5 ms·

Quite the opposite. Automakers passed the responsibility on to people who don't even drive.

sandworm101 3y ago
Except for the speeding laws. And the red light/intersection/right-of-way laws. And the drunk driving laws. Those laws placed plenty of the responsibility on drivers.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  But they did not make the cars inherently safer. A red light does not stop a driver from driving through a pedestrian crossing when people are there. Speeding laws do little for the bikers in unsegregated bike lanes, mere inches away from an inattentive driver.
  - wredue 3y ago
    Maybe I’m just thinking outside of the box here, but how exactly do 3,000 lbs pieces of metal and glass become safer for people crossing the street in an addressable way by auto makers, when it’s the buyers demanding larger and larger vehicles? On segregated bike lanes, I’m afraid to tell you, cyclists don’t use them anyway, so why on earth should anyone focus on putting them in?
    - alexanderchr 3y ago
      Oh cyclists do use segregated lanes, they just have to be done properly. Primarily they need to be safer than sharing the road with heavy vehicles, something that most bike lines spectacularly fail at.
    - maest 3y ago
      > cyclists don’t use them anyway This claim is so ridiculous is invalidates everything else you might be trying to argue, come on.
      - wredue 3y ago
        My dash cam filled with video of cyclists riding in a car lane beside a protected bike lane, and otherwise ignoring signage (stop and yield signs, signs stating road exceptions where bikes must use and share the sidewalk with pedestrians instead of the road) is definitely not ridiculous. Also hilariously “why do cyclists not use the bike lanes” is a top alternative question result when searching bike lanes. Clearly this is not some random anecdote. Cyclists frequently do not use the bike lanes, and I am absolutely not anywhere near the only person to observe this frequently. Never mind that: -Protected bike lane implementations often congest and slow traffic, which increases idling and carbon emissions no matter how many people say they’ll bike if it was safer. They won’t get their fat ass off out of bed 40 minutes earlier. You’re kidding yourself. -in colder climates, they’re useless for 50% of the year and exceptionally increase carbon footprints -some cities don’t actually observe reduced injuries from protected bike lanes (often because cyclists are extremely prone to ignoring the rules of the road), and cyclists disregard their own safety and get slapped by a turning vehicle, for example. We often see the excuse that “cars should pay more attention” and they should, but also, motorcyclists have built a sentiment that you have to “ride like you’re invisible”, whereas cyclists tend to “ride like you’re the king of the road”. This is not just a car problem, but an arrogant community with a lack of self preservation problem.
        Mawr 3y ago
        Okay, are you talking about protected (physical separation) or unprotected (paint on the road) bike lanes? The latter are unsafe [1][2][3][4][5] and therefore unused. It's usually safer for a cyclist to ride in the middle of the lane (primary position) than to use the unsafe unprotected bike lane. > Protected bike lane implementations often congest and slow traffic, which increases idling and carbon emissions no matter how many people say they’ll bike if it was safer. They won’t get their fat ass off out of bed 40 minutes earlier. You’re kidding yourself. As this goes against everything I've ever seen and read, I'm gonna have to request some citations. Induced demand has been well understood for decades, and yes, the more (safe!) biking infrastructure gets built, the more people bike and the fewer cars end up on the road. > -in colder climates, they’re useless for 50% of the year and exceptionally increase carbon footprints Mhm. https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU?t=112 https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU?t=112 > -some cities don’t actually observe reduced injuries from protected bike lanes (often because cyclists are extremely prone to ignoring the rules of the road), and cyclists disregard their own safety and get slapped by a turning vehicle, for example. We often see the excuse that “cars should pay more attention” and they should, but also, motorcyclists have built a sentiment that you have to “ride like you’re invisible”, whereas cyclists tend to “ride like you’re the king of the road”. This is not just a car problem, but an arrogant community with a lack of self preservation problem. No, it's an infrastructure problem. Safety must be built into the transportation system by design. Cyclists ignoring the rules of the road are irrelevant when they barely have to interact with cars in the first place (rules of the road only exist because of cars). [1]: https://youtu.be/dO8XqqZK-XQ?t=63 https://youtu.be/dO8XqqZK-XQ?t=63 [2]: https://youtu.be/dO8XqqZK-XQ?t=78 https://youtu.be/dO8XqqZK-XQ?t=78 [3]: https://youtu.be/LjWbSpVnI8A?t=156 https://youtu.be/LjWbSpVnI8A?t=156 [4]: https://youtu.be/Fztvoxj_pds?t=77 https://youtu.be/Fztvoxj_pds?t=77 [5]: https://youtu.be/bzE-IMaegzQ?t=75 https://youtu.be/bzE-IMaegzQ?t=75
    - _aavaa_ 3y ago
      Cyclists very much use segregated bike lanes. The problem with most cities, mine included, is that the “segregated” bikes lines are segregated by a strip of paint on the ground. And have cars darting in and out all the time. Or people park in them, or put out their trash, or have major potholes. Or, if they are actually separated, they don’t go everywhere people would need to go. The safest 3000lb piece of metal and glass is the one that doesn’t exist. Car companies need to stop advertising fairy tales to buyers to get them to buy bigger and bigger cars, and need to start advertising (lobby) to cities to have them start banning cars out of. Ore and more of the city. As long as our cities stay designed with the primacy of cars in mind, we’ll at best be duct tapping solutions for everyone else. And finally, “in an addressable way by auto makers, when it’s the buyers demanding larger and larger vehicles”. A) this is not inevitable, it is North America that’s dominated by a want of giant cars. And why? Because the roads and culture are designed specifically to accommodate them. B) the car manufacturers are still responsible for making them, and it’s not like they’re sitting around saying “darn, well it looks like people want big cars, guess we will have to make some bigger cars”. No, they are actively pushing and advertising bigger cars.
    - Mawr 3y ago
      Buyers buy what's available and automakers comply with regulations. It's the regulations that need changing. Apparently in the US, it's easier for automakers to meet the efficiency requirements by increasing the weight of their vehicles instead of actually making them more efficient. Moreover, crash testing does not include crashes with pedestrians. The results are predictable - the rise of big, heavy, wall-like-bumper, limited visibility pedestrian killing machines.
drunner 3y ago
Same with the oil industry and `reduce, reuse, recycle` nonsense. Like I wouldn't need to be concerned with that if your product didn't individually wrap every item I can purchase in a store.
- talideon 3y ago
  Reduce, reuse, recycle isn't nonsense, but good sense. What is nonsense is how the fossil fuel industry uses it as a shield to avoid taking responsibility for the damage they do to the world.
akira2501 3y ago
> Automakers passed the responsibility on to people who don't even drive. We have roads. They are shared by all users and taxpayers for common purposes. The responsibilities are likewise shared. The available technology changed. We can't expect to force the prior status quo to continue to exist in the face of available technological changes. This article points out that attitudes like your similarly existed at the time and contributed to the apparent delay in creating a reasonable solution.
- Fricken 3y ago
  Going whole hog with an unsustainable technology is not reasonable, never was.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    Okay.. so what if they skipped gasoline and built electric from the start? That's "sustainable" according to some modern definition. What should we have done then? Meanwhile.. take a look at the way life was 120 years ago. Are you eager to go back to the rural life of farm labor that implied for the majority of Americans?
    - Fricken 3y ago
      Sounds better than going forward 120 years into the future at the rate we're going.
zelon88 3y ago
I've noticed that people who don't drive usually don't have frame of reference of what cars are capable of, and usually don't understand all of the simultaneous requirements that must be fulfilled by drivers. So you get pedestrians who don't understand what the stopping distance of a car is, or pedestrians who don't recognize dangerous situations that they create. In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  > In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians. A great example of this is pedestrians in San Francisco. I've never seen more entitled oblivious assholes that pedestrians there. They seem to have no situational awareness and blithely jump out in front of cars. One of my favorite stupid pedestrian tricks is them jumping out from between parked cars crossing without so much as turning their heads to look for cars. Thankfully I don't have to deal with SF pedestrians very often. The city very obviously hates cars but is decidedly dependent on them existing. The pedestrians there act dumber than a deer in the rut.
  - zelon88 3y ago
    Cambridge/Boston is the same. Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed. These are not environmentally friendly alternatives. They are Chinesium E-waste with low quality batteries. They will be driven for one or two years then put in a closet and forgotten about. When they do get used they typically cause more greenhouse gasses from regular cars that have to yield to them, or stop busy intersections so they can cross. As an avid dirt bike rider it is especially frustrating because these are usually the same people (yuppies) who would call the police on me if I took my 17 year old 200cc dirt bike down the same trails.
    - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
      "Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed." Wait, where is the place e-bikes should be in your opinion, then? At least where I live, the laws are quite clear which type of vehicles are allowed where. The laws here generally allow a pedal-assisted ebike to ride whereever a non-electric bicycle may ride. The pedal-assist is important. So yeah, you probably can't ride your motorbike down a pedestrian path ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Except for the speeding laws. And the red light/intersection/right-of-way laws. And the drunk driving laws. Those laws placed plenty of the responsibility on drivers.

_aavaa_ 3y ago
But they did not make the cars inherently safer. A red light does not stop a driver from driving through a pedestrian crossing when people are there. Speeding laws do little for the bikers in unsegregated bike lanes, mere inches away from an inattentive driver.
- wredue 3y ago
  Maybe I’m just thinking outside of the box here, but how exactly do 3,000 lbs pieces of metal and glass become safer for people crossing the street in an addressable way by auto makers, when it’s the buyers demanding larger and larger vehicles? On segregated bike lanes, I’m afraid to tell you, cyclists don’t use them anyway, so why on earth should anyone focus on putting them in?
  - alexanderchr 3y ago
    Oh cyclists do use segregated lanes, they just have to be done properly. Primarily they need to be safer than sharing the road with heavy vehicles, something that most bike lines spectacularly fail at.
  - maest 3y ago
    > cyclists don’t use them anyway This claim is so ridiculous is invalidates everything else you might be trying to argue, come on.
    - wredue 3y ago
      My dash cam filled with video of cyclists riding in a car lane beside a protected bike lane, and otherwise ignoring signage (stop and yield signs, signs stating road exceptions where bikes must use and share the sidewalk with pedestrians instead of the road) is definitely not ridiculous. Also hilariously “why do cyclists not use the bike lanes” is a top alternative question result when searching bike lanes. Clearly this is not some random anecdote. Cyclists frequently do not use the bike lanes, and I am absolutely not anywhere near the only person to observe this frequently. Never mind that: -Protected bike lane implementations often congest and slow traffic, which increases idling and carbon emissions no matter how many people say they’ll bike if it was safer. They won’t get their fat ass off out of bed 40 minutes earlier. You’re kidding yourself. -in colder climates, they’re useless for 50% of the year and exceptionally increase carbon footprints -some cities don’t actually observe reduced injuries from protected bike lanes (often because cyclists are extremely prone to ignoring the rules of the road), and cyclists disregard their own safety and get slapped by a turning vehicle, for example. We often see the excuse that “cars should pay more attention” and they should, but also, motorcyclists have built a sentiment that you have to “ride like you’re invisible”, whereas cyclists tend to “ride like you’re the king of the road”. This is not just a car problem, but an arrogant community with a lack of self preservation problem.
      - Mawr 3y ago
        Okay, are you talking about protected (physical separation) or unprotected (paint on the road) bike lanes? The latter are unsafe [1][2][3][4][5] and therefore unused. It's usually safer for a cyclist to ride in the middle of the lane (primary position) than to use the unsafe unprotected bike lane. > Protected bike lane implementations often congest and slow traffic, which increases idling and carbon emissions no matter how many people say they’ll bike if it was safer. They won’t get their fat ass off out of bed 40 minutes earlier. You’re kidding yourself. As this goes against everything I've ever seen and read, I'm gonna have to request some citations. Induced demand has been well understood for decades, and yes, the more (safe!) biking infrastructure gets built, the more people bike and the fewer cars end up on the road. > -in colder climates, they’re useless for 50% of the year and exceptionally increase carbon footprints Mhm. https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU?t=112 https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU?t=112 > -some cities don’t actually observe reduced injuries from protected bike lanes (often because cyclists are extremely prone to ignoring the rules of the road), and cyclists disregard their own safety and get slapped by a turning vehicle, for example. We often see the excuse that “cars should pay more attention” and they should, but also, motorcyclists have built a sentiment that you have to “ride like you’re invisible”, whereas cyclists tend to “ride like you’re the king of the road”. This is not just a car problem, but an arrogant community with a lack of self preservation problem. No, it's an infrastructure problem. Safety must be built into the transportation system by design. Cyclists ignoring the rules of the road are irrelevant when they barely have to interact with cars in the first place (rules of the road only exist because of cars). [1]: https://youtu.be/dO8XqqZK-XQ?t=63 https://youtu.be/dO8XqqZK-XQ?t=63 [2]: https://youtu.be/dO8XqqZK-XQ?t=78 https://youtu.be/dO8XqqZK-XQ?t=78 [3]: https://youtu.be/LjWbSpVnI8A?t=156 https://youtu.be/LjWbSpVnI8A?t=156 [4]: https://youtu.be/Fztvoxj_pds?t=77 https://youtu.be/Fztvoxj_pds?t=77 [5]: https://youtu.be/bzE-IMaegzQ?t=75 https://youtu.be/bzE-IMaegzQ?t=75
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    Cyclists very much use segregated bike lanes. The problem with most cities, mine included, is that the “segregated” bikes lines are segregated by a strip of paint on the ground. And have cars darting in and out all the time. Or people park in them, or put out their trash, or have major potholes. Or, if they are actually separated, they don’t go everywhere people would need to go. The safest 3000lb piece of metal and glass is the one that doesn’t exist. Car companies need to stop advertising fairy tales to buyers to get them to buy bigger and bigger cars, and need to start advertising (lobby) to cities to have them start banning cars out of. Ore and more of the city. As long as our cities stay designed with the primacy of cars in mind, we’ll at best be duct tapping solutions for everyone else. And finally, “in an addressable way by auto makers, when it’s the buyers demanding larger and larger vehicles”. A) this is not inevitable, it is North America that’s dominated by a want of giant cars. And why? Because the roads and culture are designed specifically to accommodate them. B) the car manufacturers are still responsible for making them, and it’s not like they’re sitting around saying “darn, well it looks like people want big cars, guess we will have to make some bigger cars”. No, they are actively pushing and advertising bigger cars.
  - Mawr 3y ago
    Buyers buy what's available and automakers comply with regulations. It's the regulations that need changing. Apparently in the US, it's easier for automakers to meet the efficiency requirements by increasing the weight of their vehicles instead of actually making them more efficient. Moreover, crash testing does not include crashes with pedestrians. The results are predictable - the rise of big, heavy, wall-like-bumper, limited visibility pedestrian killing machines.

drunner 3y ago

Same with the oil industry and `reduce, reuse, recycle` nonsense. Like I wouldn't need to be concerned with that if your product didn't individually wrap every item I can purchase in a store.

talideon 3y ago
Reduce, reuse, recycle isn't nonsense, but good sense. What is nonsense is how the fossil fuel industry uses it as a shield to avoid taking responsibility for the damage they do to the world.

akira2501 3y ago

> Automakers passed the responsibility on to people who don't even drive. We have roads. They are shared by all users and taxpayers for common purposes. The responsibilities are likewise shared. The available technology changed. We can't expect to force the prior status quo to continue to exist in the face of available technological changes. This article points out that attitudes like your similarly existed at the time and contributed to the apparent delay in creating a reasonable solution.

Fricken 3y ago
Going whole hog with an unsustainable technology is not reasonable, never was.
- akira2501 3y ago
  Okay.. so what if they skipped gasoline and built electric from the start? That's "sustainable" according to some modern definition. What should we have done then? Meanwhile.. take a look at the way life was 120 years ago. Are you eager to go back to the rural life of farm labor that implied for the majority of Americans?
  - Fricken 3y ago
    Sounds better than going forward 120 years into the future at the rate we're going.

zelon88 3y ago

I've noticed that people who don't drive usually don't have frame of reference of what cars are capable of, and usually don't understand all of the simultaneous requirements that must be fulfilled by drivers. So you get pedestrians who don't understand what the stopping distance of a car is, or pedestrians who don't recognize dangerous situations that they create. In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians.

giantrobot 3y ago
> In other words, people with driving experience are usually safer, more considerate as pedestrians. A great example of this is pedestrians in San Francisco. I've never seen more entitled oblivious assholes that pedestrians there. They seem to have no situational awareness and blithely jump out in front of cars. One of my favorite stupid pedestrian tricks is them jumping out from between parked cars crossing without so much as turning their heads to look for cars. Thankfully I don't have to deal with SF pedestrians very often. The city very obviously hates cars but is decidedly dependent on them existing. The pedestrians there act dumber than a deer in the rut.
- zelon88 3y ago
  Cambridge/Boston is the same. Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed. These are not environmentally friendly alternatives. They are Chinesium E-waste with low quality batteries. They will be driven for one or two years then put in a closet and forgotten about. When they do get used they typically cause more greenhouse gasses from regular cars that have to yield to them, or stop busy intersections so they can cross. As an avid dirt bike rider it is especially frustrating because these are usually the same people (yuppies) who would call the police on me if I took my 17 year old 200cc dirt bike down the same trails.
  - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
    "Another one that baffles me is seeing people ride E-bikes and scooters on streets with cars or worse, walk ways and trails where other motor vehicles are not allowed." Wait, where is the place e-bikes should be in your opinion, then? At least where I live, the laws are quite clear which type of vehicles are allowed where. The laws here generally allow a pedal-assisted ebike to ride whereever a non-electric bicycle may ride. The pedal-assist is important. So yeah, you probably can't ride your motorbike down a pedestrian path ¯\_(ツ)_/¯