Speeding Slows You Down (By a Lot) • Hacker News Board

Re: Speeding Slows You Down (By a Lot)

#131

Post by kragen » Sun, Jan 28, 2024, 5:07 PM UTC

alexwhb wrote: post #126

jethro_tell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd you shorten your life expectancy by 20 min but get 2 hours back today it seems like a fair trade. And that's why public transit in the us is such a mess, if you want people to use it, you have to make it fast and frequent before people need it, so when you do use it, you thin, huh, that's not too bad.

This I definitely agree with. A bus is the worst mode. Most of the downsides of a car with very few if any of rail especially in places with significant traffic. If you replaced that bus experience with light rail, almost certainly you’d be at your destination several times faster

well no, because light rail would necessarily involve walking farther from my house, and it has to wait for car traffic too, albeit less often than buses do. the bus i took actually had a reserved bus lane for a lot of the route, avoiding the traffic thing, but it still only averaged 14 km/hour

Re: Speeding Slows You Down (By a Lot)

#132

Post by xp84 » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

alexwhb wrote: post #16

While the methods in this post may not be a super accurate depiction of reality.. I did find it entertaining. Additionally I agree generally with the point the post is making. It is shocking to me that we accept so whole heartedly the risk associated with driving when, comparatively, it is shockingly unsafe relative to other modes of transportation. In the US somewhere around 41,000 people die per year from traffic a…

> we accept…. We accept…

I’d like to point out that as individuals, our ‘acceptance’ is not required nor even checked for. As Americans (speaking for my own countrymen only) we accept it the same way we accept our air quality. We, in broad strokes, may choose only to drive, or to remain stationary - just as we can breathe the air, or just stop breathing. Other practical options only even exist in very specific exceptional places or situations (most of them require you to commit to stay in an urban core 100% of the time, and that space physically cannot contain all Americans at once, due to space constraints, which we perceive via cost signals).

Of course, if the entire country were built out when NYC was built out, without cars even being hypothesized, things may have been very different today. But we shouldn’t pretend that most car-dependent people are choosing to be so, except maybe those who made an unforced decision to move from say, Manhattan to Phoenix. And even they may have accepted it only grudgingly in exchange for some other benefit such as weather, lower taxes, proximity to family, etc.

Note: I personally would like to not be car dependent, so please don’t try to explain to me why cars are bad. I cringe every time i see 327 SUVs idling in the street waiting to drop off each student in a school, on a warm, dry morning in the ‘burbs.

Re: Speeding Slows You Down (By a Lot)

#133

Post by Ferret7446 » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 12:47 AM UTC

tasty_freeze wrote: post #49

konschubert wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter. The sad reality is that people recklessly kill cyclists and barely get a slap on the wrist.

Yes, it is amazing when the driver says, "I just didn't see him!" and that is accepted as a reasonable explanation. I think it is because the overwhelming number of drivers (in the US) haven't ridden a bike since they were children. A judge and most of the jurors fall into that category, and they empathize with the driver, as they could imagine themselves doing the exact same thing that the driver did.

I don't think "I just didn't see him!" is considered a reasonable explanation in court. Now, if the cyclist came out from the gap between parked cars or a tight corner...

Cyclists can absolutely be at fault. I don't see why you'd think otherwise. Humans are uniquely fallible, cyclist and drivers are both human (if you ignore Waymo et al).