Just one more edit.
The victim, who walked with a cane, was making his way through a crosswalk with highly visible markings while he had the walk signal. He was hospitalized after the crash with several broken bones. But because the driver stayed at the scene and was “cooperative,” SFPD spokesperson Albie Esparza told ABC 7 that police determined it to be nothing more than “an unfortunate traffic collision.”
many law enforcement officials still operate under the assumption that cyclists and pedestrians are at fault in collisions because they don’t belong on the roads.
Half of all pedestrians hit on Delancey Street are struck while they have the walk signal, according to Benson.
Yet no where near this proportion of incidents leads to a criminal trial, where facts can be determined fairly. Is it not even potentially a crime in this city to drive vehicles over people following walk signals?
One reporter assured readers that biking doesn’t lead to excessive sweatiness, another found that her nighttime ride on a busy road wasn’t as perilous as expected, and a number of them found that walking to the station made them see their neighborhoods with fresh eyes.
The only time I sweat because of cycling is when I get all hot and bothered and from being asked dumbass questions about it. Including whether I arrive at work drenched in sweat from a casual 25 minute ride. I arrive in the same condition as my coworkers who have traveled by train, foot, or cycling. We all experience the weather—and it happens to be winter out there at the moment. That this preoccupation with sweat continues year round shows just how disconnected some people are from the world outside their houses and cars. They live in a climate controlled bubble.
But yes it is nice some reporters at a Connecticut paper have bravely tried living for one day without a personal automobile, just as the majority of earthlings do every single day. But be careful: it’s addictive!
This is really outrageous. DOT hired a corps of pedestrian safety managers in response to one politically motivated Daily News editorial about “pedestrian perdition” on the Manhattan Bridge, even though there had been no deaths, just the random complaint of an editor who got yelled at by a cyclist one day.
But a little girl died crossing the street and there’s no response to Silver and no pedestrian safety managers deployed to keep people alive? How tone deaf can the DOT be?
If the DOT wants to disprove the meme that it does not listen to the community, this is not helping.
Hiring those $80k / month “pedestrian safety managers” to loaf around on cycling paths that demonstrated no safety problem was a low point for the DOT, if not the human race generally.
The City Council enacts legislation to add roadblocks to new bike lanes, bizarrely claim they hurt business, and take stabs at Sadik-Kahn. But these same elected officials do not think about the massive scale of traffic violence: about 300 killed a year and another three thousand seriously injured.
NYPD needs to crack down on dangerous driving like what killed Mathieu Lefevre, but it’s not just dangerous drivers who are at fault. Felix Salmon points to studies finding that 2/3rds of bike accidents happen because of unsafe cycling and safer biking would surely keep people alive.
Doh. A very nice call to action on traffic danger had to be watered down at the last moment by the irresistible urge to be the most reasonable man in the room by reminding everyone that “both sides” are inevitably “at fault”.
Here we have two studies uplifted by their association with the great Felix Salmon. Each time they are cited their results can be exaggerated and their credibility bolstered by their prior esteemed repeaters. Salmon quoted a book that quoted one clause from each study:
According to Mapes, a 1996 study by the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center found that “as many as a third of all bike accidents involved simply riding against the flow of traffic,” and a 2003–2004 Orlando, Florida, study found that “nearly two-thirds [of bike accidents] involved riding on the sidewalk or another unsafe choice by the cyclist.”
Do you spot the gross errors in Drum Major’s paraphrasing? It is like a game of telephone, except with adults who feign themselves more reasonable the more they garble basic facts. It is not “2/3rds of bike accidents”: in one study it is “as many as a third” and in another it is “nearly two-thirds”. (The average of that is less than half, which sounds rather different.)
And just as fundamentally, the studies do not find that accidents “happen because” of cyclist error: they “involve” some reported cyclist error. Traffic crashes often involve poor choices by several parties. This doesn’t mean that you can’t say anything based on studies of some classes of cycling error, but it does mean that you can’t assign fault based on them. To do that you would have to conduct a more detailed analysis than anyone above has had the interest to conduct. They want to declare fault but they don’t want to be bothered with the chore of determining it.
The cost of this sloppy citing is that myths undermining the Drum Major’s advocacy are reinforced. They think they are strengthening their message by sounding extra-reasonable, but really they are giving readers a reason to dismiss it: the belief that killed cyclists are usually at fault for their own deaths. It’s not some minor side question, it’s our society’s primary rationalization for the fatal status quo. It is the engine of the “culture of accepting traffic deaths”, and it has been given a shy squirt of gasoline by the same people saying it must be shut down.
Victim-blaming is the only way we can morally tolerate the regular killings of pedestrians and cyclists. When we have the courage to stop blaming the dead, the system of imperiling the living will unravel.
Today more than 12 percent of trips are made by foot or bike, yet less than 2 percent of our nation’s transportation funding goes towards biking and pedestrian infrastructure. According to the Alliance for Biking and Walking, bike commuting increased 57 percent between 2000 and 2009. Instead of increasing investment in transportation options that Americans want, the House bill appears to funnel more dollars towards roads…
“We have built America in a way that is, I believe, is fundamentally unhealthy,” Dr. Jackson says. “It prevents us from walking. It inhibits us from socializing. It removes trees and the things that make our air quality better. We could not have designed an environment that is more difficult for people’s well being at this point.”
I honestly think the majority of people feel there’s little which can be done to reduce deaths/injuries caused by motor vehicles. Whenever I’ve discussed this with people, the pat answer is usually “you have to die somehow”, or “it’s the cost of doing business”. We used to think the same way about crime up until the early 1990s. It was just accepted as a fact of life that you might be robbed, raped, or even killed if you stepped out the door. The only way this was turned around was by actually significantly reducing crime rates. When this happened, people wanted them reduced even further, to the point where we went from about 2000 murders annually to around 500. I feel if some measures we take now reduce the carnage to the point where it happens infrequently enough to make the front pages, then we might have public support for reducing it even further.
