3 Way Street

[filkertom]

You may never leave the house again.

Comments

[james-the-evil1.livejournal.com]

Wow!

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

BRILLIANT!
and as for the self righteous air cyclists carry with them wherever they go, saving the planet....

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

I'd have much more respect for cyclists if they accepted the fact that they are _vehicles_ and are required to follow the rules of the road. (At least where I've always lived anyway.)

They should get tickets and moving violations like any other motorist. (Kids below a certain age get some leeway but need a system for learning and correction.)

And I fully admit that I was just as bad on a bike when I was a kid.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Welcome to Ann Arbor. We have a vast network of bicycle lanes criss-crossing the city, which are used by approximately four people per year, and two of those are Volkswagen drivers trying to avoid bicyclists who will not get out of the way, because they are on "vehicles" yet don't seem to grasp the seven-miles-per-hour part.

[laurensa.livejournal.com]

I find the pedestrians in Ann Arbor more frightening than even the bicyclists. Apparently, UofM students believe they are immortal.

[lizziecrowe.livejournal.com]

Yipe!

[realinterrobang.livejournal.com]

If I were scared of that sort of thing, I'd never leave the house already. At least NYC drivers seem to yield for pedestrians; drivers in my hometown don't actually grok the concept of yielding for anybody, and certainly not for lesser mortals on foot. They also don't understand that pedestrians have the right of way, nor do they understand turn signals. Frankly, I'd be safer in New York.

[thistlethorn.livejournal.com]

That seems...sorta normal, to me (as in "not shocking," which is probably A Bad Thing). It was much like that in downtown St. Louis when I had to go there from my then-dwelling in South St. Louis.

My method of assuming that every driver on the road is a complete idiot and/or a selfish dickhead has served me well in 34 years of driving. Out here in Boonieville, it's almost worse: pickup trucks with good ol' boys who think our winding, twisty roller coaster roads are a Nascar track, wherein the goal is to drive as fast as possible, and damn the lane designations; staying in your lane is for sissies. Fucktards. But I now plan for that, so I'm usually prepared. :-)

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Another day, another intersection.

I'd rather be the pedestrian than drive in NYC (or, I think, any decent-sized city). At least pedestrians generally have the best mobility in traffic.

Oh No!!

[danceswithlife]

Joseph Campbell said, "The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and The Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change."

If that's this corner they might not survive to tell us their stories.

Awesome video! The music was perfect.

[jenrose]

My town is apparently weird. MOST of the people obey most of the traffic laws most of the time. Cyclists use the bike lanes and the sidewalks (using sidewalks where there are bike lanes pisses me off though). Most cars yield readily, almost too readily, to pedestrians in or out of crosswalks. (I say too readily because yielding to pedestrians who are crossing in the middle of the street before they've started crossing can create dangerous situations in multi-lane roads).

When there was construction on a major route, people got more polite, letting in people from the side streets alternating cars reliably, and the traffic never really stopped moving.

Occasionally we get an out of towner who drives rudely, and it's shocking. It happens infrequently enough that it is a surprise.

I loathe driving elsewhere.

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

I don't know how many times I've seen cyclists run red lights in Portland.

Which ruins it for the law-abiding ones. Particularly since we have had too many car v. bike accidents that did not appear to involve cyclist negligence.

OTOH, I was once rear-ended by a cyclist downtown while stopping for a red light.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

The amount of human discretion and caution shown in the video actually startles me. Let's just say I don't see much of that happening here. Cars don't yield on freeway merges or let other folks change lanes in front of them (they get into games of "not in front of me, ego speeding up"), and it's worse out in the long straight stretches in the boonies with the SUVs.
n Davis, a famously bike-friend town, people drive much slower. When they grow up and leave college and come to Sacramento because they can longer find both work and livable rent, many of them stop riding bikes because it's just too darn unsafe at too many poorly-designed crucial but wierd five- and six-way intersections.
I have talked to people who say that Americans are actually very law-abiding drivers, more like the Germans are, than many drivers in other countries. One person described Cairo in Egypt as having slow-moving masses of inter-mingled camels, donkeys, donkey carts, trucks, pedestrians, taxis, tourist carts with horses, none of whom pay any attention at all to traffic control lights. You as a tourist ride in taxis who know the local signals, and they basically push/negotiate their way through completely uncontrolled crossings.
Probably the other important point to this is that wacko last-minute calculations visible in the vid would be very hard for automated computerized driving systems to cope with. A lot of this mixed traffic would have to be disentangled and rerouted.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

The only thing keeping anybody on the roads alive in New York (and I include pedestrians) is human discretion and caution. Precisely because nobody obeys the traffic laws, nobody can obey the traffic laws. You'd be dead if you did. Instead, what you have to use are your wits and your knowledge of the terrain. To me, this video looks like a perfectly ordinary afternoon on the corner of 28th and 3rd, or whatever it is exactly, but that's speaking as someone who survived New York traffic for my entire youth. From your description of Cairo, I'd probably feel right at home there (though I would not be stupid enough to attempt to go anywhere without a local; if I weren't from New York I wouldn't try to navigate there without a local either).

[mneme]

Like the other New Yorkers I recognize in the thread...looks pretty normal. The bikes come off the worst (and, in fact, tend to be the worst in real life); most of the human/car stuff is real time negotiation/recalibration.

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

Blimey.