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The best thing to do is to stop driving. The whole idea is bad. We should be living in urban environments where we don't need to drive at all; driving is dang

by magduf 7y ago

The best thing to do is to stop driving. The whole idea is bad. We should be living in urban environments where we don't need to drive at all; driving is dangerous (30,000 people killed in the US every year, not to mention maimings), and an ecological disaster due to pollution and sprawl.

jacquesm 7y ago
I cycle when I can, which is a lot but I feel a lot safer in my car and that's not just an illusion, that's born from the number of near misses with vehicles that are straying outside of their lanes and onto the bike path and/or aggressively overtaking my bike when they have to wait behind it for a few seconds until someone from the other side has passed them. It has worked so far but I always wonder how the long term numbers work in cases like these. 20-25 Km average daily every day of the week, that's only about an hours worth of cycling on a slow bike or maybe 45 minutes on a faster one. That's on the order of a few hundred hours of exposure per year. Near misses several times per month at least.
- magduf 7y ago
  You are safer in a car, when you're around other cars, than on a bike. I don't I need to explain the physics of why this is obviously true. The problem here is that there are cars around you when you're biking. If you didn't have to ride alongside cars, then cycling would be far safer, and your main worry would be things like gravel, snow, rain (anything that makes the road surface slippery), and probably pedestrians. There's a reason that places that put bike lanes next to car traffic, with no barrier, don't get much increase in cycling, and why places with physically divided biking lanes have far lower cyclist deaths and injuries. Cars are just too dangerous to be allowed around bikes. The fundamental problem here is the existence of cars, and the sheer dominance of cars as a transport method. It makes it almost impossible for anything else to be a viable alternative, for many different reasons including safety and sprawl (cycling isn't all that feasible if you have to ride 30 miles each way because the "city" is so sprawling).
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    There are also still scooters and e-bikes to contend with.
    - magduf 7y ago
      Sure, but scooters don't move very fast (slower than bikes), and e-bikes are usually limited to 28mph. So yeah, getting hit by one of those is still dangerous, but nothing like getting hit by a 6000-pound SUV. Being on any kind of moving vehicle will always have some element of danger to it: our bodies just weren't designed for traveling very fast and colliding with concrete or other hard surfaces. But the momentum carried by any kind of car is far beyond that carried by someone on a scooter or e-bike. Also, those small vehicles don't take up remotely as much space as cars, and their riders have far better visibility, plus their riders are also exposed to a high degree of risk in a collision, unlike a car driver who can easily mow down cyclists without any injury at all.

by magduf 7y ago

jacquesm 7y ago

I cycle when I can, which is a lot but I feel a lot safer in my car and that's not just an illusion, that's born from the number of near misses with vehicles that are straying outside of their lanes and onto the bike path and/or aggressively overtaking my bike when they have to wait behind it for a few seconds until someone from the other side has passed them. It has worked so far but I always wonder how the long term numbers work in cases like these. 20-25 Km average daily every day of the week, that's only about an hours worth of cycling on a slow bike or maybe 45 minutes on a faster one. That's on the order of a few hundred hours of exposure per year. Near misses several times per month at least.

magduf 7y ago
You are safer in a car, when you're around other cars, than on a bike. I don't I need to explain the physics of why this is obviously true. The problem here is that there are cars around you when you're biking. If you didn't have to ride alongside cars, then cycling would be far safer, and your main worry would be things like gravel, snow, rain (anything that makes the road surface slippery), and probably pedestrians. There's a reason that places that put bike lanes next to car traffic, with no barrier, don't get much increase in cycling, and why places with physically divided biking lanes have far lower cyclist deaths and injuries. Cars are just too dangerous to be allowed around bikes. The fundamental problem here is the existence of cars, and the sheer dominance of cars as a transport method. It makes it almost impossible for anything else to be a viable alternative, for many different reasons including safety and sprawl (cycling isn't all that feasible if you have to ride 30 miles each way because the "city" is so sprawling).
- jacquesm 7y ago
  There are also still scooters and e-bikes to contend with.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Sure, but scooters don't move very fast (slower than bikes), and e-bikes are usually limited to 28mph. So yeah, getting hit by one of those is still dangerous, but nothing like getting hit by a 6000-pound SUV. Being on any kind of moving vehicle will always have some element of danger to it: our bodies just weren't designed for traveling very fast and colliding with concrete or other hard surfaces. But the momentum carried by any kind of car is far beyond that carried by someone on a scooter or e-bike. Also, those small vehicles don't take up remotely as much space as cars, and their riders have far better visibility, plus their riders are also exposed to a high degree of risk in a collision, unlike a car driver who can easily mow down cyclists without any injury at all.