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This might be true in Canada too? I thought the death rate was related to the size of the vehicles preferred by the drivers in the measured region. And nobody likes ‘em bigger than Americans. And may Canadians, from what I’ve seen.
How are other countries on drivers not being on their cell phones or watching their phones\browsing? The US is terrible about it. It's not legal most places, but it's also not very enforced. I figured that was a bigger cause than the rise in vehicle size.
In Norway, even though we have a lot of larger SUV's driving around, being caught on mobile is very pricy and police controls are very regular.
Here in Western Australia we've just introduced new cameras to address this.
The penalty has always been very steep if you get caught. Like a third of a weeks wage, and if you got caught 3x in 3x years you'd lose your license for a while.
That said, I dont actually know anyone who had been caught.
6 months ago these new cameras showed up. Its actually on a boxy trailer, hi-vis reflective yellow, a vertical boom going up 5 metres or so, then extending horizontally over the lane.
They've been issuing warnings up to now. "Here's the photo of you using your phone, usually you'd get a penalty but we're waiving that during this introductory phase".
The penalties will start shortly.
Honestly anyone who doesn't notice one of these things on the side of the road has the situational awareness of a spare tyre and shouldn't be driving an e-scooter let alone a car.
I've seen a few other factors that might contribute to increased pedestrian/cyclist deaths on our roads:
e-Bikes. e-Bikes are mostly a goddamn mistake. The ones that don't make the bike go any faster than you yourself can pedal it, just make pushing the pedals easier? Those are fine. Anything else should be classified as a moped, and I don't know why they aren't. People are riding them at 20+ miles per hour on sidewalks and getting backed into out of blind driveways that weren't designed with traffic that speed on the sidewalk. Plus you've just got more people on 2-wheelers mixing with car traffic, which is a game they lost at the character select screen.
Half-assed attempts by DMVs to add bike lanes and walking paths. All the squawking about walkable cities this and fuck cars that you bots have been bitching about has been heard. In my area, where new housing developments or shopping centers are going in, the DOT now requires bike lanes and sidewalks in such places. They connect to nowhere because the main roads aren't all being modified to add such features, not until they need major modifications themselves. So you'll see bikes and pedestrians on highways they didn't used to appear on.
Another problem I've seen is the mixing of bike lanes and turn lanes. Our roads have long been built such that any lane that is allowed to turn right does not have lanes that can go straight to their right. So if you have the right of way to turn right, by green circle or green right arrow signal, it is logically safe for the driver to proceed. Until they added bike lanes to the extreme outside next to the curb. We didn't add signals for these bike lanes, they're supposed to follow the same signals as cars. So. You're sitting at a red light with your right turn signal on. It turns solid green. You go. The cyclist overtaking you in the bike lane also saw the light turn green, he tries to go straight, he is crushed to death under your right rear tire. This didn't used to be a problem, it is now.
Terminal car brain
For real, they think the only solution to cars endangering pedestrians and bikes is to ban both bikes and pedestrians... As God intended eagle screeches and flies overhead
Yeah go die in traffic with all the other zealots.
Having a quasi-religious hatred of automobiles only causes people to demand things like bike lanes right the fuck now, paint the lines on the asphalt, NOW. They don't put in traffic lights with dedicated bike lane lights that would stop car traffic to let bike lane traffic safely cross, they don't close some roads to automobile traffic, they paint the lines on the road. And then cyclists think that white line on the pavement somehow keeps them safe when they cross paths with a sedan, when the presence of those lines fundamentally breaks the safety algorithm the roads are built on in the first place.
e-bikes should be outright illegal. We should be imprisoning containership crews for landing with them on board.
So is the problem that there's too much support for non-car infrastructure, or that there's so little they get away with half-assing it, and not slowing the cars down enough that the road is safe?
As far as mopeds in traffic, the problem is obviously the cars running them over, wtf?
It is my assertion that bike lanes, as implemented, are a rock chewing stupid idea.
For about a century now, we've had two kinds of travel lane: Sidewalks, and traffic lanes. Sidewalks are for WALKING, traffic lanes are for all vehicles of every description. Every vehicle is supposed to behave the same way following the same rules, regardless of performance. A bicycle, moped, motorcycle, car, truck, all of them are supposed to follow the same rules.
When there are traffic lanes only, no sidewalks, we have rules for how traffic flows. For example, right-turn only lanes at an intersection are right-most, followed by turn-or-straight lanes, then straight only lanes, then straight or left lanes, then left only lanes. Having a lane that goes straight to the right of a right-turning lane is a recipe for collisions.
We do that all the time with sidewalks. Pedestrians are expected to exercise a lot of caution when entering crosswalks to avoid conflict with vehicle traffic. Pedestrians are expected to treat EVERY intersection as if it has a stop sign for them, or they are expected to obey crosswalks with signal devices that are interlocked with traffic lights.
Bike lanes as I have seen them implemented are a lot like sidewalks; slower traffic is placed to the right of traffic lanes...except they do not expect to treat every intersection as a stop sign, and they interpret green lights for straight through as for them, even in conflict with right turning traffic.
So we have a travel lane positioned similarly to how sidewalks are positioned relative to roads, but without the rules that make sidewalks safe. It doesn't help that, where they do implement lights or whatnot, they increasingly do so in non-standard ways that generations of drivers have not been trained on. There are new kinds of lights at crosswalks, new and weird nomenclature at intersections rather than "No Right On Red 🔴 " signs that have been around for years. It's not implemented well, and it's getting people killed.
As for e-bikes: They're basically not regulated, there's supposedly a classification system for them, which people ignore. There's no enforcement, and they do whatever the hell they want, including riding at travel lane speeds on sidewalks, which causes collisions because no other traffic, vehicle or pedestrian, is expecting 20+mph traffic on the sidewalk. They either need to be regulated like mopeds, or they need to go away. "But the motor is electric not gas" fucks with people's brains. Somehow people aren't riding Honda Metropolitans or Yamaha Zumas on the sidewalks at 20 or 30mph but that's happening with e-bikes.
The issues you are identifying aren't the fault of attempting to add non-car modes of transit, those people are just the victims. The issue is that they add them while fearing slowing down drivers or taking away parking or driver RoW. If drivers are swerving into unprotected bike lanes, you don't go "guess bike lanes can't work", you protect the bike lane. If drivers are hitting bicyclists when there's no bike lanes, build more bike lanes and slow the traffic down. Ride a bike in HCMC or Hanoi some time. There's literally thousands of bikes on the road, swarming cars, trucks, buses, and pedestrians. Serious accidents are very rare in the city, and typically involve texting or drinking. If drivers in your area drive too dangerously for mixed traffic, the problem is the drivers driving dangerously, not their victims.
So implement them better, either ban right on reds or start ticketing drivers who don't come to a complete stop.
Design sidewalks better. Couriers use bikes on sidewalks across east asia, except Japan, nobody cares. You can slow heavy ebikes via pavers, or block them entirely by requiring they be lifted a certain height to pass a barrier.
Why the fuck would you have right turns on the same signal as straight? Why the shit wouldn't you make protected intersections.
Your argument is basically "poorly designed roads are dangerous". Yeah, they are, stop making them
Edit: Also, Dutch pedestrians have the right of way over cars in the same road. If you're turning right, and someone is walking there, the car stops. This works fine, because we actually know how to design roads.
Your parents didn't even try to educate you, did they?
There are a lot of different kinds of intersections. Simple two-lane meets two lane where each kind has a stop-go light, up to hugely complicated intersections with multiple turn lanes in each direction.
At a small stop-go light, like you might find in a residential neighborhood, there's one travel lane in all four directions, and each one is a left, straight and right lane. Going left is a yield across oncoming traffic, a green light gives you right of way to go straight or right.
A more medium size intersection might have left and right turn lanes in addition to one or two travel lanes. Let's say Some Road (N/S) is crossing Another Street (E/W). Some Road is a four-lane divided highway, and at this intersection it has both right and left turn lanes. Another Street is a 2 lane road with much less traffic than Some Road, so it comes out to a left turn lane and a straight/right turn lane.
A typical light cycle will go Some Road gets green circles and green right arrows. Straight lanes bound North and South get to go, as well as those turning right onto Another Street. The through traffic on Some Road blocks any other right of way that could collide with those right turn lanes.
The through lights will turn red, possibly the turn lights will stay green, and the left turn lanes on Another Street will turn green. They can now make a protected left across the intersection, again this blocks any other traffic from colliding with the right turns from Some Road to Another Street, so they retain the right of way.
Finally, those will turn red (or sometimes flashing yellow meaning yield) and Another Street's straight/right lanes get to go. This cycle will then repeat.
This is for an intersection that doesn't have sidewalks. You'll find these out in the middle of nowhere where a state route crosses a federal highway. Interstates and highways built like them will have overpasses and non-blocking intersections.
Where you DO have sidewalks, such as larger intersections inside cities, there are signals for the crosswalks. Those are interlinked with the traffic signals, and depending on the implementation there won't be any straight and turn signals because "cars go straight" is when the pedestrians cross. When turn lanes are on, all pedestrian traffic is stopped.
Note that these are two different environments; at an intersection in a city center, the speed limits are often 20mph, and frankly, bicycles should not have their own lanes there. By law they're vehicles, they should be in traffic behaving the same as cars and have the right of way that cars do. Where they get themselves killed is trying to weave in and out of traffic, or insisting on putting in a parallel bike lane pretending it turns off friendly fire. "Just add to every driver's cognitive load and make them responsible for my safety." Fuck off.
Meanwhile, back out on Some Road and Another Street, these have 45 and 55 mph speed limits, you're traveling from town to town here, and these places pretty much should not see bicycle traffic. Here we're really in the realm of discussing better public transportation and rail service than pedestrian and cycle routes.
I have a bachelor's in civil engineering, and that's part of the reason why I'm able to pierce through the deep coating of carbrain induced status-quo thinking.
You're making all the wrong assumptions right from the start.
These shouldn't even exist. A residential neighborhood shouldn't have traffic lights, and it should have a low enough speed and low enough volume of cars (only the people who live there should be driving there) that accidents should be rare and low risk.
The fact that you assume there's a traffic light here starts from the basic assumption that there is so much car traffic that it needs managing. You've already designed your residential street wrong then.
Skipping this, because these intersections shouldn't have ANY bicycle interactions at all. If bikes are crossing your 4-lane divided highway, you've already designed your roads wrong. I would argue if you're putting a full streetlevel crossing in, you're also not doing great unless you get paid per traffic jam.
A protected bike path and protected intersection REDUCE everyone's mental load because it makes it practically impossible to hit a bike. And it separates bikes from traffic too, so they can't weave.
The problem with American bike gutters with painted lines is that cars enter them constantly, by design. Cars cross the bike lane to park, they cross it to turn right, and something they just drive in it because the drivers are idiots. Or cars park in it because they're idiots. And every time a car enters the bike path, the bike needs to move or die. So they move, creating more risks.
All of those problems go away with a raised barrier between the bikes and the cars. You can just stop thinking about them, because they're in an entirely different lane that you physically can't even get to. And if you turn right, you can treat them like any other vehicle again, where they'll have the right of way or there's a traffic light.
Depends. A 20km bike ride is totally fine, an 80km one isn't. But if there's cars going 55mph right next to me, I won't be taking a bike because that's super dangerous. There should be a seperate bike path there as well, removing all risks.
Of course, only if it's actually inhabited in that distance.
There's a lot of "should"s in there that just don't reflect reality. Because of how so many American towns and cities are built, you'd have to bulldoze entire cities to do things like eliminate small traffic lights from residential neighborhoods. And we're not gonna do that. We're not going to tear down the entire fucking nation for some retards on bicycles.
New towns are areas are ALSO designed poorly. It's not just existing areas that have been made wrong, new areas are still being designed by idiots with blinders on.
Weird how other countries manage just fine without bulldozing. What they actually do is switch up road lanes and on-street parking, and it fits just fine.
Having multiple lanes in between level intersections adds pretty much nothing to the capacity anyway, so you may as well use it for something useful.
Terminal carbrain: not realizing that getting more people on bikes means fewer cars, less traffic and a nicer trip for literally everyone, including cars.
There's plenty of examples where car and bike can coexist. Look at Denmark or the Netherlands.
The United States isn't Denmark or the Netherlands; we have been building bike unfriendly roads for a century, and it's not going to be trivially undone by painting a white line on the side.
They didn't come out of nowhere in those countries. They were once as car centric as everywhere else.
'if you build it, it will come'
Not quite sure about that. Denmark famously had a bicycle regiment during WW2. We've never been anywhere near as car centric as places like the US, for various reasons including, but probably not limited to:
This is not to say that the person you responded to isn't completely wrong about everything, it's just not going to help acting like we've ever been as crazy about our cars as they have always been. It could also be a decent roadmap for how to get rid of the huge deathtraps, and get people more excited about bicycles.
All of those are policy choices though. None of that (except the old cities) happened by accident
Sure. I'm from the Netherlands, we did use bikes more often. But if you look at infrastructure from the fifties and compare that to today there's a world of change. Cars were everywhere and bike lanes just a line on the road.
Right, so you don't stop at a white line, you lower speed limits+add speed bumps, or protect your bikelanes.
Or you do what I've seen some cities do and you close certain roads to car traffic entirely, and then send the bikes down there. Further increase the efficiency of both modes of traffic while eliminating collisions. Create walkable and bikeable sections of town that cars can travel between.
Of course you should ban cars from areas of the city, but bikes still need to travel between those islands. If your "pedestrian area" is an island everyone has to drive to get to, it will fail.
At that point, you can do things like pedestrian bridges, over/underpasses with roads and streets, or level crossings with signals. Instead of trying to mix traffic everywhere, have the two systems meet at certain well designed controlled spots. Instead of bikers being in a near constant state of "I am in traffic", have certain points along their journey be "I am crossing a road." These areas will almost certainly drive both cars and bikes to stop, and then one or the other gets to go at a time, rather than both are in motion failing to predict the other's movements.
Bikes are a much denser form a transportation; you can have 100s of bikes cross an intersection in the time it takes 4 cars to cross. You don't want a traffic system where both have to wait, you prioritize the more efficient form of transit.
If people aren't driving cars down a road because stopping at so many stop signs is unpleasant, why do you expect cyclists to bike down that road, when they actually have to physical work (not just pushing a pedal) getting up to speed again? Stop signs suck for bikes more than for cars. If cars avoid a route because of stop signs, of course bikes will avoid it!
In my area, there are very few cyclists who actually bike to get anywhere. They do it for exercise and/or to be allowed to wear their little padded shorts in public. So get the exercise from peddling away from a stop sign. The reason to choose that route instead of the others? To not get hit by cars.
And what exactly is the pedestrian excuse? Why do people insist on walking on the sidewalkless busy roads when in between them there's a sidewalkless non-busy road?
I think e-bikes are such a problem in the US because we have such a car-sentric culture and the majority of people who are riding them seem to be people who lost their drivers licenses due to poor life decisions (AKA, dangerous driving or DUI) or are too young to get a drivers license in the first place. They take the same dangerous, stupid mentality and transfer it into their riding of the e-bikes. I drive an ambulance and every single day I see a suicidal idiot blitzing through traffic at top speed on an e-bike, running red lights and stop signs without even slowing down or looking, going the wrong way up one way roads in the middle of the lane, driving at 3am down the middle of the road with no lights (almost always going the wrong way and running stop signs), ignoring the blocked off bike lanes on the roads that do have them, or just generally being an absolute menace and an idiot. We have so many bikers getting seriously hurt or killed because of their antisocial behavior. I've almost hit a couple in my ambulance because they're constantly pulling out right in front of me or simply trying to bike right into the side of my rig as I'm driving down the road doing the speed limit, forcing me to either swerve or possibly end their entire existence. They just assume that car drivers will get out of their way, which is a dumb assumption when most of the drivers are just as dumb and are fucking around on their phones. Suicidal fucking idiots with zero survival instincts. I have zero problems whatsoever with the ones who are responsible and follow traffic laws, but they seem to be in the low minority around here.
There's something about the damn things that makes people think they can do vehicular parkour.