Did you read the article?
It's talking about the effect of wide lanes on urban and suburban streets. You're talking about what happens on open highway. Completely different animals. He acknowledges as much, and that wider highway lanes are safer.
It's talking about the effect of wide lanes on urban and suburban streets. You're talking about what happens on open highway. Completely different animals. He acknowledges as much, and that wider highway lanes are safer.
I'm not a kid any more. I am not easily impressed. I've seen too much of this over the years. Particularly around elections.
Living in Los Angeles I see people crossing the street ALL THE TIME without even looking for traffic. I mean, they just continue walking off the sidewalk as if cars did not even exist. Having traveled to many parts of the world and all corners of the US this has always been rather perplexing to me. It is somewhat unique to California, I think. To see people with such low apparent common sense is jaw dropping. Anywhere else in the world they'd be flattened in a microsecond. In Amsterdam you'd have 15 bikes pile on top of you. Unbelievable.
My point is that there are a ton of factors behind how people get hurt or die on and around roads. Someone else was far more eloquent than I care to be right now about how studies can be total garbage. He or she was far more gentle and politically correct than I am interested in being any more. Crap in Crap Out. Bias in Bias Out. That's what a lot of these studies are.
One can scaffold a bunch of bad conclusions and paragraphs from a bunch of crap studies and build a seemingly solid foundation for the conclusion that if we had less men wearing ties the mortality rate while riding bikes in Manhattan would go down. In other words, more crap out.
We have far more important things to worry about than to devote billions of dollars to repainting all of our streets. Take that money and use it to lift people out of poverty. Maybe we can do a study that shows how not spending money in bullshit projects supported by a maze of bullshit studies and, instead, using that money to truly support the education and growth of the economically disadvantaged might reduce mortality rates when the clueless cross the streets in Los Angeles?
Sorry for the tone. I find that as I get older I am far less tolerant of bullshit the might have tantalized me when I was a twenty-something. It's amazing what a few decades of perspective can reveal to you about people, politics, business and society. Not grumpy, just a realist. I think.
That said, I'm not sure how the chicken/egg situation worked out but I'm appalled by how pedestrians walk across the street. They just go without looking up from their phones.
The crosswalk by my work has added giant signs and flashing lights and you still see people blow thru at 40+ (speed limit is 25). I'm not sure if I'd be alive if I didn't look both ways before crossing. On the other hand, judging by how mad people are when they stop and you don't cross because someone else isn't stopping, it might not have been much of a gain.
You should certainly look both ways at a cross-walk anyway, again because multi-ton vehicle; but, they should also follow those signs that say "stop here for crosswalk"