Apparently pedestrians should take personal responsibility but not drivers
I do agree that if people weren’t morons there would be less necessity for regulation. However, that is not the case.
It’s common sense to drive slowly in a populated area and yet people need to be told to drive slower in a school zone. We only have ourselves to blame.
It’s classic rightwinger stuff anyway: nothing should be regulated, everything just works, oh my god my car broke my family’s dead my ass is on fire…
More “guns don’t kill people” logic. Blaming victims from the crime, and separating the tool used from the criminal.
having to drive slower than reasonable
Honestly, this only exemplifies why speed limits by themselves don’t work. We have to design the streets so that the lower speed feels reasonable.
I know I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but it’s always worth saying.
The go-to method right now seems to be to enforce it electronically, using the systems that are built into most new cars nowadays. Personally I’m not a fan of that, but it IS preferable to having all the surveillance electronics built into cars and just not doing anything worthwhile with it.
There’s another method using visual design that “calms” traffic. Ex, if you have a wide road, paint the sides of it a notable color that visually corrals people to a tighter space. They have the sides if absolutely needed, but recognize they need to go slower to stay within the lines.
You need forceful enforcement in some situations, but for the most part it pays to inspect the psychology that gets people to behave a certain way.
It is very possible to make higher speeds seem extremely unreasonable to drivers.
Having the streets be cobblestone instead of asphalt, for one, makes driving faster louder and more difficult for drivers. I’m not rooting for cars, I’m just saying there are so many methods that governments just don’t think are worth implementing because they value corporate lobbying more than citizen safety.
But … that exasperates so many issues that cars already cause. Like noise pollution, street maintenance costs (IDK maybe cobblestone lasts longer, but it’s for sure expensive to change a street into cobblestone vs. leaving it as-is), it compromises road safety for people who will drive fast anyway, and on streets that are too narrow for separate bike lanes they compromise bike safety (if we assume that cars start driving slow enough that it’s reasonably safe to ride a bicycle on that streets).
Sure, speed bumps are better solutions that cobblestone?
As long as everything works out perfectly in every way, we don’t need safety stuff
And it always works perfectly every time, except those times when things don’t work out, which is often, but they don’t count, so we ignore them
We all just need to act more correctly and then this kind of thing won’t happen! If the guy simply didn’t run over pedestrians, this wouldn’t be a problem! Problem solved!
Any time “personal responsibility” comes up, ask who is getting the bulk of the consequences when it fails. Is it the person failing at personal responsibility, or did it fall on someone else?
In this case, the personal responsibility was on the driver to not run a red light. However, it’s the pedestrian who risks major injury or death. The driver may suffer a damaged vehicle, or possibly trauma leading to PTSD, but they will mostly likely be OK physically. It’s clear that the consequences to the driver are vastly outweighed by the consequences to the pedestrian. However, the pedestrian can do everything right and still get hit.
This is why we have safety rules. Your lack of personal responsibility can hurt me. If you feel that there are too many rules around how to safely drive a car, maybe that’s an indication that the idea of using it on a mass scale is fundamentally flawed in the first place.
A person who pipes up on Facebook to champion “personal responsibility” as an argument against common-sense safety regulations does NOT have the intellectual ability to process what you’ve just typed.
Arguments on the internet used to be ridiculous. Arguments on social media are simply childish. #EverybodyIs12
The lack of self awareness is at maximum speed.
I’m very sure that this person or (“person”) would also complain if the article was demanding or celebrating severe penalties for drivers who do this kind of thing. Constant goalpost moving.
They want “personal responsibility”, but definitely it isn’t murder to kill someone with a car. It can’t be murder if I was so happy and comfy and distracted the whole time I was violently ending a human life!
Quite literally braindead, full zombiemode
Cars are a privilege of rich people.¹ So is personal responsibility rhetoric.
So, for that matter, is no political violence rhetoric, as well, though the affluent version is we don’t negotiate with terrorists.
-1.- ( ¹ ) Granted, there are destitute, homeless people with cars, but they’re a higher strata than destitute, homeless people without cars and look down on their sans-car brethren.
ETA: I’m a home-enabled poor person without a car, trying to get by with an e-bike and thin-spread public transit. And my car-enabled peers look down on me for being transit-restricted. It sucks.
Cars a privilege when your city is garbage. When it’s well built they’re more of a pain.
I own a literal sportscar from when I lived in a car centric place and now I keep it parked behind my mid-density apartment, rarely using it because it’s almost never better than taking public transit. You have to be super rich for it to be actually better because then you can pay for all the parking fees, maintenance, etc. without much thought. I’m not a rich person(BRZs are not expensive sportscars) and all the extra maintenance and tires and whatever else are such a huge pain to deal with and I do most of the work myself!
What I’m trying to say is that, as someone who can actually claim to “be a car person”, and who has all the skills to back that up, people who think cars are objectively better are dumb as hell and you shouldn’t let their hollow words get to you if you can help it. They’re just losers who repeat shit fed to them by companies like GM so said companies can make more money.
It’s been decades since I started driving but wasn’t 25 MPH taught as when most accidents with pedestrians became fatal? 50 kmph is much faster.
I think the math is a little confusing. 50 km/h is about 31 mph, which is very close to the number you’re thinking of
Edit: the person knew the math and was commenting that it is a big difference in speed, my bad.
That’s beyond 20%, which is the rule I use for speeding. I never go more than 20% faster than the posted speed limit, except on the New Jersey Turnpike, where all bets are off.
Did you just admit to speeding on Fuck Cars? May god have mercy on your soul
Oh Jesus, what have I done.
Not the speed limit apparently
You were in NJ and keeping up with traffic is important
I’m not debating that 31mph is over 20% faster, which is certainly more likely to get a speeding ticket. The context I was replying to was “25mph is the speed when it’s fatal to a pedestrian, and 50km/h is
somuch faster.” In the context of life and death, considering both would be potentially fatal to a pedestrian, those numbers are not substantially far apart.I took that original statement to be an honest mistake in not realizing those two numbers used two different measurements.
Edited to fix the paraphrased quote
Yeah, I meant that anything above the 20% threshold is too fast! But below is within the Goldilocks zone.
Yeah I get that. I try to stay close to the speed limit myself, but try more often to take the train or to walk whenever possible. I wish it was more widely available in the States and not a horrible chore to try and use transit in most states.
Also just dangerous…my local train system is simply not safe to use once it starts getting late as a woman. I truly wish I could use it more often, but the safety factor makes it very difficult for me.
It’s such a sad reality, and I’m sorry that you experience that.
I think part of it is the mandatory driving culture - if you can afford a car you will drive, so you only take public transit if you can’t afford to drive yourself. That, plus public transit in the US is typically only available in high population cities, and it feels like there’s little law enforcement around transit locations.
I’m sure there’s other reasons as well but it’s a really unfortunate situation altogether.
“much faster” not “so much faster” and IMO 25% is a sizable difference.
Thanks for the correction. I’ll edit it, though i was intending to paraphrase and not provide a direct word for word quote.
It’s a bit of a semantic debate at this point as to what constitutes a substantial difference in the context of competing scientific studies, but in a casual conversation.
I was under the impression that the original person did a mistake in the mental math. I’m not trying to critique how people feel about differences in speed.
i am the original person. the point of my comment was to explain why I thought that.
I’m tired and missed that, thank you for the clarification.
Ah, the American brain.
Does not sound “over regulated” to me??
In 2022, 42,514 motor vehicle fatalities occurred across the United States¹ This was a 1% decrease in fatal accidents compared to 43,230 deaths from collisions in 2021.¹ In total, 5930,496 motor vehicle accidents were reported to the police in 2022.¹ Among all non-fatal auto accidents in 2022, 1,664,598 caused injuries and 4,226,677 caused damage to property.¹ There were approximately 8,650 motor vehicle accident fatalities in the first quarter of 2024, compared with 8,935 during the same time period in 2023.¹ In total, injuries resulting from motor vehicle accidents caused $481.2 billion in financial costs in 2022.² 1,910 (25%) of the 7,522 pedestrians killed in motor vehicle accidents in 2022 were involved in a hit-and-run accident.¹ Motor vehicle accidents are the second leading cause of deaths resulting from unintentional injury in the United States
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/auto-accident/car-accident-statistics/#3
Ask them if I can do heroin in a church as long as i promise to be responsible
or look at the road, adapt your speed to not run over anything, pedestrians included
people in cars assume that it’s the others that have to be careful and not the person driving one tonne of metal on wheels…
In France, and probably most countries in the world, pedestrians are priority on crosswalk (without lights): it’s just like a Yield the right-of-way intersection when you can engage only if it’s free, and therefore have to slow down.
But we were taught as kids to thank drivers for stopping when it’s actually the law, by this logic I should thank people for stopping at stop signs, red light and stuffs…
My youngest and I have done a lot of walking through our town the last few summers and any close calls were mostly
- twice someone going the wrong way on a one way street
- people turning right on red without stopping, without yielding to pedestrians, without regard to the walk signal
- special hate to people parking or driving on the sidewalk. It’s never been immediately dangerous but you have no business there.
- I do worry about my dog since all too often someone cuts corners enough to be up on the sidewalk in turns and she thinks she can stand near the edge
by this logic I should thank people for stopping at stop signs, red light and stuffs…
Really feels like it these days.
People seem really annoyed whenever they have to stop at a stop sign for me instead of being able to treat it more like a speed bump
Both should take personal responsibilities for their actions. I had to brake more than once because some pedestrian crossed the road without looking up from his or her phone. On the other hand, someone playing around with his / her phone while driving a car should be seriously punished.
