Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them • Hacker News Board

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#171

Post by rahimnathwani » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 2:12 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #154

danielwarna wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd claim that cyclists tend behave a lot more like other motorists than like pedestrians The speed difference between a cyclists and a pedestrian is usually bigger than that between a car and a cyclists, at least in urban traffic. Pedestrians can be very unpredictable and they don't tend to signal very clearly what they are about to do, not to mention that a pedestrian can stop or turn around pretty much instantly.…

So, I live in Shanghai, which hopefully qualifies as "urban" with a population of over 20 million people (according to wikipedia, almost 10k per square mile, healthily above LA). All of the following situations are routine: 1. Dedicated bike lanes. 2. Bikes hiding along the side of a street without bike lanes, hoping not to be killed. 3. Bikes using the sidewalk. Sharing the sidewalk is far and away the safest thing…

I've lived in China (Beijing and Shanghai) for ~5 years, and frequently ride bicycles and an electric Vespa-style scooter.

Bicycles and scooters on the sidewalk, ridden by inconsiderate riders, are common, irritating and dangerous. The same is true of cars driving in cycle lanes or service lanes, and the myriad other thinga car drivers do to make life difficult for cyclists.

Sure, cycling on the pavement may be in your own self-interest, but it is strictly bad for pedestrians. Why should they have to change their walking pattern for you? I will give way to electric scooters on the sidewalk, not because I don't mind them, but because it's less unpleasant than a collision or being shouted/hooted at.

/rant

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#172

Post by pandaman » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 2:16 PM UTC

malka wrote: post #96

pandaman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe cyclists in SF are so special, but in LA I have yet to see a cyclist stopping at a stop sign. I walk to/from work about 2 miles each way and see about a dozen cyclists every day. Sure, cars some times do not stop at the sign either but I don't see this happening nearly as often as I see cyclists just happily cycling through stop without even an attempt to slow down. And I see much more cars than bikes.

They are the same in France. Never saw a single cyclist stop at a red light.

I have seen some red light stops here. There are streets in LA that are physically impossible to cross at a red light.

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#173

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 3:49 PM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #170

thaumasiotes wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I live in Shanghai, which hopefully qualifies as "urban" with a population of over 20 million people (according to wikipedia, almost 10k per square mile, healthily above LA). All of the following situations are routine: 1. Dedicated bike lanes. 2. Bikes hiding along the side of a street without bike lanes, hoping not to be killed. 3. Bikes using the sidewalk. Sharing the sidewalk is far and away the safest thing…

I've lived in China (Beijing and Shanghai) for ~5 years, and frequently ride bicycles and an electric Vespa-style scooter. Bicycles and scooters on the sidewalk, ridden by inconsiderate riders, are common, irritating and dangerous. The same is true of cars driving in cycle lanes or service lanes, and the myriad other thinga car drivers do to make life difficult for cyclists. Sure, cycling on the pavement may be in yo…

I've never asked anyone to change. Note how I described getting stuck and hearing chinese pedestrians admonish each other to let me by. If I get really stuck I get off and walk the bicycle.

Bicycles on the sidewalk are fairly common. They're not dangerous.

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#174

Post by vishaldpatel » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 4:49 PM UTC

diyorgasms wrote: post #165

vishaldpatel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helmet laws may be dumb, but visibility laws could actually make cycling much safer!

Or, and here's a shocking concept, motorists could actually pay attention to their surroundings. Cyclists are not difficult to spot if you are paying proper attention while operating your vehicle.

Sure, that would be nice. But I'm gonna make damn sure that people see me. Being the smallest one on the road is bad enough, now you want me to trust that they'll all do the right thing all the time?

In fact, I think cycling at night is safer because my flashing lights and reflectors are in their eye. During the day, I just blend into the background. This is also why I keep my car's lights on when driving in the day.

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#175

Post by cheshire137 » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

rkischuk wrote: post #3

Almost every time I encounter cyclists in traffic, they context switch between vehicle and pedestrian at their convenience. If you want to be treated as a vehicle, be a vehicle. Don't block a lane between intersections and then ride the divider lines to advance ahead of cars at every intersection so they can wait and merge around you once the light turns. As a former bike commuter, I really don't understand why bikes…

Yes! I have so much dislike for cyclists because they run red lights, they drive between cars, and they flit about. I can't ever predict what they're going to do because they don't seem bound by the same rules I am bound by in my car.

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#176

Post by stephendedalus » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 5:08 PM UTC

ptaipale wrote: post #153

bytecycle wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To justify the cost of these additional bike lanes and infrastructure you'll first need people actually riding their bikes. A change of mentality is required here. As a cyclist you shouldn't feel so unsafe that you have to put on a helmet and war paint. The money spent on ridiculous bike laws and expensive special infrastructure should first be allocated to educating all drivers. There needs to be a shift in attitude…

> To justify the cost of these additional bike lanes and infrastructure you'll first need people actually riding their bikes Chicken-and-egg. On the other hand, to get people riding their bikes, you need to offer them an infrastructure that feels safe enough to get started.

Yeah. That was basically the entire point of the article. That the roads didn't always belong to motorists. That the idea of the roads being car-centric is a fairly recent development in human history. One of my favorite examples is Las Vegas and Moscow, Russia. In the case of Las Vegas they've built entire elevated sidewalks with escalators and elevators. Cars rule in a city where people could, in theory, walk between casinos, restaurants, etc. In Moscow there are many many large sections of the city where the only way to cross the street is to go through the subway. On the upside that city has a pretty great subway system, so it makes some sense.

Either way the point of the article (which a shocking number of people in the comments here and on the article missed) is that it's this chicken and the egg problem that needs to be addressed.

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#177

Post by maxerickson » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 5:22 PM UTC

makeitsuckless wrote: post #12

I've repeated this dozens of times whenever Americans come up with lame excuses for why cycling is dangerous in the US: in the Netherlands cyclists still share the road with cars a lot of the time. The rules however are very simple: as a driver, you're not allowed to hit weaker traffic like cyclists and pedestrians. Period. If it happens, the burden of proof that you could do nothing about it is on you. Is this insan…

I was in the Netherlands, cycling on the path shown here:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/3739+Hollandsche+Rading,+N...

I was cycling south on the bike path, against the flow of the traffic in the lane of the road closest to the path when a work van pulled into the path at speed and nearly killed me (I managed to move over into the median between the path and road in time to avoid a collision).

The rest of the bicycling scene was fantastic, but given my short period there, it was quite an experience to record.

Last time I mentioned this to a Nederlander they said I must not have had the awareness of a native (I did not link the location that time), but it seems clear enough that a vehicle had no business pulling onto that path to travel (of course they might pull across it into a house or whatever).

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#178

Post by thraxil » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

Nrsolis wrote: post #39

jinushaun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a cyclist in the U.S., but have no problem admitting that probably 90% of the time, the cyclist is at fault. I've ridden bikes in Europe with real bike lanes—U.S. urban cycling culture is not Dutch cycling culture. There is not a culture of responsible cycling. We don't have real bike lanes. We don't stop for red lights. We don't stop for pedestrians. As a result, the U.S. also does not have many drivers or pedes…

Come to NYC. We have Citibike here and messengers and delivery people on bikes. And it's horrible. The bicyclists ROUTINELY violate nearly every sane traffic law on the books. They go the wrong way against traffic, refuse to stop for stop lights or pedestrians in crosswalks, ride on sidewalks, have few if any safety features like headlights or taillights, and on and on. If cyclists would simply follow the traffic law…

According to Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-23/pedestrian...), there were 11 bicycle on pedestrian fatalities in NYC between 1996 and 2005.

"There were no pedestrian deaths from cyclists in 2010, 2011 or 2012, according to city data."

I live in the Netherlands now but lived in NYC for 15 years and biked a lot while I was there. I'm not going to argue that NYC cyclists are perfect and follow all the traffic laws all the time, but at the same time, they're really not much different than Dutch cyclists. When it comes down to it, cyclists do what they have to do to get where they're going and avoid getting hit by cars. Some differences I have noticed: in the Netherlands, it's explicitly allowed for cyclists to bike against traffic on one way streets. Many more bikes in the Netherlands do have lights because 1) it's a 60 EUR fine otherwise and they enforce it and 2) the heavy dutch style bikes just tend to have them built in, whereas on the typical NYC bike, they're externally mounted and will get stolen off your bike in a heartbeat. The Dutch actually can be very aggressive cyclists, cruising through red lights when there's no traffic coming, passing suddenly and closely, flying through crowds of people, squeezing past trams, and generally inducing mild heart attacks in someone like me watching, but they're also extremely skilled since almost all of them have been biking nearly everywhere they go nearly every day of their lives since they were small children. They pull off complex maneuvers that I would never dream of and do it while texting. The final difference is that pedestrians here tend to be a bit more aware and will be careful to stay out of the bike paths.

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#179

Post by bsder » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 8:33 PM UTC

ffumarola wrote: post #127

bsder wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 184 cyclist deaths in 2013 (out of +- 10 million active cyclists) Um, isn't that actually quite a LOT . Do we really want to emulate that? The annual cyclist death toll in San Francisco looks to be under 10 people a year. Right about the same level as the fatal car crash death toll per year. Complaining about something that really looks purely accidental from a statistical viewpoint is not going to make people ve…

The population of SF is ~840k. The SFMTA estimates that 16% of San Francisco residents are "frequent cyclists", defined as cycling two or more days per week. That means ~135k frequent cyclists. 184:10,000,000 = .0184 per 1,000 10:135,000 = .0741 per 1,000 SF = 4x higher For SF to be safer than the Netherlands, bike deaths need to pretty much disappear.

So, basically, cyclist deaths are effectively at the minimum you can reasonably expect in both areas.

Okay. Kind of makes the ranting of the whole article pointless, though.

Re: Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them

#180

Post by yitchelle » Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 9:15 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #17

yitchelle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They seem far more compatible to ride sidewalks and co-travel with pedestrians. Pedestrians and bike riders are not compatible either. I am a bike commuter as well. I live in West Germany at the moment, but I have also bike commuted to work in Australia. In general, commuting in Germany is a much safer proposition than in Australia. The German drivers seem to be more aware and tolerance to the bike commuters. The b…

> Pedestrians and bike riders are not compatible either Maybe you could explain what you're thinking of when you say this? My experience says that pedestrians and bikes are fully compatible; they commonly share sidewalks.

off the top of my head... * An accident between a bike and pedestrian usually results in the pedestrian getting hurt. * Footpath is generally too crowded or too small to cater for both pedestrian and bike. * Kids walking on the footpath are usually absent minded and not lookout for bikes. * etc

In general, it is similar to the reasons why bike and car are not so compatible on the road.