I’ve seen a lot of people wearing all dark clothing at night while walking their dog or jogging. I was told growing up not to do that. I guess they don’t teach that anymore?
People do that here and get really annoyed when they step off the curb into 30mph traffic and tires squeal and people narrowly avoid hitting them, lol. Meanwhile, I either wait until the car is past, or make direct eye contact with the driver while I’m under a streetlight. Sometimes wear bright colors too.
One of these days, someone is gonna get plowed over by the 80,000,000 lb electric streetcar, which cannot stop as quickly. People on bikes and scooters always run the red lights too, adding to the problem, despite there being red lights specifically for bikes so that people don’t get struck. It’s a mess. We need gates to keep people out of harms way :P
Cool victim blaming
If you’re walking in the road at night wearing dark clothes, you’re not a victim, you’re a road hazard.
Closest I came to smoking a pedestrian was a black dude, like Wesley Snipes black, wearing all black, sauntering across a Chicagoland street at 10PM.
His white shoes were the only thing that saved his life. Saw little white flashes moving low, puzzled me so I dropped down from 55. Motherfucker just looked at me like, “What? Fuck you.”, kept rolling. My heart was hammering out my chest.
See assholes in my hood dressed dark all the time. You don’t gotta have reflectors on (I do have a strip on my pack), but FFS, wearing black at night?!
(Old man rant; I did that shit when I was a young punker.)
This happened to me recently, but with someone’s pale white ass. Same thing, saw something oddly white in the inky blackness, it was someone’s face crossing the road right in front of my car. (They were dressed in head to toe black with a black bag)
We need a law that all black overcoats need red reflective material built into the sleeves, back, and front. Make it stylish, but make it visible. Will improve safety on bikes, scooters, ski slopes and hiking.
If you’re driving you’re a road hazard, not pedestrians
Explain your reasoning, please.
This is a common vibe from urbanists (spoiler alert: I’m an urbanist, myself). The heart of the message is this: in the US, our streets and cities have been designed to prioritize the car above all else, at the expense of all else. In most of the US, if you try to go anywhere by any other means, bicycle, walking, bus, you name it, it’s downright hostile. In fact, it wasn’t always this way, and we only arrived here after decades of consistent lobbying, political fuck fuck games, and influence campaigns by car makers. So, this is, in part, an effort to reframe people’s thinking about streets from something that cars go on to something that cars share with others.
Oh, so you’re one of those.
Roads are made for cars, and people shouldn’t be walking on them at night with dark clothes on.
They’re by definition a road hazard, no matter your personal beef with cars.
My cousin in Buddha, I’ve got no beef with you. You asked, I answered. Drive your car if it makes you happy, hell, I don’t want to take it away from you even if I had a wish granting urbanism genie. But building our infrastructure to be car dependent, where the default state is cars, has been a disaster that’s going to haunt us for decades, ecologically, culturally, and fiscally. It’s the dependency part I’d like to change.
You should drive at a speed appropriate for the conditions. If you can’t see fsr enough ahead, or can’t stop fast enough to avoid a pedestrian, you are driving too fast. I shouldn’t have to wear day glow neon and flashing lights everywhere I go, because you can’t slow down a bit.
In the UK most roads were made well before cars existed you moron
Ok, how many deaths per year are caused by people driving cars hitting people, and how many deaths per year are caused by people walking hitting people. This figure should help you figure out who the real problem is.
I think you might misunderstand the topic of discussion.
I think you misunderstand
How many people get hit because drivers cannot see them?
We’re taught to drive to the conditions. If you’re going too fast to stop in an area with pedestrians, you’re driving dangerously
Pedestrian running k to a pedestrian isn’t what’s leading to deaths. If you can’t drive safe then don’t drive. Of course there should probably be some compromise here.
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. I think a few words there got messed up.
Nope. Infrastructure problem. Why is the pedestrian walking in the road and not on a pedestrian path? There likely is none.
Because they refuse to walk further down (or up) to the crosswalk.
Nice assumption to make a straw man.
Here’s an idea. Walk alongside the road. With the exception of those that have disabilities and for some reason can’t be walking on grass, the rest of us can walk OFF of the road.
It’d be victim blaming if people were intentionally running over people in dark clothing. When talking about victim blaming you’re generally talking about the intent of the perpetrator, not the general circumstances. “She was dressed all sexy like and made him rape her” and such. It’s an excuse for agency, rather than lack of agency.
Wearing dark clothes in poorly lit high traffic areas makes you harder to see, and harder to avoid. Drivers can not act on information they do not have, so they have less agency to avoid those pedestrians.
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Lol, apart from the fact that the original comment literally is victim blaming? The rise in pedestrian deaths Is NOT because people are wearing darker clothes. If you think this is true you are a complete moron
I agree with you completely. Drivers have a responsibility to not run people over. If they can’t handle that then they need alternative transit.
Night is when the sun is on the other side of the planet. Night is dark
But is night becoming darker since 2010?
Yes
Is always darker before the dawn
We have no infrastructure in place for pedestrians across most of the US. Combine that with laws on land ownership ranging from arresting trespassers to shooting them on sight, the only legal place to walk is usually a road. And even then that’s a stretch.
Interesting article. I skimmed it so maybe I missed this, but my first thought was that the population is aging, and older people have more trouble driving at night. I’m 60 and I am definitely impaired at night, so I avoid driving after dark if at all possible.
I haven’t read it yet, but the first thing I noticed was the graph starts heading upward just after the 2008 financial crisis. More people working extra or odd shifts, more people doing without cars, more people driving tired and stressed …
A second and better thought: it’s the US obsession with ever-increasing
penis substitutesSUV and truck sizes. With a smaller vehicle, when you get hit, you roll over the hood and off to the side. With a bigger vehicle, you go underneath, run over by a much heavier vehicles, she potentially dragged. There are also bigger blind spots and, from my experience driving near matter SUVs and pickups, their drivers are often just right fucking oblivious to the outside world, or fucking entitled, driving like they own the road and everyone else is obligated to get out of their way.My other thought was that the rise of Android auto and apple carplay have really driven a move to large bright displays in the car that both kill your night vision and provide a nice distraction when you look down to check on the GPS or what song is playing or whatever.
I think it is a combination of all of those things. Phones, infotainment systems, driven by overworked and tired people driving ever larger cars.
@athos77 this seems like the most plausible explanation.
Post GFC funding cuts to enforcement of drunk driving laws might be a related factor.
Archived link: https://archive.ph/7mfli
Archive always thinks I’m a robot. I check the box as not a robot, complete the captcha and then it just repeats the process. Must be my privacy settings. Anyways, thanks for linking.
Because there’s no longer anything interesting on TV.
The part about automatic transmissions is interesting. Manual transmissions require both hands to drive (one for the wheel, one for the stick shifter) while automatic transmissions only require one hand to drive. This allows drivers of automatic transmission cars to use their free hand to play on their phone.
As someone who has driven both for decades, manuals only require two hands when accelerating and decelerating. While that does discourage holding something to an extent, I can easily eat a hamburger and shift with the same hand and would imagine a phone would be even easier to hold since there is no risk of dripping ketchup on the shift.
Wouldn’t know though, since I don’t hold a phone while driving either.
