Kindralas wrote:
All of which should impress upon people safer driving habits. The fact is that your reflex and reaction times are not a factor in whether or not you can make a vehicle go over that speed, they are factors on how easily it can be controlled at those higher speeds. And while people think their braking and steering capabilities in their cars are fine, they are in no way good enough to make driving a car safe. This is why there are all the safety regulations that Corolinth mentioned above.
Reflex and reaction times are not, in and of themselves, major factors in controlling a vehicle at high speed. What is a major factor is paying attention to what you are doing so that you can act. It is possible for the conditions for an accident to appear so quickly that it is impossible for the driver to execute any safe escape, and frequently this is because the vehicle is incapable of such a maneuver. It can also be because, despite seeing the accident coming in time, and being in a vehicle capable of avoiding it, the driver simply does not know how to execute the maneuver correctly, has not practiced the maneuver, or a number of other reasons.
As for this stuff about "making a car safe", yes, they do make the car safe
provided it is operated in the manner it is designed and intended to be operated in. Driving is a perfectly safe activity, that people can complete in total safety
when they take the correct actions. the fact that people frequently do not says nothing about the physical preparedness of the human being to drive, nor the inherent safety of driving; it speaks to the lack of proper driver training and
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Generally speaking, driving is such a casual activity that most people simply tune it out, as though driving is simply something you do. It isn't. It's getting a two-ton missile up to speeds you're not really equipped to go, and hoping it doesn't run into anything. Having that respect for what you're doing should be a prerequisite for driving, but it isn't.
This is not what driving is at all. People are equipped just fine to go at speeds much higher than any land vehicle can even achieve; and you are not hoping it doesn't run into anything; it's your job as a driver to make it not do that.
People may not take the actions necessary to execute the act of driving because they don't respect the speed they are going at, but humans are not inherently unable to control things just because they exceed a certain speed. It's merely a matter of understanding that, as speed increases, reaction distance increases. Note, that's distance, not time. A person can react just as fast at 100mph as they can at 10; they just cover more distance in the intervening time. It is therefore their responsibility to select an appropriate speed based on the conditions.
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I'll put this another way: Most people would reasonably not ride their bike anywhere near a stampeding elephant, why would you ride your bike anywhere near a car? The supposition is that another human being will actually care about not hitting you, but that supposition relies on a faith in your fellow man much greater than my own. While I don't think there are a significant number of people who would sideswipe a cyclist just for the hell of it, the number of people who either aren't paying attention, or just being a complete moron is significantly larger. The key to defensive driving is the assumption that everyone else on the road will do the stupidest possible thing at any given moment. Cyclists should make the same assumption. The only real difference is that the consequences of hitting a cyclists are much more grave.
While inattentive people are a hazard, the simple fact is that a car, even driven by a relatively inattentive driver, is not a stampeding elephant. Furthermore, the supposition that the other driver will not
intentionally hit you requires practically no faith in humanity whatsoever; almost no one will intentionally run down a bicyclist for no apparent reason, and the few who do would almost certainly engage in some other sort of homicidal antisocial behavior anyhow, so it's just a matter of them running over a bicyclist or doing something else. Your personal faith in humanity is really not much of an argument, and we have entirely too many people who think their personal lack of faith in, disgust with, opinion that it should die off and be replaced, et cetra. actually matters, around here.
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In the end, riding a bike on any street where the speed limit is higher than 20 MPH is taking a much larger risk than cyclists are willing to admit. And rather than choosing the simplest option, "don't ride on those streets," they're calling for bicycle lanes and complaining when a car passes anywhere near them while they blatantly ignore a stop sign. I'm all for people riding their bikes, I have been known to watch a Tour de France or two. However, the arguments for bikes being allowed on major streets aren't grounded in an attempt to make cycling safer, they're grounded in a semi-random collection of liberal beliefs that laws should account for cyclists being able to ride wherever they want. If I can't skate or walk wherever I want, why should cyclists be able to?
Bicyclists can't ride wherever they want. They can't ride on the sidewalk, nor upon freeways. We make exceptions for small children, but technically, they can't. You're correct though; the law is not an attempt to make cycling safer; it's an attempt to compromise so that everyone can make use of public thoroughfares. Yes, bicyclists are assuming additional risk by doing so, and yes, a lot of that is due to the inattentive or foolish habits of other drivers, but those drivers should not be driving that way whether cyclists are there or not. What we need to do is punish people - cyclists and otherwise - who cause accidents through negligence.
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Cyclists need to realize that, when riding a bike, they are moving much slower among vehicles which have much more mass with essentially zero protection in the event of a collision. If we refuse to accommodate BASE jumpers off of buildings, we shouldn't be accommodating cyclists either. The law should not allow for the risk a cyclist takes driving on a major street to be assumed by the drivers on that street, who have no influence in whether or not that cyclist undertakes the risk to begin with.
Cycling is nowhere near the level of risk BASE jumping is, and most buildings are privately owned; even government buildings are there for government purposes, not for entertainment. Bicycling is a form of transportation, not merely an entertainment activity. As for zero protection, motorcycles offer essentially zero protection as well; possibly worse if several hundred pounds of Harley Davidson end up on top of you. Shall we ban them too? I thought we opposed authoritarian solutions here.
I understand where you're trying to go with all this; bicyclists simply can't assume that they will be safe on a small, slow vehicle that is hard for people to see, especially when so many of those people take driving less seriously than they should.
However, the human body is equipped to deal with speeds
well in excess of 20 mph. flying aircraft would be totally impossible if this were not true. However, pilots, unlike drivers, are almost always paying attention to what they are doing. Pilots also know to allow themselves enough room and altitude to execute maneuvers; they know the limits of themselves and their machine. The mere fact that greater speed means more distance is required to react isn't a matter of humans being unable to deal with things; it's a matter of simple physics.
You're vastly exaggerating the inherent dangers of driving, when the real danger come from people not doing it correctly. There is nothing wrong with most people's ability to drive if they do it the way they're supposed to. The problem is that they don't. We could take certain steps; a good one would be to make a driver's education course
mandatory to get a license regardless of age, because a lot of parents are simply incompetent to teach driving. Another would be to add actual evasive driving to the cirriculum; put students on a course, in a car, and make them execute last second maneuvers to learn how it feels. Teach a lot more about what's happening in certain situations. In an emergency, most drivers will instinctively brake, but there are situations where the best response is to floor the accelerator! Teach people how to properly take a curve at high speeds; "late and deep" is one technique. How to steer, and hold the steering wheel. Most of what's taught these days is wrong.
Just to highlight how important the limits of the vehicle are, there was a bad train crash not long ago here in Texas where a Union Pacific freight train hit a tractor trailer float. It was mentioned in the thread about some psycho that pushed a guy onto the tracks in front of a commuter train. This example may seem inapplicable, but I pick it for 2 reasons A) the difference between a train and a tractor trailer is probably comparable to a truck and a bicyclist and B) it illustrates perfectly that no matter what you do, sometimes your vehicle cannot avoid the accident. Now yes, trains can't steer, but they also can only hit things on the tracks, or at least right beside them if there's a derailment.
In this incident, the tractor trailer stopped on the tracks, being blocked by another float ahead. The gates came down, and the train came into sight. The engineer evidently complied with all regulations; he was within the speed limit; he sounded his horn as required and everything on the train was in working order. When the engineer realized the truck was not moving off the tracks, he slammed on his brakes (including his emergency brake), but a 7,200 foot freight train takes over a mile to stop.
That's a truely extreme example, but the point is that vehicles have limits to their capabilities. This does not mean that humans are unprepared to operate those vehicles; it means we need to have due respect for them. Engineers generally do, because they are well trained, experienced, highly paid employees. The truck driver, in this case, did not; he pulled onto a high-speed train track with no clear escape in front. The same is true of bicycles. Drivers need to respect their cars; bicycles need to respect the cars they are on the road with. However, we do not need to just blanket-ban bicylces from city streets any more than we need to ban railroad crossings. We need to evaluate situations case by case, and when someone violates the law, they need to be dealt with.
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