In many jurisdictions, it's legal for the bike to pass you on the right, even w/o a marked bike lane (it varies among the states, but in most places it is legal). It's also the case that (in many places) it's illegal to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk in a business district, so the bike was probably in the wrong. If it's not a business district, I am not really sure who is in the wrong, but it is standard advice for all cyclists to Not Ride on the Sidewalk, precisely because of the risk of these crashes.
However, you miss my point.
If you expect cyclists to obey traffic laws, you first need to get the majority vehicle (the one that weighs 10x as much and routinely enters intersections at twice the speed) to also obey the law. We (and obviously, I also drive) observe a boatload of unsafe behavior by people in cars, that is de facto "not accountable" -- the laws go unenforced. We care about different laws, is one thing (right-on-red-no-stop is one, not stopping at stop lines is another). We also see more than almost anyone in a car, because we are not in a car -- my head is level with the top of many SUVs and mini-vans, and my view is unobstructed by any posts or columns, and there's not even the possibility of a dirty windshield, plus I hear everything with both ears (and I do both, so I have a pretty good idea of how impaired a car driver's senses are). But, what you read here, is people accustomed to pushing their luck (that shortened yellow is still long enough, we've just gotten used to the grace period), getting caught, and complaining, and they're breaking the law in a great big heavy car, that has bad consequences for other people if they make a mistake. And any excuse given -- "I might get rear-ended", just for example -- you think that doesn't go 10x for someone on a bike? So, given the ambient bitching about scofflaw cyclists, to read this, is pretty much massive-eye-roll territory.
And the thing to note, is that a lot of this is precisely about being able to notice. It is safe to turn right-on-red if you have absolute knowledge that nobody is crossing, but the point of stopping, is not that you stop, it is that you take the time to look real hard for cross traffic, and not just glance and carry on. One bit of cyclist advice is "ride as if you are invisible", because there is a non-zero probability (it's pretty low, fortunately) that someone will look right through you.
As a practical matter, one does make special note of big rigs. What I read here, however, is the general idea that one should generally not take yellows as a stop-if-possible signal, because there might be someone tailgating and they might be a big rig. Stopping is the rule, not stopping should be the exception. We've got big brains, we can handle rules with two or three cases in them, no problem. We can also use them to concoct silly excuses for our behavior when we are in a hurry.
If people stopped for yellows when they could, and if they were not already driving too fast for conditions, these red-light cameras would be uneconomical, even with a slightly shortened yellow. People push their luck when it doesn't usually result in a crash, and then whine if they get caught.
If you stop in a situation when you should stop, if you were not tailgated, then you are not at fault if an accident occurs because the tailgater was not able to match your legal stop. Stopping for a yellow light is a legitimate place to stop. Stopping for a pedestrian is another legitimate place to stop. However, I do appreciate your concern, and (as other people besides me have recommended) if I am being tailgated, I slow down so as to convert the following distance into a safe one. As you say, safety is our first responsibility, and sometimes we simply must stop, and the only way to resolve this if the guy behind insists on a tiny following distance, is to slow down.
I noticed that "panic stop" was not one of your options for your unusual non-crash. Why not? All the cars behind you were better placed to see the crazy driving (since it happens in front of them), if they are sensible drivers they are (a) already slowing down so as to avoid the probable carnage and (b) able to stop if you must stop in a hurry, because one must be prepared for nonsense in front of you (tire-change in the fast lane on the back side of a freeway overpass, my personal worst). You can stop faster than you can accelerate; you can open a larger gap faster by stopping than you can by accelerating, and by stopping, you reduce the kinetic energy available should there be a collision. Better to lose control of your car at 30, than at 50, right?
You assume that your speed should stay the same in wet conditions, and that the light should accommodate. Why not slow down so that you can still stop in the allotted time? What if a pedestrian steps into a crosswalk? You must be able to stop -- peds are not required to perform TSD calculations and check the coefficient of friction, it's a crosswalk, they own it. So chances are, if wet weather makes the difference between able to stop and not, then you are probably driving too fast in the wet weather.
Safety, also. Right-turn-on-red w/o stopping means you might nail a pedestrian crossing the road. The fact that people habitually do this without stopping, inconveniences people on foot who have a legal right to enter the intersection and walk across. There are intersections where I ride my bike, with strict rules about who may do what when, and I depend on people obeying the law (because at that intersection, I usually do).
Suck it up, you got caught, be glad that was all it was.
By-the-way, if you ever consider griping about those law-breaking guys on bicycles, think about our reaction to this "ticket". When you've literally got skin in the game, you pay a lot of attention to what people around you are doing. People in cars break traffic laws All The Time, and those of us not wearing armor must accommodate.
You ought to do a minor dogma check. As a practical matter, traffic, especially undisciplined traffic, is moderately deadly. In our little suburb, in the last 10 years, I think 4 (at certainly at least 2) pedestrians have been killed by cars in crosswalks. One of those government things, is preventing easily prevented deaths -- if people simply obeyed the law (which is to say, stopped for pedestrians in crosswalks, which has all sorts of implications about what is a safe speed if you see a pedestrian near a crosswalk) we would have saved a couple of lives here. But you don't get people to obey the law, if you don't enforce it, and the law ought to be enforced as economically as possible. The red light cameras are also fair -- they don't fail to ding the police chief's buddy, etc.
I think, also, that the right to face your accuser, is one of those criminal infraction things, and I don't think that traffic tickets meet that standard.
There is one very structured traffic light near here, in Arlington, at the intersection of Route 60 and Mass Ave. For any direction, what you see, is left, then straight, then right, then cross traffic. No right on red, no chance of a left if there is no cross traffic. A bike trail also shares that intersection, and the regular bike commuters have learned to take their lefts (following the trail) from any lane, because they can.
You only get rear-ended if the guy behind you is following too close or not paying attention. Not your problem, you are supposed to assume that they will get it right. I they don't, they will eat all the repair costs and liability, and you will usually survive the collision with nothing worse than a stiff neck.
From an informal statistical study, the answer is "yes, they would usually be able to stop if they tried". I benchmark them against my 18-year-old Honda Civic; no ABS, just brakes. I stop whenever I can. One thing to note is that if you are exceeding the posted speed limit (which, also informally studied, is usually the case) you might not be off the hook if you "can't stop".
Are you sure that DOC and XLS files are a good format? I've certainly run into compatibility problems over the years. Compare that to (say) HTML written in 1995 -- it still renders fine (except for the BLINK tag, bummer), or documents written in LaTeX back in the mid-80s -- they still render fine, too.
If you're concerned about data longevity, there's an awful lot to be said for 80% solutions that will still be 80% solutions 20 years from now.
I agree. Unfortunately, later in the video, they also shoot up a van, helping an injured person off the street. Said van has children in it, sitting in the front seat, similarly visible. Wikileaks highlights this in their video, in practice I think it is all difficult to make out on the fly.
Till they shoot up the van, it's (my opinion) with the bounds of "horrible mistake that happens in war". After they shoot up the van, I think it's something much worse.
My best friend from high school has worked at Intrinsity since I-don't-know-when; I'd hope he'd have enough stock+options to make him happy (not that he lacks for money, but it's always nice when good things happen to good people).
And they run a pretty tight ship, because I never knew what the heck he was working on, until the public announcement of their ARM work.
You do realize, that we in the US, are not really in a position to tell the rest of the world how to cycle effectively or safely.
Our cycling ride share is in the toilet, and our accident rate is pretty high. In the Netherlands, which is about as flat as several places I have lived and commuted in my lifetime, they have separated paths all over the place (some paralleling the roads in a way that we here would recognize as "unsafe"), a low accident rate, and a huge ride share. I know all about "vehicular" cycling and "effective" cycling, but I also know that a theory that cannot explain the data is not a good theory.
What they do differently (so I read) is that they have made it much more expensive and inconvenient to own a car, and they also have a much more difficult driver's test. And, also, they don't go out of their way to make it easy to drive cars fast near people.
Rule of thumb (from a friend who once worked as a traffic engineer). 1500 cars per hour can pass over a chunk of pavement, more or less. So 4 lanes gives you 6000 car/hour, or 72,000 cars in a 12-hour span (e.g,, 7-to-7) of heavy traffic. 100s of thousands is unlikely, given normal traffic patterns. (do the math -- 1800/hour = 1 car every two seconds, continuously. That's not a sustainable rate -- something will happen, and the traffic will jam, and then the rate plummets.)
Two lanes, even with 24-hour heavy traffic, you will not crack 100,000 cars in a day.
I think your kids just need better toys. I recommend concrete blocks and construction lumber, and perhaps a bag of roofing nails. I think the traffic would slow down soon enough.
Good old slashdot binary logic. 0 < 1, and those are the only possible outcomes. It is possible to take a slightly dangerous situation, and make it much more dangerous. Again, if you wonder why people might think you suffer from recto-cranial inversion, this could be part of it. Furthermore, if you are licensed to drive a car, you are expected to have enough common sense and enough self control to know that even in the presence of other people not obeying the law, you are expected to avoid accidents and reduce danger if you are able.
In the case of someone hogging the left lane, all that is required is that you adjust your following distance to a safe one, and wait for the bozo to clear, or wait for an opportunity to pass them carefully on the right, and carry on. Arguably, passing on the right is an ever-so-slightly dangerous maneuver, but only in slashdot-logic-land is that exactly as dangerous as tailgating.
The reason you're considered an asshole, is that by tailgating, you transform an annoying situation, into a dangerous one. Be a grownup; there are worse outcomes than arriving five minutes late to wherever you happen to be going (5 minutes = 5 minutes at 30mph instead of 60mph, i.e., some serious lane hogging. Or 10 minutes at 60mph instead of 120mph.)
One way to make driving safer, is to drive less. We don't see this obvious choice because we like to drive so much, and perceive it as necessary, but it is not necessary to drive as much as we do, and this is especially true of those places where cars and people interact (which tend to have lower speeds, be more bikeable, walkable, and often have mass transit).
Slashdot Mirror
In many jurisdictions, it's legal for the bike to pass you on the right, even w/o a marked bike lane (it varies among the states, but in most places it is legal). It's also the case that (in many places) it's illegal to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk in a business district, so the bike was probably in the wrong. If it's not a business district, I am not really sure who is in the wrong, but it is standard advice for all cyclists to Not Ride on the Sidewalk, precisely because of the risk of these crashes.
However, you miss my point.
If you expect cyclists to obey traffic laws, you first need to get the majority vehicle (the one that weighs 10x as much and routinely enters intersections at twice the speed) to also obey the law. We (and obviously, I also drive) observe a boatload of unsafe behavior by people in cars, that is de facto "not accountable" -- the laws go unenforced. We care about different laws, is one thing (right-on-red-no-stop is one, not stopping at stop lines is another). We also see more than almost anyone in a car, because we are not in a car -- my head is level with the top of many SUVs and mini-vans, and my view is unobstructed by any posts or columns, and there's not even the possibility of a dirty windshield, plus I hear everything with both ears (and I do both, so I have a pretty good idea of how impaired a car driver's senses are). But, what you read here, is people accustomed to pushing their luck (that shortened yellow is still long enough, we've just gotten used to the grace period), getting caught, and complaining, and they're breaking the law in a great big heavy car, that has bad consequences for other people if they make a mistake. And any excuse given -- "I might get rear-ended", just for example -- you think that doesn't go 10x for someone on a bike? So, given the ambient bitching about scofflaw cyclists, to read this, is pretty much massive-eye-roll territory.
And the thing to note, is that a lot of this is precisely about being able to notice. It is safe to turn right-on-red if you have absolute knowledge that nobody is crossing, but the point of stopping, is not that you stop, it is that you take the time to look real hard for cross traffic, and not just glance and carry on. One bit of cyclist advice is "ride as if you are invisible", because there is a non-zero probability (it's pretty low, fortunately) that someone will look right through you.
As a practical matter, one does make special note of big rigs. What I read here, however, is the general idea that one should generally not take yellows as a stop-if-possible signal, because there might be someone tailgating and they might be a big rig. Stopping is the rule, not stopping should be the exception. We've got big brains, we can handle rules with two or three cases in them, no problem. We can also use them to concoct silly excuses for our behavior when we are in a hurry.
If people stopped for yellows when they could, and if they were not already driving too fast for conditions, these red-light cameras would be uneconomical, even with a slightly shortened yellow. People push their luck when it doesn't usually result in a crash, and then whine if they get caught.
If you stop in a situation when you should stop, if you were not tailgated, then you are not at fault if an accident occurs because the tailgater was not able to match your legal stop. Stopping for a yellow light is a legitimate place to stop. Stopping for a pedestrian is another legitimate place to stop. However, I do appreciate your concern, and (as other people besides me have recommended) if I am being tailgated, I slow down so as to convert the following distance into a safe one. As you say, safety is our first responsibility, and sometimes we simply must stop, and the only way to resolve this if the guy behind insists on a tiny following distance, is to slow down.
I noticed that "panic stop" was not one of your options for your unusual non-crash. Why not? All the cars behind you were better placed to see the crazy driving (since it happens in front of them), if they are sensible drivers they are (a) already slowing down so as to avoid the probable carnage and (b) able to stop if you must stop in a hurry, because one must be prepared for nonsense in front of you (tire-change in the fast lane on the back side of a freeway overpass, my personal worst). You can stop faster than you can accelerate; you can open a larger gap faster by stopping than you can by accelerating, and by stopping, you reduce the kinetic energy available should there be a collision. Better to lose control of your car at 30, than at 50, right?
Or if the pedestrian is pushing a shopping cart. I love it when I get to push a shopping cart across a crosswalk; the cars stop as if they meant it.
Don't know if you've noticed, but the government gets to do lots of things that private companies do not. High interest rates is the least of it.
You assume that your speed should stay the same in wet conditions, and that the light should accommodate. Why not slow down so that you can still stop in the allotted time? What if a pedestrian steps into a crosswalk? You must be able to stop -- peds are not required to perform TSD calculations and check the coefficient of friction, it's a crosswalk, they own it. So chances are, if wet weather makes the difference between able to stop and not, then you are probably driving too fast in the wet weather.
Safety, also. Right-turn-on-red w/o stopping means you might nail a pedestrian crossing the road. The fact that people habitually do this without stopping, inconveniences people on foot who have a legal right to enter the intersection and walk across. There are intersections where I ride my bike, with strict rules about who may do what when, and I depend on people obeying the law (because at that intersection, I usually do).
Suck it up, you got caught, be glad that was all it was.
By-the-way, if you ever consider griping about those law-breaking guys on bicycles, think about our reaction to this "ticket". When you've literally got skin in the game, you pay a lot of attention to what people around you are doing. People in cars break traffic laws All The Time, and those of us not wearing armor must accommodate.
You ought to do a minor dogma check. As a practical matter, traffic, especially undisciplined traffic, is moderately deadly. In our little suburb, in the last 10 years, I think 4 (at certainly at least 2) pedestrians have been killed by cars in crosswalks. One of those government things, is preventing easily prevented deaths -- if people simply obeyed the law (which is to say, stopped for pedestrians in crosswalks, which has all sorts of implications about what is a safe speed if you see a pedestrian near a crosswalk) we would have saved a couple of lives here. But you don't get people to obey the law, if you don't enforce it, and the law ought to be enforced as economically as possible. The red light cameras are also fair -- they don't fail to ding the police chief's buddy, etc.
I think, also, that the right to face your accuser, is one of those criminal infraction things, and I don't think that traffic tickets meet that standard.
There is one very structured traffic light near here, in Arlington, at the intersection of Route 60 and Mass Ave. For any direction, what you see, is left, then straight, then right, then cross traffic. No right on red, no chance of a left if there is no cross traffic. A bike trail also shares that intersection, and the regular bike commuters have learned to take their lefts (following the trail) from any lane, because they can.
You only get rear-ended if the guy behind you is following too close or not paying attention. Not your problem, you are supposed to assume that they will get it right. I they don't, they will eat all the repair costs and liability, and you will usually survive the collision with nothing worse than a stiff neck.
From an informal statistical study, the answer is "yes, they would usually be able to stop if they tried". I benchmark them against my 18-year-old Honda Civic; no ABS, just brakes. I stop whenever I can. One thing to note is that if you are exceeding the posted speed limit (which, also informally studied, is usually the case) you might not be off the hook if you "can't stop".
no-one makes their hardware open-source except a few niche vendors
Like my employer.
When you say "niche vendor", I think of the guys who helped design my bicycle.
Careful -- PDF does lock you into the paper size on which it was originally printed :-) (though it does scale).
PDF is also crap for diffs.
Are you sure that DOC and XLS files are a good format? I've certainly run into compatibility problems over the years. Compare that to (say) HTML written in 1995 -- it still renders fine (except for the BLINK tag, bummer), or documents written in LaTeX back in the mid-80s -- they still render fine, too.
If you're concerned about data longevity, there's an awful lot to be said for 80% solutions that will still be 80% solutions 20 years from now.
Because it's pretty clear that the humans aren't paying attention to the road anymore.
I agree. Unfortunately, later in the video, they also shoot up a van, helping an injured person off the street. Said van has children in it, sitting in the front seat, similarly visible. Wikileaks highlights this in their video, in practice I think it is all difficult to make out on the fly.
Till they shoot up the van, it's (my opinion) with the bounds of "horrible mistake that happens in war". After they shoot up the van, I think it's something much worse.
My internet traffic is not confined to my state; this seems like a reasonable place for the FCC to regulate.
My best friend from high school has worked at Intrinsity since I-don't-know-when; I'd hope he'd have enough stock+options to make him happy (not that he lacks for money, but it's always nice when good things happen to good people).
And they run a pretty tight ship, because I never knew what the heck he was working on, until the public announcement of their ARM work.
Skim.app (1.3.5) also fails to implement the /Launch command. Yay!
You do realize, that we in the US, are not really in a position to tell the rest of the world how to cycle effectively or safely. Our cycling ride share is in the toilet, and our accident rate is pretty high. In the Netherlands, which is about as flat as several places I have lived and commuted in my lifetime, they have separated paths all over the place (some paralleling the roads in a way that we here would recognize as "unsafe"), a low accident rate, and a huge ride share. I know all about "vehicular" cycling and "effective" cycling, but I also know that a theory that cannot explain the data is not a good theory.
What they do differently (so I read) is that they have made it much more expensive and inconvenient to own a car, and they also have a much more difficult driver's test. And, also, they don't go out of their way to make it easy to drive cars fast near people.
Rule of thumb (from a friend who once worked as a traffic engineer). 1500 cars per hour can pass over a chunk of pavement, more or less. So 4 lanes gives you 6000 car/hour, or 72,000 cars in a 12-hour span (e.g,, 7-to-7) of heavy traffic. 100s of thousands is unlikely, given normal traffic patterns. (do the math -- 1800/hour = 1 car every two seconds, continuously. That's not a sustainable rate -- something will happen, and the traffic will jam, and then the rate plummets.)
Two lanes, even with 24-hour heavy traffic, you will not crack 100,000 cars in a day.
I think your kids just need better toys. I recommend concrete blocks and construction lumber, and perhaps a bag of roofing nails. I think the traffic would slow down soon enough.
Good old slashdot binary logic. 0 < 1, and those are the only possible outcomes. It is possible to take a slightly dangerous situation, and make it much more dangerous. Again, if you wonder why people might think you suffer from recto-cranial inversion, this could be part of it. Furthermore, if you are licensed to drive a car, you are expected to have enough common sense and enough self control to know that even in the presence of other people not obeying the law, you are expected to avoid accidents and reduce danger if you are able.
In the case of someone hogging the left lane, all that is required is that you adjust your following distance to a safe one, and wait for the bozo to clear, or wait for an opportunity to pass them carefully on the right, and carry on. Arguably, passing on the right is an ever-so-slightly dangerous maneuver, but only in slashdot-logic-land is that exactly as dangerous as tailgating.
The reason you're considered an asshole, is that by tailgating, you transform an annoying situation, into a dangerous one. Be a grownup; there are worse outcomes than arriving five minutes late to wherever you happen to be going (5 minutes = 5 minutes at 30mph instead of 60mph, i.e., some serious lane hogging. Or 10 minutes at 60mph instead of 120mph.)
One way to make driving safer, is to drive less. We don't see this obvious choice because we like to drive so much, and perceive it as necessary, but it is not necessary to drive as much as we do, and this is especially true of those places where cars and people interact (which tend to have lower speeds, be more bikeable, walkable, and often have mass transit).