Walk this Way: Feds Finally Want Car Safety Standards to Apply to People Outside the Vehicle

[morgan20]

1 hour ago, Chrisgb said:

If you cross in a crosswalk, you are a pedestrian. If you J-walk you are a target.

 

California officially turned targets into pedestrians last year. Or is it pedestrians into targets? The state government there passed a bill called The Freedom to Walk Act. LEO no longer enforce jaywalking laws except in cases of immediate danger

 

Existing law imposes various duties relating to the rules of the road, including, but not limited to, traffic signs, symbols, and markings, and pedestrians’ rights and duties. Existing law prohibits pedestrians from entering roadways and crosswalks, except under specified circumstances. Under existing law, a violation of these provisions is an infraction. Existing law establishes procedures for peace officers to make arrests for violations of the Vehicle Code without a warrant for offenses committed in their presence, as specified.

This bill would prohibit a peace officer, as defined, from stopping a pedestrian for specified traffic infractions unless a reasonably careful person would realize there is an immediate danger of collision with a moving vehicle or other device moving exclusively by human power.

Edited September 12 by morgan20

[Biker16]

On 9/12/2024 at 9:43 AM, Chrisgb said:

Just might work! Maybe would encourage more people to cross at crosswalks.

 

If you cross in a crosswalk, you are a pedestrian. If you J-walk you are a target.

 

This is a great article on this issue and how distorted the Conversation on Traffic Safety has become. Similar to other lethal machines, the conversation moved from dialog around systemic Impact to one of personal responsibility. 

 

The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking"

 

A hundred years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: You walked across it.

Today, if there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green.

In the 1920s, auto groups redefined who owned the city street 

Fail to do so, and you’re committing a crime: jaywalking. In some cities — Los Angeles, for instance — police ticket tens of thousands of pedestrians annually for jaywalking, with fines of up to $250.

To most people, this seems part of the basic nature of roads. But it’s actually the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led by auto groups and manufacturers that redefined who owned the city streets.
 

“In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers’ job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it’s your fault if you get hit.”

Those killed were mostly pedestrians, not drivers, and they were disproportionately the elderly and children, who had previously had free rein to play in the streets.

The public response to these deaths, by and large, was outrage. Automobiles were often seen as frivolous playthings, akin to the way we think of yachts today (they were often called “pleasure cars”). And on the streets, they were considered violent intruders.

 

Cities erected prominent memorials for children killed in traffic accidents, and newspapers covered traffic deaths in detail, usually blaming drivers. They also published cartoons demonizing cars, often associating them with the Grim Reaper.

 

Edited September 13 by Biker16

[tbone]

On 9/11/2024 at 3:10 PM, DeluxeStang said:

I'm starting to see quite a few around Salt Lake. They're always wrapped as well. One had fake carbon fiber over the body. It looked tacky, but not awful. 

There’s a wrapped black one near me.  Definitely looks better with some color, but as mentioned above, it doesn’t look that big and is just weird. 

[tbone]

On 9/12/2024 at 10:17 AM, morgan20 said:

 

California officially turned targets into pedestrians last year. Or is it pedestrians into targets? The state government there passed a bill called The Freedom to Walk Act. LEO no longer enforce jaywalking laws except in cases of immediate danger

 

Existing law imposes various duties relating to the rules of the road, including, but not limited to, traffic signs, symbols, and markings, and pedestrians’ rights and duties. Existing law prohibits pedestrians from entering roadways and crosswalks, except under specified circumstances. Under existing law, a violation of these provisions is an infraction. Existing law establishes procedures for peace officers to make arrests for violations of the Vehicle Code without a warrant for offenses committed in their presence, as specified.

This bill would prohibit a peace officer, as defined, from stopping a pedestrian for specified traffic infractions unless a reasonably careful person would realize there is an immediate danger of collision with a moving vehicle or other device moving exclusively by human power.

Nothing coming from that state surprises me. 

[Joe771476]

I'll say what I told a pedestrian advocate agency here in CT a year ago. A) Tell pedestrians/joggers to put down their cell phone. B) Look both ways at least twice before crossing a driveway or street. C) Wear reflective clothing. D) Teach schoolchildren these tips from the first day of pre-school!  Amazingly I saw a public service announcement two weeks later featuring A and B!

[rmc523]

16 hours ago, Joe771476 said:

I'll say what I told a pedestrian advocate agency here in CT a year ago. A) Tell pedestrians/joggers to put down their cell phone. B) Look both ways at least twice before crossing a driveway or street. C) Wear reflective clothing. D) Teach schoolchildren these tips from the first day of pre-school!  Amazingly I saw a public service announcement two weeks later featuring A and B!

 

I was recently on a trip to the UK, and it was actually crazy - in Scotland - even in major cities like Edinburgh, I barely saw anyone looking at their phones while walking......we kept pointing it out because it was so odd compared to back home.  When we got to London, though, it was back to eyeballs glued to phones lol.

[Biker16]

On 9/22/2024 at 4:33 PM, Joe771476 said:

I'll say what I told a pedestrian advocate agency here in CT a year ago. A) Tell pedestrians/joggers to put down their cell phone. B) Look both ways at least twice before crossing a driveway or street. C) Wear reflective clothing. D) Teach schoolchildren these tips from the first day of pre-school!  Amazingly I saw a public service announcement two weeks later featuring A and B!

It'd be great if we put reflective clothing on houses.



or if, when riding in broad daylight, some teenager doesn't kill you trying to Roll Coal on you in his F-350. 

 

[morgan20]

The Economist had a cover page article about the dilemma. Americans buy big heavy pickup trucks and SUVs because they feel safer in them. But they're a lot more dangerous for people outside them including pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists in smaller vehicles

 

The next time you are stuck in traffic, look around you at the other passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. ⁠
⁠
Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. ⁠
⁠
The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. ⁠
⁠
What can be done about this killer car problem? In theory, regulators could insist that vehicles were lighter. But there is little chance of that happening.

 

[Sherminator98]

1 hour ago, morgan20 said:

What can be done about this killer car problem? In theory, regulators could insist that vehicles were lighter. But there is little chance of that happening.

 

Good luck with that with all the other requirements for making a car safer to drive and well EVs coming on that add an extra 1000lbs for a battery pack.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. 

[morgan20]

13 minutes ago, silvrsvt said:

You can't have your cake and eat it too. 

 

Yea, it's an ethical dilemma with no solution that satisfies both sides. Save lives of people inside the big heavy vehicles at a cost of people's lives outside the vehicles? Or the other way around?

 

“For every life the heaviest one percent of SUVs or trucks saves in America,” The Economist wrote, “more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.”

Edited September 25 by morgan20

[akirby]

35 minutes ago, morgan20 said:

 

“For every life the heaviest one percent of SUVs or trucks saves in America,” The Economist wrote, “more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.”

I seriously question those statistics.  How do you determine that a particular fatal crash was survivable if the vehicle sizes were the same?  In a lot of accidents size is irrelevant and the person would have died anyway.  Way too many assumptions required to get that statistic.

[morgan20]

23 minutes ago, akirby said:

I seriously question those statistics.  How do you determine that a particular fatal crash was survivable if the vehicle sizes were the same?  In a lot of accidents size is irrelevant and the person would have died anyway.  Way too many assumptions required to get that statistic.

 

Yea, lots of assumptions. The Economist said the following

 

Using data for 7.5 million two-vehicle crashes in 14 American states in 2013–2023, The Economist found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles killed 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The publication estimates that if the heaviest 10 percent of vehicles on America’s roads were roughly 1,000 pounds lighter, fatalities in multicar crashes would fall by 12 percent, saving 2,300 lives a year, without compromising the safety of the occupants of the heavier vehicles

[Multitask]

On 9/11/2024 at 11:16 AM, silvrsvt said:

 

I can't really walk across the country either...there has to be some common sense applied to this-outside of people justifying their jobs-and most of the accidents above where due to other factors. Its not like people are just plowing into people just because...

What you CAN do is take a train or BUS.  😎

[Joe771476]

On 9/25/2024 at 9:10 AM, silvrsvt said:

 

Good luck with that with all the other requirements for making a car safer to drive and well EVs coming on that add an extra 1000lbs for a battery pack.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. 

You can't even hear EV's!  If and when NASCAR goes electric, they're going to put smoke throwing devices in the rear wheel wells along with loud speakers blaring out the sound of tire squealing! 

[Biker16]

36 minutes ago, Joe771476 said:

You can't even hear EV's!  If and when NASCAR goes electric, they're going to put smoke throwing devices in the rear wheel wells along with loud speakers blaring out the sound of tire squealing! 

 I don't know this sounds pretty loud