Chicken Catch the Metro? 'Cause It Was Faster Than Crossing the Road | Hacker News Reader

Why Did the Chicken Catch the Metro? 'Cause It Was Faster Than Crossing the Road

jakecoppinger.com

As a former Sydney resident, i would also like to point out for our North American audience that Australia doesnt have the same pedestrian right of way laws as N.A.

Pedestrians must give way to cars at all intersections and corners unless there is a marked ped crossing or traffic lights displaying a walk symbol.

Its not like NA in that every intersection or corner is a de-facto crosswalk.

In Sydney the police are also VERY active in enforcing and ticketing people who cross outside signals, or outside the walk signal. As a personal anecdote, i was fined in Sydney because the copper said i crossed on the flashing red walk symbol. He argued that in the time i took to step off the curb and before my foot landed on the roadway, that the signal changed.

Thank you for the information. To me, that policy sounds absurd and inhumane; is it perceived that way in Australia, or do people generally believe that this is a reasonable way of doing things?

I can't speak for everyone. But it took me moving out of Australia to more walkable locations for me to realize how backwards it is.

Safe to say, when I visit home 8 strongly dislike it and usually have some very close calls with cars.

I've heard many people from overseas, particularly those running businesses, say Australia is "over regulated". I'm an Australian, and I doubt that Australia has more laws than anywhere else, so I suspect that doesn't mean what is sounds like at first glance. What it means is we tend to enforce the letter of the law more than other anglo countries.

In this case the outcome is maybe not so good - but bear in mind it probably means traffic in Australian cities moves faster, and I suspect that is the intended outcome which is why it's tolerated. With other laws it's harder to find a good side. Like the time we jailed for someone for having Simpsons cartoons because the kids were naked (it was deemed to be CSAM). Recently the Australian government got smacked down when it tried to make twitter take down content deemed harmful in Australia (someone had died) globally. Twitter had voluntarily blocked it in Australia. Much as I don't like much of Musk's politics, him winning that battle seemed like the right outcome to me.

However, we also uphold laws like "you can't lie in ads", and "you must honour your warranty". For example, an ISP market their offerings based on the lowest expected speed during the day. If they are found to be systemically lying, they will have will find the government watch dog's teeth embedded somewhere - at no expense to the citizen who was lied to. It is Australia who has been most successful in in reducing smoking rates, pioneering plain packaging for cigarettes among other things. Undeniably taxing cigarettes so they $50 instead of a couple of dollars is a form of nannystateism. But there was a recent article here comparing expected lifetimes of the USA to the rest of the words and as you might expect the comparison to Australia with its nannystate laws was not pretty for the USA.

So this enthusiasm for enforcing the law cuts both ways for us Australians. US companies in particular do find it surprising. It was Australia who fined Facebook for redirecting Android users traffic through a VPN, so they could mine their data. I vividly remember when HP's Australia pages were forced to carry a large banner at the top for a few months, proclaiming their did not honour their warranties. Needless to say, all large US tech sector retailers honour their warranties in Australia now. Once consequence of this is many Australian's have learnt to not grey import, despite the considerable cost savings of doing so. People here are voting with their wallets, and surprising they voting to pay more.

Also, I suspect one outcome of having the laws enforced vigorously is bad laws tend to get repealed here, rather than left on the books.

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