Apparently pedestrians should take personal responsibility but not drivers
having to drive slower than reasonable
Honestly, this only exemplifies why speed limits by themselves don’t work. We have to design the streets so that the lower speed feels reasonable.
I know I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but it’s always worth saying.
One thing that people forget when talking about speed limits is the physical infrastructure.
Feeling reasonable is directly correlated to the designed speed of the road, meaning it’s an engineering problem. If a road isn’t engineered to its specifications the speed limits imposed are merely a suggestion.
The go-to method right now seems to be to enforce it electronically, using the systems that are built into most new cars nowadays. Personally I’m not a fan of that, but it IS preferable to having all the surveillance electronics built into cars and just not doing anything worthwhile with it.
I don’t understand how they want to use cars to enforce this electronically. My car tries to tell me the speed limit, and it’s often wrong. I think you need to have a signal built into the road to tell cars the speed limit, and that sounds expensive and impractical.
But designing roads so lower speed feels reasonable is very effective. You can make the road narrower, curvier and bumpier is various ways, but you can also make it appear or feel narrower, curvier and bumpier without actual making it so.
The electronic solutions are definitely shit shows. They’re probably going to try and use them to enforce it, anyway. If nothing else, it’s cheaper than building speedbumps etc. everywhere.
I shudder to think what will happen when I’m driving on a 120 kph highway and the camera on my windscreen sees a 30 sign on a dirt road next to the highway.
I don’t like that my car sees a faded 80 sign and reads it as 30 and keeps going 80 (but starts flashing the speed on the screen)
I can’t think of any roads around me that have pedestrians and a speed limit of 50+. All the places pedestrians are 40 at most and have guardrails between the sidewalk and road. Usually 25 is the norm when pedestrians will be present.
I live near a state highway that just recently lowered the local speed limit to 40. No physical barrier and loads of intersections and crosswalks.
Every time I’ve been hit by a car, it’s been when I’ve had the right of way. You have to be super defensive as a pedestrian because you can be thoroughly solidly right and follow all the rules… and still end up dead.
How many times have you been hit by a car? To be hit once is a lot.
Not your parent comenter.
I’ve been hit by cars twice and hit a car once and every time I’ve had the right of way. Tho I was on a bike, it just happens if you spend enough time in traffic I think.
I didn’t really get injured on either of these, 2 bikes got destroyed tho.
I have tbf gone down pretty hard trying to overtake other cyclists which is also traffic but there it was certainly my own fault.
Twice more than I would have liked to.
Very fortunate nobody was hurt
0 x 2 = 0
Twice more is plus two, not times two
I’ve never seen ‘twice’ used like that, do you have a link to back that up? If I search “twice more” on the web, I get zero results.
It’s how I learnt to use the words. “Twice as much” or “twice as many” = 2x, “twice more than” is +2. It’s less than perfectly standard, but it’s unambiguous in English as I was taught
As long as everything works out perfectly in every way, we don’t need safety stuff
And it always works perfectly every time, except those times when things don’t work out, which is often, but they don’t count, so we ignore them
Both should take personal responsibilities for their actions. I had to brake more than once because some pedestrian crossed the road without looking up from his or her phone. On the other hand, someone playing around with his / her phone while driving a car should be seriously punished.
Pedestrians always have right of way in my state, regardless of legality. They can indeed step out into a busy road and it is entirely the drivers responsibility to stop. Ensuring safety in a shared space is always heavily biased towards the person who is operating a deadly weapon, as it should be.
If you can’t be sure you wont kill a person walking, even one making irresponsible choices, you need to slow down, drive more defensively, or not drive at all.
Pedantry incoming: “Right of way” implies drivers have to yield to pedestrians, which isn’t true — they just have to not hit them. You’re still absolutely right about everything else, “right of way” is just the wrong expression. You’re thinking of “duty of care”.
I’m very sure that this person or (“person”) would also complain if the article was demanding or celebrating severe penalties for drivers who do this kind of thing. Constant goalpost moving.
They want “personal responsibility”, but definitely it isn’t murder to kill someone with a car. It can’t be murder if I was so happy and comfy and distracted the whole time I was violently ending a human life!
Correct! It’s just manslaughter :)
Anyways off to jail with you
or look at the road, adapt your speed to not run over anything, pedestrians included
people in cars assume that it’s the others that have to be careful and not the person driving one tonne of metal on wheels…
In France, and probably most countries in the world, pedestrians are priority on crosswalk (without lights): it’s just like a Yield the right-of-way intersection when you can engage only if it’s free, and therefore have to slow down.
But we were taught as kids to thank drivers for stopping when it’s actually the law, by this logic I should thank people for stopping at stop signs, red light and stuffs…
My youngest and I have done a lot of walking through our town the last few summers and any close calls were mostly
- twice someone going the wrong way on a one way street
- people turning right on red without stopping, without yielding to pedestrians, without regard to the walk signal
- special hate to people parking or driving on the sidewalk. It’s never been immediately dangerous but you have no business there.
- I do worry about my dog since all too often someone cuts corners enough to be up on the sidewalk in turns and she thinks she can stand near the edge
people turning right on red without stopping
We drive on the other side, so it’s our left turns. Newer intersections have a red left arrow while the pedestrian light is on green, then the red arrow goes out and the drivers may turn.
Older intersections have slip lanes which are pretty dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists
Yeah but the problem at least here is right on red is by default unless explicitly disallowed, whereas lights like that are nowhere near as common
