Category: Motorists

Over 7,000 pedestrian crash reports studied.
NY Times has an article which highlights unexpected results.
Taxis, it turns out, are not a careering menace: cabs, along with buses and trucks, accounted for far fewer pedestrian accidents in Manhattan than did private automobiles. Jaywalkers were involved in fewer collisions than their law-abiding counterparts who [...]

In hot pursuit!
About two weeks after Retired Admiral Collins was hit while cycling in a crosswalk before dawn, the Tampa police stage a raid on downtown Tampa. The motorist, a 2nd year OB/GYN resident on her way to work at a hospital wasn’t cited. No details yet as to whether Collins had lights.
Ironically, a pedestrian [...]

I want to trust people. I really do. It would make everything so much easier.

The road in the photo above is Woodcock. I use it and Lawton all the time. The lanes are 13ft (measured from the center of the double-yellow line to the gutter seam). That makes them “substandard” for the purpose of FS316.2065(5)(a), [...]

Bob Sutterfield has written an excellent letter to his local paper about the problem of motorists passing into oncoming traffic. This is the only regular problem I have with car drivers. I rarely experience close passing. Harassment comes from significantly less than 1% of drivers I encounter. I almost never have conflicts or scary moments [...]

As a tradesman, I was taught two very important things. One was “Attention to Detail!” and the other was “Use the Right Tool for the Right Job!”
“Attention to Detail” means to single-mindedly finish one thing before moving on to another (so much for multi-tasking) and “Use the Right Tool for the Right Job” means don’t [...]

(Helmet tip to Danc for posting the video on Yaybikes.)
Recent articles about the MBL law and the Jacksonville stabbing have brought out the anti-cyclist comment trolls. I typically avoid the comments, but even that isn’t working anymore. Now some of these people feel so emboldened by their righteousness, they’ve even taken to joining cyclist groups [...]

Fishing for ideas.
We can cast blame where ever we like . . . But now it is time to make lemonade from lemons. I was thinking about this and something else that has been weighing heavily on my mind and wonder if they can’t be combined . . .
What’s been bothering me lately is that [...]

Since the 1930′s, London and other cities in the UK used pedestrian guardrails. If you haven’t been there and seen them, here is a pretty good picture from the Daily Mail.
Click this to make it bigger
As you can see, in some places, they are on the sidewalk and line entire streets. In other places, they [...]

Tom Vanderbilt’s article on Stop Signs in Slate yesterday, Stop! Is it possible to design a better stop sign?, raises some good points about our traffic culture.
In 1998… there were more than 700,000 crashes at intersections marked—or “controlled,” as engineers say—by stop signs. More than 3,000 of these were fatal.
Having nearly been [...]

Motorist – "Hello, killed anything?" Sportsman – "No, have you?"
Found in the transportation section of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Display caption: Like railroads, trolleys, buggies, horses and ships, automobiles kill and injure people. In 1913, more than 4,000 people died in car accidents. But the 1930s, more than 30,000 people died every year. [...]