San Francisco traffic deaths: Pedestrians must do better, drivers say
San Francisco traffic deaths: Pedestrians must do better, drivers say
San Francisco’s Vision Zero data suggest that in recent years, motorists were at fault in most pedestrian deaths by car. Still, some readers think city safety measures do more to inconvenience drivers than to protect those on foot.
Daylighting, which involves removing parked cars from around crosswalks in order to improve visibility and just wiped out about 14,000 street parking spaces, has proved especially controversial.
“If someone doesn’t die because of it, we will never know, while the living have to suffer,” Nina Geneson Otis wrote in an email to The Standard. The real estate broker said daylighting is the kind of policy that makes Democrats lose elections.
Others say the city’s actions remove responsibility from pedestrians to look out for their own safety. “A pedestrian can do anything, and be irresponsible, and no harm will come to them?” Brandi said, describing the policies as “idiot-proof.”
The idea that a pedestrian walking anywhere but on a limited access highway would ever be at fault for a collision with an automobile is a direct result of century-old propaganda by the moral equivalent of the NRA.
If i made a self-propelled battering ram with remote controlled steering I would rightly be held to strict liabily if anyone was hurt. But if we put a a chair in the same thing and call it a "vehicle", suddenly the rules change in our favor.
I like cars and driving, and can easily imagine a number of mitigating circumstances that would shift liability away from the driver, but the presumption that once-walkable city streets are for cars is the result of fierce industrial lobbying and not a reasoned public policy process.
110The origin of the word "jaywalking" is exactly that. Blame the victim.
46Always remember that "vehicular manslaughter" was created with lower penalties than manslaughter, because juries were consistently not finding motorists guilty of manslaughter.
It was too easy for jurors to identify with the driver, and think, what if it was me driving that car, killing that person by accident?
We need safer infrastructure in this world than one allowing anyone to be a killer just by being distracted.
22For all its faults, the NRA knows that guns are unsafe. It promotes "gun safety" not "shirt safety" – it doesn't blame people who get shot accidentally because they were wearing the wrong kind of shirt. Whereas cities around the world talk about "bike safety" when the unsafe element is not the bike at all.
6In my country its normal for pedestrians to walk in highways. The result is that drivers expect pedestrians everywhere, and collisions are rare
3
“If someone doesn’t die because of it, we will never know, while the living have to suffer” is such a wild thing to say oh my god. Yeah, thats the point. Less people die because of it.
89“If someone doesn’t die because of it, we will never know, while the living have to suffer"
Man, I could not have done a better job of distilling the effects of the toxic "rugged individualism" ingrained in American culture down to a single sentence...
29She’s an estate agent. What do you expect?
22
“If someone doesn’t die because of it, we will never know, while the living have to suffer,” Nina Geneson Otis wrote in an email to The Standard. The real estate broker said daylighting is the kind of policy that makes Democrats lose elections.
The fuck? Is parking at the corners of intersections legal in the US then? Because where I live it isn't for that exact same reason of it blocking visibility. And I'm sure she's suffering deeply for lacking a few parking spots... Dumb entitled cunt.
34I think they recently passed a bill to make it illegal, but it won't be enforced till sometime next year.
2I don't think she's complaining. She is making the very good point that the benefit of the bill is invisible, while the downsides are visible. Making policy decisions based on what's right instead of what's marketable makes a party unpopular because the electorate is dumb and shortsighted.
FWIW, it's not allowed in Chicago but people tend to use the space for short-term parking and pulling over. The city has started blocking the road surface near corners to make this impossible, both with curb bump outs and simple flexible reflective posts.
2It's legal in many places. My city is just now starting to enforce corner parking.
1
Nina Geneson Otis wrote in an email to The Standard. The real estate broker said daylighting is the kind of policy that makes Democrats lose elections.
Urbaninsm, like climate change, shouldn't be a political issue but oddly is. I wonder who could be behind it all?
31Is this what we are going to do now, anything remotely good say "things like that is why Dems lose elections" as we watch people and our planet die.
Cool. This is great.
9
This is funny because in the bay area as nowhere else I've ever lived, pedestrians actually take the right of way as they should. In Berkeley they don't even glance over their shoulder, it is completely up to the driver. Doesn't work where the driver can't see them, though, so I think peds and (most) drivers are more conscious of that as a bad situation. I don't believe real estate agents speak for residents.
I found it much more annoying as a driver elsewhere where people wait two feet from the curb and wave at you to come to a complete stop before they start crossing. Or while walking, after I've stepped off the curb drivers half a block away assume I must not have seen them so they honk at me. A lot of theatre and emotion for what is really just a normal part of driving (don't run into people even if it means you have to slow down).
25Drivers don’t stop. I’m not stupid enough to step off the curb until it’s clear you’ve seen me and are stopping
32You might, I might, but Kids and some adults don't have the awareness. And it's not their fault they don't have the awareness either
17
I almost got nailed by a city bus on 5th and Market in SF after the green walk signal turned on. Somebody literally grabbed my jacket and pulled me back and maybe saved my life.
8Half a block seems really close unless it's a huge block or they're going really slowly to begin with
1Oh I just mean ample space the details vary, as you say.
1
The most braindead article ever...
"People die from leopards attacks, leopards say people should be more careful"
24I mean, there are plenty of warnings and advice on how to do things like hike through bear or cougar country. Someone who gets mauled trying to pet a bear cub isn't going to get much sympathy.
6
Well, an argument that would fly over their heads is that this "daylighting" rule is in place in more than half of the world.
So maybe there’s a good reason ?
22It's such a common-sense rule that it'd never occurred to me that such a developped country wouldn't have it.
6America's more of a developed company than it is a developed country, and the CEOs don't work for the employees.
5
The beating heart of American progressiveism: San Fransisco where the residents would rather kill the poor than inconvenience everyone else. If only you could patch a caved in skull with a pussy hat...
14This article is because san francisco is actually trying to address pedestrian fatalities instead of just writing them off as the cost of modernity. Most of the article is from reactionaries, who may not even live here, mad about progressive, at least by American standards, policies that the city is implementing like daylighting.
You could live in a socialist utopia and you could still find people to quote saying they liked it back when the poor knew there place.
San francisco isn't perfect but it's still miles ahead of almost every city in America. That may be a low bar but it's something.
3I hear you, but the article is full of dissenting opinions and quotes from people that disagree with what should be a very common sense policy. Like, why even give a platform to someone who says stuff like “If someone doesn’t die because of it, we will never know, while the living have to suffer"? Why disingenuously portray the issue of pedestrian deaths as some back and forth battle between two equal parties, instead of the incredibly one sided bullying it really is?
3
Lmao. No. Where I live drivers have no problem going right though the crosswalks while people are in them.
I thought they were going to talk about the people who cross at random places, wearing dark clothing, at night. But no they chose to complain about the people crossing correctly who get harassed by cars.
14Onion?
3It sounds like satire, but it might just be 2024.
2
Normally, I'm 100% on the pedestrian's side, and I think drivers bear the responsibility in basically all urban traffic situation. However, after visiting San Francisco, I can see why it's a bit different. Those hills severely limit visibility on so many of those crosswalks, and if you're driving up one of them, and the sun is in your eyes, I don't know how you would approach an intersection safely. After less than a week in that city, I realized that pedestrians really do have to cross responsibly (and also I would never, ever drive there).
That being said, I've never seen less people jay walking in an American city than I did in San Francisco. Also, all of the measures laid out in this article seem like good, common sense ideas. If drivers think that the pedestrians need to be more responsible, fine, but that's no reason to demand the rollback of potentially lifesaving safety measures.
-12Those hills severely limit visibility on so many of those crosswalks, and if you’re driving up one of them, and the sun is in your eyes, I don’t know how you would approach an intersection safely.
If you can't see where you're going then your speed should be as low as possible. I'm not from SF so maybe it already exists, but ideally there would be traffic calming measures such as lane narrowing, speed bumps, etc and so going faster than around 20 mph or so would feel very unnatural.
23Yeah, but those hills are so steep that you've got to give it a ton of gas just to get up them. Like, imagine laying on the gas super hard just to keep yourself going above 20. As you crest the hill, the sun hits your eyes, blinding you to the person that was invisible to you until a millisecond ago, who is crossing against the light at exactly the time you're trying to lay off the gas so you don't start accelerating.
Don't get me wrong, I support every measure listed in the article, and I think the people who want them repealed because they find them inconvenient are assholes. If Daylighting makes it too hard to park, well, maybe don't drive; it's an extremely walkable city with a good public transit system anyway. But this is the only city I've ever been to where, when I hear drivers say, "pedestrians need do better," I think, "well, that's not just entitlement, everyone really does need act responsibly here, even pedestrians."
1
Sounds really dangerous. Maybe cars should be banned from them?
17I mean, that's the dream for every city. But, on the off chance that we can't immediately reverse a century of car-centric urban design, maybe we should look at some alternatives?
1