Granted you've misinterpreted the posters point - but I will respond to your perception of his point (which I agree with).
You could easily imagine a world where pedestrians have the right of way on the streets, and cars "request access to the road" in a similar way that pedestrians do. Actually, if this is not easy for you to imagine - it suggests enormous internal bias.
However, pedestrians can cross wherever/whenever they think that it's safe to do so anywhere in Britain (Northern Ireland I think has some kind of jaywalking law). It's not just in London or other cities, but remote countrysides too where crossings may not be available. Pedestrians have priority, but it's definitely frowned upon to cause vehicles to have to slow/swerve to avoid a collision.
The Highway Code was recently updated (a few years ago) to make it more explicit that pedestrians crossing a side road junction should have priority over vehicles trying to turn into the side road. However, that's not necessarily followed by all drivers/cyclists etc.
Basically, drivers/cyclists are expected to make all efforts to avoid a collision and will be considered at fault unless it's a scenario where the pedestrian steps into the road without enough time for the driver/cyclist to react and avoid them.
So on that basis, jaywalking should be prohibited on Manhattan Island, because it's population density is greater than that of London, which we have for some reason decided is the arbiter, but allowed virtually everywhere else in the US, where the population density is less than London?
If you allow pedestrians to cross anywhere at any time with right of way, that can work to a certain density. On the other end of the scale, traffic will be at a standstill due to a constant stream of pedestrians. I don't know exactly where on that scale either of those cities is, but the argument that it works in the UK where the density is 5x less seems flawed.
I've posted in the sibling thread r.e. the density (which I believe you have underestimated by several orders of magnitude), however a stroll around london will show you that, excepting arterial roads, cars always have to deal with pedestrians crossing at any time and place, including between you and the car ahead if you come to a stop, or if there's more than a couple meters between you and the next car. Even busy arterial roads will have to deal with people walking across them if there are large gaps or the traffic is slow or stalled.
In practice nobody steps out in front of a moving vehicle (for obvious reasons) and most people cross at the crossings most of the time because that makes sense.
In situations where there are a lot of people at the same time, like say a music festival or a sports game finishing, the police tend to manage the flow of people.
I'm struggling to believe London Brigde area and the square mile get 5x less congested than New York. What areas of London and New York are we comparing?
Greater London compared to Manhattan, apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London. I don't see what conclusions can be drawn from that comparison, which is why I asked GP to be explicit.
I don't think that's not very comparable. You don't get that many high rise residential buildings in central London, but it gets all the workers anyway. It's not as extreme, but think of Shibuya crossing having 0 population. We'd need some measure of people on the streets instead.
London is the densest, but the comparison was between the central area of one city and the entire area of another, perhaps even including suburbs beyond the formal city limits of the second. When you're leave out enough detail and just post two numbers, you're apt to make such mistakes while posting and thereby post something meaningless.
One good way to avoid posting meaninglessly is to write meaningful sentences and explain your conclusions/inferences explicitly.
It would kill the utility of cars though, you could never drive faster than maybe 30 miles per hour or you would constantly run people over.
Pedestrians are more nimble than cars, so it kind of makes sense that cars have the right of way. As far as I know, large container ships have right of way over small vessels for the same reason.
This speed limit, or lower, is pretty common in major European cities. Helps divert investment to things more beneficial to society than individual car ownership, improves transit, cleans up cities, makes for great public spaces.
Yes, I was saying that 30 miles would have to be the limit on every street though, in cities you would probably have to do 10 if everyone could step onto the street at every moment.
But just because jaywalking isn’t a crime doesn’t mean pedestrians have right of way. Is that the case anywhere? I thought that was the proposal, which is much different than allowing people to cross everywhere, after looking out that there’s no car coming.
reedf1 wrote:
> You could easily imagine a world where pedestrians have the right of way on the streets, and cars "request access to the road" in a similar way that pedestrians do.
Pedestrians have quite broad right of way in the UK - you can't step into moving traffic and expect them to slam on the brakes, but you will see people crossing anywhere and everywhere at any time:
Using the right tools at the right place is part of it: cars are useful for some trips, less for others. Trying to solve every transportation problem with a unique solution was IMHO the original sin of this.
> Pedestrians are more nimble
Think kids going to school and elderlies. Having something that work for them requires either putting the burden on cars or removing cars from the picture. One costs a lot more than the other, and in the case you want to keep cars in cities the former is probably more attractive than the latter.
> you could never drive faster than maybe 30 miles per hour or you would constantly run people over.
Wait, when are you driving faster than that in a city anyway? City roads here are mostly restricted to 30kph; travel times didn't significantly increase when this was imposed a while back.
Have you ever driven through a downtown urban area? You can't go more than 30mph anyway, even if you wanted to. There is simply too much connections, turns, etc.
And yet, I still disagree that pedestrians should be able to just enter the road willy-nilly. Crosswalks are there for safety because it sets the same expectations for everyone using the road, drivers included, thus creating order and flow that is generally reliable.
This is also the same problem I have with cyclists that think they should be allowed to ride against traffic, ignore stop signs, etc. By not moving with the expected flow, they endanger themselves and creat problems. When I am making a right hand turn, for example, and a cyclist has decided to ride against traffic, I am not compelled to look to my right as I am timing my turn because I am not expecting traffic to be there since a right turn has you crossing zero lanes of traffic and merging with on-coning that would be on your left.
I don't really like our car-centric roads in the US at all, but rules are in place for a reason.
> I am not compelled to look to my right as I am timing my turn because I am not expecting traffic to be there since a right turn has you crossing zero lanes of traffic and merging with on-coning that would be on your left.
Except you may have just passed a cyclist without leaving enough time to turn because you barely registered their presence and are now going to cut them off. Or you stopped at an intersection and they approached on the right because that is where they are supposed to stay by law and you didn't check your blind spot before you started. The first situation can happen with cars where you pass a slow moving car just before an intersection and immediately slow down to turn right, merging back into the lane and cutting off the car. If you have driven any amount of time at all, I am sure you have seen that annoying scenario. The second situation doesn't typically happen with cars because of how right turn lanes are constructed but can (unlawfully) occur when someone (typically a tourist) was in the straight going lane but realized they wanted or needed to turn right.
Dedicated bicycle lanes are meant to make it clear that you are indeed crossing traffic when you turn right because bicycles as slow moving traffic are intended to stay in that area as an exceptional case.
I should clarify that when dedicated bike lanes are present, I absolutely look for cyclists in both directions. Again, setting expectations is important. It's also why we use turn signals.
My reference to cyclists goinh the wrong way takes place in the suburbs where I have lived most, and bikes are not exactly common. On a four lane highway with a speed limit of 55mph, multiple driveways, etc (Not Just Bikes calls them Stroads), a cyclist moving against traffic on a narrow shoulder is not expected. We can preach all day about "paying attention" but we have created a situation that demands high levels of attention from all, but cyclists feel they are exempt from the rules of traffic, making the situation worse in some immature act of defiance.
I like my bike. I ride it as often as possible and travel to places specifically because they have good biking infrastructure. But when I am in a place where therd is none, I ride with traffic, use my hand signals, and assume drivers cannot see me because they have a hundred other things they need to pay attention to, so I put effort into making myself visible and communicating intent.
> but cyclists feel they are exempt from the rules of traffic, making the situation worse in some immature act of defiance.
The vast majority of drivers are continuously violating laws. On top of the continuous speeding violation (+10-15 is surely ok?) add the occasional roll through, failures to yield, failure to use a turn signal, speeding in school zones, passing without sufficient distance, running reds, double parking, etc and the police pretty much always can pull over any given automobile driver. This fact is well known: the default state of a driver is one of rule breaking.
Primary attribution fallacy is the contextualization of our own errors or rule violations while attributing those of strangers to character flaws (immature, defiant). You pass drivers doing all of the above things every day, but it is the cyclists you notice because they are different and the other drivers are surely doing the same as you. But you understand the context in which you violate laws or make mistakes.
It is not that hard to understand that everyone is human.
> Except you may have just passed a cyclist without leaving enough time to turn because you barely registered their presence and are now going to cut them off.
> and you didn't check your blind spot before you started.
No amount of legislation or changes in rules will protect from people who aren't paying attention. These changes don't have an impact immediately, but the only way to make them is to do them at one point or another. The people learning to drive in NY now will know that things are different, and in 10-15 years the behaviour will change.
You could easily imagine a world where pedestrians have the right of way on the streets, and cars "request access to the road" in a similar way that pedestrians do. Actually, if this is not easy for you to imagine - it suggests enormous internal bias.