“We continually flame road violence as an outcome of personal choices yet we all know very well it’s the result of our cities choices,” Tom Flood said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“This is an unacceptable ad; victim blaming road violence is not the city I believe in,” architect Toon Dreessen said.
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Statistics provided by Gonthier shows 25 per cent of all fatal and major injury collisions on Ottawa’s roads involve pedestrians. The memo provided data on collisions between 2017 and 2021 on Ottawa roads:
- 29 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian was crossing a road midblock (away from an intersection)
- 23 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian with the right-of-way was struck at an intersection by a left turning driver
- 11 per cent of fatal and major injury collisions involving a pedestrian occurred when a pedestrian who did not have the right-of-way was struck by a vehicle travelling straight through an intersection
If bears kept killing people in our cities, would we do something about the bears, or would we blame people for being mauled?
We need to design our streets to be safer, which involves incorporating traffic calming measures so that drivers will choose to drive at speeds that are safe for everybody.
With infrastructure for pedestrians to regularly cross major traffic arteries, whether that be regular lights, bridges, etc.
Or, hear me out, the major arteries are designed for people, not cars. Trains, busses, and metros instead of highways and bypasses.
You don’t need cars to move people. That’s a design choice that cities make.
This is a bit of naiive fantasy. How are you going to transport a 90 year old woman from the train station to her house?
You could design the main arteries to all be trains, but ultimately you still need cars for last mile transportation.
Buses, electric wheelchairs etc.
Besides the fact that 90 year olds are notoriously terrible drivers and cause quite the number of accidents due to poor reflexes.
Buses don’t go to a house, they go to a bus stop, and the point is that there are people in society too sick and frail to walk a block. You’re not about to put a 90+ year old in an electric wheelchair and tell them to wheel home from the bus stop in the rain or snow.
Yeah cars suck, but it’s deluded fantasy to ignore their clear application. How are you getting your kids and all their sports gear to practice in the winter? How are you transporting building materials to your house or condo through snow?
End of the day if you design bikes to handle that kind of stuff you’ll quickly end up adding more wheels to help balance, a roof to cover you in inclement weather, and more power and suspension to help drive it all, and you’ve suddenly designed a car.
Why not? A family member can help, just like family members drive frail 90yo people around. What 90yo people shouldn’t do is operate heavy machinery such as a car.
With a cargo bike or a bike with a trailer. Or by walking around with a utility wagon.
Rent a van the one day a year that you need to do stuff like that. Don’t pretend it is reasonable for one person to use a 4000lbs pickup truck to commute to work, given the externalities that imposes on other people.
Many families like mine live car-free, so instead of claiming that is impossible you may want to figure out how they do it.
I have never suggested that they be the ones doing the driving, and no, you’re not just going to wheel them in a wheel chair through snow storm or freezing rain. On top of the potential physical impossibility of pushing a wheel chair through snow, they might literally die on their way to their doctor’s appointment.
Again, how are you getting through a snow storm? Or a rain storm? Is your load of thousands of dollars worth of power tools going to be fine sitting in a bike trailer in extreme weather?
Oh wow, congratulations, now you’ve arrived at the fact that we do needs roads and infrastructure for cars!
Bruh, tell me where I said that.
No you don’t, you live a life not owning a car, but you still ultimately need them and some infrastructure to support them when you use taxis/ubers, rent cars, and rely on thousands of workers and people who do use them.
Cities still need to be designed to be able to support cars, they also need to be designed to support pedestrians, cyclists, and to encourage as many people not to use cars as possible, but at a fundamental level cars are and will forever be a necessary part of our last mile transportation infrastructure. Pretending otherwise just makes anti car people look ridiculous and not get taken seriously.
If they are so frail that they won’t survive a trip to the nearest bus stop they should take an ambulance to the hospital for hospice care.
If the weather is that inclement, chances are that their oh-so-important hockey practice will be canceled that day. Or they can learn a little bit of gumption, if appropriate.
You didn’t. I was presenting a common example of today’s car culture.
Did I say the opposite? But today’s car infrastructure is far more extensive than it needs to be. People don’t need a car to commute, they choose a car for their convenience at the cost of everybody else’s.
I live in a car-infested neighborhood where ironically most people don’t have a car – the constant traffic is largely produced by the suburbanites that come here, ironically to save themselves from the traffic that the suburbanites are causing. And I’m furious that we suffer their convenience day and night, when we shouldn’t have to.
Our streets should serve the people living in them, rather than being designed to maximize the speed and convenience of the people driving through.
How many frail people unable to walk a block are there? Taxis absolutely suffice for your situation, if there is heavy rain or snow fall. In all other weather, they will be able to wheel themselves back home - if they’re unable to operate a wheelchair they probably don’t need much transport anywhere either.
How are kids going to sport practice? Ever heard of bicycles? Heavy equipment is usually short at the sport facility, everything else fits in a bag. Sure, heavy rain absolutely sucks on a bicycle but wearing a jacket and rain resistant pants is enough for usual amounts of rain. Snow isn’t that bad either, as long as the roads are properly salted. And even then, you can drive on icy roads with your bicycle as long as you’re careful.
Source: I frequently drove 5km to school and 6km to sports practice as a child. The worst thing was the difference in altitude, not the weather (there were two 12% inclines on either way).
Literally every single person at some point in their lives.
And guess what taxis need? Roads and infrastructure for cars!!! And we’re back to my original point already.
Lmao, oh yeah, hockey rinks just have warehouses filled with hundreds and hundreds of hockey bags waiting for their owners /s.
This is simply not true for any sports teams that plays in multiple locations around a city, read: all the competitive ones.
This is abelist nonsense.
Congrats on being a fit young person, yeah it’s easy for us to get around. That is not the case for all and it’s absurd to suggest that cars are not going to be part of our last mile transportation infrastructure.
Indeed. But if they’re unable to walk or drive in a wheelchair for a block they will also be unable to do anything after travelling somewhere. Maybe they could enter a drive-thru? That’s pretty much it. A car doesn’t really change all that much.
Obviously. Do you think buses and bicycles don’t need roads? When did I claim to demolish each and every street?
Yes storage. Most equipment is stored in the sport facility. Soccer teams store the footballs, hockey teams store the rackets etc.
Everything else fits on your back or your bicycle’s rack in the back.
In addition, don’t all sports teams usually stay at one facility for everything but competitions? If there is a competition guess what’s possible: Have a bus pick up the players and their equipment at their home stadium and drive towards where the competition is together.
Cars are ableist nonsense. Most people with disabilities earn significantly less money than those without and cannot afford a car accomodating them. Then there’s countless disabilities preventing you from driving altogether. Legally blind people, people with mental disabilities ranging from epilepsy to trisomy 21 or those with disabilities affecting their upper body’s mobility all cannot even get driver’s licenses. But sure, this is not ableist in the slightest.
Cars should very much not be used for single digit mile trips. They are a colossal waste of resources, kill tens of thousands of people per year, pollute the air and water with smog and microplastics and are a major cause of climate change. EVs will only reduce the smog, all other issues will persist.