I’ve tried sorting this out a couple of times, and I think I’m missing a piece of vocabulary. I get that left turns in Ireland would be like right turns in North America. So, a left turn in Ireland is not crossing the line of parallel oncoming traffic.
What I’m missing is where the “inside lane” is located. I can see from research that the inside lane is the edge nearest the side of the road, and the “outside lane” is nearest the centre of the road.
Where it gets odd is the implication that the traffic turning left is somewhere different than the inside lane. In every North American jurisdiction I have encountered, a right turn is done from the rightmost lane. In some rare circumstances, you might turn right from the next lane to the left – but only if the rightmost lane must turn right, and is not permitted to travel straight-through, and so has no right-of-way. So, getting back to your statement, if I was turning left in a legal manner in Ireland, I would find it extremely odd if there was a lane for traffic to my left. The very existence of a lane to my left should mean I am not permitted to make a left turn. (There are some careful exceptions for long trucks turning at sharp intersections.)
And yet cycling extends life expectancy. Perhaps you’re overestimating the dangers cyclists are exposed to; and perhaps underestimating the dangers inherent in sitting watching other people exercise.
Way too subtle for me. Black ice and trees are risk factors that you can take into account… or not. Corners with crosswalks are also risk factors. Going slower often prevents bad things from happening. Whenever you take a risk, accidents can happen. There is no such thing as “no risk”, but there is such a thing as “unnecessary risk”. Which is why it’s quite obvious who to blame for some accidents, and no one is to blame for other accidents. They’re all accidents, though, and redefining the word accident to mean only “accidents where no one was at fault” won’t prevent any … bad things … in the future.
And women should dress chaste, because “she was asking for it” is the first statement uttered after any type of rape. Come ON…
Instead, I propose a two-step solution:
stop victim blaming
take blind drivers off the road
When I drive a car, I take care to drive in such a way that I can see anyone I need to stop for. And that includes cyclists. Who, by the way, aren’t invisible. So far, I’ve even managed to spot all the cyclists without proper lighting at night that I have encountered. If I had run them over, they might have shared the blame, but I didn’t, and all the other cyclists were certainly very visible.
When I ride my bike, I get to go at a decent speed according to the official rules of traffic.
Ummm, that’s not the definition of the legal term. Details may differ between different countries, but not by that much.
Cycles, cars, and trucks on the side road yield to cycles, cars, and trucks on the main road. At railroad crossings, the train gets right of way (it doesn’t get much more well-protected than that).
Pedestrians at crosswalks get right-of-way. Pedestrians crossing the street elsewhere don’t.
Which is not even true for rides of less than 20 minutes or so. Cycles are just ideal for mid-sized European cities.
Problem is the way the human image recognition system works. It takes longer to recognize small unexpected objects than large expected objects. For the vast majority of drivers their brains won’t have enough time to recognize a motorcyclist, a bicyclist, or a pedestrian unless they actually stop at a stop sign./
There is an officious, ugly, and ultimately contemptible attitude on display in this response. It’s shared by many here who have gone on at length about the “need” to punish car drivers more aggressively for errors that result in accidents.
Cycling (even for commuting) is a heavily educated/professional class endeavor in North America today. People who cycle are disproportionately from the classes that expect others to be ever-aware of them in all moments of life. Privileged people, who are quick to defend their every unrecognized privilege as normal, legal, rational, what have-you. People from this class can be badly shocked when they put themselves in the same position as the under class, by being bodily in traffic without the protection of a big steel rig.
They can also be quite messily dead if they don’t look out for themselves well beyond what “should be” needed, based on the law or right-of-way rules. This is a fact, whether it peeves you, or not. It will remain true, whether we create another conduit into our ever-growing penal state, or not.
Marty’s argument has been made in a very polite, clear way, and it’s received little but pettish malice in lieu of reasoned rebuttals. Including an inane comment about the fact that he hasn’t posted here before (as though his very well written posts are de facto driving trollies because of this).
This is all unsurprising, given the make-up of this venue. But… it’s still impressively repellent.
Funny how this discussion instantly becomes one of car vs. cyclist, even though the case under consideration was that of a pedestrian who was struck and killed (while obeying the law).
Not to say that bikes aren’t at risk of collisions with cars, but hey – What about the pedestrians??
If you look at mortality statistics, the people who are in fact putting their lives at greatest risk are those who drive to work instead of riding a bicycles. Marty’s anecdotes are only anecdotes, and are most likely influenced by his own cognitive biases. If you think Marty’s comments were appropriate, then how on earth can you think that the Marktech comment you quoted is inappropriate – it is based on statistics, not anecdote, and it points out the far larger danger from excess sitting in cars. If you’d like a sanity check on your conventional wisdom, I recommend consulting “OECD, Cycling, Health and Safety”, skip straight to page 44 if you want to see a discussion of the dangers of driving (3 studies, the smallest boost in expected annual mortality risk is over 25%).
I’m a little surprised that black ice is in the “accident” category. I know a guy who fell and broke his collarbone because of black ice, and his reaction was not “wow, I guess black ice happens” – instead he said “hey, you ride with studded tires, what’s a good brand, I don’t want this to happen again” (Nokian W240 is belt+suspenders, Nokian A10 or Schwalbe Winter are probably enough on streets). The possibility of broken bones causes change in behavior that oddly enough influence the rate of “accidents” – as if those accidents are in fact not beyond our control.
Similarly, all the complaining about difficult-to-see pedestrians and cyclists – if you ride a bicycle on an unlit multiuse path, you will encounter pedestrians and cyclists that have taken only minimal steps to be visible, and somehow, the desire to (1) not be a jerk and (2) avoid broken bones means that I manage, with all of 3 watts of LED light, to spot pedestrians by the reflective bits on their shoes, or by the retroreflection from the eyeballs of the dogs that they are walking, or by the glow of a cell phone screen. This stuff is not hard if you care to make the effort. Again, 3 watts, no street lights, I see things in plenty of time to deal with that. If I can do it on my bicycle, why is it hard in a car? If the answer involves speed, well, duh, do you think I blast down the MUP at full speed on my bicycle in the dark?
One thing that is severely underappreciated by most drivers is the hazard of speed to pedestrians in crashes. I have read claims that the fatality rate in 20mph collisions is 5%, but in 30mph collisions it is 45%. There’s no way to sensibly connect those dots without a non-trivial increase in risk to pedestrians for each additional mph between 20 and 30.
so… transportation equity has finally made its way to boingboing. This post is about a few years behind in terms of where things are heading - but it’s an important first step in understanding that the law is currently balanced against vulnerable road users.
The other big issue is road design - people are always complaining about “law-breaking cyclists” - when really the problem is that traffic rules and most streets are designed with pedestrians and cyclists as an afterthought. The thinking is that if we had streets that were designed with the convenience and safety of non-car users in mind, we wouldn’t end up with all of this conflict. The biggest problem in this regard is that most traffic engineers are wholly unqualified to design for things other than cars, and current municipal, state, and federal design standards are decades behind where our counterparts are in Northern Europe and Japan… We’re far more concerned with “level of service” and “traffic flow” than whether or not it’s safe for your kid to cross the street to get to school.
This is a rabbit hole if you’re willing to dig deeper -lots of really interesting stuff related to automobility and car-politics (both “freedom” and the more insidious stuff related to the racial politics of the federal highway program). I think as we move more toward the digital economy we are finally starting to collectively discover major flaws in the 20th century car-based economy.
If you’re going to be a cyclist, it helps to be hardcore and militant about it.
If the law says you should ride inside turning cars and just trust them to give way to you coming up in their blind spot, I say fuck the law, and just do what seems most sensible: pull out and go around the outside of turning cars.
That’s just the start… there aren’t many places where the laws purporting to regulate cyclists have been formulated with any actual consideration. You should feel free to defy somebody’s half-arsed afterthought that presumes to second-guess your own safety.
“Right of way” is indeed a legal term, but it does NOT mean “the more well-protected should always yield to the less-protected.”
That’s not even close to what the laws say. It’s a general principle that informs the rulemaking process, but it’s not the only consideration.
Precisely who has right-of-way under various circumstances and in various contexts can vary immensely, and not all local laws are the same.
You should check yours for details.
Here in California, f’rex, peds in legal crosswalks, marked or un-marked, have the right-of-way over cars, but on roadways outside of crosswalks, peds must yield to any vehicle close enough to pose a hazard. (And even in crosswalks, they musn’t “suddenly leave a place of safety” to dart out in front of an oncoming car)…
The “most protected yields to least” principle is overridden all the time. Big trucks don’t automatically yield to small cars; cars aren’t always required to yield to peds (though they are required to at least TRY not to smoosh 'em, regardless of right-of-way!); bicycles are sometimes required to yield to cars; horses may yield to peds but bikes yield to horses, and so on.
And trains seldom yield to anyone, despite being easily the biggest and best-protected of all.
Learn the rules and follow them. Don’t just assume the rules match some abstract principle you’re fond of, without first checking your local codes to see if your neighbors agree.
Here’s a thought: when it’s less than obvious who should give way, perhaps it should be the person who’s incentivised to get fat and die young, all the while farting out biosphere-killing poison, by the supposed convenience of their mode of travel.
Maybe then, they’ll see the folks exercising their birthright to cycling as people to envy and emulate rather than law-breaking vermin they’re encouraged to dehumanise and allowed to kill with impunity.
People fuck up.
People get distracted, get tired, don’t look at the right place at a critical moment.
This is the nature of the motor car. A big lump of metal controlled by a big lump of meat.
