#Traffic Violence

[coulsonlives]

Holy shit

Can I just say

I am so

motherfucking tired

of these exorbitantly huge

vehicles with front hoods/grilles that are as tall as my head

These need to have the shit taxed out of them and heavily regulated instead of being subsidized as farm equipment and being given out like candy, people are basically like bugs on a windshield if they get hit

[infamousbrad]

Jason Slaughter, of the excellent "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel and "The Urbanist Agenda" podcast, just dropped an episode of the latter and it completely ignored the backlash he's gotten lately, from urbanists in the US and Canada, about his "just give up and move somewhere where cars aren't mandatory" attitude lately. But I think, accidentally or not, he explained it:

He's been hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk, with the light. And he and his wife lost a good friend who died, because the car that hit her, where she was legally allowed to be, was a giant SUV.

I also have been hit by a car, while up on the sidewalk. My second orthopedic surgeon looked at the damage to my knees and was able to tap exactly the spot where the bumper hit me, and even after bilateral knee replacement I'll never walk as well as I used to be able to. (After two surgeries, ten months' of expert physical therapy, and three years in the gym I can walk up to a mile, but it'll never not hurt.)

And I've buried not one but two friends who were run over by cars. I only literally just, in the last year, found out how uncommon that experience is, I thought that by the time you were a grown-ass adult my age, everybody in the US, Canada, or Australia knew someone who'd been killed by a car, or at least permanently injured. And looking back on it, I begin to understand in hindsight just how much more anti-automobile radical I got each time.

From where I sit (or occasionally stand or walk), the rest of y'all are just whistling past the graveyard, full of stories about why it won't happen to you and still just accepting the fact that you live and work in places you won't let your kids walk as if that had always been normal.

[punk-hunki]

Fighting for a better society feels impossible in this country.

A 16 year old kid was killed while riding a bike on Friday and once again the driver left the person to die in the street. Where is the Mayor?

It feels impossible to wrangle cars out of this selfish country's hands.

[ananiujitha]

I live next to a busy multilane stroad

... And it’s just so frustrating that there’s no safe way across.

All the crosswalks are at intersections.

The major intersections have blinding+disorienting turn signals from every direction, plus blinding+disorienting crosswalk lights. I used to be able to shield my eyes, but the lights are getting more powerful, and some cars have additional lights. I once turned away from one set of flashing lights, got hit by another,  and regained awareness 2 or 3 lanes into the stroad.

The state also allows right turn on red.

The minor intersections don’t have as many turn signals, but the state department of transportation has installed extra flashing lights at those intersections so they aren’t safe either.

Now if I take a long detour to use crossings with sliplanes, I can avoid the right turn on red issue, but I’m still afraid I’ll have a seizure.

I have anti-glare glasses, they don’t help, and I have tried sunglasses, they actually make things worse, and I only cross in the middle of the day, but they’re still too bright.

I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.

I have already been hit twice on other local stroads and I fear I will be killed.

[carhatred]

The U.S. is by far the most dangerous developed nation when it comes to roadway safety. We accept too much carnage on our streets and our roadway policies have neglected safety for the sake of driver speed and convenience.  Given recent crash trends, America’s traffic safety problem strikes me as an emergency. And emergencies call for bold action. 

(...) I recently had a long discussion with a recent graduate of a Civil Engineering graduate program while at a dinner party.  We discussed a lot of the issues Miami is facing with improving its transit and bike network. The conversation ultimately led to the challenges of designing safer streets when many engineering professionals were taught that the primary goal of street design is to reduce traffic delay.  This concurs with my graduate education, where I focused on Transportation Planning and took several Civil Engineering courses. In these courses, the “success” of a transportation network was measured in reduced delay for automobiles, with no value given to reduced crashes or multimodal access.  Likewise, none of my Planning courses even touched on the roadway safety problem.

(...) The Four Step Travel Model, just like traffic delay metrics and the 85th percentile rule, were originally designed for highways. Over the past decades, they’ve been applied to surface streets to disastrous outcomes. In my professional experience, I’ve seen traffic models developed in 2010 that overestimated projected daily future volumes for 2020 by tens of thousands of cars. Underutilized and ultimately unneeded traffic lanes were built for these projects due to flawed traffic forecasts, leading to increased vehicle speeds, more severe crashes, and more right-of-way used which could have gone to better uses.

[kiranherbert]

Better Bike Infrastructure Saves Lives

[comingsoon2aroadsideditchnearyou]

"GET OFF THE ROAD!", you say?

Well if it's called that, then why are you droaving a cahr on it instead of roading a skapedord like me is? Checkmate, loser.

[welcome2thebronx]

Fatalities due to traffic violence continue to rise in The Bronx; 47 killed in first nine months of 2022

Traffic violence keeps rising in New York City with 188 people killed with The #Bronx accounting for 47 of those lives lost or 25% of the total thus far for 2022. #VisionZero

New data released today by Transportation Alternatives and Families for Safe Streets shows just how much deadlier city streets, particularly those in The Bronx, have become since before the pandemic due to traffic violence. Worst of all, The Bronx leads the five boroughs of New York City in such fatalities where one in four deaths have occurred on our borough’s streets resulting in the deaths of…

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I made an illegal u-turn to get on some kind of exit ramp, kind of accidentally cut someone off but they just pulled around me and sped away. A little further down the road I come upon that same person pulled over by a traffic cop, see their hand sticking out their window pointing at me, then the cop gestures for me to pull over also. I thought I was gonna get a ticket but the cop just wanted to referee while we fought to the death.

[zzombiecleo]

on shadowrot and the overlap between violence and love

// @navy-leader // @brennatwohy // Belvedere Hotel, Pittsburgh // ??? // Boyish - Japanese Breakfast // Letters to Milena - Franz Kafka // Splitter - Linnea Paskow // Rupi Kaur // Kingdom of the Wicked - Kerri Maniscalco // The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) // This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone // @navy-leader //

[pearlescentmoon-enjoyers]

[infamousbrad]

Our two-tier justice system at its finest. If your dad's rich enough to buy you a Maserati at 17, it scarcely matters if you murder someone with it.

[whalesharkstho]

pov: ur best friend and partner in crime beats u to death on top of a mountain

[krashlite]

lil exercise i did awhile ago hehe

[carhatred]

A new grassroots-funded documentary will expose the ways that America’s autocentric approach to building infrastructure is destroying our physical and mental health — and why we can only become well by rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges for people rather than cars.

Planner, engineer, and multi-media storyteller Andy Boenau recently launched a fundraising effort for his new film “White Collar Epidemic: How Infrastructure is Crumbling Our Minds and Bodies,” which he hopes will “sound an alarm, provoke critical thought, and to inspire people to band together to make their neighborhoods healthy and delightful places to live.”That alarm, of course, has been ringing in the minds of sustainable transportation advocates for years — even if the rest of the world can’t always hear it.Decades of research have shown that residents of car-dependent places have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory conditions and other ailments associated with sedentary lifestyles and car pollution, especially when compared to residents of walkable areas, who also report higher levels of happiness and a host other social, emotional, and physical benefits. Even gun suicide rates go down by roughly half in neighborhoods with access to walkable places like parks — and that’s not even considering the massive public health threat of car crashes themselves, which claimed nearly 43,000 lives last year alone.

Boenau hopes his film can use the power of narrative to animate those sobering statistics, and make them urgent enough to get people to demand healthier neighborhoods.“It’s sort of like ‘Erin Brockovich’ meets ‘Super Size Me’ meets ‘The Blues Brothers,'” he joked. “I want normies to get the message: it’s even worse than you think it is, but it can get better. As awful as some state regulations are, this is problem so fixable at the local level.”

Active living is prevented by the local planning dept & public works dept.Some studies show blue collar workers suffer the most from the rules made by white collar workers.Here's how you can help me shine a giant spotlight on this: https://t.co/rmfDVnrb0n@seedandsparkpic.twitter.com/UjEp5VFA9M— Andy Boenau (@Boenau) June 5, 2023

The Brockovich-ian quest at the center of Boenau’s documentary is his own journey to unveil who’s behind America’s unhealthy infrastructure, and how their actions have inhibited the ability of public health professionals to keep the population well. An urban planner and traffic engineer himself, he says knew that his white collar colleagues were heavily implicated in that scandal — but even he’s been shocked by the extent of it.

“You’ve really got these two groups of white-collar professionals: one is is the medical profession, and one is urban planners,” Boenau explains. “The first knows what’s good for our minds and bodies, and the other is prohibiting it.”

So far, that investigation has taken him to the doorsteps of some of the leading lights of the sustainable transportation movement and the field of public health. He’s already queued up interviews with “Right of Way” author (and former Streetsblog editor) Angie Schmitt, Shared-Use Mobility Center CEO Benjie de la Peña, “Curbing Traffic” co-author Chris Bruntlett, historian and author Peter Norton, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer David Ederer, and many more.Boenau says he expects even the most well-informed sustainable transportation advocates will learn something new when the film comes together — and his biggest challenge will be keeping it under a one-hour run-time.

“The more I research this, the more this wants to be a 100-episode TV series,” Boenau laughs. “When people watch this, I want them to think, ‘Oh, I thought this was a big deal, but I don’t know it was that big of deal.”

[omgitsbeewave]

tw(cw???) strangulation, thorns, vines, idk

i've been seeing a lot of interesting things lately... one beautiful color palette for example! "I Thought You'd Always Be Here"

it inspired me so much to draw the guys from au where scott is flower hybrid, mhm

i love it