That's not true: 30km/h is enough to kill, and that's a very sedate speed.
Whether we like it or not, pedestrians and cyclists have to also follow the rules.
If you want change the rules, well that's a different argument to the one you appearing to make which is that certain entities should not be bound by any rules.
>>2008, nearly 40 per cent of pedestrians killed on Canadian roads were impaired, with two-thirds of them having a blood alcohol concentration more than double the legal limit. In fact, of all the fatally injured pedestrians with alcohol in their systems, fewer than one in five was at or below the legal driving limit of 0.08 blood alcohol concentration (BAC), according to the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators* (CCMTA).
https://canadasafetycouncil.org/impaired-walking/
And just try discussing drunk biking and you will be run out of town by a spandex army shouting about thier "right" to use the roads while drunk or high.
A bicycle's brakes are far less effective than a car's. I don't know how a man got to middle age not knowing this. A lot of cyclists ride like they have an invisible shield protecting them.
When I use a crosswalk, I wait until the cars stop before I cross. It's nuts to step into it assuming the cars will stop.
Or they are looking at their phones standing on the wheelchair ramp or chatting with someone, kinda going in, maybe, maybe not, and when it looks like they’ll be crossing the street parallel to yours and you start going they change their minds and cross diagonally in front of you?
Because I’m all for pedestrian safety and prioritization. But SF has gone so “safe” that it’s back to unsafe. Runners will join an intersection from behind a tree in front of a car that had stopped and was starting to go without even looking up. People join a crossing looking down or away from the flow of traffic, it’s insane to me. I find that kids cross streets much better than adults here. A kid will stop, look, check if they were seen and then proceed.
There’s no need to make eye contact. Crosswalks (or Zebras) are the ultimate "pedestrian has all the rights" element.
And the driver is at fault in the cases where the driver is at fault. 18% of pedestrian fatalities are cases where the driver was drunk. Meanwhile 30% of pedestrian fatalities are cases where the pedestrian was drunk.
Your example is actually a pretty rare cause of pedestrian fatalities because even if someone doesn't see a pedestrian, cars turning right on red are almost always traveling at low speed.
> if a driver is fast enough to kill them, then the driver is almost certainly already at fault because they were driving faster than conditions warranted.
There is a double digit percent chance of a fatality if a vehicle hits a pedestrian at 25 MPH. The vast majority of roads allow speeds of 25 MPH or more. That doesn't mean you can stop if someone without the right of way who you had no reason to expect to step out directly in front of a car suddenly does.
Meanwhile:
> Sure, it's possible for a pedestrian to be at fault, but even if they step out from behind an occluded object, if a driver is fast enough to kill them, then the driver is almost certainly already at fault because they were driving faster than conditions warranted.
"A pedestrian can be at fault in a fatality but the driver would still be at fault anyway" is apparently not a straw man.
> "A pedestrian can be at fault in a fatality but the driver would still be at fault anyway"
That's not what they actually said ... work on your reading comprehension, ability to reason, and intellectual honesty--faking up quotations is not legit. a) A pedestrian could be at fault in other scenarios, like running into the middle of the street in dark clothing at night. In California, if a pedestrian is in a crosswalk then the driver is legally at fault. b) Morally, both parties could be at fault.
I won't respond further.
The intention of the comment you accused of replying to a straw man was meant to point out that a pedestrian could be at fault instead of the driver.
That reply is pretty clearly arguing that even if the pedestrian was at fault, the driver would still have to be at fault anyway. Summarizing an argument after quoting it isn't misquoting it.
> A pedestrian could be at fault in other scenarios, like running into the middle of the street in dark clothing at night.
There is nothing to distinguish this from the original argument where the driver could still be be accused of "driving faster than conditions warranted" because visibility is lower at night.
> In California, if a pedestrian is in a crosswalk then the driver is legally at fault
And strict liability rules like that often lead to ridiculous outcomes, e.g. if someone jumps out of the back of a truck into an intersection and you then hit them, technically they were a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Or there is a pedestrian standing next to a crosswalk but they're stationary and talking on their phone without seeming to want to enter the crosswalk, so you start to proceed and then they step in front of your car.
In the real world, pedestrians don't play frogger with highways all that frequently. When you talk about pedestrians suddenly jumping onto the road, that is usually because they are in an area where pedestrian and vehicular interaction is likely--school zones, residential areas, parking lots, etc. In those scenarios... yeah, speeding is the fault here, not the pedestrian. I thought this was an obvious consideration that I didn't need to spell it out so clearly. But it turns out that the tendency to try to shift the blame from the driver to pedestrians in every scenario is just too ingrained into people, I guess...
[1] This isn't exactly a strawman--someone here was trying to argue that the driver isn't at fault in this scenario just this past week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877232