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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Use your eyes, your situational awareness and your best judgement. The traffic light is not god's word.

In my neighborhood there used to be a traffic light that would be red for a long time despite not usefully regulating any traffic whatsoever. It stopped traffic despite the fact no other traffic could possibly conflict with it. People realized this and routinely ran that light with zero consequences. At some point the city realized it too and redesigned the traffic controls so that the light would be green in this situation.

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Stop training yourself to run red lights before you kill some body.

The correct action is to constantly bug your local representative to fix the problem, not break a law written in blood.

The correct action is to understand why certain barriers were erected in your way before attempting to demolish them. If you don't understand, just respect the barrier. If you understand, you know if, when and under which conditions it can be safely bypassed. Use your judgement.

Jaywalking laws were also written in blood. People break them every single day regardless because they have eyes and can look both ways to determine if it is safe to cross the street before actually doing it.

And yet, jaywalking pedestrians get killed daily, despite their best attempts at determining whether it's safe to cross. The problem with allowing drivers to use their best judgment as to whether it's safe to continue through a red light (after stopping) is that a non-zero percent of those drivers will fail to judge the situation correctly, especially during an edge case they rarely encounter.

It's impossible to get hit by cars if there are no cars around you. Vehicles are not going to materialize out of nowhere and crash into you. They are going to be funneled into your path by the roads. If you look at the road and see zero traffic, then you cannot be hit by traffic. Even if you run a red light.

Obviously, if you can't see the road where the cars will come from, then you cannot know if there are any cars coming towards you in a potentially intersecting trajectory.

> Vehicles are not going to materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.

At 60kmh a vehicle travels 16 meters per second. In freedom units: at 37mph a vehicle travels 54 feet per second.

A vehicle will materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.

>A vehicle will materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.

God I hate these sort of responsibility shirking opinions and their peddlers.

I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I've never had a close call closer than the "two people trying to pass each other in the hallway" routine with a driver trying to take a right on red.

Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.

If the traffic on a road goes X miles per hour, then simply don't cross it where you don't have a sufficiently long line of sight. If crossing where the lines of sight are sufficient is not tractable due to traffic volumes or road construction then cross at a marked crossing, intersection that interrupts traffic flow or use proper body language and someone will stop for you.

Sure, you might get exceptionally unlucky and choose to cross at the exact minute some car that's a few standard deviations above the norm but you might also get hit by lightening.

> I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I

I, I, I

> Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.

Yes. Yes they do.

That's why some countries (e.g. Sweden) actually have this in drivers ed: how fast a vehicle travels, how long it takes for the driver to react, what the stopping distance is for a vehicle etc.

They even teach things like "parked cars are a double problem because you can have people especially kids suddenly appear from behind them".

Or things like "at night you only see this far, and judging distance to things becomes harder".

But all that, including laws of physics, is invalidated by a litany of "I, I, mine, my, me".

I'm not special. I'm fairly normal. Hundreds of millions of people manage to walk and drive as uneventfully as I do. The presence of some few number of people who can't manage to jaywalk decently and not run reds when it matters doesn't justify saddling the literal entire rest of society with some automotive flavor of 1984 anymore than some small number people robbing convenience stores to pay for their drug addiction justifies subjecting all of society to pervasive surveillance and the war on drugs fueled police state.

I couldn't parse your demagoguery, bad analogies and non-sequiturs, and I don't want to.

Adieu.

Obviously. Don't take risks near pedestrians, near schools, near parked cars. Don't make assumptions in low visibility conditions where you can't actually see what's ahead of you. Use your judgement.

In my city there are segments where I can see several kilometers ahead, including the traffic lights and their associated roads and traffic.

If you can't understand the fact it's safe to run a red light when you can see the roads are clear for several kilometers ahead of you, then I simply don't know what else to say.

Even police does this while roaming about on patrol.

Honestly, these arguments sound like cartoon logic. Guy looks both ways and sees the roads are clear but on the exact second he starts to cross the street 10 cars materialize out of nowhere at 200 km/h and nearly run him over just to teach him a lesson. This isn't how the world works.

I understand the desire to act holier than thou and pretend that going through a red light with no traffic is murder in the making, but the situation they advocate for (running when clear) is even written into law in some states (at least for motorcycles/bicycles). Some vehicles don't trigger the sensors and the lights never change, so you are allowed to go after a full stop. I would not be surprised in the least if there were some states where the wording of the law applied to cars as well.

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