“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
‘Jaywalking’, like piracy, is a crime invented and enforced among the public by greedy corporations. Roads were originally for pedestrians. This and the fact that cities are designed only for car owners means more profit for car makers. Don’t encourage corporate demonization words like jaywalking.
Fuck cars
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, electric wheelchairs etc.
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.
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. 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.
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.
How are you getting your kids and all their sports gear to practice in the winter?
With a cargo bike or a bike with a trailer. Or by walking around with a utility wagon.
How are you transporting building materials to your house or condo through snow?
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.
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.
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.
With a cargo bike or a bike with a trailer. Or by walking around with a utility wagon.
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?
Rent a van the one day a year that you need to do stuff like that.
Oh wow, congratulations, now you’ve arrived at the fact that we do needs roads and infrastructure for cars!
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.
Bruh, tell me where I said that.
Many families like mine live car-free, so instead of claiming that is impossible you may want to figure out how they do it.
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.
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).
How many frail people unable to walk a block are there?
Literally every single person at some point in their lives.
Taxis absolutely suffice for your situation
And guess what taxis need? Roads and infrastructure for cars!!! And we’re back to my original point already.
Heavy equipment is usually short at the sport facility, everything else fits in a bag.
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.
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
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.
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)
So 71% don’t involve jaywalking at all? Funny how they left that out.
100% of those deaths involve an automobile.
@Rodeo @BedSharkPal Crossing away from an intersection is only illegal (or in anti-pedestrian slang, “jaywalking”) if it’s between two adjacent signalized intersections. Crossing against a “don’t walk” signal could also be considered “jaywalking”… but police reports are notoriously inaccurate and windshield biased anyway so take everything with a grain of salt. Most dangerous crossings happen due to bad traffic engineering, regardless of legality.
Crossing against the signal at a controlled intersection can get you a fine, and sometimes PDs to blitzes at certain intersections.
I wonder how many of them involve cars
That may be somewhat biased if most people don’t jaywalk and instead concentrate at intersections. California just made jaywalking legal, so we’ll find out in a few years I suppose.
Isn’t that just basic math? How is that funny?
Edit: ah, nvm. I didn’t realize this thread was just a circlejerk. Carry on.
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It’s wild that this city (read: the suburbs and rural communities that shouldn’t be a part of the city of Ottawa) decided the dude with ZERO political experience and ZERO urban planning interest was the right choice for mayor.
It might be me being very tuned in to urban planning, but it feels like across the world, and even Canada, there’s a huge wave of urban planning progress being made. People are begining to realize that we cant continue to build car dependant suburbs, but our own mayor hasn’t caught up to this fact. There’s huge improvements in Montreal, Toronto, even places like Calgary and Edmonton are getting proper biking infrastructure. Granted, do see it slowly progressing in Ottawa, but my god it could be done so much faster and with less of this bullshit.
Like, maybe before this he didn’t know anything about cities and shit like this, but you fucking hire someone who does and have them explain it to you. You’re a mayor now, you MUST be into urban planning and all it entails.
Apologies for the long rant, this bugs me to no end. Can I protest somewhere? Can I give the mayor some book recommendations? (Walkable Cities by Jeff Speck, and Strong Towns by Charles Marhon.)
Bold of you to assume he can read.
I’ll get him the audiobooks then lol
No but really, he’s not stupid, I’d say willfully ignorant or naive (I’m not sure of the right word.) Plus very boomer minded about cars and the way a city should be focused around them.
I’m sure his financial supporters don’t help too much either.
Jaywalking is not a real thing XD
Jaywalking is a meme invented by the auto industry so that they could make fun of the people they murder
Fuck cars
The writing of the copy of the final example is so fucking bad, and the graphics on all of them are noticeably poor. When they say, “evidence-based,” I wonder how many adventures were had between the evidence it was based on, and the crap that they finally delivered.
