Controversial road diet reduced accidents, say scientists

You aren’t supposed to overtake if you will put other people at risk.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/using-the-road-159-to-203#overtaking-162-to-169

Cyclists aren’t trying to deliberately obstruct car drivers when they are controlling when they are overtaken. You are.

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It is not impossible to see near signals, unless they are unreasonably bright for the conditions, which they sometimes are. Flashing lights create contrast that catches the human brain’s attention, just as a moving cat toy catches a cat’s attention. It’s built-in to neuro typical brains. That’s something I take for granted, but your experience shows me that I should not.

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Victims of poor planning. In fact, you answered this for yourself:

Showing the issue wasn’t with cyclists, but infrastructure designed by people ignoring their needs.

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I’m a teeny bit confused: everything above 1 hz is an issue? With no upper bound where the effect rolls off?

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I’m unusually sensitive to bright lights, which may be part of my problem here. I have a Лос computer monitor which I can’t use because its minimum brightness is too bright for me to look at. I tried to use thick plastic to block some of the excess brightness, at the cost of distortion and blurring.

And, one assumes, much, much lower frequencies of turn signals, which are about 1 to 2 Hz.

I’m not sure it’s always a good plan - it really depends on city planners thinking ahead to what needs might come up in the future. My street (in Portland) was recently “dieted” over the last 3 years but now:

  • the massive increase in population and cars on the road with the latest wave of migrants it’s been overwhelmed
  • this area of the city is only served by buses, which aren’t an acceptable alternative to driving (for it it’s 90mins to work by bus vs. 40mins by car - on an 8 mile commute)
  • the design doesn’t have the throughput to get people to the closest-in arterial street (Cesar Chavez) before it goes urban/walk/retail closer to downtown
  • traffic is moving much more slowly on a commuter street to downtown, from 7-10 and 3-6 every intersection along the street is gridlocked
  • our bicycle traffic load is such that the bike lanes often overflow into car traffic (which I know is legal, but as a motorist it is unpredictable - unpredictability is dangerous
  • cyclists refuse to use the designated cycling routes which were built at great expense, that parallel the major streets, ironically because the traffic calming devices meant to keep cars off those streets are just as annoying to cyclists!

Not a rant against traffic calming plans or cyclists. I honestly think the problem is our real estate market and a massive increase in population, coupled with city planners that didn’t have the insight to see that an influx of affluent residents into an area without any attempt to improve the transit system would mean more cars on the road.

I’m not a motorist because I’m an ass who hates the environment. I am a foster parent and the kids go to a before and after school program halfway across the city. Because of idiotic state laws we aren’t permitted to carpool the kids, even though most of our families live within 2 miles of me. Public transit would take too long to get home and cause privacy issues for the kids, so we slog through the traffic twice a day.

On a related note, anyone want to buy a gorgeous mid-century home in southeast Portland? 3/2.5 2600 sq ft, full basement, remodeled bathrooms. Come with ping pong and pool tables! Owned by two happening gay guys so you know it’s stylish.

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… I have a lot of trouble with low frequencies, like turn signals, and particularly police car lights, and also the flashing cursors in some word processors on the Mac. I have more troble if I’m turning, and especially turning away from one flashing light only to be hit by another.

I had much less trouble with middle frequencies, like most of the strobe lights in the e.e.g. test. (apparently those run from 6 Hz to 30 Hz. I think I had trouble with the first couple but not much trouble with the rest.)

I have a lot of trouble with moderately high frequencies, like long-bulb fluorescents as they’re about to burn out. I have less trouble with long-bulb fluorescents if they’re new.

They don’t leave gaps in the sleeping policemen for bikes and/or buses?

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Epilepsy is a common reason to be prohibited from driving, whether or not affected by photo-sensitivity. Driving is dangerous enough without having a medical condition that could be triggered by driving and cause an accident.

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You’re not riding that one enough?

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I know that. And it and other strobe sensitivities mean we can’t use public transportation, or most crosswalks, or wait for the taxi without getting beaten with strobes. And it means if traffic safety studies focus on drivers, the studies may not take our safety into consideration.

Ah.
So, I wonder this: if you were to use glasses like those used in some 3D tv applications, they essentially strobe the lens- only allowing light to pass through when they’re open, and being opaque otherwise. In 3D tv application, this allows the tv to display an image for the left eye one moment (while the left lens is open) and follow that with the right eye image (when the right lens is open).
So we’re left with a set of glasses that can either be opaque or transparent (and alternate between those two states quickly). Might it be possible to use something like that to shift a troublesome 30hz signal up to something much higher- say, 120hz? High enough it might no longer be a problem?
I dunno- I’m just spitballing here.
If that worked, it would also (by it’s very nature) reduce incoming light, which sounds like it might be a good thing for you, too…

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Finally got around to reading the OP. I remember when they first got this particular diet going. It’s right in front of Ivanhoe Elementary where my kids went to school up until last year. This thing was totally necessary, and I’m glad to be proven right about it.

As you can see, the school is right there on Rowena, and on weekday mornings, both sides of Rowena are filled with schoolchildren. Most of the neighborhood is residential, but Rowena itself is commercial storefronts, and also a fairly busy thoroughfare connecting the businessy side of Silver Lake with Los Feliz and Atwater Village. People do tend to haul ass through there, if their business takes them through the neighborhood rather than to the neighborhood. But it’s no Sunset, nor even Glendale Boulevard, and the pedestrian traffic being so loaded with kids as it is, the traffic desperately needed to be throttled.

(Personal side note: I first met my wife at Blair’s Restaurant there at the corner of Rowena and Herkimer. They were pretty awful and pretentious then, but we went back there for our 10-year anniversary this past July, and somehow they’ve become incredibly delicious. Highly recommend!)

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he was kicking around the idea of learning to weld himself a custom frame in the bike thread recently…

I’m a lefty. I also have downtube shifting. it works out pretty well to apply the rear brake and keep steering with my favored left hand and simultaneously use my “weaker” hand to take off the bar to downshift (all lefties are stronger with their “off” hand than righties due to the world being rigged for righties, so my right isn’t really “weak” but whateves /OT.) Once I’m geared down, I finish braking with both hands like the method you mentioned earlier.

modern components have integrated the brake and shift levers into one, so less of an issue, I guess.

[ more OT: Sometimes “right-hand-favored” stuff works out better for lefties. manual shift on a car in the US is “for” the right hand (kinda forced to engineer it center-mounted, so maybe only “right-favored” because US-steerer-on-the-left) but it’s cool to me, I want my dominant hand on the wheel. I don’t really play guitar, but fretting seems much harder than strumming, and a “right-hand” guitar is left-hand fretted, so I was OK with that]

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What point are you trying to make with your snarky comment? That cyclists should not act so as to be responsible for their own safety? That cyclists should trust their safety to the decision making of whomever is behind them, with no knowledge of their competence and knowing that there is a significant asymmetry of risk?

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As a driver, you pretty much have to always take the absence of turn signals as “no info,” because some people just don’t signal. I’m always alert for people “twitching” towards my lane as a sign that they might be about to change lanes. However, having a visual indication gives me more reaction time, as well as allowing me to handle requests for access to the space ahead of my car.

Perhaps when we have self-driving cars, they’ll be able to transmit signalling intentions without flashing lights, but of the major senses (sight, smell, taste, touch, scent), only two of them (sight and sound) can readily transmit information from one car’s driver to another car’s driver, and sound lacks precise directionality. The information more or less has to be transmitted visually, and human eyesight is most drawn to change. So the signal would need to be something that would be visual, prominent, unambiguous, and constantly changing, in order to transmit the message with any reliability. Flashing lights are the obvious solution; I don’t doubt there are others, but it would take billions of dollars’ worth of changes to research and implement it to the point where you’d be able to drive without unacceptable levels of risk. It’d probably just be cheaper and easier to buy everyone with your condition limousines and hire chauffeurs, until the self-driving revolution comes.

For myself, at least, most lights are bright enough to serve as indicators, but not enough to blind, even at night. The exception would be a car flashing their high beams, but that’s pretty rare.

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as your whole post makes clear, you mean

Victims of poor infrastructure planning.

but I was about to be mad the way you phrased the initial sentence :upside_down:

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I’ve seen some cross walks installed in my area with flashing lights embedded in them that I think meet @MarjaE’s criteria. The areas have poor street lighting, and the flashing lights are bright strobes, making it hard to see if anyone is actually in the cross walk - or, for that matter, on the road between you and the cross walk.

Some car drivers are conscientious – its incidents like this and Stephen King that give drivers a bad name.

True they are few and far between, and until they speak up and denounce the bad drivers amongst them they are all equally complicit.

#notAllDrivers

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