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Comment by ahomescu1 | Hacker News Reader

> Cars are not required to look out for people, people have to look out for cars.

It's not always sufficient to just "look out for people". It is quite possible that the driver, at the speed they're driving at, does not have the reflexes or braking distance to safely stop when encountering a "jaywalker".

The alternative that many people propose is to reduce driving speed to "safe" values, which I always thought naive. Even if you make everyone drive at 20MPH inside cities, you'll still have people exceeding that limit and getting into accidents. IMHO, it's just safer to keep pedestrians away from cars.

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The main issue is unless we ban cars from areas that benefit from pedestrian traffic, it's essentially impossible to keep pedestrians from cars. Given there will be a mixing of cars and pedestrians, who should we design primarily for: the person driving or walking? If we design for driving, then we relegate walkers to malls and parking lots. If we design for pedestrians, we relegate cars to narrow, crowded, slow streets, and possibly limit which streets cars are allowed on (or which streets through-traffic is allowed on). There isn't one "right" solution, but these are conscious decisions that communities need to be aware of.

    >It's not always sufficient to just "look out for people"....

Aren't the drivers of vehicles expected to look out for other vehicles that may be driving either slower or stopped within a driver's line of transit such as delivery vehicles or police cars?

Is it reasonable to say "... well I can't be looking out for a police car working a traffic accident, it's really more their fault than mine..."

That seems to be the implication if the collision is vehicle/person vs. vehicle/vehicle.

At some point it's not unreasonable for drivers have to pull their heads out of their asses and "look out for people" as they drive.

Alright, so the majority of that is pretty ridiculous. Obviously drivers are looking out for any potential obstruction, and anyone whose head is not up their ass knows that much.

The point is, and this is the real crux of the issue, when you're traveling at the speeds that the automobile was invented, purchased, licensed, taxed, and the road was paved to support, you don't always have the ability to react to obstructions that come up suddenly, such as a pedestrian stepping off of a crowded sidewalk.

So what most people here seem to be arguing is, cars are inherently bad. Streets should always be crowded with people walking on foot, no matter the weather, because it is the only mode of transportation ordained by God and Steve Jobs, and to hell with peoples' want of freedom to travel in comfort on their own schedule.

What about the freedom of the people who are walking to travel in comfort and safety? Yes, we do now have a vast infrastructure optimized for cars. The point of the article is that this didn't just spring up out of nowhere as a naturally occurring phenomenon, it was the result of a concerted effort by people with an interest in selling cars.

Cars are a great tool for travelling from one city to another, but they kind of suck for getting around a crowded city center. Yet, the streets in the city center are still giving the highest priority to cars, at least partly because car manufacturers lobbied for it to be that way.

>such as a pedestrian stepping off of a crowded sidewalk.

Cars shouldn't be driving at high speeds along sidewalks. It's extremely dangerous and unplesant.

the crux of the issue is that you, the licensed operator of the automobile, have been trusted to identify possible hazards and adjust your speed accordingly.

if you're driving to fast to stop for a pedestrian from a crowded sidewalk, you shouldnt have a license.

> Even if you make everyone drive at 20MPH inside cities, you'll still have people exceeding that limit and getting into accidents.

The key is how you make everyone drive 20mph. It's been pretty well established that speed limits do a horrible job of forcing drivers to slow down and are even counter productive since a small minority of drivers will actually follow them. This creates a delta between them and the majority of drivers and deltas between drivers, more so than absolute speed, contribute to an increase in accidents.

However you can actually slow drivers down by making the lanes narrower. Drivers may complain, object and lobby to revert back to wider lanes, but they'll actually slow down until that happens.

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