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Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

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Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#231

Post by obelos »

joshuahaglund wrote: post #149
cjensen wrote: post #10

The Library of Congress has a great film taken from the front of a cable car in pre-fire San Francisco [1]. It's absolutely terrifying to see how unsafe the streets were. It wasn't just cars either: horse-drawn carts dart in and out of traffic just as cars did, pedestrians cross at-will in front of all vehicles, and at one points kids mess about jumping on the back of vehicles. It's obvious major regulation was neede…

Looks fine to me. I think the unsafe thing is speed. Top speed of a cable car is 9.5mph. No vehicle appears to be going over 15mph. There's a cyclist pretty casually keeping pace with the cars. https://youtu.be/uINgSqEU26A?t=153 From https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve... "Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed o…

A lot of car-centric people conflate “I don't know exactly what's about to happen next” with “danger!” What's actually dangerous is the hubristic trance people fall into when they believe they do know exactly what's about to happen next. When that happens at car speeds in a world that is inherently unpredictable, it's often deadly.

Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#232

Post by aidenn0 »

wongarsu wrote: post #187
dm319 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law in the UK has just changed to explicitly give priority to pedestrians already crossing the road, particularly in the context of a car turning off a main road and finding pedestrians crossing the road.

In Germany pedestrians also always have priority over turning cars when crossing at an intersection, no matter if there is a pedestrian crossing or not.

This is also true in many parts of the US, including California.

Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#233

Post by loloquwowndueo »

giantg2 wrote: post #228
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t have looked too hard if you didn’t find it.

Please be more charitable. I legitimately looked. All I found were biased pieces calling them beg buttons. I'm asking for an unbiased source calling them that. It seems the real term is a pedestrian call button.

The CBC is pretty objective and unbiased in their reporting : https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/councillor-takes-steps...

I’m sure you’ll find a way to disqualify that also, but well. By the way this was like the fourth result on a ddg search, there are many more if you care to actually look and read.

Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#234

Post by loloquwowndueo »

giantg2 wrote: post #175
Retric wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the event of high foot and road traffic you could have A or B go 3D. The fact it’s pedestrians suggests they have a lower priority.

Or that the infrastructure is cheaper

Oh now I know you are a troll. It would be cheaper to build level intersections with traffic lights. Why then are billions spent on wide freeways, exchanges, overpasses when it’s road over road but when it’s about pedestrians then sure, do whatever is cheapest because they’re already on foot, how much of a hurry can they be in?

Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#235

Post by currymj »

Affric wrote: post #182
munk-a wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield. Alternative no-brainer - the new entrant to street traffic that doesn't have the handling or control to safely co-habitate the street with existing users shouldn't be allowed onto streets. They should instead be restricted to specific and limited long distance routes that actually take advantage of their ability to travel many miles an hour…

Car-brain be strong. You gotta give it to the auto-makers. Probably the greatest propagandists of the modern world. The fact is that cars make places suck. They are dangerous to other road users, the roads built for them create dangerous microclimates, monopolise what was once shared infrastructure, and they enable evils such as the supermarket. Cars are like guns in the states but worse.

you lost me with the supermarket... lots of people in NYC walk or take the subway to supermarkets that have little/no parking... people like a big store where all the food is in one place.

Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#236

Post by AndrewKemendo »

oldbbsnickname wrote: post #210

Automakers are also directly and/or indirectly responsible for the destruction of American local mass transit and the dysfunctional regression in urban planning* towards inefficient suburbanization. * It wasn't unplanned. It was the purposeful design of city planners who failed to take into account unintended externalities including gridlock, pollution, and cost.

Don't forget how transportation has been one of the key areas of conflict for racial integration and has been used again and again to ensure that black and brown people did not have access to certain areas of cities.

Robert Moses being the most egregious direct example, but Plessy v Ferguson enshrining racist segregationist laws around transportation which then provided precedent to spread to other segregationist laws.

Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#237

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

voisin wrote: post #229
oldbbsnickname wrote: post #210

Automakers are also directly and/or indirectly responsible for the destruction of American local mass transit and the dysfunctional regression in urban planning* towards inefficient suburbanization. * It wasn't unplanned. It was the purposeful design of city planners who failed to take into account unintended externalities including gridlock, pollution, and cost.

I’ve heard several times but never verified that trees aren’t planted on boulevards anymore because of automaker lobbying. Something about drunk drivers might hit them. As if driver preference, even drunk drivers, should supersede the public interest.

I've also read that drivers drive faster on streets without trees than those with because they feel more open

Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#238

Post by userbinator »

tialaramex wrote: post #41
nerdjon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pedestrians should also take responsibility for acting dangerously. To me it's the same if a driver cuts in front of me and then slams on their brakes, there was nothing I could have done about crashing into them no matter how safely I was driving. If a person runs in front of a moving vehicle it shouldn't be the driver responsible if they basically cut the car off. A car can't stop on a dime. Drivers should be held…

> A car can't stop on a dime. That sounds like a you problem. Why is it up to the pedestrian (who may have never driven a motor vehicle) to anticipate the performance characteristics of this large metal vehicle in the street ? The UK already has designated areas with no pedestrians ("Motorways" ~= US highways [?]) and it has expended considerable resources closing or diverting at-grade crossings of railways (which ob…

It's absolutely insane to see the extremist anti-car faction here essentially trying to argue against the laws of physics.

Humans can change velocity and look in all directions much easier than cars.

Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#239

Post by Sebb767 »

jcynix wrote: post #11

If you cross the street "near" a red traffic light, that costs you 5€ in Germany. If you admit that you did it intentionally, the ticket price doubles. Happened to my wife some years ago when walking to a bus stop on the other side of the street. How did the cop know that it was intentional? She remarked that there was no car in sight, neither left nor right, on a straight road in town. Oh, and what's the definition…

> How did the cop know that it was intentional? She remarked that there was no car in sight, neither left nor right, on a straight road in town.

Not to be nitpicky, but if that were the case, wouldn't she have seen the cop?

Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)

#240

Post by zarzavat »

digital-cygnet wrote: post #147
trothamel wrote: post #79

Note that like most laws, Jaywalking laws tend to make more sense when you read them. Here's the law in New York: https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2015/vat/title-7/artic... 1152. Crossing at other than crosswalks. (a) Every pedestrian crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right of way to all vehicles upon the roadwa…

I think you've misunderstood the law you've quoted. It's not about "crossing without checking", it's about the pedestrian "yield[ing] the right of way to all vehicles". It's hard to imagine from a modern perspective, but until laws like this were passed roads were not, as today, universally perceived as places for cars to drive. In cities in much of the developing world the pre-jaywalking regime remains: road users w…

The UK has never had such a law (except on motorways), yet pedestrians know to stay off the roads because it is dangerous.

In those developing countries the reason that there is chaos is because traffic rules are not enforced. When traffic rules are enforced vehicle speeds increase such that pedestrians avoid roads by their own volition.

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