371–380 of 642 posts
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People in LA wait to jaywalk on the street or even in the suicide lane all the time. The Waymos handle it fine; generally by asserting it has right of way unless collision is obviously imminent. They'll even happily swerve around you if you're too far out.
What is a "suicide lane"?
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I don’t think people commenting and downvoting us realize how things are in NYC. Not only do you have to deal with insane chaos you also have to deal with malicious drivers. Hit-and-run in NYC is shockingly high because it’s a no-fault state. People don’t stop after accidents. It’s gotten really bad since the pandemic.
> insane chaos Hardly. I live in downtown Manhattan. I used to live in downtown San Francisco and between the streetcars, cable cars, hills, and the extraordinarily large homeless population, it feels far more chaotic in the denser areas. NY by comparison is big, flat and orderly. I feel significantly safer as a pedestrian here than I ever did in SF. And it's a much more pleasant place to drive.
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Semi-related, but just once in my life, I want to hear a mayoral candidate say: “I endorse broken windows theory, but for drivers. You honk when there’s no emergency, block the box, roll through a stop sign — buddy that’s a ticket. Do it enough and we’ll impound your car.” Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…
We don't go after moving violations anymore (in NYC) because the driver might have a bad reaction. True story.
Who is "we"? And it's not a "true story." In fact, the NYPD issued almost 52,000 moving violation summonses in July 2025 alone and more than 400,000 year to date.[0]
If 400,000 moving violation summonses just this year is your "true story" about moving violations not being issued to avoid "bad reactions", do you believe in the tooth fairy and santa claus as well?
Or are you referring to the policy that NYPD cars shouldn't endanger the lives of everyone by engaging in high-speed chases on city streets?[1] Which is a completely different thing.
[0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/traffic_data/m...
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/01/15/us-news/nypd-cops-ordered-not-...
Edit: Clarified prose.
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And I wish cyclists would re-learn that pedestrians have more rights of being on sidewalks. That said, the bigger plague on sidewalks are e-scooters. Additionally, most cyclists I see never stop at stop signs no matter how busy the intersection is.
That's the "Idaho stop". You're moving at speeds slow enough to be easily able to check for traffic without stopping, plus losing inertia as a cyclist is much more annoying (and arguably even dangerous) than for a car.
I live in one of the areas they are actively testing/training in. Their cars consistently behave better and more safely than most human drivers that I’m forced to share the road with. As semi-autonomous and autonomous cars become the norm, I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
The real issue is all the current bad drivers. A requirement to start re-testing normal people in addition to the elderly would be a large benefit to society.
1) Are you going to fund that? Because it means a significant increase in testing examiners.
2) The data say over and over and over that the single best traffic safety enhancement would be to ban drivers until they are 21. People have to be in their 80s(!) before they are as bad as drivers in their teens and early 20s.
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In Miami, there is very little enforcement and reckless driving flourishes. I used to regularly see cars doing 90, weaving, pass cops who did nothing. I've also talked to multiple cops who confirmed that they rarely enforce unless specifically doing traffic duty. Which never made sense to me, since it's a revenue stream. But however the incentives are set up, they motivate cops to do nothing, and drivers know it.
Maybe it's only one part of an overall trend in cultural rot around rule enforcement. A woman had her dog in the cart at Costco that kept barking at people. I joked with an employee during check-out "So anyone can bring their dog to the store these days?" and she said they stopped confronting these people because it's not worth it and makes things worse. Worse for who? Man, I thought that was the exact type of person…
When I'm in the position that I have to enforce rules, I usually provide an alternative and explain to people that they're not the problem. I spell out that problems arise when you have a dozen people breaking said rule, or when the people who come after them decide to push the limits even further. As long as they see the rules enforced consistently and equally, I rarely encounter any pushback. But until my employer got all of the staff to consistently enforce the rules, things were getting pretty nasty (threats towards staff, people doing stuff that would endager lives, etc.).
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This always astounds me about cities who have a reputation for people breaking certain traffic laws. In St. Louis, people run red lights for 5+ seconds after it turns red, and no one seems to care to solve it, but if they'd just station police at some worst-offender lights for a couple months to write tickets, people would catch on pretty quickly that it's not worth the risk. I have similar thoughts on people using t…
In europe we use traffic cameras for this. Going through red light? A bill is in your mailbox automatically. No need for a whole police station.
The cameras would get installed at busy intersections with lots of minor infractions to collect fines on rather than unsafe intersections that had lots of bad accidents. And then, when the revenue was insufficient, they would dial down the yellow light time.
Consequently, and rightly, Americans now immediately revolt against traffic cameras whenever they appear.
(San Diego was one particularly egregious example. They installed the cameras on the busy freeway interchange lights when the super dangerous intersection that produced all the T-bone accidents was literally one traffic light up the hill. This infuriated everybody.)
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People are risking their lives and the lives of others, and a fine is supposed to be the thing that finally gets them to comply?
This is what the points system is for. Any individual infraction might only be a small fine, but it adds points to your license. Collect enough points and you risk license suspension. I’ve known a couple people who got close to having enough points for license suspension. They drove perfectly for years.
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The real issue is all the current bad drivers. A requirement to start re-testing normal people in addition to the elderly would be a large benefit to society.
I think the US at least does sight tests periodically? The UK still doesn't do that, you're required to have decent vision to drive, but the license renewals are just paperwork, pay the money and click a web form. There is talk in the UK of requiring sight tests for the elderly. Historically UK licenses required frequent renewal, when they were centralised for convenience they ceased to have a renewal step, and it wa…
Depends on the state because drivers licenses are their remit.