How cities can stem the tide of pedestrian deaths from large cars and SUVs – Ars Technica
How cities can stem the tide of pedestrian deaths from large cars and SUVs – Ars Technica
All these children are invisible to the driver...
Fuck all those cars!!! Put them away to hell, not to earth. They are too big for all - except for small egos. But for small egos is therapy much better.
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Require vehicle safety standards to test for pedestrian and cyclist survivability first and foremost.
Require a commercial license to drive large and/or heavy vehicles such as pickup trucks. Take it away when a driver gets caught driving unsafely.
Require vehicles to provide better visibility through the windshield, like Europe does.
Design street lanes to be narrow and winding, so that drivers intuitively choose to drive at speeds that are safe for people outside the vehicle. Raise pedestrian crossings at the same level as the sidewalk so that drivers habitually slow down when they see a crossing.
In other words, value the safety of the people outside the vehicle above the speed and convenience of the drivers.
Require a commercial license to drive large and/or heavy vehicles. Take away such commercial license when a driver gets caught driving unsafely.
This is my favorite type of suggestion because it puts the responsibility on the person driving and makes it clear that hauling heavy loads or large trailers is a bigger deal than driving a sedan. We have different licenses for motorcycles, the same makes sense for any light truck and above. This would also promote the use of compact sized trucks that are basically cars with beds and minivans instead of people getting full sized vans and massive trucks.
My personal favorite: the fines for moving violations should scale with vehicle size. It's total BS an F150 and a Miata get the same ticket for running a red light.
@blandy @frostbiker
In Victoria (Australia), the fine for using your mobile phone while riding a bicycle is the same as when driving a 2.6 tonne ute.That's stupid.
Killing/hurting others vs killing/hurting yourself.
Maybe make the fines scale with the mass instead of linear size.
Yeah, I tried to stay away from the specifics of how to consider size. I was thinking weight more than anything since it factors into how much force is imparted. But I also think more than length, ride height should be considered in addition to mass. Fuckin bumper to the face is way less survivable than to the waist.
Design our streets to be narrow and winding
I drive to several places that have traffic flow designs. The road narrows near crosswalk to just enough for 2 cars to pass, no shoulder. It definitely makes me slow down even when alone. These can do a lot to impact drivers speed and safety.
Design our streets to be narrow and winding
And with separate, protected walking and cycling infrastructure.
and don't take out the bike lane because " no one uses it" and/or "we used to be able to go murder speed along there".
If the street is sufficiently hostile to fast moving cars, at some point dedicated infra space for cyclists becomes unnecessary. As soon as it becomes reasonable for a nutjob to speed past 30 kph though, cycling infra becomes quite necessary.
I guess this was in reaction to our city in particular, where they have made the new 3 lanes each way major arteries much more curvy to help control traffic speds but still have a bike lane separated only by white paint (on a 35mph street where everyone travels 50mph). The winding aspect has just made it more likely that drivers cutting the corners clip into the bike lane more basically.
Put concrete barriers between the road and the bike path. And raise the bike path to top-of-the-barrier level with a sheet of perspex between them and the road. I thought of installing device to damage cars at roughly head height for motorists, but that'd move into the satirical and unserious domain. But the first two parts are pretty serious.
Require a commercial license to drive large and/or heavy vehicles. Take it away when a driver gets caught driving unsafely.
This is already a thing. In my state anything weighing over 10,000 pounds and used in interstate commerce requires a medical card. 17,000 and used intrastate is the same medical card. Towing anything for commercial reasons above 10,000 pounds requires a special license. Driving a vehicle weighing over 26,000 pounds requires a special license.