Sorry that happened to you. I have had similar experiences, I have had people literally hit me with their cars because they’re angry I’m taking the lane, bad things thrown at me from moving vehicles.
However, I don’t see experiences like yours as being caused by the right turn law so much as the constant fact that people on cars sharing roads with bikes are assholes.
I will say, as a cyclist the polite thing to do is to position your bike to let turn-on-red people past you whenever possible. I don’t think it justifies this guys behavior and don’t know what this intersection looks like but it’s worth bringing up.
Did you actually read anything I have written?
The point is that simply lowering speed limits as the primary lever to improve quality of life isn’t useful. It does nothing to reallocate that space in a beneficial way.
I’m literally arguing in favor of reducing space for cars for more pedestrian, cycling and transit infrastructure
The bottom line is that if you build to accommodate cars, you will never have walkability. It's geometrically impossible.
Guess what? The city is already built. I agree with you.
The question is how to move forward and slapping lower speed limits on everything isn’t the solution. You need to actually spend money on revamping the infrastructure so there are meaningful alternatives. Try to read more and jump to conclusions less.
There are many reasons why it is bad for everyone, but I will cite a few specifics.
To start with, in the absence of good alternatives, vast majority of pedestrians and cyclists would also be regular drivers. The only exceptions would be people who are too poor to avoid a car. If the drivers and the walkers are the same people then the people who regularly walk still suffer from slowed traffic because they still take the car for some trips.
Poor mobility for cars also translates to increased cost of living. Most businesses rely upon vehicle transport in some way or another and the increased cost of doing business gets passed onto the consumer.
In addition, the existence of high throughput streets with higher speed limits tends to concentrate traffic into specific predictable areas. When you reduce the throughput of those areas, traffic gets distributed onto more roads. The result is that cyclists and pedestrians are less able to avoid cars with strategic route planning.
I wouldn’t ride my bike nearly as often if cars could go 45 mph on Canadian streets.
To clarify, this isn’t every street in the USA, it’s only major thoroughfares. Most side streets in US cities have a 25-30 mph speed limit. In a world with well designed bike infrastructure we would have dedicated paths separated from traffic so you don’t have to share the road with fast moving cars.
Disagree. I spent all of my 20s living the no car lifestyle and cycling 100-200 miles a week on city streets. I have had countless negative interactions with cars but not a single one had anything to do with right turns on red.
I just don’t see any meaningful safety improvement from it but significant downsides in terms of traffic flow.
I think the focus here really needs to be on supporting alternative forms of transport.
We have a city that’s already filled with gridlock almost 24/7, even at 2am in the evening. The city planning is such that it’s hard to go significant distances without a car without spending hours in transit. If the primary lever for change is to institute slower speed limits and traffic calming measures, it simply makes things miserable for everyone involved.
IMO the root of the issue is we have way too many cars and not enough alternative infrastructure to make going without a car especially practical.
Denverites love to walk and bike when it’s convenient and they feel safe. I firmly believe that dedicated infrastructure would dramatically reduce the number of car trips as well as give structural safety measures walkers and cyclists. This would reduce deaths while making the city a more pleasant and healthy place to be. Thats why it should be the primary focus in terms of change.
Yup and I’d LOVE to see some of those four lane roads get turned into two or three lane roads with protected bike lanes
However, in a city that’s primarily optimized for cars and lacking in other forms of infrastructure, the main impact of traffic calming measures is to make it really hard to get anywhere in an efficient manner. I don’t believe it significantly improves safety, but it will undoubtedly make a lot of people who rely on their cars absolutely miserable.
The root of the problem is that we simply have too many cars on the roads to begin with. However, we can’t reasonably ask people to stop driving until the alternatives are as safe and convenient as a car. The primary focus should be on urban planning that makes walking, biking, or taking light rail an attractive alternative. In the case of walking and cycling, this overwhelmingly means dedicated infrastructure.
I live in one of these cities (Denver) and in my city’s case this push is part of a ton of other provisions including a push to set a maximum speed limit citywide of 25 mph.
About 80% of my trips out of the house are walking or on a bike, but it seems clear to me that policies like this don’t improve safety. It’s just lazy policy making. For example, if you set a 25 mph speed limit on a road designed to support 45 mph traffic, most drivers will still drive 45+ mph and you instead get a wild mismatch of driving speeds. This just slows traffic with an arguably negative benefit to safety. Similarly, if you ban turn on red in the city many drivers will still turn on red, but now whether or not a car will turn on red becomes unpredictable.
What our cities need is more dedicated bike and pedestrian infrastructure that is separated altogether from the roads, as well as greatly improved public transit.
Because you might find it’s really fun if you kept at it and learned the new skill?
Many rewarding hobbies take years of work to develop any significant level of skill in. Golf, racing cars, skiing, etc
Our DM did this, I had no idea they were an official creature. We saved some of them from goblins and their god was shaped like the party’s wizard except with claw hands.
Suede as a term has a wide range of different meanings, but the orthodox definition is a byproduct of full grain leather production.
A manufacturer makes full grain leather of whatever thickness by slicing off the upper part of the leather where the grain is. The vast majority of the strength in leather is in the grain. The remaining thickness is a loose collection of fibers with nowhere near the density, strength or water resistance of full grain leather. That’s suede. That stuff is far less durable than leather with the grain in it.
The suede referenced in the article isn’t suede by the traditional definition because it has the grain on the backside. The manufacturer description says it is, “A production of selected, young calf skins with a luxurious silky suede side and a natural full grain, aniline reverse.” It’s more of a rough-out leather, which is absolutely a durable and long lasting product.
@nBodyProblem
@lemmy.world