9 ms·

As a pedestrian (or cyclist), you should always give way to cars, even being prepared to jump out of the way when you have the right-of-way. Unless the driver i

As a pedestrian (or cyclist), you should always give way to cars, even being prepared to jump out of the way when you have the right-of-way. Unless the driver is intoxicated, they get inconvenienced with higher insurance premiums for a little while at worst, while you get stuck with life long injuries and pain at worst.

myspy 7y ago
Which is a reason why cars have to vanish from cities.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Then cities have to radically change. I don't know how people can ever commute from the current urban sprawl to their place of work without them. Cities would need to build massive bus and rail infrastructures at the cost of billions or similar amounts are going to have to be spent to increase densification. I chose where to live because of a desire to be able to commute easily - the bus is 10 minutes, walking is about 25 - but I paid for it, both literally and figuratively.
  - freen 7y ago
    They can, and they have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      I believe you're looking at a city that was historically traveled via footpath - try and apply that to a modern American city.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Simple: they need to bulldoze most everything and start over, building cities the way they are in Europe with high density and public transit lines built in (and under). Add in either closed roads for anything except delivery trucks (you can't deliver goods to the supermarket with a subway), or huge tolls/taxes for personal vehicles to keep people from driving there and causing gridlock and get them out of the suburbs. But in addition you need to have lots of construction of residential units (in high-rises) so that housing costs stay affordable.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or you think that's actually feasible and simple.
      - turtlecloud 7y ago
        You need to have the political will. There is nothing in the previous comment that is physically impossible.
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        No, you're right - but to say it's simple is ridiculous. That will take the entire city being willing to be displaced for years - millions of people without homes - what does the political will for that look like?
        magduf 7y ago
        Well you don't need to do it all at once, and you don't really need to bulldoze every building and road. It would be more realistic to just "upzone" as the other commenter said, and stop accommodating car transport so much and start aggressively redeveloping after adding public transit infrastructure (which would be a lot cheaper and easier if you bulldoze along the routes so you can do cut-and-cover instead of digging tunnels).
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        While you do that in the core, the outside of the city still grows, and that's all car based - there's no way around a city expanding and not building it for cars, unless you get the bus infrastructure out there before the people show up, which would appear to be a monumental waste when every city in the world's focus seems to be cutting taxes.
        magduf 7y ago
  - jdavis703 7y ago
    I've had three jobs where I commuted from 10-30 miles over public transit. All those long commutes were either suburb to suburb or from city to suburb via reverse commute. There’s no need to drive a car if you’re commuting to a fixed location and you live in the burbs or the city.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      What were your long commutes? 1-2 hours? Why would people accept that when a car can do that in a quarter the time?
      - mac01021 7y ago
        They will if car taxes increase. And if ridership increases enough, then bus commute times will be reduced a great deal.
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        People will pay a lot for the convenience - I think of all my coworkers who need to go pick their kids up from school to take them to soccer practice after work - that's really hard to do commuting.
        bsanr 7y ago
        Is it? Robust transit systems are efficient and don't take much more time. If it's substantially longer, maybe we need to look at our work attendance policies to account for the increased transit time? (We already needed to do that anyway, considering how little of the average workday is spent on actual work, and how much less the average labor hour is worth today compared to a few decades ago.) And how old are the kids? Alien as it is to suburbanites, city kids often get around by themselves (often in groups) by the end of elementary school.
        wool_gather 7y ago
        The kids need to be picked up in a car partly (largely?) because there's no alternative. Given increased public transit, they may be able to get themselves to soccer practice.
  - mac01021 7y ago
    I'm not sure how much ifrastructure is really needed most places. Could we just use existing roads, and try to replace every 30 cars on the road with a bus?
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      That's what I mean - if you assume 100,000 cars on the road, that's 3,000 new buses the city needs, as well as multiples of that more bus drivers.
- fromthestart 7y ago
  I think you're drastically underestimating the ratio of benefit to cost for cars in cities. That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say.
- tossAfterUsing 7y ago
  That's a great idea! https://arcosanti.org/project/about-arcosanti/ https://arcosanti.org/project/about-arcosanti/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
delfinom 7y ago
Actually higher insurance premiums stick around alot longer these days or indefinitely. Costs of everything has gone up.
mistersquid 7y ago
Even a professional athlete would have difficulty “jump[ing] out of the way” of a vehicle (or anything, for that matter) traveling at 25 miles per hour. It is unrealistic to expect pedestrians and bicyclists to avoid automobiles by yielding to them. EDIT: spelling; more spelling
pmichaud 7y ago
Pedestrian culture in that area is weird. There's a general region which I think centers on Berkeley, but definitely includes Oakland, in which pedestrians have right of way (in some cases legally, in others just culturally/in expectation). It makes driving pretty stressful because it makes people much less predictable. When I commuted to Berkeley I would often joke/not joke that Berkeley pedestrians were trying to make me kill them with my car. But a different weird thing is that being a pedestrian in Berkeley turns you into one of those people who is trying to die by car. I was more cautious than average (read: acting like a normal pedestrian somewhere else), and it was annoying and maybe dangerous for everyone else. That may not seem clear, but it's analogous to someone being "nice" at a 4-way stop and letting everyone else go even if it's your turn. It's not "nice," because it delays and confuses everyone who now has to cautiously navigate a potentially dangerous situation instead of just following a simple procedure. Similarly, cars stop for people in Berkeley. That's how it goes. If you act like they don't, then you get awkward standoffs between people and cars each not trusting the other to go first, all while traffic piles up behind the cars, and other pedestrians are now interleaving in between the cars in the jam. If you're on foot, you should just step out into road and cross it, after a perfunctory check, otherwise you're gumming up the works. I don't like it, on either side, but it's not possible to unilaterally do better. You just have to go with it.
- borkt 7y ago
  Are you talking about outside of crosswalks? Because in all of California the pedestrian has the right of way at any crosswalk and even at unmarked intersections.
  - Trilkhai 7y ago
    Pedestrians have the right of way in our state in general, but in most of the state they still wait until it's safe (i.e. no cars immediately arriving) before they cross. In Berkeley, especially in the two-lane roads immediately surrounding the university, pedestrians often walk out blindly wherever they please in the assumption that cars will stop. Getting through some intersections takes freaking forever because groups of pedestrians simply ignore the signals, causing traffic to snarl.
praying4death 7y ago
But I want to get hit by a car. I want to die. I want to escape this hellscape of nightmares. I don’t fucking care anymore. Fuck money. Fuck jobs. Fuck electronic devices. Fucking kill me now. I want none of this. I won’t try anymore. I don’t care what happens. Let it all fucking burn.

myspy 7y ago

Which is a reason why cars have to vanish from cities.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
Then cities have to radically change. I don't know how people can ever commute from the current urban sprawl to their place of work without them. Cities would need to build massive bus and rail infrastructures at the cost of billions or similar amounts are going to have to be spent to increase densification. I chose where to live because of a desire to be able to commute easily - the bus is 10 minutes, walking is about 25 - but I paid for it, both literally and figuratively.
- freen 7y ago
  They can, and they have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    I believe you're looking at a city that was historically traveled via footpath - try and apply that to a modern American city.
- magduf 7y ago
  Simple: they need to bulldoze most everything and start over, building cities the way they are in Europe with high density and public transit lines built in (and under). Add in either closed roads for anything except delivery trucks (you can't deliver goods to the supermarket with a subway), or huge tolls/taxes for personal vehicles to keep people from driving there and causing gridlock and get them out of the suburbs. But in addition you need to have lots of construction of residential units (in high-rises) so that housing costs stay affordable.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or you think that's actually feasible and simple.
    - turtlecloud 7y ago
      You need to have the political will. There is nothing in the previous comment that is physically impossible.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        No, you're right - but to say it's simple is ridiculous. That will take the entire city being willing to be displaced for years - millions of people without homes - what does the political will for that look like?
        magduf 7y ago
        Well you don't need to do it all at once, and you don't really need to bulldoze every building and road. It would be more realistic to just "upzone" as the other commenter said, and stop accommodating car transport so much and start aggressively redeveloping after adding public transit infrastructure (which would be a lot cheaper and easier if you bulldoze along the routes so you can do cut-and-cover instead of digging tunnels).
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        While you do that in the core, the outside of the city still grows, and that's all car based - there's no way around a city expanding and not building it for cars, unless you get the bus infrastructure out there before the people show up, which would appear to be a monumental waste when every city in the world's focus seems to be cutting taxes.
        magduf 7y ago
- jdavis703 7y ago
  I've had three jobs where I commuted from 10-30 miles over public transit. All those long commutes were either suburb to suburb or from city to suburb via reverse commute. There’s no need to drive a car if you’re commuting to a fixed location and you live in the burbs or the city.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    What were your long commutes? 1-2 hours? Why would people accept that when a car can do that in a quarter the time?
    - mac01021 7y ago
      They will if car taxes increase. And if ridership increases enough, then bus commute times will be reduced a great deal.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        People will pay a lot for the convenience - I think of all my coworkers who need to go pick their kids up from school to take them to soccer practice after work - that's really hard to do commuting.
        bsanr 7y ago
        Is it? Robust transit systems are efficient and don't take much more time. If it's substantially longer, maybe we need to look at our work attendance policies to account for the increased transit time? (We already needed to do that anyway, considering how little of the average workday is spent on actual work, and how much less the average labor hour is worth today compared to a few decades ago.) And how old are the kids? Alien as it is to suburbanites, city kids often get around by themselves (often in groups) by the end of elementary school.
        wool_gather 7y ago
        The kids need to be picked up in a car partly (largely?) because there's no alternative. Given increased public transit, they may be able to get themselves to soccer practice.
- mac01021 7y ago
  I'm not sure how much ifrastructure is really needed most places. Could we just use existing roads, and try to replace every 30 cars on the road with a bus?
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    That's what I mean - if you assume 100,000 cars on the road, that's 3,000 new buses the city needs, as well as multiples of that more bus drivers.
fromthestart 7y ago
I think you're drastically underestimating the ratio of benefit to cost for cars in cities. That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say.
tossAfterUsing 7y ago
That's a great idea! https://arcosanti.org/project/about-arcosanti/ https://arcosanti.org/project/about-arcosanti/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

delfinom 7y ago

Actually higher insurance premiums stick around alot longer these days or indefinitely. Costs of everything has gone up.

mistersquid 7y ago

Even a professional athlete would have difficulty “jump[ing] out of the way” of a vehicle (or anything, for that matter) traveling at 25 miles per hour. It is unrealistic to expect pedestrians and bicyclists to avoid automobiles by yielding to them. EDIT: spelling; more spelling

pmichaud 7y ago

Pedestrian culture in that area is weird. There's a general region which I think centers on Berkeley, but definitely includes Oakland, in which pedestrians have right of way (in some cases legally, in others just culturally/in expectation). It makes driving pretty stressful because it makes people much less predictable. When I commuted to Berkeley I would often joke/not joke that Berkeley pedestrians were trying to make me kill them with my car. But a different weird thing is that being a pedestrian in Berkeley turns you into one of those people who is trying to die by car. I was more cautious than average (read: acting like a normal pedestrian somewhere else), and it was annoying and maybe dangerous for everyone else. That may not seem clear, but it's analogous to someone being "nice" at a 4-way stop and letting everyone else go even if it's your turn. It's not "nice," because it delays and confuses everyone who now has to cautiously navigate a potentially dangerous situation instead of just following a simple procedure. Similarly, cars stop for people in Berkeley. That's how it goes. If you act like they don't, then you get awkward standoffs between people and cars each not trusting the other to go first, all while traffic piles up behind the cars, and other pedestrians are now interleaving in between the cars in the jam. If you're on foot, you should just step out into road and cross it, after a perfunctory check, otherwise you're gumming up the works. I don't like it, on either side, but it's not possible to unilaterally do better. You just have to go with it.

borkt 7y ago
Are you talking about outside of crosswalks? Because in all of California the pedestrian has the right of way at any crosswalk and even at unmarked intersections.
- Trilkhai 7y ago
  Pedestrians have the right of way in our state in general, but in most of the state they still wait until it's safe (i.e. no cars immediately arriving) before they cross. In Berkeley, especially in the two-lane roads immediately surrounding the university, pedestrians often walk out blindly wherever they please in the assumption that cars will stop. Getting through some intersections takes freaking forever because groups of pedestrians simply ignore the signals, causing traffic to snarl.

praying4death 7y ago

But I want to get hit by a car. I want to die. I want to escape this hellscape of nightmares. I don’t fucking care anymore. Fuck money. Fuck jobs. Fuck electronic devices. Fucking kill me now. I want none of this. I won’t try anymore. I don’t care what happens. Let it all fucking burn.