Riding bikes in ABQ is really dangerous, there's not a single sufficient bike lane, and there are multiple bikers in the last decade who have been deliberately ran over by abq drivers.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
546 points (98.1% liked)
Fuck Cars
12922 readers
1383 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That's no good.
Teen was third employee of city bike safety center to die in bike crash
Ah yes. It's not that A CAR crashed into her, it was a bike crash.
/s
Awful. Just awful that this keeps happening.
Yes, the article confirms all three were killed "by drivers," i.e. in CARS.
load more comments
(1 replies)
This is infuriating to me. I'm going to include big chunks from the article, because otherwise you won't get the actual picture.
Here is the incident:
Yellow lights flashed on a pole above — fixed alongside bicycle and pedestrian crossing signs — as she biked off the Hahn Arroyo trail and across Carlisle, south of Montgomery, in Northeast Albuquerque. A driver in a blue car slowed to a stop for the 19-year-old as she rolled into the northbound lanes that afternoon.
An SUV in the next lane screeched to a halt, nearly hitting her.
But it was a black Ford Fiesta, in the far right lane, that slammed into VanLandingham — sending her and her bicycle flying through the air.
Here is the legal context:
Burton said the woman was driving 28 mph in the 35 mph zone and told police she didn’t see the flashing yellow lights — although they don’t require drivers to yield, either, according to state statute. Only flashing red lights require drivers to stop and yield to those walking and biking.
“There’s no signage that says that requires a driver to slow, stop, yield right of way — anything,” Burton said of the crossing used by VanLandingham. He said drivers they spoke with had different interpretations of the crossing: some said the lights are always flashing, even with nobody there. Others said they slow down if they see the lights flashing.
The crossing is not considered a marked or unmarked crosswalk despite the signs and lights and, according to the statute, drivers “may proceed through the intersection or pass such a signal only with caution.”
And here are the consequences:
The Albuquerque Police Department said no charges are expected to be filed against the woman who crashed into VanLandingham.
Sgt. James Burton of APD’s Fatal Crash Unit said, “She’s not speeding, she’s not intoxicated, she’s not driving recklessly. We have no proof that she was doing anything distracted in the vehicle, so even if she was, I can’t prove it.”
This is how incredibly fucking bad people are at driving. Even the police can't imagine that seeing people in other lanes slowing down and stopping at a flashing yellow light should be an indication that there might be something to be cautious about.
Even without the yellow flashing lights, if you see people suddenly stopping in other lanes on the road, continuing to drive without slowing down to a near stop seems like completely reckless driving to me, because you can't see through the stopped cars. And if you didn't see the stopped cars, then you must be driving distracted.
And the laws in Albuquerque don't even require drivers to yield at flashing yellow lights? What's the fucking point? That's disgusting.
And let this be a reminder. If you're crossing a road, even if you have the right of way, that won't save you from being killed by a shitty driver.
This is a fucking tragedy, and they're doing nothing about it. Pathetic excuse for a city. The bodies of good intentioned young people will continue to pile up while they sit there and do nothing.
I hate this mindset that you have to prove they were distracted
mf the outcome proves that they were not capable of driving safely NO MATTER the reason
no charges are expected to be filed against the woman who crashed into VanLandingham.
Literally walking away. Really infuriating.
Burton said the woman (...) didn’t see the flashing yellow lights — although they don’t require drivers to yield, either, according to state statute. Only flashing red lights require drivers to stop and yield to those walking and biking.
“There’s no signage that says that requires a driver to slow, stop, yield right of way — anything,”
Am I getting this right: yellow flashing lights at a crossing, presumably installed officially, are legally meaningless? Isn't putting them there an act of deliberately misleading pedestrians/cyclists then?
Wouldnt matter, only a fucking moron would think the can demand priority/right of way. You wait for cars to stop, because if they dont, well, this happens. So many people think that being right is some kind of shield, its not. Being right will get you killed just as quickly as being wrong. Even when its a red light, if youre stepping out in front of a 2 tonne death machine, you make sure its stopped first.
@Bennyboybumberchums @A_norny_mousse Do you say this about motorists who are proceeding through an intersection with a green light when someone comes along speeding on the cross street, fails to stop, and t-bones them?
Yes I do. Priority/right of way is not taken, it is given. Had loads of fucking idiots speeding through shit they werent supposed to. LOOKING, saved my life on many occasions over my 30 years of driving. As I said, being right isnt a protective shield.
It’s absolutely insane, that means it’s not a pedestrian crossing it’s a pedestrian trap to bait them into crossing where drivers can legally run them over.
There is a lot of malpractice going on in traffic engineering (I say as a person trained as a traffic engineer). In a sane world, the engineer of record would lose his license for this sort of shit.
load more comments
(13 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Here is the intersection location:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/4uxzNMZbAVDuyrsz5
This type of flashing yellow light does not require drivers to stop, it is just there for warning. My city has been spending (wasting) a huge chunk of its ped "safety" funds on this type of signal. It is a way to make it look like traffic engineers care about ped safety, without doing anything that would actually slow down cars.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
The Albuquerque Police Department said no charges are expected to be filed against the woman who crashed into VanLandingham.
WTF?!
There’s an old joke among American lawyers that if you’re going to murder someone in America, do it with your car. But it’s not really a joke, because the cops will 100% assume it was just an accident, and prosecutors will refuse to bring any charges.
what happened to the good old man-slaughter which should also apply in cases of accidents
12 out of 12 jurors will be drivers. They will not convict another driver for being distracted because they also do it all the time. Prosecutors know this and don't wan to waste time on pointless cases.
It's not the driver that kills, it's the car. How are you going to assign man-slaughter charges to an inanimate object?
PS: The inverse is true for guns tho.
it was just a little accident. haven't you ever bumped into someone by mistake before?
jeez, before are so uptight about this, it's not a big deal, just a harmless little accident
If anything, it was the cyclists/pedestrians fault for traveling unprotected by a car. /s
“Traffic collision”. ‘Accident’ implies no one’s to blame.
Well, as the article's headline tells us, it was a "bike crash". Probably be charges laid posthumously so that the motorist can sue for civil damages. (Modulo being killed, this happened to someone I know; hit by a car in the bike lane, had to pay for the car's damage.)
Our collective tolerance for driver negligence is literally killing us and most people don't care. In fact, it may as well be on you for choosing to put yourself in harm's way by choosing not to drive a car.
Crazy that on a shitty technicality, the driver did not break any rules...
The crosswalk with the flashing lights is neither marked or unmarked, and drivers are not required to slow down or yield right of way when yellow lights are flashing, only flashing red.
Like sure maybe you don't see lights flashing above you, but maybe pay attention at the road directly in front of you??
There's every excuse to take blame off drivers.
load more comments
(3 replies)
view more: next ›