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Effectiveness of hi-vis in car traffic
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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Fuck Cars
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Your hub for collection of materials that contribute to a world with less car ownership. Including buses, motorcycles, bicycles, skateboards, longboards, scooters, hoverboards, e-scooters, pedestrians, walking, running
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In my experience you will generally only be stopped if you are riding in a way that's a risk to the pedestrians around you, and there's plenty of ways to avoid that. Police have better things to go after unless they are deliberately trying to fish for fines income.
Police may have better things to do but periodically they are still there giving fines for not having lights or cycling on the driveway, easy cash low risk
Bicycling on a sidewalk and hoping the cops don't care is not a solution.
That's right, that's why I said the real answer is really dedicated bicycle paths.
Yeah, being stopped by the police is unlikely, but when the norm and the law is for people to cycle on the road rather than the pavement it leads pedestrians to wander round without watching for cyclists, which in turn means you have to cycle slowly to be prepared for someone to step out in front of you.
Yeah, you have to slow down, but that's normal, the real problem isn't the vehicle, it's its speed and compared to the traffic around it. In roads, cars have to slow down because of bicycles, it makes sense that in pavements with no dedicated bicycle lanes you have to slow down to the speed of pedestrian traffic when present. The real answer is really dedicated bicycle paths.
Car speed is an issue. Kinetic energy increases with square of velocity, so when a car goes faster, its energy increases exponentially. This is why faster moving vehicles exponentially increase fatality rates when crashing into a person.
Yes, the answer is dedicated bicycle infrastructure to separate bikes from vehicles. But the reason is safety. A car momentarily slowing down to pass a person on a bike on a road with poor bike infrastructure is a several second inconvenience which will be nullified by the next light they are stuck at for several minutes. What is much more important is that people die because of being hit by cars, which makes it unsafe for people to choose any form of transport other than cars.
So yes to what I was saying, that vehicle speed is an issue? What you really meant to say is that vehicle mass is an issue, but that only happens when you actually get hit when the problems that led up to that collision happened long before. The real issue is being able to predict and adapt to traffic, such as you imply in your next sentence that the car must do. Applies perfectly well to people in bicycles as well, or to any person. The real problem is speed, doesn't matter how much mass or energy a vehicle can have if it's not moving.
My dad got hit by a kid in a bicycle causing a wound that never really healed. People die from doing activities with risk, the answer is not to lock yourself in a room and live afraid. People die from hitting their heads on low hanging branches and from just simply falling, even off of bicycles. That you dismiss the utility of cars is more of a commentary of the bubble and environment you've had the opportunity to enjoy, it is far from universal and more than likely probably still involves the use of larger, more "kinetic energy" where "people die" vehicles.
I distinguished that speed of a vehicle itself is an issue and not primarily, as you stated, how its speed relates to traffic around it. A car that's going with the flow of traffic at 80km/h is still fatal to be hit by when you're walking or biking.
This shows a fundamental lack of understanding; a stationary vehicle has no kinetic energy. When you get hit by a car, the energy you are hit with (kinetic energy) depends on the mass and speed of the vehicle.
I'm sorry to hear that, it sounds like I really difficult experience. I fail to see how a child making a mistake while riding a bike is relevant to your claim that "the real problem isn’t the vehicle, it’s its speed and compared to the traffic around it." and how "cars have to slow down because of bicycles" is the cause of danger. Orders of magnitude more people and children die being hit by cars than any other form of transportation and the answer is not blaming people on bikes for collisions since they "made" cars change their speed relative to traffic around them.
No such claim was made.
Nobody is denying the utility of vehicles. Our infrastructure are designed with cars having absolute top priority, making short trips by bike and walking dangerous. Most trips in cities are short and doable by bike or walking, but when the infrastructure is poor and people perceive it to be an unacceptable risk, they take a car. How many times have you seen people riding on sidewalks because they don't feel that the line of painted bike lane protects them from a driver on their phone who could kill them? Or someone on a mobility scooter in a bike lane because the uneven, discontinuous sidewalk that lowers for cars at each crossing presents more danger of them falling over? I bike, I walk, and I drive; everything I've mentioned is the product of not living in a bubble, otherwise I wouldn't see the problems.
I'm starting to see ad hominem and straw man arguments, so I'm not going to put the energy into continuing this conversation. Enjoy the rest of your day. :)
You really are showing a fundamental lack of reading comprehension while being quite adept at mental gymnastics to make no real point while moving the scale. Goodbye, have fun arguing for a third non-existent observer. I'll do you an extra solid and block you, so I don't have to experience your bs nor you any form of a reasonable observation that may cause you to continue to have to exert mental gymnastics to such a great extent or increase baseless hostility and accusations so you can drivel on endlessly (which right back at you, buddy).