The Road Dangers That We Face & Why

[commandcomm]

I only ride on the bike paths anymore. I am blessed in Oklahoma City to have 100 miles of paths with few walkers in some areas.

[bikeboy1]

Traffic calming devices have worked in the EU for years but then they dont have jacked up pick ups who would just see this as something to catch air on. I do think it would slow a large number of drivers down though.

[Red Tornado]

Originally Posted by commandcomm

I only ride on the bike paths anymore. I am blessed in Oklahoma City to have 100 miles of paths with few walkers in some areas.

Same here, sort of. MTB and some multi-use trails (dirt/gravel & paved) are all I do now. Just too dangerous on the open roads in central TX.

It's interesting how what Europe is doing, and what cyclists and also a lot of pedestrians might want, is the polar opposite of what traffic engineers/planners and the general driving public want.

[oldpotatoe]

Originally Posted by cgolvin

Indeed; I have firsthand experience in this regard, interacting with the Los Angeles Dept. of Transportation. Talking with them about traffic calming and minimizing traffic impact on the neighborhood was, initially, like speaking a foreign language to them. The head of the project acknowledged that we were asking them to think completely differently.

'Traffic engineers' see bicycles as a problem to solve, not any kind of 'solution'.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by dmitrik4

Exactly. “Better” road infrastructure in the US is defined as “move as many cars as possible as quickly as possible,” with every other consideration running a distant second place, if considered at all.

This is actually a point of contention with my county government. The county's urban planners want a more holistic look at traffic as it relates to overall QoL.

The state's DOT (Virginia) is stuck in the 1980s and only concerned with moving as many cars as possible with as small a budget as possible (which leads to unusable bike lanes because the lanes are a requirement for some federal funding).

Unfortunately, the DOT owns/maintains the vast majority of roads in the area. The county staff really only gets to provide input during major new development, but day-to-day repaving/restriping projects.

[fignon's barber]

Originally Posted by oldpotatoe

'Traffic engineers' see bicycles as a problem to solve, not any kind of 'solution'.

This is correct. I have a friend who owns a business that sells hi tech traffic monitor equipment (radar, data collecting, etc) for highways, roads and MUT paths and trails. A few years ago he asked me to go to a conference with him to meet traffic engineers from around the US. He introduced me to the group as " a cyclist who rides 10000 miles a year". These people treated me like I was an alien that just stepped off the saucer. They seemed curious to actually meet a cyclist. And these are the people who design our roads and trails.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by fignon's barber

This is correct. I have a friend who owns a business that sells hi tech traffic monitor equipment (radar, data collecting, etc) for highways, roads and MUT paths and trails. A few years ago he asked me to go to a conference with him to meet traffic engineers from around the US. He introduced me to the group as " a cyclist who rides 10000 miles a year". These people treated me like I was an alien that just stepped off the saucer. They seemed curious to actually meet a cyclist. And these are the people who design our roads and trails.

Too late now, but he probably should have introduced you without the 10k miles bit. I get the same reaction from the general public and I barely do half that mileage in a year. But, when I was running more than cycling, it was the same thing (30-40 miles/week). So, it's not just cycling, it's any physical endeavor that goes beyond chugging beers in front of the boob tube.

But, yeah, we need more traffic engineers/planners who use bikes, buses, etc instead of just cars.

[cgolvin]

Originally Posted by oldpotatoe

'Traffic engineers' see bicycles as a problem to solve, not any kind of 'solution'.

Sure, but, to be clear, my discussion with LADOT had nothing to do with bicycles, only about measures to calm and reduce motor vehicle traffic through the neighborhood. That idea was antithetical to their way of thinking.

[bikinchris]

When traffic engineers in most communities make room for cycling, they paint lines.

Please repeat after me: Painted lines are NOT infrastructure.

Another point I want to mention is that while watching dashboard camera channels and seeing Instagram videos from companies that make video cameras for bicycles, the comments are ALWAYS overwhelmingly negative toward the cyclist.
I often comment that watching dashboard videos, NO ONE seems to make a legal stop at stop signs or red lights. Pointing fingers at bicycles for not driving perfectly is mentioning that the three other fingers point back at you.

[verticaldoug]

Roads are just dangerous for everyone. 3x the rate of other developed countries.

Shared linked from a paying account, so should work.
https://on.ft.com/3U8tih5


I have good news and bad news about America’s roads. The good news is the number of people killed in traffic collisions fell by almost 4 per cent in 2023. The bad news is the mortality rate on US roads is still 25 per cent up on a decade earlier, and three times the rate of the average developed country.

[5oakterrace]

I understand the focus on fatalities. They are terrible and they can be measured. But for every fatality, how many injuries are there, notably to cyclists.

Smartphone use, car computer screens are a cause, but as well consider the effect of smartphones on our general manner of being. I suggest they ramp up the go,go pace of life - in general - and promote a hurry up mentality/spirit. That moves us to drive faster as well. Not much will change that.

I have been humbled by a return to my old town and the old roads I cycled. Now, I am in cycling nirvana. Little traffic. People go slower on these curvy country roads. When I went back I could understand folks being reluctant to go on roads I once saw as pretty decent. One almost has to live in a sparsely populated area or be very bold to cycle these days.

[Turkle]

Originally Posted by verticaldoug

Roads are just dangerous for everyone. 3x the rate of other developed countries.

Shared linked from a paying account, so should work.
https://on.ft.com/3U8tih5


I have good news and bad news about America’s roads. The good news is the number of people killed in traffic collisions fell by almost 4 per cent in 2023. The bad news is the mortality rate on US roads is still 25 per cent up on a decade earlier, and three times the rate of the average developed country.

Thanks for sharing. This article is sort of getting at something that seems very obvious to me, but I don't see anyone else talking about when we look at the appalling rate of road deaths and injuries in the US.

The fact is that we have allowed a small minority of utterly insane, antisocial, aggressive drivers to do whatever the heck they want on the roads without the slightest fear of consequences or enforcement of traffic infractions.

While things like larger vehicles, unwalkable suburbs, high-speed arterial road design in residential communities, and other structural factors clearly have a part to play, I think that these are only increasing fatalities around the margins.

When I'm out cycling, I am clearly in danger not because of all the above things, but because I know I am out on the road with antisocial maniacs who would kill you to get to Target 30 seconds faster or wherever the heck they think they're going.

And I do mean a minority of awful drivers. In NYC, the ongoing joke was every time you looked up the plate of someone that killed someone with their vehicle, they had 25+ speeding tickets in school zones, 3+_infractions for driving without a license, $100,000 in unpaid parking tickets, etc. etc. etc. These people are not normal! And we are allowing this small minority of people to put the rest of us in mortal danger!

Road safety is going to have to start with aggressive enforcement of the laws that are already on the books, with jail time and similar penalties for messing around. That's how it was when I drove in the 90s and I see no reason that can't work again.

[benb]

Is it even a minority? Drivers don't have to actually be malicious when you just have far more of them than you should. Once they are stuck in traffic they get more aggressive and frustrated and problems build.

Ignoring cycling and walking (which are problematic here) the issue we have here is you also can't really drive your car around town for 4-5 hours every day without it taking longer than it takes to bicycle and almost longer than it takes to walk.

And the issue is housing is unaffordable but jobs are here, so we have so many out of state NH residents who work here and other folks who live far away in MA that commute extreme distances to the office.

What that means for the town I live in is that there are 3x as many cars that come through than people who live in town. 14k people, and likely much less than 14k cars in town, but we have 50k out of town/state cars coming through every day.

At this point they are filling up neighborhoods as Waze directs them down ever more local roads since the highway is full and the main routes through town are full.

There is no way any traffic engineer can figure out a way to move even more cars through really. Realistically we need to start thinking about in-town tolls to try and incentivize drivers to sit in the highway traffic jam instead of making a traffic jam on residential roads.

The real solution would probably be to extend the current passenger train lines into NH where these people live, but trains are communist so NH has been blocking it for decades. (These lines used to function but got shut down cause cars are a Utopian solution)

I thought I heard NYC is talking about putting in a toll to go into Manhattan like London. Seems like a step in the right direction, but NYC probably needed it 30 years ago and lots of other places in the US need it now.

[Gummee]

My 'neighbors' continually complain about cyclists in the road. Lately they've been kvetching about dump trucks driving unsafely around them

Now y'all know how I feel.

Too bad none of them equate THEIR bad driving around me to how they feel when dump trucks drive badly around them. Complete lack of self-awareness.

M

[ridethecliche]

I had an 'essential' job during the height of the pandemic and was often shocked at how fast and aggressively people were driving then. I feel like I see way more of it these days.

Folks have mentioned some of this already... blowing reds, pulling around from turn lanes, etc.

I think this also has to do with policing in some ways. I feel like a lot of places are more interested in traffic policing to increase revenue vs increasing safety...