A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Apparently pedestrians should take personal responsibility but not drivers
Kinetic energy scales not just with velocity, but with the square of velocity. Speed makes a BIG FUCKING difference in your ability to avoid an accident.
I do agree that if people weren't morons there would be less necessity for regulation. However, that is not the case.
It's common sense to drive slowly in a populated area and yet people need to be told to drive slower in a school zone. We only have ourselves to blame.
It's classic rightwinger stuff anyway: nothing should be regulated, everything just works, oh my god my car broke my family's dead my ass is on fire...
More “guns don’t kill people” logic. Blaming victims from the crime, and separating the tool used from the criminal.
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.
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.
There’s another method using visual design that “calms” traffic. Ex, if you have a wide road, paint the sides of it a notable color that visually corrals people to a tighter space. They have the sides if absolutely needed, but recognize they need to go slower to stay within the lines.
You need forceful enforcement in some situations, but for the most part it pays to inspect the psychology that gets people to behave a certain way.
i've long thought that all the rural roads that are like, 1.9 lanes wide should just be repainted so there's one lane in the middle and generous shoulders, like those bike-first roads in the netherlands on a budget.
It is very possible to make higher speeds seem extremely unreasonable to drivers.
Having the streets be cobblestone instead of asphalt, for one, makes driving faster louder and more difficult for drivers. I'm not rooting for cars, I'm just saying there are so many methods that governments just don't think are worth implementing because they value corporate lobbying more than citizen safety.
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.
Yep, have a highway by me that is three lanes (sometimes 4), has good sized shoulders on both sides, median divider, and it's pretty much dead straight. Speed limit is 55mph but most people go 70 or more cause you can without issue.
I have no clue what this dude's argument is even trying to be.
As far as I can tell: "My personal freedom is threatened by rules that I didn't make. How we get to having too many rules is immaterial; my skewed moral compass dictates that my personal freedom comes first."
Jackass is a brainless ideologue, and engages in performative empathy and/or justice only to save face.
"I never killed anyone yet, so I should be allowed to have an opportunity"
"It's your fault, and even if it the facts say it is my fault - there's nothing we can do about it, and it's probably also still your fault."
I think "I want to drive as fast as possible with no thoughts in my skull whatsoever" but maybe I'm wrong??
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
We all just need to act more correctly and then this kind of thing won't happen! If the guy simply didn't run over pedestrians, this wouldn't be a problem! Problem solved!
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.
Different person: I've been struck on a bike. Driver didn't look while pulling out of a driveway and hit my rear wheel as I passed directly in front of them. They didn't notice until I was right by their window (having pushed my bike aside) then they stared blankly at me and drove off. Zero awareness or concern. If I had been slower I'm sure they would have lazily driven over me.
And I know a dude who was intentionally hit by a car at speed (also cycling) and has permanent injuries.
And I know another guy who was hit by a drunk driver at a crosswalk.
It's not that uncommon.
Oh, and one of my sister's childhood friends was killed by an inattentive driver. It's way too easy to get, and keep, a license.
Twice. Once by someone turning right on a red, head turned to see if the traffic cleared and who didn't bother looking straight ahead before moving and I was in the crosswalk; and once by someone who drove through a crosswalk, stopped to park, I believe realized they weren't in a parking spot, and backed into the crosswalk after I had started crossing. Both times I was in the centre of their car and thankfully a soild whump of the hand made them stop.
Personal responsibility is driving below 40kmph when in high pedestrian area, fancy that.
So the point of view is Pedestrians should evolve superhero reflexes so cars can do whatever they want?
A more charitable interpretation is that they are arguing that we don't need to impose any new traffic regulations to stop that specific incident from happening because running red lights is already against the law. Not that I agree
Any time "personal responsibility" comes up, ask who is getting the bulk of the consequences when it fails. Is it the person failing at personal responsibility, or did it fall on someone else?
In this case, the personal responsibility was on the driver to not run a red light. However, it's the pedestrian who risks major injury or death. The driver may suffer a damaged vehicle, or possibly trauma leading to PTSD, but they will mostly likely be OK physically. It's clear that the consequences to the driver are vastly outweighed by the consequences to the pedestrian. However, the pedestrian can do everything right and still get hit.
This is why we have safety rules. Your lack of personal responsibility can hurt me. If you feel that there are too many rules around how to safely drive a car, maybe that's an indication that the idea of using it on a mass scale is fundamentally flawed in the first place.
A person who pipes up on Facebook to champion “personal responsibility” as an argument against common-sense safety regulations does NOT have the intellectual ability to process what you’ve just typed.
Arguments on the internet used to be ridiculous. Arguments on social media are simply childish. #EverybodyIs12
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
The lack of self awareness is at maximum speed.
Quite literally braindead, full zombiemode
It’s been decades since I started driving but wasn’t 25 MPH taught as when most accidents with pedestrians became fatal? 50 kmph is much faster.
I think the math is a little confusing. 50 km/h is about 31 mph, which is very close to the number you're thinking of
Edit: the person knew the math and was commenting that it is a big difference in speed, my bad.
Literally any amount of increase in speed increases fatality risk.
Cars are a privilege of rich people.¹ So is personal responsibility rhetoric.
So, for that matter, is no political violence rhetoric, as well, though the affluent version is we don't negotiate with terrorists.
-1.- ( ¹ ) Granted, there are destitute, homeless people with cars, but they're a higher strata than destitute, homeless people without cars and look down on their sans-car brethren.
ETA: I'm a home-enabled poor person without a car, trying to get by with an e-bike and thin-spread public transit. And my car-enabled peers look down on me for being transit-restricted. It sucks.
Cars a privilege when your city is garbage. When it’s well built they’re more of a pain.
I own a literal sportscar from when I lived in a car centric place and now I keep it parked behind my mid-density apartment, rarely using it because it’s almost never better than taking public transit. You have to be super rich for it to be actually better because then you can pay for all the parking fees, maintenance, etc. without much thought. I’m not a rich person(BRZs are not expensive sportscars) and all the extra maintenance and tires and whatever else are such a huge pain to deal with and I do most of the work myself!
What I’m trying to say is that, as someone who can actually claim to “be a car person”, and who has all the skills to back that up, people who think cars are objectively better are dumb as hell and you shouldn’t let their hollow words get to you if you can help it. They’re just losers who repeat shit fed to them by companies like GM so said companies can make more money.
Ask them if I can do heroin in a church as long as i promise to be responsible
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...
Does not sound "over regulated" to me??
In 2022, 42,514 motor vehicle fatalities occurred across the United States¹ This was a 1% decrease in fatal accidents compared to 43,230 deaths from collisions in 2021.¹ In total, 5930,496 motor vehicle accidents were reported to the police in 2022.¹ Among all non-fatal auto accidents in 2022, 1,664,598 caused injuries and 4,226,677 caused damage to property.¹ There were approximately 8,650 motor vehicle accident fatalities in the first quarter of 2024, compared with 8,935 during the same time period in 2023.¹ In total, injuries resulting from motor vehicle accidents caused $481.2 billion in financial costs in 2022.² 1,910 (25%) of the 7,522 pedestrians killed in motor vehicle accidents in 2022 were involved in a hit-and-run accident.¹ Motor vehicle accidents are the second leading cause of deaths resulting from unintentional injury in the United States
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/auto-accident/car-accident-statistics/#3