Asking pedestrians to cross streets where cars are stopped and they are mostly protected?
How is that broken?
How is that broken?
You could easily imagine a world where pedestrians have the right of way on the streets, and cars "request access to the road" in a similar way that pedestrians do. Actually, if this is not easy for you to imagine - it suggests enormous internal bias.
Pedestrians are more nimble than cars, so it kind of makes sense that cars have the right of way. As far as I know, large container ships have right of way over small vessels for the same reason.
That sounds lovely. I would live in that city.
And yet, I still disagree that pedestrians should be able to just enter the road willy-nilly. Crosswalks are there for safety because it sets the same expectations for everyone using the road, drivers included, thus creating order and flow that is generally reliable.
This is also the same problem I have with cyclists that think they should be allowed to ride against traffic, ignore stop signs, etc. By not moving with the expected flow, they endanger themselves and creat problems. When I am making a right hand turn, for example, and a cyclist has decided to ride against traffic, I am not compelled to look to my right as I am timing my turn because I am not expecting traffic to be there since a right turn has you crossing zero lanes of traffic and merging with on-coning that would be on your left.
I don't really like our car-centric roads in the US at all, but rules are in place for a reason.
Except you may have just passed a cyclist without leaving enough time to turn because you barely registered their presence and are now going to cut them off. Or you stopped at an intersection and they approached on the right because that is where they are supposed to stay by law and you didn't check your blind spot before you started. The first situation can happen with cars where you pass a slow moving car just before an intersection and immediately slow down to turn right, merging back into the lane and cutting off the car. If you have driven any amount of time at all, I am sure you have seen that annoying scenario. The second situation doesn't typically happen with cars because of how right turn lanes are constructed but can (unlawfully) occur when someone (typically a tourist) was in the straight going lane but realized they wanted or needed to turn right.
Dedicated bicycle lanes are meant to make it clear that you are indeed crossing traffic when you turn right because bicycles as slow moving traffic are intended to stay in that area as an exceptional case.
> and you didn't check your blind spot before you started.
No amount of legislation or changes in rules will protect from people who aren't paying attention. These changes don't have an impact immediately, but the only way to make them is to do them at one point or another. The people learning to drive in NY now will know that things are different, and in 10-15 years the behaviour will change.
My reference to cyclists goinh the wrong way takes place in the suburbs where I have lived most, and bikes are not exactly common. On a four lane highway with a speed limit of 55mph, multiple driveways, etc (Not Just Bikes calls them Stroads), a cyclist moving against traffic on a narrow shoulder is not expected. We can preach all day about "paying attention" but we have created a situation that demands high levels of attention from all, but cyclists feel they are exempt from the rules of traffic, making the situation worse in some immature act of defiance.
I like my bike. I ride it as often as possible and travel to places specifically because they have good biking infrastructure. But when I am in a place where therd is none, I ride with traffic, use my hand signals, and assume drivers cannot see me because they have a hundred other things they need to pay attention to, so I put effort into making myself visible and communicating intent.
It's not that hard.
The vast majority of drivers are continuously violating laws. On top of the continuous speeding violation (+10-15 is surely ok?) add the occasional roll through, failures to yield, failure to use a turn signal, speeding in school zones, passing without sufficient distance, running reds, double parking, etc and the police pretty much always can pull over any given automobile driver. This fact is well known: the default state of a driver is one of rule breaking.
Primary attribution fallacy is the contextualization of our own errors or rule violations while attributing those of strangers to character flaws (immature, defiant). You pass drivers doing all of the above things every day, but it is the cyclists you notice because they are different and the other drivers are surely doing the same as you. But you understand the context in which you violate laws or make mistakes.
It is not that hard to understand that everyone is human.
We can look at the data. Aactual cities where jaywalking isn't a crime; they do not set the speed limit at 10, and it all seems to work fine.
reedf1 wrote:
> You could easily imagine a world where pedestrians have the right of way on the streets, and cars "request access to the road" in a similar way that pedestrians do.
https://www.thewindscreenco.co.uk/help-advice/highway-code-2...
In NYC, the speed limit is 25 miles per hour. What's more, there are plans to reduce that to 20mph in a bunch of places.
Moral: Don't drive in NYC.
Using the right tools at the right place is part of it: cars are useful for some trips, less for others. Trying to solve every transportation problem with a unique solution was IMHO the original sin of this.
> Pedestrians are more nimble
Think kids going to school and elderlies. Having something that work for them requires either putting the burden on cars or removing cars from the picture. One costs a lot more than the other, and in the case you want to keep cars in cities the former is probably more attractive than the latter.
Wait, when are you driving faster than that in a city anyway? City roads here are mostly restricted to 30kph; travel times didn't significantly increase when this was imposed a while back.
Population density of Manhattan: 78,000 per square mile
(according to wikipedia on both)
In situations where there are a lot of people at the same time, like say a music festival or a sports game finishing, the police tend to manage the flow of people.
The City of Westminster has a day-time population of around 1 million people, and its area is around 8 sq miles; (doing casual searching).
One good way to avoid posting meaninglessly is to write meaningful sentences and explain your conclusions/inferences explicitly.
The Highway Code was recently updated (a few years ago) to make it more explicit that pedestrians crossing a side road junction should have priority over vehicles trying to turn into the side road. However, that's not necessarily followed by all drivers/cyclists etc.
Basically, drivers/cyclists are expected to make all efforts to avoid a collision and will be considered at fault unless it's a scenario where the pedestrian steps into the road without enough time for the driver/cyclist to react and avoid them.
Ambiguity will be the problem and it is solved by the rule of "not crossing at all". The lesser of 2 evils.
So, in the situation you describe, the solution is clear: the car has to slow down, and any police officer is supposed to notice that the car had to slow down and issue some citation to the pedestrian for not respecting the right of way. This is exactly how all traffic violations work: if some car is not yielding to you, you don't drive into them, you break to avoid the accident, and hope that the police sees this and issues a citation to the other driver.
If a bad rule is enacted and it kills 100 people per year more, will enforcement of the rule bring back those 100 people?
Rules should take into account the stupid things people will do and that in real life you won't get 100% compliance and enforcement won't get you to 100%. (many real life examples)
Yes. Enforcement of the rules, when done properly, does save lives. We have psychology studies that show that judgement/punishment needs to be swift/certain. When that is the case, human behavior is altered (sometimes permanently).
> and that in real life you won't get 100% compliance and enforcement
No one needs 100% compliance. We need something up near 98% or 99%, which is achievable.
Maybe the problem here is that a 2 ton SUV shouldn't be driven at 50mph when pedestrians are anywhere near. I always find it interesting how the ones advocating for the absolute freedom of owning and driving an SUV everywhere, to carry 70kg of human flesh, are usually also the ones asking for the restriction of the freedom of other users of the public space.
Bad rules = ambiguous rules and need for interpretation and that leads to many bad consequences.
Can you cite any specific examples of this being a problem anywhere in practice?
See a judge doing the right thing:
https://youtu.be/0PUgbArgXJA?si=9-8viC2MM-mIGEFe
We don't need a society that relies only on judges doing the right thing. We need better laws
But as someone who lives in a country that has never had that law, I’m pretty sure it’s unnecessary.
Criminalizing the behavior was regulatory capture by Big Auto.
It being enforced by police from Connecticut who treat NYC’s minorities like a VR simulation was broken.
Strong recommendations and pointing out the loss in civil suits would have always been totally fine.
But most broken seems like a stretch!
Trevor Noah titled a book Born a Crime in reference to his birth in South Africa, similar laws remained in force in many US states until 1967 which means a number of people walking about the US today have an existence that was a crime.
Why would they? They drive from their home to their job to the parking lot of the grocery store to the drive through pickup line at school for their kids.
I'm one of the more transit/pedestrian/bike people in the group I routinely hang out with and I haven't actually crossed the street as a pedestrian in a few days.
Tons of Americans never have to deal with crossing a street for their parking. They're not parking at some lot around the block and walking. It's all just a sea of pavement. City codes mandate each big box store has dozens of spots per shelf in the store. This on its face seems like a gross overstatement but looking at maps shows the truth of the seas of empty lots surrounding big box stores.
But many large cities don't have such city codes and have very limited parking as a result, even around large stores etc; especially not in downtown. Which, even if you don't live or work there, is still somewhere people sometimes have to go to for other reasons, from visiting a fancy restaurant to jury summons.
Come to think of it, laws that are most frequently broken by the general public are also probably deeply broken in their concept or the worldview they were based on.
For instance speeding laws, while making sense on paper, are completely inadequate for the thing they want to improve. Structural changes to either the roads or other infra, the cars, or more deterring power than a slap on the wrist are probably needed in the places where they're routinely broken by normal people.
When you're at an intersection, there's cars coming from many directions. In addition, from the crosswalks I've seen they don't even stop turning cars - the turning cars have to be looking and stop themselves.