Safe Speed Forums

So what?

And who says so?

Firstly, I can drive into a child and kill it.

However a child can run in front of me, cause me to "Think Child" and swerve.

Into a bus queue of schoolkids, then the bus stop, which falls across the road, causing a coach trip of OAP's to career through a sensory garden for the blind before swerving back onto the road, onto a bridge, off it onto a railway track, causing a passenger express to jump the rails into the river, sinking a pleasure cruise of mother and toddlers.

Secondly, why are you allowing a child on the roads unsupervised in your version of utopia?

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So, still trying to distract from:

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And your point is?

That you run red lights across the path of HGV's, dodge round the barriers on level crossings, and play chicken on runways expecting the pilot to take responsibility for your safety.

Do you actually have an argument?

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

So you're the one encouraging kids to "reclaim" the streets because the driver is responsible for their safety and and no one can touch them for jaywalking!

And people think that using child soldiers and even child suicide bombers is immoral!



Errrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmm.

Wot?

Like the jaywalkers and kids above playing chicken?

Like the 85% of pedestrian fatalities responsible for their own deaths?

You clearly don't drive if you really believe that!

Or you drive with your eyes closed and judge the rest of us by your own standards.


You might think that it's normal to drive around thinking it's OK to run that pedestrian down because I'm in a steel box and it will hurt him more than it hurts me.

But there are other implications to hitting them that cause serious harm to the driver.

Why is it that you are unable to think forward or anticipate far enough ahead to figure this out for yourself?

No wonder you failed your driving test.

Am I getting warm?

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Tell that to the canals and railways.

I suppose you could walk on water before the canals came along and you were forced to give up "your right" to do so.

By the way, how would your argument go before the days of horseless car-riages?

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Have just skimmed through this thread very quickly.

Number of points raised:

On the topic of parking on pavements - it does depend on the road and circumstance, apermits and normal practice in the area. I can think of a number of residential roads where this appears to be the practice and widely accepted by the neighbourhead and the authorities.

We did see cars parking with two wheels on a pavement in the 70s. I was at school at the time and remember seeing this occur - and notably in the same roads as they do now.

Then I think



They are called "Junctions"; "crossroads" and the pavement ends in a kerb and people are supposed to stop at the kerb and look and listen for traffic! If they have kids - then rules about holding hands, using reins, and a good old fashioned dollop of discipline, guidance and parenting shoud be encouraged as normal again! There seems to be a very daft attitude about parenting. My wife heard one parent tell her screaming child in a sicky sweet voice that "You are making Mummy very sad, Chloe!" or some trendy name. Child carries on. Wildy version - in blunt, firm directness was more of counting to three and hand will meet with a backside. For some reason - always worked - never been carried out!

But now - if we tap our kids and the skin turns slightly pink - we can get arrested over it. This pinkness will depend on individual reaction as well - some skins redden more easily than others. The law effectively takes away a sanction which you could threaten as ultimate sanction - but never actually carry out. But a daft and confusing law in any case.

The same daftness applies to hunting. A lot of loopholes and how could you prove otherwise short of chucking police at the hunts on the off chancethey may prove the fox happened by chance on the "innocent chasing of a tub of lard posing as a fox" (police who should be trying to find the rapist, burglar, hit and run driver)

We have subways and bridges. But these attract the anti-social yobs and we have a perceived danger which permeates through to parental fears over the school run issues. Even seasoned cyclists think twice about using these subways. Nothing new - yobs have always congregated in these areas - but we rarely see cameras monitoring bad behaviour in these subways. - possibly because the camera would be vandalised in any case.

But these are social and criminal problems which the police should be targetting instead of soft targets such as investigating themselves over free mugs of tea at a service station; wasting resources to bring a apple muncher to justice; prosecuting a policeman for being a bit liberal with his baton and CS spray when stopping a thug from assaulting a woman - and failing to catch 75% of all criminals. In fact, 99% of all prosecutions fail before they get to court according to latest Home Office figures and dection rates are at an all time low.

So - has a speed camera really freed up police time to reslove other issues. The figures reporting increases in violent crimes, despite overall average drop of just 6% - certainly does not look like a resounding success to me!

You will come back with electronic tagging and computer can identify these criminals.

Any criminal worthy of the title criminal will not slip through the net. In the meantime civil liberties and personal freedoms will take on an Orwellian nature - and we have already debated the "those with nothing to fear" argument. Fine - so long as the government remains democratic and benign. But we have a government which practiases nightmare politics with bucket loads of whitewash and a spin tactic which would make Nazi propaganda machine look amateurish by comparison!

As for the people in cars roaring through villages and causing noise pollution. Same applies to trains. Once stayed in a hotel in the Italian Riviera...nice hotel but was close to the railway line. All houses were on account of the Med being to the immediate South. After the first night -it did not bother us. Same applies to cars - which are not as noisy as those trains were.

I think Gatosbait has already mentioned that idiots will be idiots no matter hwo they travel. You see it all the time - they hurtlein to car parks, park up and j-walk into the path of other cars, or stop the car and open the driver's door without looking to see if anyone might be passing,

They come up to Cumbria, or the the Yorkshire pair ranted - to the Dales for a day or two of walking and cycling. Most belong to the normal courteous brand of nature lover. Others, unfortunately, chuck litter around, and walk and ride their bicycles around with the same lack of consideration as they drove to get to the tourist car parks.

These are the ones who ironically never get pinged by Steve's vans and yet I would bet they are the catalyst in most incidents in some way.

My children receive lessons in "Citizenship" at school. Basically, this appears to tell them what their legal rights are. It does not seem to enhance and reinforce the ethical and moral fibre I have tried to instil in them. Old fashioned concepts such as courtesy and manners do not seem to feature at all in this concept of the learner-centred schooling in which the child is always right.

This insistence that the child is always right and the spin of political correctness, nightmare poliitics, nanny state rulings apears to be working as a solvent on our social glue!

Not going to be easy to get a new type of glue to fix it either

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We are most concerned with :

a) protecting pedestrians from cars,
b) protecting car drivers from other cars and
c) protecting drivers from their own cars!

In all cases, we are protecting people from cars! There is a problem managing cars because a) they are powerfully dangerous b) hard to control/easy to crash and c) engenderer a feeling of territorialism in male drivers, d) noisy e) polluting f) visually unpleasant g) space and resource consuming etc. etc, and it’s no use pushing that over to the pedestrians, who (like drivers) are just monkeys!

Unfortunately, for my argument, cars are necessary despite all these disadvantages, so we must use them sparingly, safely, and considerately especially when in conjunction with other road users.

By the way, why is bogush suspended? I knew I was being slightly provocative about the “reclaim the pavements” thing, and I have been keeping my head down while he thrashed his keyboard into a froth as a result of that, but what specific misdemeanour did he make that was over the line?

Also, while I’m in the mood for asking questions, why is that car drivers treat themselves so badly as a matter of routine (cutting up, tailgating, rude gestures, pulling out, inconsideration, light flashing/horn blowing/fist shaking, too fast for conditions, undertaking etc. etc) yet you all band together nicely here on SafeSpeed’s site? How come you can be so horrid to each other all the time, yet you all turn into Saints when you post here – what gives, fellers?

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Ah yes, but we're the car drivers who don't behave like that (and also, in most cases, drive carefully and considerately along narrow village streets, just like you want us to)

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Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Might be your main concern, but I feel it falls short of what's needed. IMO it's simpler and more complex at the same time. We should be most concerned with getting all road users to act in a way that protect both themselves and those in the vicinity.

If my safety as a pedestrian was made entirely the responsibility of passing drivers I'd be very worried. Well, actually I wouldn't since I'd act the same way I do now and take responsibility myself. Otherwise it would pass from one driver to another from minute to minute, so my level of safety would boil down to which of those drivers was least able . In a very practical sense this is in fact already true, and is a very strong reason for us all as individuals to take responsibility for our own safety and act accordingly. Hence, as I've said before, regardless of where legal responsibility lies the actual responsibility for my safety as a pedestrian will always be mine and mine alone. Even though walking along by the road is a pretty innocuous activity I apply the same attitude as I would to an obviously risky activity like rock climbing or being near the speakers at an Iron Maiden concert. Put bluntly, I can never rely on anyone else to watch my arse with the same level of attention as I'm prepared to put into it.

Okay, first off and most predictably I dispute points b), c) and f), and would suggest that a), d), e) and g) are qualified.

If cars were as easy to crash as you suggest there we all ought to be crashing much more often. In fact crashes are actually quite rare, so rare in fact that there are plenty of people who have never had one. I'm not convinced about this territorialism thing either. I suspect the majority of drivers, even male drivers, are not affected in any great way. The minority who are territorial in the car... well, is it the car making them territorial or are they like that all the time? If they hog the TV remote a lot, or have ever said "are you looking at my pint/did you spill my bird" to someone in a bar I'd say it's the latter. As for visually unpleasant, well this is rather personal but I'm not at all fond of the current crop of big-arse Renault Migraines or anything that resembles a filing cabinet on a skateboard, but there are plenty of cars that are pleasant to look at. Some I'd consider almost as works of art in steel, plastic and recently carbon. If money was no object I'd have a 550 Maranello just to look at - nothing to do with power, in fact it woudn't really need an engine. <sigh> and the chances of that happening Anyhow, what you mean is just that cars don't flick your switch. That's okay, but is very subjective. My wife loves Dali, my aunt hates Dali. You think cars are ugly, I think many are beautiful. All pretty irrelevant when we're talking about road safety, unless you can suggest an example of a car so supremely ugly that it causes pedestrians to stampede across motorways to get away from it. Noisy and polluting applies rather more to older cars than newer ones, and resource consuming is almost the same thing. It's true they take up space, but whether that's really a problem depends entirely on how and where. And finally, putting first last, powerfully dangerous, yes, but only in the wrong hands. Used sensibly and correctly they really are quite safe.

It's not pushing responsibility onto pedestrians as that implies moving it from where it is now. Quite the opposite in fact. Pedestrians have always had the responsibility. Again, I'm thinking only about rules of life, not rules of law. Life says that if someone walks off the pavement onto the road without looking, and an artic is coming his way at the time, he's likely to end up as a sticky veneer on the tarmac. We could create legislation that would automatically hold the driver responsible, but that would not change the fact that the pedestrian's actions and negligence determined his fate.

Full circle and kind of back to social glue I think. It's not a car thing or a transport thing, but a society thing I reckon. As a whole we're just more impatient than we were a few years ago. The behaviour you mention is just the car version of shouting at some poor minimum wage kid in a shop because they're out of stock of something, or getting drunk on a plane and hassling the cabin crew and other passengers, or supermarket trolley rage , and so on and so on. For some reason society has come to expect instant gratification, but unfortunately life often fails to deliver. When that happens people get frustrated and angry, and more and more often react in that other modern style - find someone to blame and, if possible, sue. Strange one, that. People seem to be so keen on finding out who to blame for the balls up that solving the problem often gets forgotten about.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

He made a series of confrontational and acidic posts that caused me to receive three complaints by PM. I PM'd him and asked him to take it easy.

He replied by PM ignoring my point and continued with confrontational posts.

I PM'd him again, politely asking him to take a week off from posting while I tried to figure out how to manage the problem.

He replied in acidic style in the forums. That was the last straw for me.

It's a bugger. I don't know what else I could have done, and I wasted well over three hours on it in total.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
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Look, I’m only doing a ‘bogush’ and presenting a contrarian case here to see if it can hold any water. Yes, that’s how it played out though history. I’m high up on a heavy cart with yaks, so get out of the way or be crushed! Only now, it’s playing out as ‘I’m walking and I can’t wait for all those cars to get out of my way, so I’ll vote to get rid of all that by putting in charges, lights, crossings, barriers, bus lanes, humps, cameras, and whatnot, and the car drivers can walk or get the bus too, which is good for them if it increases the total bandwidth and safety of the system, and cuts down smoke and noise’.




The pavements stop at the corners - the road is the constant, crossing facilities are the exception.



Why don’t the lights change the instant I press the button?



Pedestrian lights are green for cars more than they are green for pedestrians. In fact, unless a pedestrian presses the button, strangely they are permanently green for cars. They could be reversed, so that they are always green for pedestrians. Then, when a car comes along, the car waits for three minutes, then they go green for the car for 5 seconds, then back to red for the car in case some more pedestrians come!



The problem is that modern roads are designed for cars, for pedestrians.



On what ground - might is right? No way!



The roads should stop to allow the pavements to cross.



The natural mode of transport tight communities is foot. Cars are dangerous intrusions, so limits are applied to them to make them safer.

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I still think you're looking at it from the wrong direction. I've been talking about self preservation actions/attitudes on the part of the pedestrian. Here, you are talking about selfish actions/attitudes on the part of the yak carter. Or more recently the motorist. Now I think about it the two are actually co-operating attitudes, not competing ones. Although you make the yak carter sound a bit of a bastard with "get out of the way or be crushed" it's in his interest not to run over a peasant. Delays, aggro, risk of irate fellow peasants turning up with scythes and so on. Equally it's in the interest of the peasant not to be run over, for reasons I think we don't have to go into.

I think the kerbs really prevent it being the other way round given the shape of the wheel. Sure, kerbs wouldn't be a problem if we ditched wheeled transport in favour of hovercraft, but given how hovercraft corner... - no thanks.

Even ignoring that for the moment, from a practical point of view it has to be the way it is. Consider a T junction - as things are there the road layout forms three virtual barriers to foot traffic, a maximum of one of which is going to be faced by any single pedestrian when passing through the junction. In fact half the time there will be no barrier at all (turning left from the left hand side pavement, ditto r/h side, and walking along the section of pavement that isn't interrupted by the joining road). Do it the other way round and there would still be three virtual barriers, but this time they would be faced by vehicles. What's different is that the vehicles will all face TWO of the three barriers, and this will happen to each and every vehicle passing through the junction - no exceptions. This is unavoidable because in the space between buildings vehicles go down the middle and pedestrians go down the edge. That's problem no. 1. Now bearing in mind that vehicles are larger than pedestrians, making them give way to one pedestrian could cause them to block another, especially a particularly large vehicle like a bus or lorry. That's problem no. 2. The only solution to these problems that I can think of is to rip up all adjoining roads and pavements, and relay the whole shooting match with the road surface up against shop doorways and a single double widthe pavement running down the middle. Er, hang on... that leaves me in the middle of the road when I want to look in the shop window, and poor granny is housebound now the edge of the carriageway is up against her garden gate. On the plus side you'd need never again worry about bad overtaking manoeuvres.

And I was just talking about instant gratification in my last post. Actually the crossing between the new and old buildings of my school used to change really quick, possibly because the installers knew it would be used by a bunch of kids every 40 minutes as well as anyone else who happened to show up. But normally they don't change the instant you press the button for the same reason they don't go red again as soon as a car comes. In both cases that particular bit of road is regarded as being in use by someone, so it would be inappropriate to change the lights until they've finished with it. I do agree with you that lights that fail to change right away when there's no car for half a mile are annoying, but to be honest life's too short to be lsoing sleep over it.

They could do, but it would be a bit on the mad side. Do you really want cars sat at idle using up fuel for no reason? Actually, while I think it's a bit mad it does sound suspiciously close to the reality of Oxford Street and High Holborn shortly before the kengestion charge came along. Not that I'm a conspiracy theorist or anything.

:?: I'm assuming that should finish "not for pedestrians" or I can't make sense of it.
How is that a problem? That's like saying the problem with trespassing on the railways is that railways were designed for trains not for pedestrians. Or complaining that you can't tighten screws with a hammer.

Again, you're looking at it from the cart driver/motorist perspective. A truly selfish ****hole may feel that way (and with any luck they'll get what's coming to them ), but that won't hurt me one bit if I am taking responsibility for my safety. As I said before, as a pedestrian I am really not too interested in an individual driver's attitude or thoughts. I treat them as part of the road, which in turn I treat as a natural hazard.

See above. There are practical reasons why this isn't a good idea.

You weren't talking about limits, you were talking about exclusion. Pedestrianising a town centre is, by definition, excluding cars. I stand by what I said.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Pedestrianising a town centre is an absolute form of limit. It’s a speed limit of zero!



It was in his interest not to run over a peasant, unless he was late, and would get in trouble with the Baron. Consider speed cameras to be a form of modern scythe!



Kerbs show how uncontrollable cars are – they can’t negotiate them. Couple this inflexibility with their unreasonable stopping distance, and they are a real danger to control. Hence pedestrians used to have to compensate for these inadequacies (not now, as drivers are finding out). Yet when one is exposed to danger as a result of compensating for the inadequacies of cars, you blame them for the ensuing collision!



That’s excellent thinking, Gatsobait. Imagine how humbled car drivers would be if they knew they had to stop and wait and look left and right before every pavement. And the inconvenience alone would drive them out of their cars!



This shows how show how resource hungry cars really are, and adds to their undesirability. The truth about the real cost is coming out now!



There is another configuration, where the north and west sides of the street are allocated to cars, and the south and east sides are allocated to walkers, with similar problems. No, you are right, cars and pedestrians don’t mix in towns. As we are stuck with pedestrians, cars have to go!



More reasons why cars are so bad, this time they are dirty and polluting, let alone their visual horrendousness.



Except that we are stuck with pedestrians, so cars have to go even though roads were designed for cars! Oh, if only bogush were here now! He'd thrash his keyboard into splinters.

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So cars are allowed to be there as long as they don't move? Hmm, I wonder how much it would cost to have my car lowered by helicopter into Staines High Street, and whether I could defend the inevitable parking ticket on the grounds that it didn't exceeed the notional zero mph speed limit. I suspect I'd be told to stuff off and pay up. But let's say for a moment that it is, as you say, a zero mph limit. That still changes nothing. Elsewhere pedestrians must still treat roads with traffic as potentially hazardous and act accordingly. Pedestrianising areas isn't solving anything, it's just an exercise in relocation. I'm not actually against pedestrianisng high streets, but don't tell me it's a great safety benefit 'cos I reckon it achieves square root of bugger all there.

I think the scythe is more akin to litigation and the baron is closer to the scamera myself, but that's really a non-issue. The important thing is that self interest is essential in avoiding an incident, and this is true in both the yak driving carter and our Baldrick character on foot. If Baldrick has no such self interest there is little to prevent him casually wandering underneath the hooves of the yaks. Of course it is equally true to say that if the carter has no such self interest there is little to prevent him from directing the yaks left a bit to run poor Baldrick over. Put the two together and you avoid incidents virtually all the time. It's still happening out on our modern roads probably every second of every day.

Kerbs show how uncontrollable cars are? Nope, don't see it at all. Cars can negotiate them (with care on the part of the driver, or at recklessly high speed if the driver is an idiot who doesn't care), but what they do is form a physical impediment at the boundary. And what was that about unreasonable stopping distances? I think stopping distances in modern cars are superb, and even in older ones still pretty good. In order to get a direct comparison I'm going to design a mechanism that will accelerate you to 60 or 70 miles an hour at which point you'll be expected to stop within the Highway Code distances using just your feet and without any control loss (i.e. falling over and rolling along the ground bleeding). If you wish you may wear thick soled boots for this experiment.

Nope to both. Pedestrians are not having to compensate for anything. All they have to do is to take the same pragmatic approach to potentially dangerous situations that prevented their ancestors from being eaten five seconds after they came down from the trees. Or fell out of the trees in the case of some of the people who use Wimbledon station .

As for the blame bit, I think you misunderstand. I am not saying that every car/pedestrian collision is the fault of the pedestrian. Absolutely not, though a significant number certainly are (I've heard the TRL once came up with something like 80% of pedestrian injuries were down to the pedestrians themselves, but I don't know this for sure). However, at the moment we have a virtual presumption that it is usually the fault of the driver, and that is just as prejudicial and unfair as automatically blaming the pedestrian. Personally I find both positions equally repellant. What I am saying is that pedestrians can do a huge amount to prevent themeselves being injured or killed by cars, and that this can be done for very little effort. I'm happy about this when I'm on foot, as quite frankly I am not prepared to entrust my safety to anyone else.

Edit: length was getting a bit excessive, so I'm splitting my responses into two posts.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Next bit. For humbled read "delayed unreasonably", which would also apply to the goods and services used by the minority who choose never to drive. The inconveneice alone, far from driving people out of cars, would drive almost everyone to demand that things were put back the way they were.

Pffft. Resource hungry? In this situation we would have deliberately choked the availbilty of space, which is the specific resource we're talking about. To put it another way, we'll have magnified the real cost for no real gain.

Don't put words in my mouth! I have not said that cars and pedestrians don't mix in towns. The closest I have ever said to that is that they don't mix well if both attempt to occupy the same space at the same time, which is something else entirely. Vehicles and pedestrians are fine together around towns. In fact it's hard to imagine a modern town without both present.
Oh, and drawing a conclusion from something that wasn't said is a bit of a sticky wicket too. Cars have to go because we're stuck with pedestrians? Nonsense. There is the space for both provided we don't deliberately screw it up.

<sigh> That's all relative apart from the visual thing, which as I've repeatedly said is too subjective. Cars have an undoubted benefit. Without them we would have far less choice of where to work, where to shop, where to go for recreation and leisure. There is a cost to all that of course. They do pollute, but if you allow them to complete their journeys in as short a time as possible they will obviously do so more briefly. Better yet, encourage them to be driven as economically as possible and use less fuel for minimal pollution. Not always possible, but the worst of all worlds is to deliberately force them to sit at idle for absolutely no reason. Like the space issue, it's artificially increasing the cost way beyond its true value.

I'm sorry, but I can't resist coming back to "visual horrendousness". No, no, no, no, no. Cars are objects of great beauty. Drivers should all take great care of their cars, if for no other reason than to prevent their loveliness being marred by bits of unwashed pedestrians. Well, it's just an opinion and as such just as valid as saying that cars are visually horrendous.

Again, we may be 'stuck with' pedestrians, we certainly will have pedestrians for as long as we have cars, but it doesn't follow that since one will inevitably stay the other has to go. There is room for both to move about in safety. If not pavements would all look like the Somme.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

I know all that, but consider for a minute the genius of Turing's test, i.e. if a system is able to fool a human judge into thinking it's human, then that system has intelligence. Which is actually another form of the old American expression - if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it is a duck (because there is no way to tell it isn’t)!

But anyway, the beauty of the test is that it depersonalises the object, and it works both ways. What I mean is that it is all very well to say, as a driver, that pedestrians must act like this, and pedestrians must watch out for that, but the simple fact is that there is no meaningful way for the driver to communicate with pedestrians, so they might as well be random motion machines capable of any action at any time as far as the driver is concerned. Like the Turing test, there is no way to tell that in reality, pedestrians are rational people, and in fact pedestrians (like drivers) are often irrational.

The upshot is that drivers have to treat pedestrians as unpredictable beings in a state of Brownian motion! The simple facts are that drivers have little control over pedestrians; drivers have absolute power of death over pedestrians; pedestrians have no power or control of drivers. In that context, although it is rational for pedestrians to treat roads as hazardous and act accordingly, nothing compels them too. Yet this doesn’t absolve us drivers from moral behaviour in my opinion. And that means that we have to watch out for them. That’s the bottom line, after we have had our fun.

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With you so far as the idea of Turing's test, though I'm struggling to see how it helps us here. Okay, you're basically saying that we really can't tell if the driver approaching or the pedestrian ahead is an idiot or not. But if we're simply relocating the areas of potential risk by excluding cars from some areas but not others, how does the ability or inability to assess their idiocy (or not) change anything?

Let me stop you there. I am not saying that as a driver. I am saying that as a pedestrian. I feel the distinction is quite important. Remember, all drivers are necessarily pedestrians as well.

I completely agree about the basically random behaviour (as you know it's the main reason why I'd be so worried about taking driver control out of cars). However, this is all the more reason for drivers and pedestrians to both act with caution.

Yep, though I'd say that pedestrians are far from powerless. Again, this is an entirely personal point of view, but I feel that by taking responsibility for my own safety I have the power to avoid being run over. Okay, that's not actually having power over traffic, but the point is I don't need to have any power over the traffic.

I think self preservation should compel us to act accordingly, though I do believe it would be beneficial to have a jaywalking law to back that up. It might not actually get used much, but I do think that a message of some sorts needs to be sent out to the small number of people that think they can walk out into the road and it's someone else's job to avoid them. I feel this attitude is quite wrong as well as being bloody dangerous. The crazy thing is I don't it's militant pedestrians doing this, it's people who are drivers themselves and would almost certainly say "watch where you're walking, you twat" if someone did it to them. This really is less a drivers vs pedestrians problem than a cretins vs the rest of us problem.

If by moral behaviour you mean that drivers still have a responsibility to drive with care in areas where there are or may be pdedestrians, then yeah, I agree with that too. Never said otherwise.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

It gives us a benchmark about interpreting systems from the way they behave externally, not from how we think they work, or what we think the system 'should' or 'must' do. A test might simply ask 'does the behaviour look systematic', not 'are pedestrians systematic'. It doesn't matter really whether you speak as a driver who is also a pedestrian. All that matters is the knowledge that pedestrians, as a system, are unpredictable.



The test shows that any pedestrian is likely to act as an idiot in some circumstances and not in others. Have you ever nearly been knocked down? Or nearly nearly knocked down?



Pedestrians should act with fear of death in thier mind! That is thier side of the safety contract (which, BTW, they are compelled to keep out of self preservation). Our (drivers) side of the equation is to cope if they do not act with caution. We keep our side of the contract not to save ourselves (we are not in danger from pedestrians) but partly for moral reasons (scythe attacks aside). So the equation is not equal.

Why should we bother to allow margin to cope if pedestrians do not act with caution? I think there are several reasons. First, tradition. Second, we know that cars are dangerous, hard to control, require long stopping distances and can do great harm. And last, because we know that that pedestrians, as a system, are are unpredictable and collisions are therefore inevitable unless we make allowances for that unpredictability. That is partly why I am in favour of speed limits and thier enforcement. There are many drivers who don't cut pedestrians any slack, and don't drive defensively. For those, and there are many like this in the Thumb in Bum, Mind in Neutral Brigade, speed limits are one of the few mitigating influences we have over them.



We have political power over the decisions that control traffic. That is the whole reason for the site. You may be happy with having the power to avoid being run over, but you don't have even that in reality. Most people who get run over (and survive) are surprised, I would guess.

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I stole this .sig

Doesn't it help being able to predict that they are unpredictable? Seriously, I'm still unsure where the relevancy is when we were talking about pedestrianising town centres. In a pedestrian zone they can be as unpredictable as they like, elsewhere they would be better off being a little more predictable. Like by staying on the pavement, which is what happens most of the time anyway. Unpredictable, yes, but most aren't suicidally stupid. <coughs> Wimbledon

Not as far as I can recall. But I was around for the tail end of the Tufty days and Darth Vader in his day job , plus a bunch of other adverts about how to cross the road safely and how getting it wrong can get you killed. I think that's hardly surprising I've not had even a near miss that I can recall. I think I just got a better quality of road safety education, that's all. Or perhaps I place more value on my skin than some.

Asking the impossible. The best you can hope for is for drivers to do the best they can if pedestrians do not act with caution. Most of the time this will be enough to avoid a collsion. But as I've said before, a pedestrian can very easily through either negligence or plain misjudgement overwhelm the ability of a driver to cope.

I'm with you part of the way, but I say again, cars are no more dangerous when properly used than any other tool. They are hard to control if, and only if, they are driven beyond the limits for a given situation. Their stopping distances are a non-issue as I suspect that at equal speeds they are generally comparable to or better than pedestrian stopping distances. BTW, work on Gatsobait's Mark I Basingwerk Flinger (R) designed to test this has ceased . I'm going to watch the next sprint I find on TV very carefully instead. It's really only for curiosity value as I don't believe stopping distances are a big deal. Look at it like this, jumbo jets take a hell of a long way to stop, but since we don't go wandering round runways it's never going to be an issue.

Ta-da-da-daaaa. Common ground. Ish. It's partly why I'm in favour of limits and enforcement (though not as an absolute). However, I do believe that crap limits devalue the whole lot, especially for the inexperienced and the numpty TIBMIN types, and we've got way too many crap limits.

I'm not sure why you think I don't really have the power to avoid being run over. It might not be 100% reliable as there's always the chance of the random nutter falling off the road as I walk by, but that aside it's very effective. Nearly thirty years and it's still working fine. If the same can be said of this computer in 28 years time I'll eat it.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

I've just visited here on reccommendation from bogush's site - it's your duty. You seem to have banned him according to his latest rant and he's got somew pretty bad things to say about it.

The man's gone wierd - posting all sorts of anti-road pro speed camera stuff. What's happened?

see http://www.network54.com/Forum/96157