We have a letter for state and local organizations to sign to push Congress to prioritize investment in community transit, biking and walking over more highways. Please get your organization to sign! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Petition to change the V in #VRU to "venerable"
They are talking like traffic engineers haven't been trying - and failing - to fix traffic congestion for the last 70+ years
It's the wrong question to ask
And a good part of the reason we're in the mess that we're in
oh god y'all, the sportsball fan board is now talking about bike lanes
now I have to unplug my router and take the SIM card out of my phone
later friends
And by mocked I mean from multiple directions because when people have feelings about cars and driving them sometimes those feelings run deep. Viciously, aggressively deep.
There are about sixty things we could do as a nation to prevent road deaths and injuries. We do very, very few of them and in some states DOTS actively try to make their roads less safe (because speed sells cars, which run on oil)
I am not going to wade in because I'd be just one more voice whose sincerity (and expertise) is mocked. Instead I'm gonna mute and go touch grass on behalf of all y'all
Hooo boy there is a hot thread going on here about road safety and a lot of people involved are entirely unwilling to share enough grace to hear each other and recognize that we all want people to not die.
"The [odds ratio] of car crashes associated with COVID-19 was comparable to driving under the influence of alcohol at legal limits or driving with a seizure disorder."
The study suggests that acute COVID-19, regardless of Long COVID status, is linked to an increased risk of car crashes presumably due to neurologic changes caused by SARS-CoV-2.
www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/...
We can't even figure out how to educate regular - smart babies well.
And all the other things wrong with this, too
I do not want to create an account or open a subscription I just want to buy a thing and never hear from you again why is this so hard.
@chapelhillgov.bsky.social these would be dreamy
this
...which is why we're always on high alert, trying to identify the biggest threat and looking for ways to avoid it
when the environment denies you escape routes, you're completely at the mercy of a fallible human driving a multi-ton vehicle capable of smashing you to pieces.
that's scary AF.
Our roads are designed with the assumption that fender benders are NBD. Inconvenient, sure, but not a serious crash.
But for bicycles, there's no such thing as a fender bender. You get hit at 20mph and you're toast.
So for us, every interaction with a driver is a potential near-death experience
...the roadway design here meant there was no way I could avoid a crash. No shoulder, no way to swerve hard right and hope for a glancing blow. Swerving left might have given him time to avoid me, or given him time to accelerate and obliterate me.
A comment elsewhere commending the driver in this clip for driving safely
And yeah, he was...and that's the whole point. On my bike, I have no idea if the driver near me is going to be one of the nice attentive ones or watching tiktok.
He saw me. Yay. But had he not seen (or not cared)...
20. If this thread resonated with you, please share it with your driver friends.
We desperately need safer, more sensitively designed roads & intersections. Until then, more drivers understanding what people on bikes are doing and why we're doing it means more of us get home in one piece. /end
19. There a million reasons to not to drive. The planet's on fire. The AMOC is on the verge of collapse. Cars are expensive, loud, stinky, take up space, and kill people.
Our systems shouldn't punish people who opt to get to work and back some other way.
18. And even if they don't make a mistake -- like the driver of the white pickup truck, who did absolutely nothing wrong! -- the infrastructure we've been provided with means when either of us does make a mistake, the person on the bike could easily end up dead.
17. I'm among the first to acknowledge that most drivers in this town *are* trying really hard to not hit people on bikes. But even they usually don't understand what we're actually going through, or why the slightest mistake on their part can be a heart-in-mouth moment for us.
16. And if you are a local government ignoring repeated requests to trim vegetation and remove signs and other obscuring structures at intersections and driveway entrances, please listen: our options are shitty. You *can* make them less shitty...and by not doing so you are putting lives at risk.
15. So when you're driving and you see someone on a bike doing something you don't understand, please know that they're in the middle of about a million calculations to try and figure out which of the shitty options they've got is the least likely to get them killed, possibly by you.
14. Ignore a driver "helpfully" motioning for you to go in front of them at an intersection, or pretend to be polite and take the bait and piss everybody else off?
I could go on and on, as could anyone else who's ever tried to "share the road" with motorists.
13. Sprint to "get out of the way" or go slow enough to always have a viable escape route?
Take the lane on a blind curve, or move over so the aggressive driver behind you can pass even though it means they might cause a head-on collision?
12. But when your mode of transportation is not a car, you're forced to choose amongst shitty options all the time. And most of the time, those shitty options are all about predicting and managing the behavior of the drivers all around you.
11. And so I opt for plan B, a longer route but generally safer...except for this one blind side street entrance.
So I'm choosing between almost certain death on my normal route, or potential death at this one intersection.
It's a shitty choice.
10. So why do I go this way?
Well, I've got 2 route options for getting home. The direct route is my normal one; it's hairy but nothing I can't handle unless there's a ton of traffic.
But some days there IS a ton of traffic, and my normal route becomes far too dangerous.
9. This doesn't happen every day, but when it does, I'm distracted and unsettled the rest of the way home. Wound up tight, cortisol and adrenaline sky high, ready to fly off the handle at the next person my flight-or-fright lizard brain thinks may be about to end me.