Why Are So Many American Pedestrians Dying at Night?
Why Are So Many American Pedestrians Dying at Night?
Nothing resembling this pattern has occurred in other comparably wealthy countries.
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I’ve seen a lot of people wearing all dark clothing at night while walking their dog or jogging. I was told growing up not to do that. I guess they don’t teach that anymore?
People do that here and get really annoyed when they step off the curb into 30mph traffic and tires squeal and people narrowly avoid hitting them, lol. Meanwhile, I either wait until the car is past, or make direct eye contact with the driver while I'm under a streetlight. Sometimes wear bright colors too.
One of these days, someone is gonna get plowed over by the 80,000,000 lb electric streetcar, which cannot stop as quickly. People on bikes and scooters always run the red lights too, adding to the problem, despite there being red lights specifically for bikes so that people don't get struck. It's a mess. We need gates to keep people out of harms way :P
Cool victim blaming
If you're walking in the road at night wearing dark clothes, you're not a victim, you're a road hazard.
Closest I came to smoking a pedestrian was a black dude, like Wesley Snipes black, wearing all black, sauntering across a Chicagoland street at 10PM.
His white shoes were the only thing that saved his life. Saw little white flashes moving low, puzzled me so I dropped down from 55. Motherfucker just looked at me like, "What? Fuck you.", kept rolling. My heart was hammering out my chest.
See assholes in my hood dressed dark all the time. You don't gotta have reflectors on (I do have a strip on my pack), but FFS, wearing black at night?!
(Old man rant; I did that shit when I was a young punker.)
This happened to me recently, but with someone's pale white ass. Same thing, saw something oddly white in the inky blackness, it was someone's face crossing the road right in front of my car. (They were dressed in head to toe black with a black bag)
We need a law that all black overcoats need red reflective material built into the sleeves, back, and front. Make it stylish, but make it visible. Will improve safety on bikes, scooters, ski slopes and hiking.
Nope. Infrastructure problem. Why is the pedestrian walking in the road and not on a pedestrian path? There likely is none.
Because they refuse to walk further down (or up) to the crosswalk.
Nice assumption to make a straw man.
Here's an idea. Walk alongside the road. With the exception of those that have disabilities and for some reason can't be walking on grass, the rest of us can walk OFF of the road.
If you're driving you're a road hazard, not pedestrians
Explain your reasoning, please.
This is a common vibe from urbanists (spoiler alert: I'm an urbanist, myself). The heart of the message is this: in the US, our streets and cities have been designed to prioritize the car above all else, at the expense of all else. In most of the US, if you try to go anywhere by any other means, bicycle, walking, bus, you name it, it's downright hostile. In fact, it wasn't always this way, and we only arrived here after decades of consistent lobbying, political fuck fuck games, and influence campaigns by car makers. So, this is, in part, an effort to reframe people's thinking about streets from something that cars go on to something that cars share with others.
Oh, so you're one of those.
Roads are made for cars, and people shouldn't be walking on them at night with dark clothes on.
They're by definition a road hazard, no matter your personal beef with cars.
My cousin in Buddha, I've got no beef with you. You asked, I answered. Drive your car if it makes you happy, hell, I don't want to take it away from you even if I had a wish granting urbanism genie. But building our infrastructure to be car dependent, where the default state is cars, has been a disaster that's going to haunt us for decades, ecologically, culturally, and fiscally. It's the dependency part I'd like to change.
Yeah, no one is arguing against that, but you have to realize that you're no better than stoners 20 years ago talking about how weed should be legal.
Well, the stoners actually have a decent chance of their thing happening. There's absolutely zero chance the modern world that we're going to rip out millions of miles of road and dump trillions into infrastructure to make cars obsolete. Society would have to collapse first.
While yes, a car-less society would be good, bringing it up literally any time a car is mentioned does absolutely nothing to further the conversation, and is likely turning people against your position. Don't be like an annoying vegan.
I'd argue that twenty years ago, weed legalization was still a pipe dream. It was only consistent advocacy and activism that has slowly bent legalization policies to where we are today. There's a non-zero chance that we can change the way we do things, because car dependency has only been the policy for seventy years or so, and we only arrived here by changing what was. We can do it again. To the point about trillions of dollars: it costs about that much to replace our roads every twenty years or so (that's about the lifespan for a residential road), and it's getting more expensive because of shit like Amazon using the fuck out of our interstates and shortening up their lifespans (heavier vehicles increase road damage quadratically). All these infrastructure bills are so insanely expensive with seemingly so little to show for it because we haven't been doing the required maintenance on our roads, and we're still not seeing the full bill. So, to be completely straight with you about it, it costs as much as you're describing just to keep what we have, because car infrastructure doesn't last very long/hold up very well compared to other transport modes.
As for your annoying vegan point: maybe, maybe not, I guess we'll see if it does turn people off. I do think it furthers the conversation, though, because this is more or less the arc of how marijuana advocacy progressed. This is a little like saying that protestors should only protest if it will inconvenience nobody at all; if you protest and nobody notices, it's not really a protest, it's digging a hole and screaming into it.
Anyway, you seem to be upset, so maybe it's best to just let this conversation die off. Have a good day, stranger.
You should drive at a speed appropriate for the conditions. If you can't see fsr enough ahead, or can't stop fast enough to avoid a pedestrian, you are driving too fast. I shouldn't have to wear day glow neon and flashing lights everywhere I go, because you can't slow down a bit.
Nice strawman, buddy. No one said anything about neon or flashing lights.
If you're walking in the road at night wearing dark clothes, you're an idiot and a road hazard.
In the UK most roads were made well before cars existed you moron
And? They're currently made for cars.
Moron
I know you are, but what am I?
You see, that's how you sound. Only children resort to insults when they have no legitimate argument back.
Ok, how many deaths per year are caused by people driving cars hitting people, and how many deaths per year are caused by people walking hitting people. This figure should help you figure out who the real problem is.
I think you might misunderstand the topic of discussion.
I think you misunderstand
No, I definitely understand the discussion at hand. I don't know where you got the bit about pedestrians slamming into other pedestrians from.
Although I might have misinterpreted what you meant due to various spelling and grammar mistakes.
How many people get hit because drivers cannot see them?
We're taught to drive to the conditions. If you're going too fast to stop in an area with pedestrians, you're driving dangerously
I mean that makes sense, but what happens if you are doing the speed limit and you still hit someone in dark clothing? While again, you have a point, but going the speed limit isn't gonna make the problem of people just walking out in the middle of the street any better.
Pedestrian running k to a pedestrian isn't what's leading to deaths. If you can't drive safe then don't drive. Of course there should probably be some compromise here.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. I think a few words there got messed up.
It'd be victim blaming if people were intentionally running over people in dark clothing. When talking about victim blaming you're generally talking about the intent of the perpetrator, not the general circumstances. "She was dressed all sexy like and made him rape her" and such. It's an excuse for agency, rather than lack of agency.
Wearing dark clothes in poorly lit high traffic areas makes you harder to see, and harder to avoid. Drivers can not act on information they do not have, so they have less agency to avoid those pedestrians.
Lol, apart from the fact that the original comment literally is victim blaming? The rise in pedestrian deaths Is NOT because people are wearing darker clothes. If you think this is true you are a complete moron
I agree with you completely. Drivers have a responsibility to not run people over. If they can't handle that then they need alternative transit.
I'm not sure a person can be called a victim if they step in front of a super heavy object that has a good amount of momentum. Laws of physics do apply here. If person A steps in front of object B and based on the laws of physics it would be basically impossible to avoid or stop in time the it is persons A fault. If person A is wearing dark clothes at night it becomes very difficult to see them. Which compounds the problem. There is no victim blaming here just a simple stating of where the problem is at.
Unless drivers have night vision goggles on then that changes things, for seeing them. But there is still the problem of people stepping in front of a moving car. Again laws of physics.