#Traffic Violence

[infamousbrad]

[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

[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.

[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.”

[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.

[comingsoon2aroadsideditchnearyou]

They're just salty I decided to get forcibly rendered into a soup-like homogenate by the rusted-out buick skylark down the block instead.

yes i go out of my way to drive safely around bicyclists, no i dont care about their human lives, i know the fucking perverts are desperately slavering to be slammed and crushed by the beautiful steel of an automobile, trembling and hot with death-drive that only the merciless fenders of my foreverially dealerplated altima can answer, and i simply refuse to give them release.

[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.

[teaboot]

i dont understand how people call you "basically a cop" when the most power you have is to tell someone to leave.... like?? you cant arrest people you cant detain them the most you can do is call the actual cops which...... literally ANYONE can do that like????

p much. Usually don't have to tho, people usually listen when you're calm and respectful- more than half the time I'm on the phone it's for an ambulance

People aren't kidding when they say it's basically babysitting

[ananiujitha]

And of course, most crosswalks are at intersections, so they aren't the safest places to cross.

Ok so what is jaywalking then

[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.

[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 //

[carhatred]

Unsurprisingly, most Americans frown upon antisocial behavior. Stealing people’s stuff, bending food safety rules, or smoking in large crowds tend to generate a lot of stern reactions.

But get behind the wheel of a car, and all that disapproval tends to melt away.

That’s because a lot of us suffer from a malady called “car brain” — though Ian Walker, a professor of environmental psychology at Swansea University in Wales, prefers to call it “motonormativity.” This is the term coined by Walker and his team to describe the “cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately” about how we use cars.

[pearlescentmoon-enjoyers]

[amethystfairy1]

"I need to tell him something." - Scar, actually.

Don't say I never gave ya any plot for Whumptober :P

Day 10! Please enjoy!