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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

Also of note: SF is a very pedestrian dense city with people wandering into the street looking at phones, not paying attention...and sadly a large number of substance abuse casualties endangering themselves and others. This reality has got increasingly worse since the iphone launch last decade, it's a huge problem.

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Probably true, but being distracted or burned out shouldn't be punished by being run over... you could equally argue that lots of those drivers are distractedly looking at their phones too?

It's a fact, a lot of people whether driving or walking are looking at their map directions on phones. If you're driving you have to really watch out for mad drivers - if you're turning into a gap in oncoming traffic it can be a huge problem if some clown accelerates up to you as you try to make a turn while pedestrian(s) with no peripheral vision skills walk out into the road in your path oblivious to what could be a pretty nasty accident.

It would also be really helpful if US drivers could learn to use their indicators to signal their intentions to everyone.

Why are car drivers taking turns so quickly they cannot stop fast enough to not kill someone on a crosswalk?

The drivers are still 100% at fault, but left-turns are difficult because there's oncoming traffic if it's unprotected. Stopping when there's incoming traffic feasible isn't feasible.

The best move for drivers making unprotected left turns in busy intersections would be to wait until the end of the light: no more oncoming traffic, so the driver can wait until the last jaywalkers pass. The best solution from a city-planning perspective could be more protected left turn lights installed at those intersections with lots of accidents from left-hand turns.

You can keep asking that question, but physics doesn't care about who is morally right. Everyone should pay more attention to increase safety. Drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, everyone.

Alternatively, instead of relying on people not acting like people, we could design the streets themselves to be safer for everyone. Doing so most of the time has a lot of pushback due to the perception from drivers that doing so is somehow punishing them.

As someone who drives more than walks (except for my daily three mile recreational walks), I agree. Roads are often designed for speed, not for multi-user safety. I think city streets should be narrower in general, to the point of being single-lane in residential neighborhoods. Changing speed signs doesn't really have a strong effect. Changing design works.

Without going into unreasonable drivers (that surely are plenty), how many turns do one make in a trip there, what is the speed on the outgoing street, and what visibility do they have over the new street.

Anything you do is an exercise of balancing risks. Breaking too hard is a risk, taking time slow at a fast street is a risk, and turning too fast is a risk.

The problem is, as a pedestrian, I have no way of knowing if vehicle intends to take a left turn across my crosswalk UNLESS they come to a complete stop and I can see their turn signal. So even if I am fully alert I ultimately have to trust that you will not run me over in the crosswalk if you are traveling fast.

If you as a pedestrian are having this problem, it's because the road geometry is completely unfit for the purpose and the cars have absolutely no chance of reacting to your moves either. This should only happen on very low speed streets.

It's certainly not your fault either. Somebody is guilty of mass manslaughter.

Probably focused on, and wanting to get out of the way of, other oncoming cars.

Typical driver mindset, blaming those they run over. If anything, the "iPhone issue" you mention is probably more apparent in distracted drivers, not pedestrians.

Do you also park in the cycle lanes, and then later complain about cyclists not using them?

I was speaking mostly as a pedestrian. The word 'victim' is offensive in this context. If I do drive in SF I do so at a snails pace as there are so many people there who chose to think the laws of physics are irrelevant to them and that if they are injured it is someone else's fault.

This goes back years and so does victim scamming: I was picking my (then young) son up on a rainy night from outside the Davies Symphony hall where he'd been performing in a youth choir. I fortunately saw a guy sneak behind my car and lie in the gutter: he hoped I'd reverse and touch him to get out of the parking space at which point he could cry out in pain and sue. Happens all the time. Who's the victim in this situation?

> Typical driver mindset

You're building your argument on a borderline ad-hominem assumption

> the "iPhone issue" you mention is probably more apparent in distracted drivers

then on something that may or may not be true and honestly doesn't really mean anything

> Do you also park in the cycle lanes, and then later complain about cyclists not using them?

and accusing the person some more.

You skipped the main part, where I called them out for victim blaming. Nothing to say on that?

Shouldn't the person driving 2000+ lbs of machinery be responsible for how they are operating rather than a person trying to walk in a crosswalk?

It is a shared space, which belongs both to cars as well as pedestrians. So the responsibility for safety is shared as well.

Typically in scenarios where it's supposedly a shared responsibility, and one is at a significant disadvantage, where errors from either side has massively skewed consequences, you often want to put most of the responsibility on the one with ability to cause the most harm.

And I don't agree with it being a shared space. In a crosswalk cars are entering pedestrian space. It's not pedestrians entering car space. But that might just be telling on what continent I live.

I think it probably matters what your preconceptions are. I don't know what continent has to do with it. I'm pragmatic. It's a place cars and pedestrians both have an expectation to be. Therefore, it's shared. We use signals to make it safer, but nobody should ever lose sight of the reality that they may find a car there, or a pedestrian there, at the same time.

Wow, pretty brutal victim blaming here. You're driving on average a 4000 pounds vehicle at speed, you need to be the one responsible for it. "They got in my way" doesn't really fly.

I think you might be reacting too strongly? Take a step back, and rather than making this a victim/perp situation, look for anything that can mitigate the end result. Some of that is changing how people drive, but some of it could also be how people walk -- at least when they are crossing roads. Texting on your phone while going across a sidewalk definitely increases the risk. And it doesn't matter if you're right and the driver is wrong, because you're still dead either way.

The strong reaction is from being used to getting blamed whenever a car and its driver slaughter someone.

Now is the season for the reflective band discussion. Where pedestrians are being told they will be mowed down if not wearing any. Of course we will wear them, but that always moves the discussion away from the true problem areas. Pedestrians having to walk in the street because there is no curbside walkways, drivers driving too fast to be able to react in time, drivers not removing ice from their windows and lots of other factors contributing to accidents.

But no, lets blame those getting hit.

I don't think so. There's a victim in this situation, and it's never the driver.

Why are both not responsible? Something seems broken and I don't think it's just drivers. As someone else noted, a lot of these accidents (73%) do not occur at a crosswalk. I could only think that means parking lots and people j-walking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29465068

The rush to push blame on either drivers or pedestrians with these kind of vague statistics is really weird.

What would happen if the driver was walking instead? They'd bump into each other and possibly even fall down.

If you are operating something that has the ability to kill someone, you need to be responsible for it.

73% of these incidents are at non-intersections and 80% of them are at night. I'm not sure how much of that a driver can be totally responsible for. If a lot of people are dying at non-intersections that tells me the city likely has some obligation to investigate unsafe locations people are crossing at and make them safer. Point being, it doesn't mean it's the driver or pedestrians fault, but it's also certainly not automatically the person operating a machines fault. That's just silly.

>it's also certainly not automatically the person operating a machines fault

It is. If you work on a factory floor and you are operating machinery and kill someone, it's your fault. If you play ice hockey and accidently stick someone in the face, it's your fault. If you kill someone with your car because it's night time...

> If you work on a factory floor and you are operating machinery and kill someone, it's your fault.

I worked around heavy machinery and I know that's not true. I'm talking dramatically large forklifts for picking up massive shipping containers. It is the job of both the operator and the person on the ground to coordinate their activity. If the person on the ground has signaled it is safe for the operator to move the container and then steps into an unsafe position (eg: walking when there is no signal, or the signal is red) the operator isn't at fault. That doesn't mean that an operator can go around squashing people for fun, but there are rules and procedure for everyone's safety. This blame-the-driver rhetoric is just odd.

>I worked around heavy machinery and I know that's not true. I'm talking dramatically large forklifts for picking up massive shipping containers. It is the job of both the operator and the person on the ground to coordinate their activity.

You've actually worked somewhere that it wasn't the forklift operators fault? Was it the military? Because this sounds way out of step from my experiences.

> there are rules and procedure for everyone's safety

No drivers are injured in pedestrian collisions.

>This blame-the-driver rhetoric is just odd.

It really isn't if you've spent most of your life as a pedestrian, walking or biking. If I'm an idiot, I'm likely to die, if the car driver is an idiot, I'm likely to die. Who do you think is more likely to be the idiot in that situation?

What he is describing is SOP in every rail yard, pit mine, construction site, ship yard, inter-modal facility, airport, etc, etc, etc and has been since not long after the advent of these kinds of workplaces.

In addition to staying in your "zone" (men use man doors vehicles use vehicle doors, service trucks use service roads haul trucks use haul roads, etc, etc) your obligation in these settings is to stay out of the way of everything bigger than you and behave predictably so that everything smaller may stay out of your way. The smallest most nimble and greatest visibility traffic (usually a pedestrian) is expected to not get crushed underfoot of everything else. The biggest "slowest to take evasive action" traffic with the worst visibility has the greatest obligation to behave predictably and stay within the bounds of where, when and how it should be operating. And of course if there's someone in charge of directing traffic everyone listens to them.

Pedestrian yields to forklift yields to semi truck yields to crane yields to haul truck yields to ship (granted I can't think of a workplace where a haul truck would encounter a ship but you get my point).

I could say this is "OSHA 101" if I wanted to rake in the cheap virtue points but most of this stuff was formalized a century before OSHA in the rail yards of the 1800s.

>Who do you think is more likely to be the idiot in that situation?

Whoever is least able to empathize with what the other is trying to do and predict the other's actions correctly. The car driver probably has been a pedestrian from time to time so....

> The car driver probably has been a pedestrian from time to time so....

That seems to be the key here. It's easy for people to say "always the driver's fault" when they never drive themselves, instead paying Other People to do all the driving - FAANG shuttles, various delivery trucks, Uber if necessary - that sustains their lifestyle. In reality, safety in a shared space is a shared responsibility.

> Was it the military?

Yes. The system seemed to work pretty well from my experience. Safety, in general, is everyones responsibility -- from the individual to the systems at play. If you've ever been to a civilian gun range and heard, "everyone is a safety officer", that's where that comes from.

> It really isn't if you've spent most of your life as a pedestrian, walking or biking. If I'm an idiot, I'm likely to die, if the car driver is an idiot, I'm likely to die. Who do you think is more likely to be the idiot in that situation?

I used to ride a motorcycle, can I use this logic for accidents as well? Anything bigger than I am is likely to kill me. The logic seems heavily flawed, and the binary representation of fault or no fault doesn't match with the reality that it could very well be that the city is not adequately equipping the pedestrians and drivers with viable signals to communicate with.

It's also worth noting I live in the Bay area and bike across a good portion of it, including highways, and I do not share your view.

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