- cross-posted to:
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
Daylighting, which involves removing parked cars from around crosswalks in order to improve visibility and just wiped out about 14,000 street parking spaces, has proved especially controversial.
“If someone doesn’t die because of it, we will never know, while the living have to suffer,” Nina Geneson Otis wrote in an email to The Standard. The real estate broker said daylighting is the kind of policy that makes Democrats lose elections.
Others say the city’s actions remove responsibility from pedestrians to look out for their own safety. “A pedestrian can do anything, and be irresponsible, and no harm will come to them?” Brandi said, describing the policies as “idiot-proof.”
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The idea that a pedestrian walking anywhere but on a limited access highway would ever be at fault for a collision with an automobile is a direct result of century-old propaganda by the moral equivalent of the NRA.
If i made a self-propelled battering ram with remote controlled steering I would rightly be held to strict liabily if anyone was hurt. But if we put a a chair in the same thing and call it a “vehicle”, suddenly the rules change in our favor.
I like cars and driving, and can easily imagine a number of mitigating circumstances that would shift liability away from the driver, but the presumption that once-walkable city streets are for cars is the result of fierce industrial lobbying and not a reasoned public policy process.
For all its faults, the NRA knows that guns are unsafe. It promotes “gun safety” not “shirt safety” – it doesn’t blame people who get shot accidentally because they were wearing the wrong kind of shirt. Whereas cities around the world talk about “bike safety” when the unsafe element is not the bike at all.
Nina Geneson Otis wrote in an email to The Standard. The real estate broker said daylighting is the kind of policy that makes Democrats lose elections.
Urbaninsm, like climate change, shouldn’t be a political issue but oddly is. I wonder who could be behind it all?
Is this what we are going to do now, anything remotely good say “things like that is why Dems lose elections” as we watch people and our planet die.
Cool. This is great.
This is funny because in the bay area as nowhere else I’ve ever lived, pedestrians actually take the right of way as they should. In Berkeley they don’t even glance over their shoulder, it is completely up to the driver. Doesn’t work where the driver can’t see them, though, so I think peds and (most) drivers are more conscious of that as a bad situation. I don’t believe real estate agents speak for residents.
I found it much more annoying as a driver elsewhere where people wait two feet from the curb and wave at you to come to a complete stop before they start crossing. Or while walking, after I’ve stepped off the curb drivers half a block away assume I must not have seen them so they honk at me. A lot of theatre and emotion for what is really just a normal part of driving (don’t run into people even if it means you have to slow down).
Drivers don’t stop. I’m not stupid enough to step off the curb until it’s clear you’ve seen me and are stopping
You might, I might, but Kids and some adults don’t have the awareness. And it’s not their fault they don’t have the awareness either
Exactly. If I’m putting myself in front of a vehicle, I HAVE to know that it will not run me over. Especially since drivers in my area seem to be unable to stop in front of stop lines.
So common to see the rear wheels past the stop line. I wish cops would at least give out warnings to reduce this habit. Its so normalized most don’t even realize to stop before the line.
One thing that I didn’t realize, as an American, is that having traffic lights on the far side of the intersection isn’t universal. If we only put them on the near side, drivers would have to stop behind the line, or else they’d be unable to see when the light turns green. Another example of better infrastructure being better than enforcement.
Dude so many intersections around me don’t even have the stop lines, because they were either never painted in the first place, or they’ve faded or been paved over
I’m not suggesting you go blindly, but it’s common practice to step off the curb – they don’t have to pay any attention to you at all until you do. My practice is to avoid eye contact until I’m really in front of them, but obviously if they aren’t stopping you don’t keep walking.
More bad driving practices in the US, that became worse as people forgot how to drive over pandemic ….
- we allow “right turn on red”, but everyone seems to have forgotten “after coming to a complete stop”. So many times they don’t even slow down, and yes I’ve almost gotten hit like that several times
- many drivers stop across the crosswalk or ahead of the stop line. Even if people stop, they could have already run over a pedestrian. So many times I’ve had to choose whether to walk out into the intersection, or behind the car blocking my right of way.
- then there’s the ”suicide lane”, where even though a car sees you and stops, that doesn’t mean the next lane will. What happens when you’re partway across and no one else stops?
- and the ever more popular running a red light. Just yesterday, I slowed to an easy stop at an already red light and two cars behind me pulled around to go through.
I agree drivers got crazy after the pandemic. I haven’t been in the bay area since then and maybe my remembered experience just doesn’t exist anymore.
I almost got nailed by a city bus on 5th and Market in SF after the green walk signal turned on. Somebody literally grabbed my jacket and pulled me back and maybe saved my life.
The most braindead article ever…
“People die from leopards attacks, leopards say people should be more careful”
I mean, there are plenty of warnings and advice on how to do things like hike through bear or cougar country. Someone who gets mauled trying to pet a bear cub isn’t going to get much sympathy.
The beating heart of American progressiveism: San Fransisco where the residents would rather kill the poor than inconvenience everyone else. If only you could patch a caved in skull with a pussy hat…
This article is because san francisco is actually trying to address pedestrian fatalities instead of just writing them off as the cost of modernity. Most of the article is from reactionaries, who may not even live here, mad about progressive, at least by American standards, policies that the city is implementing like daylighting.
You could live in a socialist utopia and you could still find people to quote saying they liked it back when the poor knew there place.
San francisco isn’t perfect but it’s still miles ahead of almost every city in America. That may be a low bar but it’s something.
I hear you, but the article is full of dissenting opinions and quotes from people that disagree with what should be a very common sense policy. Like, why even give a platform to someone who says stuff like “If someone doesn’t die because of it, we will never know, while the living have to suffer"? Why disingenuously portray the issue of pedestrian deaths as some back and forth battle between two equal parties, instead of the incredibly one sided bullying it really is?
Lmao. No. Where I live drivers have no problem going right though the crosswalks while people are in them.
I thought they were going to talk about the people who cross at random places, wearing dark clothing, at night. But no they chose to complain about the people crossing correctly who get harassed by cars.
Normally, I’m 100% on the pedestrian’s side, and I think drivers bear the responsibility in basically all urban traffic situation. However, after visiting San Francisco, I can see why it’s a bit different. Those hills severely limit visibility on so many of those crosswalks, and if you’re driving up one of them, and the sun is in your eyes, I don’t know how you would approach an intersection safely. After less than a week in that city, I realized that pedestrians really do have to cross responsibly (and also I would never, ever drive there).
That being said, I’ve never seen less people jay walking in an American city than I did in San Francisco. Also, all of the measures laid out in this article seem like good, common sense ideas. If drivers think that the pedestrians need to be more responsible, fine, but that’s no reason to demand the rollback of potentially lifesaving safety measures.
Those hills severely limit visibility on so many of those crosswalks, and if you’re driving up one of them, and the sun is in your eyes, I don’t know how you would approach an intersection safely.
If you can’t see where you’re going then your speed should be as low as possible. I’m not from SF so maybe it already exists, but ideally there would be traffic calming measures such as lane narrowing, speed bumps, etc and so going faster than around 20 mph or so would feel very unnatural.
Yeah, but those hills are so steep that you’ve got to give it a ton of gas just to get up them. Like, imagine laying on the gas super hard just to keep yourself going above 20. As you crest the hill, the sun hits your eyes, blinding you to the person that was invisible to you until a millisecond ago, who is crossing against the light at exactly the time you’re trying to lay off the gas so you don’t start accelerating.
Don’t get me wrong, I support every measure listed in the article, and I think the people who want them repealed because they find them inconvenient are assholes. If Daylighting makes it too hard to park, well, maybe don’t drive; it’s an extremely walkable city with a good public transit system anyway. But this is the only city I’ve ever been to where, when I hear drivers say, “pedestrians need do better,” I think, “well, that’s not just entitlement, everyone really does need act responsibly here, even pedestrians.”
