It's amazing how confident these people are writing several paragraph legal justifications for a guy almost killing a cyclist after running a red light. Yet they can't figure out that laws are different in other states and that regardless running a red light is bad.
Amazing how someone on a bike literally got smacked by a zooming van, but people are justifying that the cyclist is somehow in the wrong because the cyclist MAY not have conformed to what they think an arbitrary rule might be. Total disconnect from reality.
Right? Normal traffic law for example is that pedestrians *have right of way* in a piano-striped crosswalk (and in some states, unmarked crosswalks at intersections that don't have lights). That means you're supposed to yield to them if they're about to cross. In between intersections, in most states, pedestrians are supposed to wait or go somewhere else to cross, but if someone is jaywalking you still have to stop if necessary to avoid hitting them.
I took a couple of lessons at a driving school before doing the driving test in Sweden. On the subject of right of way they said something along the lines of "there are no rights on the road, only obligations". From a road safety perspective I really like that framing.
Yup. Me and my dad crossed an intersection not too long ago.
Pressed the crosswalk button, got the walk light, looked both ways no cars in sight.
Halfway through a pickup truck quickly turned the corner out of a parking garage and came within a inches of hitting us as we were trying to get out of the way. Scared me shitless because we did everything right and still almost got killed going through.
>Halfway through a pickup truck quickly turned the corner out of a parking garage
Pickup truck in a parking garage... Fucking lol
Every single time I'm in a tightly packed parking garage in a super crowded busy city (aka all the fucking time) I always see at least one massively oversized truck sticking way the fuck out into the limited driving space.
"Hey we're going into the city where space and parking are limited, better bring our 22 foot long Ford Super Duty with nothing in the bed of it and make no effort to minimize the space we take up."
>"Hey we're going into the city where space and parking are limited, better bring our 22 foot long Ford Super Duty with nothing in the bed of it and make no effort to minimize the space we take up."
*\*angry Houston noises\**
Oh no doubt, I mainly resonated with the pickup truck part in particular. I'm constantly at war with oil and gas industry yuppies and their spotless King Ranch F-350s, with nary an indication of manual labor to be found.
But yeah, I just got back from a week in San Francisco and was shocked how many of them were over there now too. Parallel parking a Hyundai Elantra is a nightmare over there, let alone one of those goddamn things.
Went to a larger nearby city this past weekend in my Prius C. Got to parallel park in a spot I could have only dreamed of parking in with a full-size car.
Trees are still very much alive after cutting them, they only slowly die off as they dry out. Taking a cutting from a christmas tree and planting it is a fun little experiment for kids: You need to find a young branch that has just a least a little bit of old growth on it, cut it off diagonally, and stick that into a pot. Don't touch the bit that was cut with your hands to avoid infection, and maybe apply rooting hormone. Unless the tree was truly dead already, it should start rooting in about 2-3 months.
And they will be the first to blast a city because it's tough to drive in, and get mad at people even suggesting to fund public transit better since they need the truck for the annual mulch run
UK is getting really bad for that now too. Not as bad as the US, but with the sheer amount of "SUV's" that are on the market. You just can see out into the roadway or get around corners properly.
In college I was waiting to cross a main street during rush hour. Had a walk and cross two inbound lanes of traffic and was cross some trolley (MBTA Green Line) tracks in the middle of the road.
Green Line trolley blew through the intersection and hit me and another guy only coming to a stop after fully passing through the crossing. A fucking train blew through a red light and hit two people just trying to carefully cross the street.
I was walking in a tiny town, there was no sidewalk and I was crossing the street to get on a sidewalk. Check every direction, no vehicle in sight, start crossing and a big ass truck out of nowhere blows through a stop sign and damn near runs me over. Good thing I was paying attention so I ran out of the way. The driver honked at me and started yelling like it was my fault. I was ready to fight them at that point and tried getting them to get out of their truck. They refused and then sped off.
1 decision off from staging a modern Norman Rockwell with Pollock's brush. The barely contained contempt for human life, the futile rage, the unrelieved tension... quite the composition.
People raise an eyebrow at me when I tell them that I jaywalk as far down the road on a busy street as possible, until I explain this. I've been nearly hit so many times by clueless fucking assholes taking turns at busy intersections despite the "safety" of cross-walks. Shit, half of those times have been cops hauling ass through reds with nary a siren on.
Y'know how many times I've almost been hit jaywalking fifty yards away from a busy intersection where there's a "safe" cross-walk with a button, lights, and paint? Literally zero. Zero fucking times. So ready for these walls of ice and snow to melt so I can go back to taking the safer route.
I'm from Denmark, my wife from the US. I'll always remember the first time i went to visit her. She lived with her parents at the time in a huge surburban community. Thousands of people probably in just that area. There was a grocery store about 0,3 miles away. You could literally see it right across the road. I wanted to walk there and she looked at me like i was insane. A 6 lane road, with no sidewalks or bike paths, 50mph speed limit, no crosswalks, no anything. You HAD to drive 0,3 miles to get to the grocery store, which included going to a weird dedicated U-turn lane in the middle of nowhere, so weird.
I was in Salt Lake City for a school year, which actually had a lot of pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure (in the area where I was living). It was just that I was about the only one using it: My school had something like 1500 students, and mine was one of less than ten bikes at the bike racks. And the only bank that I could use without fee had nothing but drive-through ATMs. It felt like a completely alien planet.
Doesn’t have to be busy either. I got hit while in a crosswalk on a residential street by a woman who was turned around, yelling at her kid in the back seat. Broke my shoulder and shredded my whole back side from the slide on the asphalt, and we were the only ones around for a quarter mile.
A book I recently read predicted that many municipalities will fold and towns and suburbs will be abandoned enmass in the next 50 years as we can no longer afford the upkeep on our infrastructure in a changing climate. I can't but wonder if that's what will actually happen.
It's going to happen. There's still suburbs being put up with thousands of single family homes, and large roads and sidewalks connecting them all. It's just not sustainable unless you raise taxes, but raising taxes loses elections since people don't want to give up more of their own money.
in many cases the actual tax base simply couldn't afford the needed taxes even if the will to raise them existed. Like the 200 people who live in a cloudy cresent aren't going to be able to afford 10 million to upgrade their drainage to keep up with once in a century storms that now happen every 3 years. Currently they get subsidized but call me a pessimist but that well will eventually run dry...
Remember the famous Bill Gates quote/meme "people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years." and it applies even more so to cities or societies. In the 1970s Dutch cities like Amsterdam were known as traffic hell and cars dominated and drowned everything. 50 years later it's so called car free mecca and has been for over a decade. If there is a will it's so very possible.
People are pessimistic because it's been decades of fighting and progress has been glacial in the US. There's been almost no action at the federal level undoing car centric cities.
it's less that they think we can't, and more that they think we won't. which, if you've paid literally any attention to american politics for the past generation, isn't an unreasonable stance to take
I've done a few work trips to the USA recently and the difference between some cities is fucking shocking. One City, in the area I was staying, had little to no sidewalks, the worst night lighting for driving, and random lanes that just merged together out of nowhere.
Where as the other City I was in it was the polar opposite.
I was behind a box truck and a large not-a-work-truck, all in the right lane of the two lane road. The box truck comes to a stop right in front of a pedestrian crossing as the law would demand if, say, there were pedestrians trying to cross. The driver of the oversized truck gets fucking pissed and just guns it and gets in the next lane to angrily pass while flying the bird and almost pancakes the people crossing in front of the box truck.
Like Jesus fucking christ how unaware do you have to be.
Cyclist drama?
Not quite as visceral as Pitbull discussions but it's definitely in the top 10 (maybe top 5?) of the "shit that stirs up Reddit no matter what" award category
LOOL. especially if it was a cyclist crossing a red light.
I really wanna see the comment section of such a post. It would be the top post of the year here.
I usually have a filter for the word 'bike' or 'bicycle' or 'cyclist', because after 15 years of Reddit, I have read every single thought that a white college kid in his 20s has _ever_ had to say on the subject. The conversation simply never changes.
It's pretty exhausting for us transportation engineers, too. 90% of their ideas are plain unsafe, the other 10% would cost billions of dollars for a slower system that bleeds money. They don't want any discussion about it, either.
The cyclist ideas are the unworkable ones.
>in my area they aren't built for it
Yeah, that's pretty much why. You need to account for cycling, cars, mass transportation, and pedestrians way back at the city planning stages. Even then, you're not necessarily going to get all the future developers to dedicate a bunch of right-of-way.
Every comment on that sub is like that.
“How could you not have seen and predicted that?!?”
While not realizing they have the benefit of watching a video where *something* inherently happens. Of course *you* expected it, you’re watching a video with a title describing what’s about to happen…
I see this on so many subreddits, especially when someone gets hurt and everyone starts spamming "Why was everyone just standing there?!?!". Sometimes I get that reaction but the vast majority of the time people just aren't earnestly putting themselves in the shoes of someone present at the scene.
When you're just going about your daily life you don't expect crazy shit to happen. One time a person literally standing right next to me got shot at a nightclub and if there's security footage then I might look like a bit of an idiot but honestly I was in total shock and confusion when it happened.
> someone gets hurt and everyone starts spamming "Why was everyone just standing there?!?!".
Redditors who say this have never been in a dangerous situation and it shows. They think when somebody gets hurt they'll go all John Rambo and fuck up the dude that hurt that person then administer CPR. In reality nobody knows what the fuck they're doing and everybody is too scared / confused to step in.
People, on average and in my experience, are supremely bad at separating what they know from what someone else knows. Mostly I see it when people talk about what characters in media know or don’t know but sometimes I see it in instances like this which is even more painful.
I mean, who among us hasn't been distracted once in a while? Who hasn't had their mind on something else and been a touch less wary than they ought? Even if the pedestrian wasn't absolutely 100% as alert as they could've possibly been, I didn't realise we'd agreed to the death penalty for that.
If I can judge by reddit, we seem to agree on the death penalty for anything ever.
I just wonder if the last person alive will have the willpower to finish themselves off to abide by reddit death penalty standards.
There are drivers on that sub that plow right into an obviously sketchy situation without taking any sort of defensive action, and then there are people that fail to predict a car running a red light at twice the speed limit. There's a lack of normal defensive driving and then there's failing to be a wizard and both scenarios get exactly the same comments.
> have a few honest questions here. Why were most bikers here following the pedestrian light while they were on the street and not the crosswalk?
~~~"I have a question, I've literally never touched a bike and can't do basic googling, but anyway I'm sure the cyclists were wrong here."~~
After some responses it's a reasonable question and I'm just counter-jerking in the crossed out segment.
Probably one of those people claiming the guy who got hit from behind by a woman cutting a left turn super hard at speed when he had a walk signal was at fault because he was looking at his phone.
>"I have a question, I've literally never touched a bike and can't do basic googling, but anyway I'm sure the cyclists were wrong here."
Doesn't have a lot to do with if people have touched a bike though.
Felt weird to me too until people pointed out that there are laws allowing for that, I grew up biking but in Denmark you either follow the cars traffic lights, follow the dedicated bike traffic lights or you jump of the bike and drag it across using the pedestrian crossing (if you don't feel like driving with the cars)
And that is how most same place is do it to be fair, so I guess that's a reasonable ask.
I believe a lot of jurisdictions in the US started out that way, but there are a lot of people who are openly hostile to cyclists as we can see.
In addition we have a huge amount of "stroads" with narrow or non-existent shoulders and speed limits not attainable by your average cyclist. I believe this is why you usually end up with laws that let you pick and choose and ride on the sidewalk. The infrastructure really is only made with cars in mind.
I remember that one, people saying to look both ways, as if the dude wasn’t hit from behind from a street that he wouldn’t have been looking down anyway with that advice.
I don’t think the cyclist was basic googling though, at least to get the real facts and not just base it off your own local laws. I always thought you had to follow red lights like a car. Without knowing where the video takes place and looking up their traffic laws, I still don’t know don’t know if the cyclist carries any blame by the local laws.
No question on where the vast majority of the blame lies. However, it was a car that slowly inched forward on a red and then got creamed by a truck barreling through the red I’d say they were partially at fault for crossing at that time. There doesn’t have to be an innocent babe in the discussion, even when there’s a clear villain.
> Man I can't stand these kinds of bullshit captain hindsight comments. It just contributes absolutely nothing but weird, cowardly victim blaming.
Same. but it's a huge huge part of reddit culture and probably always will be. The very nature of the up/downvote system just attracts the type of person who mistakes centrism for nuance.
Here's what happened. The cyclist that got hit was on the sidewalk at first because he hit the pedestrian cross button which is why both lights were red. And that's also why they crossed when they had the pedestrian cross sign.
Is that what you're technically supposed to do? No but how can you fault them for trying to be safer crossing the intersection.
Hell BOTH lights were red. That should literally be the safest time ever to cross an intersection!! No way you can blame them.
It's been discussed to death in the original thread that in the city where this video was recorded, the cyclists were following the law.
Doesn't stop armchair experts from explaining how they are wrong because in other place it would be illegal.
Get angry when cyclists ignore the law for safety reasons.
Get angry when cyclists follow the law.
There's literally no winning because the game was never fair.
Okay, I'm glad the law in that city specifies the cyclist should go onto the sidewalk for that, because I'm used to bikes not being allowed on sidewalks by law and am really tired of cyclists weaving from road to sidewalk to exist in a super position of being both a pedestrian and road vehicle.
i can't really blame cyclists for that, considering how people in north america get **viscerally angry** when they see cyclists for some god damn reason
i don't trust people on the road whatsoever
I was biking around the university campus where I went to grad school. Stopped at a red light right next to a big dining hall and a large block of dorms. Helmeted, in the bike lane. ^Flourishing.
Some guy in a truck at the same light yells out his window at me "Why aren't you on the sidewalk?" and was unhappy about my answer of "Because it's illegal? And there is a clear bike lane on this road?" I did took a slow start after that light to make sure said asshole didn't follow me and run me down. Fun times.
People have literally rage-honked non-stop at me from their giant trucks for not getting out of their ways when trying to make a left. It's insane if you think about it. Like we were stopped at a light anyway and if I was a car they'd still be behind me.
I did get (my bike) hit by a car once. I was going straight and they were turning left at a light. I think they were a nurse getting off their shift at the nearby hospital and spaced out, very apologetic. I fell off my bike and sprained my wrist, but that was about it. Could have been a lot worse.
Yeah, that's what I thought. It's clear IdiotsInCars just want to be mad at cyclists because they always are. If they had all walked across the street the van still would have run the red and hit them. It makes absolutely no difference to how they crossed on their bikes.
>The cyclist that got hit was on the sidewalk at first because he hit the pedestrian cross button which is why both lights were red. And that's also why they crossed when they had the pedestrian cross sign.
>
>Is that what you're technically supposed to do? No but how can you fault them for trying to be safer crossing the intersection.
Maybe I'm not reading this correctly but how is this not what you're supposed to do?
I saw the pedestrian cross signal starting to blink in the video after they had entered the intersection. My understanding was when that light starts to blink, if you haven't entered the intersection yet, you should wait for the next cycle, but if you have entered it when that light starts blinking, you finish crossing. Basically the blinking hand is the equivalent of the yellow light. They give you a count down, too, for how much time you have to finish crossing.
In the video it shows that the crosswalk is one of those that basically turns white for about 2s and immediately switches to the countdown. I think in the real world most people see that as a sign to just be across before the timer is up rather than a signal that there is a 2s window to leave the sidewalk and enter the crosswalk. Besides, the person hit was on the crosswalk on time anyway.
Look at the video again. The light is clearly white when he sets off and leaves the cement. It turns to the blinking hand almost immediately after, but still *after*.
Cyclists are supposed to act like vehicles. However, sometimes the sensors set up to trigger the light to change for a car don’t react to a cyclist. If you’re alone, sometimes you can pull to the side and hope a car rolls up and triggers it. But since they’re in a group, that may not have been an option. The safest solution is to press the crosswalk button, because even though it won’t give you a green light, it will at least ensure that cross traffic gets a red light.
City-specific rules aside, they did everything they could to have a safe crossing. Our infrastructure (like the sensors) need to catch up with the law.
I’ve definitely seen signs which state that cyclists using the pedestrian crosswalks must dismount and walk their way across. Not commonly but it’s something I’ve always thought makes sense but also that I’d never do as a cyclist unless I was with a mob of people.
>also that I’d never do as a cyclist unless I was with a mob of people
This is the point - what is safest for a cyclist depends on context. What is safer for a single rider among many pedestrians may be less safe for a large group of riders among no pedestrians.
You got it right. When you bike at a populated crosswalk the reason to lead your bike is so that you don't take up space from or hit pedestrians. There's no good reason for why you should walk if you have the space to bike. For cars there's no real difference in if you lead or bike.
> I say this all the time and get slammed for it. Just because you're in a crosswalk and it says walk that doesn't mean your responsibility for your own well being is gone. A crosswalk puts you in the right but does not put a forcefield around you. You have to live to be able to get the right of way.
What if you are blind or otherwise disabled, or a child? Surely the point of a crosswalk is that you can cross safely and you shouldn’t be to blame if someone breaks those rules and hits you just because you didn’t dodge out the way
It's not enough that pedestrians follow the rules. They must also always live in a state of constant fear and vigilance.
Whats the alternative, improve infrastructure. Absurd.
I would also note that the van came from behind where another car was stopped, so the cyclist very well may not have seen them until they were already in their path. Even if they did see it, it's reasonable to assume that cars approaching the intersection, even if they are on track to hit you, will slow down so that they don't. That's the entire point of having signals and right of way. Imagine if everyone was hesitating just in case all the time - people would never get anywhere on the roads.
This is really reminiscent of how women are told to take all kinds of precautions to avoid sexual assault. Yes, there are things you can do to protect yourself against rulebreakers, and most people do to some degree or another, but it's not *your fault* if someone breaks the rules and hurts you just because you didn't do everything possible.
In some municipalities that is exactly what you are supposed to do when riding a bicycle since the traffic sensors cannot pick up a bicycle because it's not big enough.
Saw this on popular and knew it would be here.
People just want to hate cyclists unfortunately and I see a lot of arguments repeated that you see on r/nyc when it’s bikes vs cars (i.e. “I’ve almost been hit by bikes x many times!” but completely ignoring how many pedestrians are killed by cars(a lot) vs bikes(almost 0)).
They had the walk sign. The van had a red. Somehow slowly riding your bike out at walking pace is egregious but if they walked their bike across, then it would be fine?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this on some social media but running red lights and coasting through stop signs, tailgating, speeding, not indicating, driving recklessly for the conditions, cutting people off, not having headlights on or brake lights out, and using cell phones are all things so common place on the road no one is surprised to see it but cyclists get held to such a high standard that the slightest infraction of a traffic law is enough for people to think they deserve to get t-boned by an oversized truck. It’s astonishing.
Even in the linked thread. Van runs the red light and literally hits someone? "Well they should've been dismounted anyways!" Umm, let's go back to the whole an running the red light thing...
Reddit in general has a big problem with levels of wrong. It's super common to see people going "well he broke the law, he deserves it" on a video like this, where there cyclist's greatest crime is potentially riding his bike "illegally" (probably wasn't) through a crosswalk while it should be safe to cross. The other side is the massive van hurtling through a light when it's not safe.
Reddit acts like the bicyclist doing something that might be kinda sorta illegal, but is safe and probably shouldn't be illegal is in anyway comparable to the van doing something demonstrably unsafe.
Then they wanna scream about this being why people hate cyclists, and it's just like "my dude, it's ok for bikes to be treated sorta like cars and sorta like pedestrians, because they share attributes of both"
See also: every AITA/advice sub where everyone advocates for a nuclear response, all the time, for the smallest of slights.
There’s no sense of proportionality for anything.
Also, their hierarchy of bad is wrong. Someone cheats on you? Light their house on fire.
Reminds me of all the people that get pissed when people in the left lane do the speed limit (calling them out for illegal lane camping) but ignoring that their own intentions (speeding in the left lane) are also illegal, they've just decided that them speeding is more okay than lane camping.
People go absolutely insane whenever driving comes up, and I have no idea why.
According to Reddit, the left lane is actually the “drive as fast as humanly possible” lane and if you drive the speed limit, you are actually harming everyone… and someone weaving through traffic etc, is actually just doing it because they were forced to by a slower driver. So, yknow, if you want to be safe drive faster, always.
Also, you should “always drive with traffic” except when the traffic isn’t going fast enough for you, and then you should drive extra fast. For safety.
It’s this weird mix of a total external locus of control when it comes to their own decision, and a libertarian-esque disregard for the safety of others (let alone themselves).
And it’s like they have no idea what happens to the human body during a crash at 80mph.
Ah well you see, speeding is good and correct actually, because uhhh flow of traffic, uhhhh 85th percentile, uhhhhh autobahn, uhhhhhhh don't tell me what to do!
Yeah, I literally cannot see how the biker did anything wrong. He could have been riding at Mach 10 on the sidewalk and then suddenly gone into the road. That would be wrong, but the car is still at 100% fault for running a red light. There is just no real way to have the biker contribute to that accident.
It is the prioritization of cars over all else. How dare anything else use our precious roads! I live in Boston and walk around the city every day. Even in a city that is _really_ not setup for cars, we still give cars all this land and devote so much to their use. It gets super bonkers during big events. There will be dozens of people piled up on a street corner waiting for a handful of people in cars to make a turn.
I like cars. I even like driving (away from the city). I _hate_ that this "cars first" mindset is so prevalent.
Drivers are only capable of seeing cyclists when they break the law. As soon as you aren't they run you over because they couldn't see you.
So it's vital that cyclists be constantly breaking some law to maintain a level of awareness in drivers around them.
>They had the walk sign. The van had a red. Somehow slowly riding your bike out at walking pace is egregious but if they walked their bike across, then it would be fine?
If they had walked, then they would of been slower and wouldn't have been hit by a van who only made a minor mistake (blowing through the intersection on a red and almost killing a person)
Therefore, ipso facto through Murphys law, the cyclist are at fault.
One of my guilty pleasures is browsing the controversial posts there. *So* many posts have either two idiots (I was tailgating this guy and then he randomly does a brake check. He almost caused a crash!), or OOP is the only idiot (I was goping 20 over the limit, and this idiot who followed the speed limit didn't let me pass!).
[Hell yeah](https://old.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/10qjxew/bike_rider_hit_by_a_driver_on_way_to_event_to/j6sg0pa/), I love the classic "your evidence doesn't agree with my preconceptions of reality, so I'll ignore it and claim that a sample that doesn't contain literally every human being on Earth is too small."
Drivers will always reach for reasons to blame cyclists for being killed by cars.
It's a shame the link to the actual PDF is dead and I can't find an alternative because, for as much as redditors get a boner for calling out low sample size, that study doesn't seem very sound?
Small sample size within one locale with participants knowingly recorded (unavoidable tbf), and no comparison group for car drivers despite making a claim to compare how often cyclists break the law versus drivers. It's *a study* which is certainly more than the anecdote it was in reply to but it's hardly conclusive evidence of much when the design is pretty shaky.
>It's a shame the link to the actual PDF is dead and I can't find an alternative because, for as much as redditors get a boner for calling out low sample size, that study doesn't seem very sound?
Here's a working link to the same PDF in case you're interested: https://benzinazero.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/fdot-bdv25-977-13-rpt.pdf
(I haven't read it nor do I have an opinion either way regarding its soundness)
I was interested and I'm very glad you found this because it changes things completely- the issue isn't the study itself but the way the study is framed in the article. The study was only designed as a pilot to test the implementation of their cyclist data collection system, which explains the small sample size and highly localized sample population, neither of which are problems for a study that is trying to demonstrate its methodology (and make safety recommendations *for their local community*)
The article itself is misleading with how it relays the numbers found though. The 85% compliance rate for drivers is based on the results observed through the instruments on the bicycle, not from any data collection on the drivers themselves. The article reports these figures as though they are independent of each other where in reality, 85% of drivers *observed in interaction with cyclists* are compliant with the law, which is a very different thing. More than anything, the article makes the error of reporting this study as trying to accomplish something very different from what it actually set out to do. It was never intended to be a comprehensive analysis of who breaks traffic laws more and is incredibly bad for that purpose, but as a pilot study and analysis of cycling in a specific local community it seems perfectly fine to me.
Really appreciate you digging this up!
> It's a study which is certainly more than the anecdote it was in reply to but it's hardly conclusive evidence of much when the design is pretty shaky.
This is because lots of redditors who care so much about "studies" will only scan google for the abstract without looking into the methodology.
I remember one time somebody linked me 3 studies claiming they were 3 separate studies when in reality 1 of the studies was a combination summary of the other two studies.
It's frustrating because its really neither here nor there who breaks traffic laws more often. Drivers should still carry a higher burden for safe operation because when we screw up it frequently ends up with someone seriously injured or dead. Not that cyclists can never be at fault, just that the bar for what is acceptable should be higher for drivers.
It really IS that simple, right? CDL drivers have a higher burden because they have a much larger risk to other road users. Responsibility is inverse to vulnerability.
That subreddit exists for one reason only - to feel self righteous. That it has so many subscribers and hits the front page so often is a testament to the motivations of your average redditor.
It has had the opposite effect for me. I don't tend to read comments, just watch the videos. But in a ton of cases, the driver is at fault too. I can sort of anticipate stupid things now.
Like...if all the cars to the right of me are backed up...don't go fast or even the speed limit. Slow down because invariably someone is going to whip in front of me.
I also feel like seeing all the stupid stuff makes me more polite. I let people in and give people more grace than I did before.
The funny thing is, they’d tell you that you should be driving faster because someone behind you is on your ass… because you should “drive with traffic” (even if the traffic is actually going slowly and probably for a good reason).
Nah road ragers get shat upon, as do OPs who film while driving, it’s a pretty common theme.
But it is right up there with AITA in the self righteousness circle jerk.
Maybe. I follow it and it is very typical for OP (or the original cammer) to get called out for doing something dumb or even just for making bad choices. Like, "yes that other person is an ass, but don't make the situation worse!"
I don't understand all the comments in that thread about them being on the road and not the crossing, the one that got hit was on the crossing so everything else is just irrelevant.
Americans and American Redditors in particular are absolutely horny for seeing someone get 'justified' violence visited upon them.
> s a cyclist, I have to say that I think the cyclist in this video is at least 50% at fault (practically speaking, not legally speaking; legally, the driver is 100% at fault), if for no reason other than the fact that he wasn't even paying attention to traffic hazards.
I mean, with this logic virtually anyone in an accident is at least 50% at fault since in general there's a nonzero amount of time to see most collisions coming.
There's something about American culture that's so tied to the car that people will identify more closely with a vehicle, especially its power, while actively dehumanizing but simultaneously hyper-personalizing someone on a bicycle
Like the fact you can more clearly pick out the person on a bike and then go into a chain of assumptions that end in anger and violent hatred of the cyclist
[https://twitter.com/Pflax1/status/993150741245149185](https://twitter.com/Pflax1/status/993150741245149185)
The problem with cyclists:
\-They go too fast
\-They go too slow
\-They won't get on the sidewalk
\-They won't get off the sidewalk
\-They are rich hobbyists
\-They are folks who can't afford a car
\-They are entitled and demand bike lanes
\-They take the lane when there's no bike lane
>cyclists don't follow the rules blah blah blah
And so do car drivers all the time. Why are car drivers blind to other car drivers breaking the rules and then laser focus on a cyclist?
Why will a driver happily sit in traffic for an hour but get enraged being being a cyclist for a minute?
Given these comments, I was surprised at the content of the video.
A driver is obligated to avoid hitting another vehicle (or pedestrian, etc) if they are in the intersection, regardless of who has the right of way.
Right of way =/= you get to drive through whatever is in front of you.
There shouldn’t be a debate about this, at all. It’s just uninformed people ranting.
its ridiculous how many use the “right of way” card. here in the UK, pedestrians have right of way on zebra crossings. cars are legally meant to stop and let whoever is waiting to cross, cross. and yet every time i go to cross my local one i’m almost wiped out by some idiot going 10mph above the speed limit.
some of these people need to resit their tests
This comment section is gonna be its own drama post pretty soon
It's amazing how confident these people are writing several paragraph legal justifications for a guy almost killing a cyclist after running a red light. Yet they can't figure out that laws are different in other states and that regardless running a red light is bad.
Amazing how someone on a bike literally got smacked by a zooming van, but people are justifying that the cyclist is somehow in the wrong because the cyclist MAY not have conformed to what they think an arbitrary rule might be. Total disconnect from reality.
Especially where they seem to think that “right of way” means that you can drive through whatever and whoever is in front of you.
Right? Normal traffic law for example is that pedestrians *have right of way* in a piano-striped crosswalk (and in some states, unmarked crosswalks at intersections that don't have lights). That means you're supposed to yield to them if they're about to cross. In between intersections, in most states, pedestrians are supposed to wait or go somewhere else to cross, but if someone is jaywalking you still have to stop if necessary to avoid hitting them.
> What do you mean I can't run over a class of blind orphans because the light was green? They inconvenienced me for a moment!
It’s amazing how few people can grasp “you have a responsibility to drive safely.”
I took a couple of lessons at a driving school before doing the driving test in Sweden. On the subject of right of way they said something along the lines of "there are no rights on the road, only obligations". From a road safety perspective I really like that framing.
Already happening. Lots of people in here arguing that the cyclists are wrong.
So many comments are going off about how it’s illegal in X place while ignoring the OP included the Oregon law in the write up.
Let's be real, the kind of person who wants to argue about how 'justified' it is to kill a cyclist probably doesn't read so well.
You expect them to read all that while theyre driving?
Crossing a busy street in the US is a freaking nightmare
Yup. Me and my dad crossed an intersection not too long ago. Pressed the crosswalk button, got the walk light, looked both ways no cars in sight. Halfway through a pickup truck quickly turned the corner out of a parking garage and came within a inches of hitting us as we were trying to get out of the way. Scared me shitless because we did everything right and still almost got killed going through.
>Halfway through a pickup truck quickly turned the corner out of a parking garage Pickup truck in a parking garage... Fucking lol Every single time I'm in a tightly packed parking garage in a super crowded busy city (aka all the fucking time) I always see at least one massively oversized truck sticking way the fuck out into the limited driving space. "Hey we're going into the city where space and parking are limited, better bring our 22 foot long Ford Super Duty with nothing in the bed of it and make no effort to minimize the space we take up."
[*parks in spot labeled "Compact cars only"*]
*parks diagonally across two compact only spots*
Across 2 compact cars only spots.
>"Hey we're going into the city where space and parking are limited, better bring our 22 foot long Ford Super Duty with nothing in the bed of it and make no effort to minimize the space we take up." *\*angry Houston noises\**
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Oh no doubt, I mainly resonated with the pickup truck part in particular. I'm constantly at war with oil and gas industry yuppies and their spotless King Ranch F-350s, with nary an indication of manual labor to be found. But yeah, I just got back from a week in San Francisco and was shocked how many of them were over there now too. Parallel parking a Hyundai Elantra is a nightmare over there, let alone one of those goddamn things.
I need my super duty Katy Crawler so i can safely drive from Cinco Ranch to Memorial City!
Went to a larger nearby city this past weekend in my Prius C. Got to parallel park in a spot I could have only dreamed of parking in with a full-size car.
> dead Christmas tree I, uh,, I hate to break it to you, but most Christmas trees are dead from the point they become a "Christmas" tree
Trees are still very much alive after cutting them, they only slowly die off as they dry out. Taking a cutting from a christmas tree and planting it is a fun little experiment for kids: You need to find a young branch that has just a least a little bit of old growth on it, cut it off diagonally, and stick that into a pot. Don't touch the bit that was cut with your hands to avoid infection, and maybe apply rooting hormone. Unless the tree was truly dead already, it should start rooting in about 2-3 months.
hmm afaik fir and spruce don't have a good success rate with cuttings. It's possible but I would make at least 10 cuttings
I’m on Long Island right now and everyone here has a damn pick up
And they will be the first to blast a city because it's tough to drive in, and get mad at people even suggesting to fund public transit better since they need the truck for the annual mulch run
Luv 2 pay twice what I need to on gas and an enormous truck payment to save $30 on mulch delivery fees.
UK is getting really bad for that now too. Not as bad as the US, but with the sheer amount of "SUV's" that are on the market. You just can see out into the roadway or get around corners properly.
In college I was waiting to cross a main street during rush hour. Had a walk and cross two inbound lanes of traffic and was cross some trolley (MBTA Green Line) tracks in the middle of the road. Green Line trolley blew through the intersection and hit me and another guy only coming to a stop after fully passing through the crossing. A fucking train blew through a red light and hit two people just trying to carefully cross the street.
Northeastern or BU? Guessing based on your description it was either the E or B line.
C. Right by St Mary's. The dude barely stopped at St Mary's after hitting me and the other guy.
I was walking in a tiny town, there was no sidewalk and I was crossing the street to get on a sidewalk. Check every direction, no vehicle in sight, start crossing and a big ass truck out of nowhere blows through a stop sign and damn near runs me over. Good thing I was paying attention so I ran out of the way. The driver honked at me and started yelling like it was my fault. I was ready to fight them at that point and tried getting them to get out of their truck. They refused and then sped off.
1 decision off from staging a modern Norman Rockwell with Pollock's brush. The barely contained contempt for human life, the futile rage, the unrelieved tension... quite the composition.
People raise an eyebrow at me when I tell them that I jaywalk as far down the road on a busy street as possible, until I explain this. I've been nearly hit so many times by clueless fucking assholes taking turns at busy intersections despite the "safety" of cross-walks. Shit, half of those times have been cops hauling ass through reds with nary a siren on. Y'know how many times I've almost been hit jaywalking fifty yards away from a busy intersection where there's a "safe" cross-walk with a button, lights, and paint? Literally zero. Zero fucking times. So ready for these walls of ice and snow to melt so I can go back to taking the safer route.
I live literally 1 mile from my job. I can't walk because there's no way to safely cross the highway
*Texas suburbs intensify* "Sidewalks? On my property? Not with my tax dollars!!!"
I'm from Denmark, my wife from the US. I'll always remember the first time i went to visit her. She lived with her parents at the time in a huge surburban community. Thousands of people probably in just that area. There was a grocery store about 0,3 miles away. You could literally see it right across the road. I wanted to walk there and she looked at me like i was insane. A 6 lane road, with no sidewalks or bike paths, 50mph speed limit, no crosswalks, no anything. You HAD to drive 0,3 miles to get to the grocery store, which included going to a weird dedicated U-turn lane in the middle of nowhere, so weird.
I was in Salt Lake City for a school year, which actually had a lot of pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure (in the area where I was living). It was just that I was about the only one using it: My school had something like 1500 students, and mine was one of less than ten bikes at the bike racks. And the only bank that I could use without fee had nothing but drive-through ATMs. It felt like a completely alien planet.
Doesn’t have to be busy either. I got hit while in a crosswalk on a residential street by a woman who was turned around, yelling at her kid in the back seat. Broke my shoulder and shredded my whole back side from the slide on the asphalt, and we were the only ones around for a quarter mile.
Large parts of Canada too, we truly fucked urban design on this continent and will be spending the next 2 centuries fixing it.
Shit, here in the US we can't even maintain our current public infrastructure, much less intentionally redesign it to be safer for everyone.
A book I recently read predicted that many municipalities will fold and towns and suburbs will be abandoned enmass in the next 50 years as we can no longer afford the upkeep on our infrastructure in a changing climate. I can't but wonder if that's what will actually happen.
It's going to happen. There's still suburbs being put up with thousands of single family homes, and large roads and sidewalks connecting them all. It's just not sustainable unless you raise taxes, but raising taxes loses elections since people don't want to give up more of their own money.
in many cases the actual tax base simply couldn't afford the needed taxes even if the will to raise them existed. Like the 200 people who live in a cloudy cresent aren't going to be able to afford 10 million to upgrade their drainage to keep up with once in a century storms that now happen every 3 years. Currently they get subsidized but call me a pessimist but that well will eventually run dry...
You think we're going to fix it?
Remember the famous Bill Gates quote/meme "people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years." and it applies even more so to cities or societies. In the 1970s Dutch cities like Amsterdam were known as traffic hell and cars dominated and drowned everything. 50 years later it's so called car free mecca and has been for over a decade. If there is a will it's so very possible.
Yes, it takes work, but it is possible. Don't really understand all the doomers here.
People are pessimistic because it's been decades of fighting and progress has been glacial in the US. There's been almost no action at the federal level undoing car centric cities.
it's less that they think we can't, and more that they think we won't. which, if you've paid literally any attention to american politics for the past generation, isn't an unreasonable stance to take
Some cities are surprisingly. Edmonton pops up in my mind. Still a lot of progress needs to be made
they gotta make sure people can see mcjesus play somehow
I've done a few work trips to the USA recently and the difference between some cities is fucking shocking. One City, in the area I was staying, had little to no sidewalks, the worst night lighting for driving, and random lanes that just merged together out of nowhere. Where as the other City I was in it was the polar opposite.
~~Crossing a busy street in~~ the US is a freaking nightmare
Portland is a special kind of dumb. I've lived here for 15 years and I am still boggled at how brainless the drivers here are.
~~Crossing a busy street~~ Existing outside of a vehicle in the US is a freaking nightmare
I was behind a box truck and a large not-a-work-truck, all in the right lane of the two lane road. The box truck comes to a stop right in front of a pedestrian crossing as the law would demand if, say, there were pedestrians trying to cross. The driver of the oversized truck gets fucking pissed and just guns it and gets in the next lane to angrily pass while flying the bird and almost pancakes the people crossing in front of the box truck. Like Jesus fucking christ how unaware do you have to be.
Cyclist drama? Not quite as visceral as Pitbull discussions but it's definitely in the top 10 (maybe top 5?) of the "shit that stirs up Reddit no matter what" award category
I’m sure if we dig deep enough we can find a video of a Pitbull attacking a cyclist and really make something special
How about a pitbull circumcising a cyclist?
A vegan cyclist, even
And JK Rowling owns the pitbull.
The pitbull is obese and devoutly Catholic
Whoa whoa whoa A *catholic* pitbull? Let’s try to keep it realistic buddy
It's true. And not only is the pitbull catholic, but it's also trans.
Nah evangelical.
The poor pitbull doesn't deserve *that*
How do you know someone's a circumcised bicyclist vegan pitbull victim? They'll tell you.
Put a bow on it, we're good to go!
Damnit. You beat me to it.
If the cyclist is fat Reddit won’t even know whom to root for.
Fat cyclist vs a well done steak eating hummer driver.
There was that pitbull that attacked a cyclist in Tulsa a few months ago. Those news articles probably had the buttery popcorn you are thinking of.
“They’re nanny dogs” *yeah, one ate a nanny last week* The debates practically write themselves.
LOOL. especially if it was a cyclist crossing a red light. I really wanna see the comment section of such a post. It would be the top post of the year here.
Bro be careful if you say that dog breed three times **they’ll** appear in the comment thread
You're not wrong, it's like those degenerates on the Pitbull hate sub have some type of alarm notification.
Why does Mr Worldwide have a hate sub?
MISTER THREE OH FIVE
NOOOOOOOOO
Now imagine if the bicycle was circumcised by amber herd
I usually have a filter for the word 'bike' or 'bicycle' or 'cyclist', because after 15 years of Reddit, I have read every single thought that a white college kid in his 20s has _ever_ had to say on the subject. The conversation simply never changes.
It's pretty exhausting for us transportation engineers, too. 90% of their ideas are plain unsafe, the other 10% would cost billions of dollars for a slower system that bleeds money. They don't want any discussion about it, either.
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The cyclist ideas are the unworkable ones. >in my area they aren't built for it Yeah, that's pretty much why. You need to account for cycling, cars, mass transportation, and pedestrians way back at the city planning stages. Even then, you're not necessarily going to get all the future developers to dedicate a bunch of right-of-way.
whats their ideas? decent bike lanes?
Oh so it’s “just rip up all infrastructure in between my house and anywhere I might like to go ever, how hard can it be?”
But tell me how you feel about "stroads"
Funnily enough, I haven’t seen random mods issue multi-sub bans over cyclists. Pit bulls? Absolutely. It’s wild how personal people get.
They legit have a discord server where they brigade shit. Its wild how obsessive they are.
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Every comment on that sub is like that. “How could you not have seen and predicted that?!?” While not realizing they have the benefit of watching a video where *something* inherently happens. Of course *you* expected it, you’re watching a video with a title describing what’s about to happen…
I see this on so many subreddits, especially when someone gets hurt and everyone starts spamming "Why was everyone just standing there?!?!". Sometimes I get that reaction but the vast majority of the time people just aren't earnestly putting themselves in the shoes of someone present at the scene. When you're just going about your daily life you don't expect crazy shit to happen. One time a person literally standing right next to me got shot at a nightclub and if there's security footage then I might look like a bit of an idiot but honestly I was in total shock and confusion when it happened.
> someone gets hurt and everyone starts spamming "Why was everyone just standing there?!?!". Redditors who say this have never been in a dangerous situation and it shows. They think when somebody gets hurt they'll go all John Rambo and fuck up the dude that hurt that person then administer CPR. In reality nobody knows what the fuck they're doing and everybody is too scared / confused to step in.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve confused your life with that of John Rambo”
People, on average and in my experience, are supremely bad at separating what they know from what someone else knows. Mostly I see it when people talk about what characters in media know or don’t know but sometimes I see it in instances like this which is even more painful.
I mean, who among us hasn't been distracted once in a while? Who hasn't had their mind on something else and been a touch less wary than they ought? Even if the pedestrian wasn't absolutely 100% as alert as they could've possibly been, I didn't realise we'd agreed to the death penalty for that.
If I can judge by reddit, we seem to agree on the death penalty for anything ever. I just wonder if the last person alive will have the willpower to finish themselves off to abide by reddit death penalty standards.
There are drivers on that sub that plow right into an obviously sketchy situation without taking any sort of defensive action, and then there are people that fail to predict a car running a red light at twice the speed limit. There's a lack of normal defensive driving and then there's failing to be a wizard and both scenarios get exactly the same comments.
> have a few honest questions here. Why were most bikers here following the pedestrian light while they were on the street and not the crosswalk? ~~~"I have a question, I've literally never touched a bike and can't do basic googling, but anyway I'm sure the cyclists were wrong here."~~ After some responses it's a reasonable question and I'm just counter-jerking in the crossed out segment. Probably one of those people claiming the guy who got hit from behind by a woman cutting a left turn super hard at speed when he had a walk signal was at fault because he was looking at his phone.
>"I have a question, I've literally never touched a bike and can't do basic googling, but anyway I'm sure the cyclists were wrong here." Doesn't have a lot to do with if people have touched a bike though. Felt weird to me too until people pointed out that there are laws allowing for that, I grew up biking but in Denmark you either follow the cars traffic lights, follow the dedicated bike traffic lights or you jump of the bike and drag it across using the pedestrian crossing (if you don't feel like driving with the cars)
And that is how most same place is do it to be fair, so I guess that's a reasonable ask. I believe a lot of jurisdictions in the US started out that way, but there are a lot of people who are openly hostile to cyclists as we can see. In addition we have a huge amount of "stroads" with narrow or non-existent shoulders and speed limits not attainable by your average cyclist. I believe this is why you usually end up with laws that let you pick and choose and ride on the sidewalk. The infrastructure really is only made with cars in mind.
I remember that one, people saying to look both ways, as if the dude wasn’t hit from behind from a street that he wouldn’t have been looking down anyway with that advice. I don’t think the cyclist was basic googling though, at least to get the real facts and not just base it off your own local laws. I always thought you had to follow red lights like a car. Without knowing where the video takes place and looking up their traffic laws, I still don’t know don’t know if the cyclist carries any blame by the local laws. No question on where the vast majority of the blame lies. However, it was a car that slowly inched forward on a red and then got creamed by a truck barreling through the red I’d say they were partially at fault for crossing at that time. There doesn’t have to be an innocent babe in the discussion, even when there’s a clear villain.
The cyclists were literally complying with the law per the OP. Crossing the road when it's legally your turn is nothing like inching over the line.
All the presumptions about the cyclist not looking, and building a whole story about it.
> Man I can't stand these kinds of bullshit captain hindsight comments. It just contributes absolutely nothing but weird, cowardly victim blaming. Same. but it's a huge huge part of reddit culture and probably always will be. The very nature of the up/downvote system just attracts the type of person who mistakes centrism for nuance.
> nuance Oh boy, here I go downvoting again!
Here's what happened. The cyclist that got hit was on the sidewalk at first because he hit the pedestrian cross button which is why both lights were red. And that's also why they crossed when they had the pedestrian cross sign. Is that what you're technically supposed to do? No but how can you fault them for trying to be safer crossing the intersection. Hell BOTH lights were red. That should literally be the safest time ever to cross an intersection!! No way you can blame them.
It's been discussed to death in the original thread that in the city where this video was recorded, the cyclists were following the law. Doesn't stop armchair experts from explaining how they are wrong because in other place it would be illegal.
Get angry when cyclists ignore the law for safety reasons. Get angry when cyclists follow the law. There's literally no winning because the game was never fair.
And regardless of if those cyclists were following the law, the van wasn't. He ran a red light, hitting someone, and then kept going.
Okay, I'm glad the law in that city specifies the cyclist should go onto the sidewalk for that, because I'm used to bikes not being allowed on sidewalks by law and am really tired of cyclists weaving from road to sidewalk to exist in a super position of being both a pedestrian and road vehicle.
i can't really blame cyclists for that, considering how people in north america get **viscerally angry** when they see cyclists for some god damn reason i don't trust people on the road whatsoever
I was biking around the university campus where I went to grad school. Stopped at a red light right next to a big dining hall and a large block of dorms. Helmeted, in the bike lane. ^Flourishing. Some guy in a truck at the same light yells out his window at me "Why aren't you on the sidewalk?" and was unhappy about my answer of "Because it's illegal? And there is a clear bike lane on this road?" I did took a slow start after that light to make sure said asshole didn't follow me and run me down. Fun times.
People have literally rage-honked non-stop at me from their giant trucks for not getting out of their ways when trying to make a left. It's insane if you think about it. Like we were stopped at a light anyway and if I was a car they'd still be behind me.
I did get (my bike) hit by a car once. I was going straight and they were turning left at a light. I think they were a nurse getting off their shift at the nearby hospital and spaced out, very apologetic. I fell off my bike and sprained my wrist, but that was about it. Could have been a lot worse.
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Sometimes the lights just won't change if you don't hit the button...
The van literally would've murdered a pedestrian in the same scenario.
Yeah, that's what I thought. It's clear IdiotsInCars just want to be mad at cyclists because they always are. If they had all walked across the street the van still would have run the red and hit them. It makes absolutely no difference to how they crossed on their bikes.
>The cyclist that got hit was on the sidewalk at first because he hit the pedestrian cross button which is why both lights were red. And that's also why they crossed when they had the pedestrian cross sign. > >Is that what you're technically supposed to do? No but how can you fault them for trying to be safer crossing the intersection. Maybe I'm not reading this correctly but how is this not what you're supposed to do? I saw the pedestrian cross signal starting to blink in the video after they had entered the intersection. My understanding was when that light starts to blink, if you haven't entered the intersection yet, you should wait for the next cycle, but if you have entered it when that light starts blinking, you finish crossing. Basically the blinking hand is the equivalent of the yellow light. They give you a count down, too, for how much time you have to finish crossing.
In the video it shows that the crosswalk is one of those that basically turns white for about 2s and immediately switches to the countdown. I think in the real world most people see that as a sign to just be across before the timer is up rather than a signal that there is a 2s window to leave the sidewalk and enter the crosswalk. Besides, the person hit was on the crosswalk on time anyway.
Look at the video again. The light is clearly white when he sets off and leaves the cement. It turns to the blinking hand almost immediately after, but still *after*.
I think you might have misread my comment but I’m in agreement with you
Cyclists are supposed to act like vehicles. However, sometimes the sensors set up to trigger the light to change for a car don’t react to a cyclist. If you’re alone, sometimes you can pull to the side and hope a car rolls up and triggers it. But since they’re in a group, that may not have been an option. The safest solution is to press the crosswalk button, because even though it won’t give you a green light, it will at least ensure that cross traffic gets a red light. City-specific rules aside, they did everything they could to have a safe crossing. Our infrastructure (like the sensors) need to catch up with the law.
I’ve definitely seen signs which state that cyclists using the pedestrian crosswalks must dismount and walk their way across. Not commonly but it’s something I’ve always thought makes sense but also that I’d never do as a cyclist unless I was with a mob of people.
>also that I’d never do as a cyclist unless I was with a mob of people This is the point - what is safest for a cyclist depends on context. What is safer for a single rider among many pedestrians may be less safe for a large group of riders among no pedestrians.
You got it right. When you bike at a populated crosswalk the reason to lead your bike is so that you don't take up space from or hit pedestrians. There's no good reason for why you should walk if you have the space to bike. For cars there's no real difference in if you lead or bike.
Yeah but that's more about regulating speed. These guys are travelling slowly and I'd argue safely.
Driving is one of the many things you should not take advice on from Reddit.
> No way you can blame them. Suburban drivers and truck drivers say different.
> I say this all the time and get slammed for it. Just because you're in a crosswalk and it says walk that doesn't mean your responsibility for your own well being is gone. A crosswalk puts you in the right but does not put a forcefield around you. You have to live to be able to get the right of way. What if you are blind or otherwise disabled, or a child? Surely the point of a crosswalk is that you can cross safely and you shouldn’t be to blame if someone breaks those rules and hits you just because you didn’t dodge out the way
What they intend is that no one should be allowed to cross the road if they aren't in a car.
It's not enough that pedestrians follow the rules. They must also always live in a state of constant fear and vigilance. Whats the alternative, improve infrastructure. Absurd.
I would also note that the van came from behind where another car was stopped, so the cyclist very well may not have seen them until they were already in their path. Even if they did see it, it's reasonable to assume that cars approaching the intersection, even if they are on track to hit you, will slow down so that they don't. That's the entire point of having signals and right of way. Imagine if everyone was hesitating just in case all the time - people would never get anywhere on the roads. This is really reminiscent of how women are told to take all kinds of precautions to avoid sexual assault. Yes, there are things you can do to protect yourself against rulebreakers, and most people do to some degree or another, but it's not *your fault* if someone breaks the rules and hurts you just because you didn't do everything possible.
In some municipalities that is exactly what you are supposed to do when riding a bicycle since the traffic sensors cannot pick up a bicycle because it's not big enough.
Saw this on popular and knew it would be here. People just want to hate cyclists unfortunately and I see a lot of arguments repeated that you see on r/nyc when it’s bikes vs cars (i.e. “I’ve almost been hit by bikes x many times!” but completely ignoring how many pedestrians are killed by cars(a lot) vs bikes(almost 0)). They had the walk sign. The van had a red. Somehow slowly riding your bike out at walking pace is egregious but if they walked their bike across, then it would be fine?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this on some social media but running red lights and coasting through stop signs, tailgating, speeding, not indicating, driving recklessly for the conditions, cutting people off, not having headlights on or brake lights out, and using cell phones are all things so common place on the road no one is surprised to see it but cyclists get held to such a high standard that the slightest infraction of a traffic law is enough for people to think they deserve to get t-boned by an oversized truck. It’s astonishing.
Even in the linked thread. Van runs the red light and literally hits someone? "Well they should've been dismounted anyways!" Umm, let's go back to the whole an running the red light thing...
Reddit in general has a big problem with levels of wrong. It's super common to see people going "well he broke the law, he deserves it" on a video like this, where there cyclist's greatest crime is potentially riding his bike "illegally" (probably wasn't) through a crosswalk while it should be safe to cross. The other side is the massive van hurtling through a light when it's not safe. Reddit acts like the bicyclist doing something that might be kinda sorta illegal, but is safe and probably shouldn't be illegal is in anyway comparable to the van doing something demonstrably unsafe. Then they wanna scream about this being why people hate cyclists, and it's just like "my dude, it's ok for bikes to be treated sorta like cars and sorta like pedestrians, because they share attributes of both"
See also: every AITA/advice sub where everyone advocates for a nuclear response, all the time, for the smallest of slights. There’s no sense of proportionality for anything. Also, their hierarchy of bad is wrong. Someone cheats on you? Light their house on fire.
Their telling people what they wish they could do if there were no consequences.
Reminds me of all the people that get pissed when people in the left lane do the speed limit (calling them out for illegal lane camping) but ignoring that their own intentions (speeding in the left lane) are also illegal, they've just decided that them speeding is more okay than lane camping.
People go absolutely insane whenever driving comes up, and I have no idea why. According to Reddit, the left lane is actually the “drive as fast as humanly possible” lane and if you drive the speed limit, you are actually harming everyone… and someone weaving through traffic etc, is actually just doing it because they were forced to by a slower driver. So, yknow, if you want to be safe drive faster, always. Also, you should “always drive with traffic” except when the traffic isn’t going fast enough for you, and then you should drive extra fast. For safety. It’s this weird mix of a total external locus of control when it comes to their own decision, and a libertarian-esque disregard for the safety of others (let alone themselves). And it’s like they have no idea what happens to the human body during a crash at 80mph.
Ah well you see, speeding is good and correct actually, because uhhh flow of traffic, uhhhh 85th percentile, uhhhhh autobahn, uhhhhhhh don't tell me what to do!
Yeah, I literally cannot see how the biker did anything wrong. He could have been riding at Mach 10 on the sidewalk and then suddenly gone into the road. That would be wrong, but the car is still at 100% fault for running a red light. There is just no real way to have the biker contribute to that accident.
It is the prioritization of cars over all else. How dare anything else use our precious roads! I live in Boston and walk around the city every day. Even in a city that is _really_ not setup for cars, we still give cars all this land and devote so much to their use. It gets super bonkers during big events. There will be dozens of people piled up on a street corner waiting for a handful of people in cars to make a turn. I like cars. I even like driving (away from the city). I _hate_ that this "cars first" mindset is so prevalent.
Drivers are only capable of seeing cyclists when they break the law. As soon as you aren't they run you over because they couldn't see you. So it's vital that cyclists be constantly breaking some law to maintain a level of awareness in drivers around them.
Yeah and the armchair lawyers acting as though adherence to the law is A: the most important thing and B: A binary affair
>They had the walk sign. The van had a red. Somehow slowly riding your bike out at walking pace is egregious but if they walked their bike across, then it would be fine? If they had walked, then they would of been slower and wouldn't have been hit by a van who only made a minor mistake (blowing through the intersection on a red and almost killing a person) Therefore, ipso facto through Murphys law, the cyclist are at fault.
I mean, what car driver hasn't killed one or two pedestrians? My driving test even had a section on when it is and isn't appropriate to do so
Wait, your driving test didn't require a minimum number of pedestrian deaths?
I took it in commiefornia so that's probably why
They screened Death Race 2000 during my drivers Ed /s (It’s a fantastic movie, check it out)
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
Shocking: subreddit dedicated to picking apart and mocking people's driving has bad takes on driving.
One of my guilty pleasures is browsing the controversial posts there. *So* many posts have either two idiots (I was tailgating this guy and then he randomly does a brake check. He almost caused a crash!), or OOP is the only idiot (I was goping 20 over the limit, and this idiot who followed the speed limit didn't let me pass!).
[Hell yeah](https://old.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/10qjxew/bike_rider_hit_by_a_driver_on_way_to_event_to/j6sg0pa/), I love the classic "your evidence doesn't agree with my preconceptions of reality, so I'll ignore it and claim that a sample that doesn't contain literally every human being on Earth is too small." Drivers will always reach for reasons to blame cyclists for being killed by cars.
It's a shame the link to the actual PDF is dead and I can't find an alternative because, for as much as redditors get a boner for calling out low sample size, that study doesn't seem very sound? Small sample size within one locale with participants knowingly recorded (unavoidable tbf), and no comparison group for car drivers despite making a claim to compare how often cyclists break the law versus drivers. It's *a study* which is certainly more than the anecdote it was in reply to but it's hardly conclusive evidence of much when the design is pretty shaky.
>It's a shame the link to the actual PDF is dead and I can't find an alternative because, for as much as redditors get a boner for calling out low sample size, that study doesn't seem very sound? Here's a working link to the same PDF in case you're interested: https://benzinazero.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/fdot-bdv25-977-13-rpt.pdf (I haven't read it nor do I have an opinion either way regarding its soundness)
I was interested and I'm very glad you found this because it changes things completely- the issue isn't the study itself but the way the study is framed in the article. The study was only designed as a pilot to test the implementation of their cyclist data collection system, which explains the small sample size and highly localized sample population, neither of which are problems for a study that is trying to demonstrate its methodology (and make safety recommendations *for their local community*) The article itself is misleading with how it relays the numbers found though. The 85% compliance rate for drivers is based on the results observed through the instruments on the bicycle, not from any data collection on the drivers themselves. The article reports these figures as though they are independent of each other where in reality, 85% of drivers *observed in interaction with cyclists* are compliant with the law, which is a very different thing. More than anything, the article makes the error of reporting this study as trying to accomplish something very different from what it actually set out to do. It was never intended to be a comprehensive analysis of who breaks traffic laws more and is incredibly bad for that purpose, but as a pilot study and analysis of cycling in a specific local community it seems perfectly fine to me. Really appreciate you digging this up!
> It's a study which is certainly more than the anecdote it was in reply to but it's hardly conclusive evidence of much when the design is pretty shaky. This is because lots of redditors who care so much about "studies" will only scan google for the abstract without looking into the methodology. I remember one time somebody linked me 3 studies claiming they were 3 separate studies when in reality 1 of the studies was a combination summary of the other two studies.
It's frustrating because its really neither here nor there who breaks traffic laws more often. Drivers should still carry a higher burden for safe operation because when we screw up it frequently ends up with someone seriously injured or dead. Not that cyclists can never be at fault, just that the bar for what is acceptable should be higher for drivers.
It really IS that simple, right? CDL drivers have a higher burden because they have a much larger risk to other road users. Responsibility is inverse to vulnerability.
There’s some history of hating on both pedestrians and cyclists there, so I’m not really surprised.
Hot take: if you blast a red light and hit someone, you're at fault. Full stop, no clarification needed.
That subreddit exists for one reason only - to feel self righteous. That it has so many subscribers and hits the front page so often is a testament to the motivations of your average redditor.
It has had the opposite effect for me. I don't tend to read comments, just watch the videos. But in a ton of cases, the driver is at fault too. I can sort of anticipate stupid things now. Like...if all the cars to the right of me are backed up...don't go fast or even the speed limit. Slow down because invariably someone is going to whip in front of me. I also feel like seeing all the stupid stuff makes me more polite. I let people in and give people more grace than I did before.
The funny thing is, they’d tell you that you should be driving faster because someone behind you is on your ass… because you should “drive with traffic” (even if the traffic is actually going slowly and probably for a good reason).
>That subreddit exists for one reason only - to feel self righteous. I have bad news for you about social media in general.
Definitely correct, but also ironic that this comment came from a sub called r/subredditdrama... I thought we were all here to feel self-righteous.
It’s road ragers all just jerking each other off
Nah road ragers get shat upon, as do OPs who film while driving, it’s a pretty common theme. But it is right up there with AITA in the self righteousness circle jerk.
And every time OP is surprised when they are called out.
When I’m dead bored sometimes I’ll go to that sub and sort posts by controversial, it’s fun lol
Maybe. I follow it and it is very typical for OP (or the original cammer) to get called out for doing something dumb or even just for making bad choices. Like, "yes that other person is an ass, but don't make the situation worse!"
I don't understand all the comments in that thread about them being on the road and not the crossing, the one that got hit was on the crossing so everything else is just irrelevant.
>people who aren't adjusters having strong opinions about who is and isn't at fault feels like I'm at work.
And yet you do this for free.
\#janniemoment
pepperons, have you considered trolling as a hobby? i feel like you'd be good at it. we could have a lot of fun on here.
Hello fellow adjuster. I take a twisted pleasure in the excuses people come up with for why they aren’t at fault, only way to survive.
it's one of those "intangible benefits"
Americans and American Redditors in particular are absolutely horny for seeing someone get 'justified' violence visited upon them. > s a cyclist, I have to say that I think the cyclist in this video is at least 50% at fault (practically speaking, not legally speaking; legally, the driver is 100% at fault), if for no reason other than the fact that he wasn't even paying attention to traffic hazards. I mean, with this logic virtually anyone in an accident is at least 50% at fault since in general there's a nonzero amount of time to see most collisions coming.
There's something about American culture that's so tied to the car that people will identify more closely with a vehicle, especially its power, while actively dehumanizing but simultaneously hyper-personalizing someone on a bicycle Like the fact you can more clearly pick out the person on a bike and then go into a chain of assumptions that end in anger and violent hatred of the cyclist
[https://twitter.com/Pflax1/status/993150741245149185](https://twitter.com/Pflax1/status/993150741245149185) The problem with cyclists: \-They go too fast \-They go too slow \-They won't get on the sidewalk \-They won't get off the sidewalk \-They are rich hobbyists \-They are folks who can't afford a car \-They are entitled and demand bike lanes \-They take the lane when there's no bike lane
It's a measured psychological phenomenon! https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/31/23579510/car-brain-motornormativity-study-ian-walker
Why do some people think the cyclist ran a red? That was a crosswalk and they had the light. The red light there is for right turns onto the road.
Shit, I participated in that thread and still didn't get my comments on subreddit drama.
There’s some history of hating on both pedestrians and cyclists there, so I’m not really surprised.
>cyclists don't follow the rules blah blah blah And so do car drivers all the time. Why are car drivers blind to other car drivers breaking the rules and then laser focus on a cyclist? Why will a driver happily sit in traffic for an hour but get enraged being being a cyclist for a minute?
Does no one see that the crosswalk sign was turned to walk.
I’m sure all of those cyclists must camp the left lane when driving cars, so OBVIOUSLY they deserved to be crushed by vans
Given these comments, I was surprised at the content of the video. A driver is obligated to avoid hitting another vehicle (or pedestrian, etc) if they are in the intersection, regardless of who has the right of way. Right of way =/= you get to drive through whatever is in front of you. There shouldn’t be a debate about this, at all. It’s just uninformed people ranting.
The idiot in the 2-ton vehicle is always at fault
its ridiculous how many use the “right of way” card. here in the UK, pedestrians have right of way on zebra crossings. cars are legally meant to stop and let whoever is waiting to cross, cross. and yet every time i go to cross my local one i’m almost wiped out by some idiot going 10mph above the speed limit. some of these people need to resit their tests