Bobstar posted:

Reminds me of driving in Belgium. 2-lane motorway - I'm going 120 (the speed limit) in the right lane, someone else is overtaking me at around 130 in the left lane (normal). Some guy finds this too slow, undertakes us both on the hard shoulder at 140+.

Bobstar posted:

Reminds me of driving in Belgium. 2-lane motorway - I'm going 120 (the speed limit) in the right lane, someone else is overtaking me at around 130 in the left lane (normal). Some guy finds this too slow, undertakes us both on the hard shoulder at 140+.

Bobstar posted:

Reminds me of driving in Belgium. 2-lane motorway - I'm going 120 (the speed limit) in the right lane, someone else is overtaking me at around 130 in the left lane (normal). Some guy finds this too slow, undertakes us both on the hard shoulder at 140+.

Cup Runneth Over posted:

That guy isn't going to get shot over his car

Why do Americans believe they live in GTA Online

Bobstar posted:

Reminds me of driving in Belgium. 2-lane motorway - I'm going 120 (the speed limit) in the right lane, someone else is overtaking me at around 130 in the left lane (normal). Some guy finds this too slow, undertakes us both on the hard shoulder at 140+.

Kicked Throat posted:

That reminds me of some posts about carjackings i saw on reddit:

That's me. If my car happens to get stolen in the next week I won't have rent. Things are just things, but I have to defend this thing to sustain my livelihood. It's at the front of my mind every night, I carry self defense, & I leave myself room to maneuver every time I stop.

I'm flirting with homelessness & if I lose my car, I'm hosed. I'm of the situation where I'll absolutely get shot over my car & I hate it.

After I wrote that, I actually looked up that a carjacking is covered by comprehensive insurance, so maybe I'm not in such a strife. However I'd imagine a lot aren't so fortunate to afford comprehensive for their car


Wow such freedom, mind body spirit

Cugel the Clever posted:

Any effort to improve alternate modes of transportation or make streets safer is taken as a direct attack on not only the owner's property, but the way they conceive of themselves in society.

Electro-Boogie Jack posted:

i was picking something up the other day and drove on a main street in a pretty dense part of the city. i'm going at or very slightly below the speed limit the entire time, and eventually the driver of a huge pickup truck behind me starts flashing his brights and then honking at me. a few blocks later he guns it through the parking lane to get ahead and then runs a red light right in front of me.

i caught up to him a few blocks later; there was too much traffic to pull that poo poo again and all of his theatrics basically just put him ten feet ahead of where he would have been otherwise. no real point to this story other than that cars bring out the absolute worst in people, and there's nothing to be done other than destroying them all and casting them into the abyss

Cugel the Clever posted:

Car dependency is a huge factor in keeping the poor poor. Without decent public transit, walkable/bikeable cities, and affordable homes near centers of economic opportunity, many are effectively forced into the purchase of a car. Often, the car they can afford will prove to be many times more expensive than anticipated because of maintenance, gas, and storage, leaving them stuck choosing between feeding themselves or their auto.

This helps feed into cars being status symbols. One mustn't be a poor slob walking to work, taking transit, or car pooling. A car—the bigger, louder, and more aggressive, the better—is a sign of success inherent to the owner's identity. Any effort to improve alternate modes of transportation or make streets safer is taken as a direct attack on not only the owner's property, but the way they conceive of themselves in society.

Dolphin posted:

every once in a while I'll have carbrain thoughts and have to correct them

like when someone is jaywalking and have to hit my brakes and I'm like "what a loving moron"

then I'm like "oh wait no, maybe I'M the loving moron


oh wow i can't believe how much of a loving moron i am"

Cup Runneth Over posted:

That guy isn't going to get shot over his car

Why do Americans believe they live in GTA Online

Cugel the Clever posted:

Cugel the Clever posted:

Electro-Boogie Jack posted:

there's something that happens in the brains of drivers when the possibility of going fast turns into an entitlement to go fast

Cugel the Clever posted:

It's incredible how deliberately unwalkable much of our car-exclusive place planning has left us. Urban areas at least tend to throw a fig leaf at pedestrians with narrow sidewalks and marked crosswalks, but pedestrians being forced into a game of frogger is the norm across much of America where folks are either forced into a death-defying 30-second jaywalk across 8 lanes of traffic or into a half-hour-long, Odyssean journey to the nearest intersection where drivers will still only stop for you if they have a light and rage at you for having the temerity to slow their roll. Drivers are so car-brained that this is just normal.

cool av posted:

i think the anger towards jaywalkers is that the driver is performing an extremely complex and extremely dangerous operation that demands very specific conditions to do safely and they sort of subconsciously realize this but don’t quite close the loop on ‘people shouldnt be doing this’ and instead (sort of rightly) see any change in condition as a dangerous affront

Cup Runneth Over posted:

I think it's mostly because jaywalking is dangerous and they dont want to be the one who accidentally hits someone crossing in the middle of the street with their car. so yes basically that

by the cartoon logic above, it's just straight up throwing yourself into the pit instead of using the rickety board to cross. it's dumb

vyelkin posted:

the house I grew up in was right in front of a stop sign that was one short block away from a traffic light. Many times as a child I was almost run over by drivers speeding through the stop sign so that they could go wait at a red light fifty metres away.

Lastgirl posted:

this is tremendous content

https://twitter.com/9EndlessShrimp6/status/1360783516695465986

Cup Runneth Over posted:

I think it's mostly because jaywalking is dangerous and they dont want to be the one who accidentally hits someone crossing in the middle of the street with their car. so yes basically that

by the cartoon logic above, it's just straight up throwing yourself into the pit instead of using the rickety board to cross. it's dumb

Jokerpilled Drudge posted:

it is the drivers who are culpable

Polo-Rican posted:

this is a good quote. gonna remember this one thank you

cool av posted:

i think the anger towards jaywalkers is that the driver is performing an extremely complex and extremely dangerous operation that demands very specific conditions to do safely and they sort of subconsciously realize this but don’t quite close the loop on ‘people shouldnt be doing this’ and instead (sort of rightly) see any change in condition as a dangerous affront

Electro-Boogie Jack posted:

thanks brother

yeah, i've thought about this phenomenon too when you see people saying bike lanes and pedestrian zones are dangerous and put people at risk because then people will bike and walk, and I think a lot of them are poking around the idea that cars are just too loving dangerous, and then they instinctively reject it because car brain thinks 'it's the presence of cyclists that's dangerous' instead of 'it's the presence of 5k lbs of metal moving fast enough to liquify someone that's dangerous'

SKULL.GIF posted:

I had to remove the speed lines unfortunately, they didn't look good shrunk down.

Cugel the Clever posted:

lol, I'm a crazy person and have nothing better to do, so here's my ramble:

The point of the cartoon is that it's utter madness that car-brained street planning effectively carves these huge canyons of certain death into places.

There are two contexts in which people cross the street at places other than marked intersections:

1. Dense, walkable areas where the flow of car traffic should be a distant priority behind creating a place that is safe and inviting to people. Note that dense and walkable doesn't have to mean "big city"! Before cars, small towns were built to be walkable. Now idiots drive 30+ minutes to those which survive in that format to get the exciting and quaint experience of a bustling, walkable main street before retreating to their isolated, car-dependent lives.
   
2. Sprawly, auto-exclusive areas where, as I mentioned above, anyone not in a car is considered inherently subhuman, so planners and traffic engineers shove their faces in the dirt and force them to either detour half an hour to the nearest intersection or make a desperate 30-second dash across the death zone, fully aware that drivers would receive zero punishment for murdering them ("they just jumped out of nowhere," says the driver going 20 over the limit and texting).
   

The former is easier to fix: use physical infrastructure and automatic enforcement to put drivers in their place while investing heavily in making alternate modes of transit safer and more reliable. This is actually conceivable because dense places already have the layout to facilitate it and only require the political will to make relatively minor adjustments to street infrastructure. There's also a disproportionately large number of people that electeds might listen to actively pushing to make car-free living more feasible.

For the latter, the poor in those places are hosed. Car dependency is irrevocably baked into the built landscape and any alternative is fundamentally inconceivable to the vast majority of residents. Making it slightly more possible to get by without a car is both extra expensive due to the sprawl and has effectively zero constituency beyond the already disadvantaged. As individuals, I don't know what we can do beyond fight to make neighborhoods in the first scenario more affordable to all

tl;dr:

Jokerpilled Drudge posted:

it is the drivers who are culpable

Lewis v. Amorous, 3 Ga. App. 50 (1907) posted:

It is insisted in the argument that automobiles are to be classed with ferocious animals, and that the law relating to the duty of the owners of such animals is to be applied. It is not the ferocity of the automobile that is to be feared, but the ferocity of those who drive them. Until human agency interferes, they are usually harmless.

While by reason of the rate of pay allotted to the judges of this State, few, if any, have ever owned one of these machines, yet some of them have occasionally ridden in them, thereby acquiring some knowledge of them; and we have therefore, found out that there are times when these machines not only lack ferocity, but assume such an indisposition to go that it taxes the limit of human ingenuity to make them move at all. They are not to be classed with bad dogs, vicious bulls, evil-disposed mules, and the like.

Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, Charles Marohn Jr. posted:

Since human error is inherent to the operation of an automobile, and since humans are not machines that can be fixed but complex organisms that respond to their environment in emergent and novel ways, there is no strategy to remove reckless behavior completely. In a society that accepts drinking and driving as normal, people will drink and drive.

This is the reality that faced the first highway engineers, and it forced them to make a fundamental breakthrough in understanding — one that has saved a countless number of lives. Instead of exclusively trying to fix the behavior of people driving automobiles, engineers needed to reshape the environment being driven so that it forgives the common mistakes that drivers make. People who drive will make mistakes, but we can keep them safe by anticipating those mistakes and compensating for them in our design.

The application of this profound insight is really simple. Consider a two-lane roadway with traffic flowing in opposite directions. Sometimes a driver in such a situation will drift out of their lane. Perhaps they are distracted by something on the side of the road or a child in the back seat, or maybe they are driving impaired. The reason does not matter because drifting into another lane is a common error that drivers make.

The engineer can compensate for this error by making the driving lanes wider. Now the driver has more room, and a little bit of drifting will not be a problem. The risk of head-on collision is dramatically reduced. Even so, there are times when a driver will fully leave their lane, either accidentally or on purpose. Perhaps their car breaks down, an animal comes onto the roadway, or they are driving with a high level of impairment. Going off the road surface can cause a driver to lose control. The vehicle may flip or spin and cause serious injury.

The engineer can compensate for this error by building a shoulder or recovery zone on the outside edges of the driving surface. That way if the driver exits the lane, they have room to recover control of the vehicle and get it back on course.

Even with wide lanes and shoulders, sometimes things transpire where the vehicle leaves the entire roadway. When that occurs, there needs to be a way to dissipate the kinetic energy of the moving vehicle before it smashes into something. Rapid changes in speed are deeply traumatic to the human body.

For these reasons, the engineer will establish a clear zone on the edge of the roadway. This is an area devoid of trees, large rocks, steep slopes, and other obstacles that would prevent a more gradual deceleration from occurring.

Wider lanes, recovery areas, and clear zones, when combined with gradual curves and the flattening of hills and depressions, form the core of the forgiving design approach. On America's roads, these innovations were revolutionary. They are so successful that they have become standard practice all over the world, saving innumerable lives.

That is the story of America's roads. On our streets, the story is much different.

-

Risk Compensation
Everyone has a level of risk that they are willing to assume. I have no qualms driving through most blizzards, even when I drove a little Honda Fit. My mother-in-law has an all-wheel drive Subaru, but she stays home if there is a threat of snow. I would never take a ride on a motorcycle, let alone drive one myself, yet I know lots of people feel very comfortable with the risk of cycling a curvy country road at 60 mph, the threat of a deer running across their path omnipresent.

Not only do we all have a different threshold for risk, but that threshold may change depending on time, place, conditions, age, and so forth. For example, I may develop a higher threshold for risk when I am running late for an event than when I am on my way home. I may have a willingness to take on slightly more risk in the car alone than when I am shuttling my daughters and their friends to softball practice.

Understand that I am not talking about recklessness. I am generally not a reckless person. Few people are, but choosing to drive somewhere, or ride in a car, is to assume some level of risk. We all assume risks every day as part of life. What risks we are willing to take is an individual decision based on our own risk threshold.

So, what happens to our threshold for risk when engineers take steps to make a road safer? What happens when lanes are widened, hills are flattened, curves are straightened, obstacles are removed, and recovery zones are established? Does our willingness to take risks change? Does my teenager suddenly realize her mortality? Does my mother-in-law suddenly become more reckless? Of course not. Our individual threshold for risk does not change. What changes is the level of risk we perceive.

Pretend that a person drives the posted speed of 55 miles per hour and perceives that, at that speed, the road met their exact threshold for risk. Then the roadway is modified to be safer, with a wider, straighter, and flatter course along with expanded clear zones. Now that same driver perceives that the roadway at 55 miles per hour is less risky. There is now a gap between the risk that the driver is willing to bear and the risk that they perceive. How does that driver respond?

The answer is that they utilize that gap in some other way. Consider an extreme example to help visualize the effect. Say that you are driving across Nebraska on the interstate. You can see for miles in every direction. The lanes are wide. The road is straight. There are wide shoulders, no trees if you go off the road, and no cars anywhere in sight. Do you feel comfortable looking down to change the radio station? How about talking to someone in the passenger's seat? Talking on your smartphone? Texting? Speeding? Reading a newspaper?

Driving the interstate across Nebraska is below most people's risk threshold. A driver has a tolerance for risk that is unlikely to be reached there and so they will feel comfortable doing other things. Some will feel comfortable changing the radio station. Some will speed. Some will text while driving. I am not making a case about whether this is reckless or not, merely how the human being who is driving the vehicles perceives the risk.

Now, ponder a busy parking lot at an elementary school. How many people text while driving in such a place? Talk on a smartphone? Speed? Read a newspaper? Likely very few, and it is clear as to why: The driver is going to perceive greater risk due to the complex and random nature of the parking lot environment. This is true even though speeds are slow. In fact, and this is critical to note, slowing down is the natural response for drivers perceiving an increased level of risk.

Risk compensation is the topic of a fascinating book called Risk (Routledge, 1995) by Emeritus Professor John Adams from University College London. Safety advocates often like to believe that adding safety features to roadways will make driving roads safer, but Adams points out that increased roadway safety induces people to drive more. While the death rate per mile has continually decreased, the total number of dead has remained consistently high.

In Risk, Adams describes the complex mental calculation that we all perform:

quote:

The reward of, say, getting to the church on time might induce a prospective bridegroom to drive faster and more recklessly than normally. In the terminology of our model this behaviour is accounted for by the driver balancing a higher than normal propensity to take risks with a higher than normal perceived danger. This propensity and perception are states of mind that are not directly measurable and are assumed to be responses to external conditions that have passed through cultural filters. The mental mechanisms by which such balancing acts are performed are but dimly understood, but behaviour is assumed to seek an “optimal” trade-off between the benefits of risk-taking and the costs.

Analyzing that tradeoff is way more difficult to do when the costs of risk-taking are transferred to others.

-

Unforgiving Streets
How does a typical driver respond when forgiving design principles developed for America's roads are instead applied to America's streets? What happens when we take a street, the framework for complex human habitat, a platform for building wealth, and forgive the common mistakes of drivers?

What happens when we widen drive lanes, flatten hills and depressions, and smooth out turning movements? What happens when we add buffer areas and clear zones to the edges of our streets?

The answer is obvious. We communicate to the driver that their common mistakes will be forgiven. We transfer the risk from driver to those outside of a vehicle within the place. We induce the driver to utilize their risk gap by driving more often and, for many, driving faster than they otherwise would.

From Adams in Risk:

quote:

Over many decades, research, policy, legislation, education and highway engineering have all focused strongly on the safety of people in vehicles, to the neglect of the welfare of vulnerable road users, those on foot or bicycle. The safety measures adopted have created vehicles that are safer to have crashes in, and road environments that are more forgiving of heedless driving.

It is a shockingly common experience across North America to have a street designed to accommodate speeds of 60 miles per hour, traffic flow at 45 miles per hour, and have the legal speed limit designated at 30 miles per hour.

Many traffic engineers look at that scenario as providing a safety buffer. They argue that there is margin for error and greater safety because the design speed is more than the posted speed. This not only ignores what is going on, but it is the exact opposite of the great insight the engineering profession made with forgiving design.

Let me reiterate that insight: Instead of exclusively trying to fix the behavior of people driving automobiles, engineers need to reshape the environment being driven so that it forgives the common mistakes drivers make. People who drive will make mistakes, but we can keep them safe by anticipating those mistakes and compensating for them in our design.

What are the common mistakes that drivers make on streets? The primary one is that they drive too fast for the actual conditions. Let us consider State Street and the collision that killed Destiny Gonzalez.

State Street is a complex environment. Anyone standing outside the Central Library for an hour will witness dozens of people crossing mid-block. Yet the wide lanes, multiple lanes, and recovery area signal to drivers that State Street is a simple environment to navigate.

Sandra Zemtsova was intoxicated. Alcohol can make some people feel overly confident, and they will misjudge risk and speed as a result, but that does not seem to be the case here. It is more likely that Zemtsova's buzz made her more risk adverse. It was dark out. It was raining. The surface was icy. Slow driving is a classic sign of an impaired driver.3

The legal speed limit on State Street is 30 miles per hour. Police reports suggest that Zemtsova was driving 42 miles per hour when she struck Destiny Gonzalez and her cousin. That sounds like she was speeding, but based on my experiences on State Street, I believe Zemtsova was driving slower than she would have under normal conditions.

Besides local knowledge of the library and the frequency with which people cross mid-block, she had no reason to suspect that anyone would be standing in the middle of the street at that time. At 42 miles per hour, Zemtsova had exited the signalized intersection just 4.5 seconds prior. There she had received a green signal light telling her that the pathway was clear and, more importantly, that it was exclusively hers to occupy.

If the goal is to forgive the mistakes of the driver, this design is doing the opposite. It tricks drivers like Zemtsova into making more mistakes — more costly mistakes — than they otherwise would. It is not accurately communicating anything near the level of risk that is present.

Am I arguing that it is okay to drive drunk? Absolutely not. Nonetheless, let's not pretend that people aren't driving drunk routinely on State Street. Impaired driving is a crime, and it should be a crime. Zemtsova spent years in jail and will be on probation for many more. She should pay a high price for her recklessness. Yet we are fooling ourselves if we fail to recognize that only the smallest fraction of impaired trips ever ends in tragedy, let alone some type of sanction.

Almost every person who has driven State Street impaired, whether from alcohol, illegal drugs, legal prescriptions, lack of sleep, caffeine, or multiple other things that limit a driver's capacity to engage fully while operating a vehicle, arrives at their destination with no problem. It is extremely rare that the kind of bad decision Zemtsova made results in someone's death. Extremely rare.

While it may be a rare event for any given Springfield resident, run the scenario every day with tens of thousands of vehicles traveling along State Street conflicting with dozens of people crossing on foot at the Central Library, and the statistically inevitable outcome is a tragedy like the one that killed Destiny Gonzalez.

Without change, there will be more people killed on State Street. The design makes it inevitable.

Random, but inevitable.

-

Forgiving Streets
On our roads, we compensate for the mistakes that drunk drivers make. We spend billions every year building and maintaining elaborate systems to ensure that even intoxicated drivers make it home safely. So how would we compensate for the mistakes Sandra Zemtsova made? How would we make State Street forgiving?

To be safe, the street must communicate the real level of risk to the driver. In other words, the driver must feel discomfort driving in a manner that is unsafe. In Risk, John Adams describes one way this communication could occur:

quote:

If all motor vehicles were to be fitted with long sharp spikes emerging from the centres of their steering wheels (or, if you prefer, high explosives set to detonate on impact), the disparities in vulnerability and lethality between cyclists and lorry drivers would be greatly reduced. There would probably be a redistribution of casualties, but also a reduction in the total number of casualties. Motorists driving with a heightened awareness of their own vulnerability would drive in a way that also benefited cyclists and pedestrians.

If this seems grotesque to you, know that it did to me as well the first time I heard it. In a conversation with the late Ben Hamilton-Baillie, the renowned urban designer and shared-space expert, he walked me through a similar scenario, including seats belts that automatically unhooked and airbags that shut off once the motor vehicle entered an urban space. This is the exact opposite of how I was trained to think of design, and I had a hard time getting the moral of the story.

Let me point out something about State Street — something commonly found in cities across North America — that will perhaps make clear the transfer of risk that has already occurred on our streets.

[b]Had Sagrario Gonzalez chosen to walk to the signalized intersection at Chestnut Street instead of attempting to cross State Street in front of the library, she would have been able to see up close the breakaway base at the bottom of the traffic signal. Just feet beneath where she would have pressed the button requesting permission to cross, the signal pole is attached to the ground with a series of sheer pins.

These pins are designed to sheer off and allow the pole to collapse if struck by a motor vehicle traveling at sufficient speeds. In the spirit of forgiving design, if a driver loses control of the vehicle, exits the travel lane, mounts the curb, and comes crashing across the sidewalk, the goal of the design is to have them continue through the signal pole, albeit with some of that force dissipated. This is preferred to having the vehicle come to an abrupt stop, which would magnify potential injuries to the driver and any passengers.

This is preferred even though it will mean horrible damage to anyone standing at the corner waiting to cross. And it is not like someone crossing there is rare. Hundreds of people cross there every day. Crossing there is what Sagrario Gonzalez was expected to do, after all. There is a bench placed right next to this pole, inviting people to sit in a place where the chance of a driver losing control and going off the roadway at high speeds is so great that the city installed breakaway poles.

That is grotesque, but that is what has been built.

Designing a forgiving street is the opposite approach to designing a forgiving road. Instead of widening lanes, we narrow them. Instead of smoothing curves, we tighten them. Instead of providing clear zones, we create edge friction. Instead of a design speed, we establish a target maximum travel speed.

On our streets, we want the price paid for mistakes to be paid in fender benders and shattered headlights instead of in human lives and suffering. Sandra Zemtsova should have hit a curb or a bollard long before she ran into Destiny Gonzalez.

an actual frog posted:

SA-hosted my edit of this:


https://fi.somethingawful.com/safs/titles/1a/36/00111561.0014.png

Hubbert posted:

[snip]

Hubbert posted:

Sphyre posted:

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Sphyre posted:

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