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I mean, say what you will about cars but the sidewalk is a dedicated lane for pedestrians. Walk on the street, fuck around and find out.
Fuck around and find out is a pretty shitty attitude towards people sharing a street. Is that the excuse you will give a parent after injuring a kid that chased a ball onto the street? It isn’t like this is a highway, people have homes on the street. The street is not exclussively for cars, cars just tend to get the most space and priority.
Don’t share the street is what I’m getting at. I can’t and won’t share the sidewalk with my car, why should I share the street with pedestrians? The picture in the OP is not a kid running into the street for a sec to get a runaway ball. It’s people walking down the street with a sidewalk mere feet away from them. This isn’t the 1800s where there is no sidewalk and you had to contend with horses. Now there are multiple thousand pound death machines. Have a little regard for your own safety and use the dedicated lanes for people.
Drivers are expected to share the street with cyclists, in many places it is the law to provide a minimum distance for a cyclist. On a residential street like this, i don’t see how some pedeatrians are a real problem or risk unless the driver is already driving unsafely. The street is not exclusively yours because you bought a car.
Really, bikes should have their own dedicated lanes too (which some cities do have). Or laws should be changed to allow cyclists to share the sidewalk with pedestrians, but that’s a controversial opinion. I know in my city, cyclists are a whole other issue - they flout all the laws by riding the wrong way down the street, switching from the road to the sidewalk without getting off their bikes, they run red lights and stop signs, and yet when they get hit by a vehicle somehow it’s the vehicle driver’s fault. But that’s an entirely different conversation.
That’s because bikes are more car like in operation than pedestrian. Else the sidewalk would be more appropriate for a bike.
It’s still a multi thousand pound machine with a fallible human operator. Better to be in a space not designated for it.
Edit to be clear the fault would generally rest with the driver, but pedestrian driver interactions should be limited at all costs
It’s not a good idea to share the street when there’s a sidewalk. In that equation a car always wins
Walk on the street, fuck around and find out.
Maybe we need to bring back blóðhefnd . If a driver murders someone with their reckless driving, maybe they should live the rest of their life in fear that the surviving kin will do the same to them or their lived ones.
If you are walking on the street when there’s a sidewalk you as the pedestrian are being reckless.
Walking on them is literally the entire purpose of sidewalks. I mean its right there in the name. This picture is exactly why - so they’re safe from cars and don’t obstruct drivers. Your opinion of cars is completely immaterial when determining who is being reasonable in this context.
I don’t disagree with you on a rational level, but on a human level, it just sometimes feels nice to walk a different route, to not be forced to walk in exactly a straight line, especially with a ridiculously narrow sidewalk like that.
And that’s then where the opinion of cars comes in. I’m not supposed to do what I feel like, because some guy with a car decides to head on through. If I think cars are vital to humanity, I’ll gladly do the rational thing. If I think cars are killing humanity, then sincerely fuck that noise.
Holy Entitlement.
“Yeah, there’s this whole path for pedestrians, and that whole path for cars, but sometimes I just want to be on the car one for no reason, so cars should be inconvenienced for that.”
TBH I think that the demeanor of „why can’t I have 80% public city land for me“ sounds way more like entitlement for me. That is for me the reason why I found the original post so interesting.
But for the current day driver trying to drive safely, the die is already cast.
It’s shitty no matter who is doing it.
Do you have any idea how often pedestrians are inconvenienced by cars? We have to beg to cross streets and only where it is designated, busniesses are farther away and hidden behind vast parking lots, we are subject to their exhaust noise and fumes just about everywhere, and in many places we neglect nearly every form of travel that isnt a car.
It isn’t like the car can’t still get down the road, they just have to do it at a safe speed and be aware of the pedestrians. This is a neighbourhood not a highway.
These people aren’t crossing the road, they’re walking along it.
So they are road users? Pedestrians are not excluded from residential streets.
Not legally, no. At least not in my state.
But they should be. This is ridiculous.
It is ridiculous that people are using the street in their own neighbourhood? Did you never get to play street hockey as kid? Maybe wheels chairs can’t handle the cracks on the sidewalk? Do you really want to ban people from their own streets?
How about we ban cars from pedestrian areas instead?
MLK argued that change requires agitation. Since cars should be mostly banned from pedestrian areas I fully support any effort to retake space and to inconvience cars. Any effort to make driving more painful for others chips away at car dependency
The road is not a pedestrian area.
The infrastructure should be changed, but the driver is not in a pedestrian area.
Further, risking your safety and potentially setting an innocent person up for an accident is a dick move.
Advocate for change. I’m into that. Smart towns and cities are making progress and I’m all for it. Don’t put people at risk.
What a gross ideology.
You can fit like 3-4 cars on there. Why not half that space and extend the sidewalk then? You could not walk next to each other on those or pass others, let alone someone in a wheelchair or with a stroller. Or better, have all the cars park outside of the residential areas and use the space for parks, playgrounds, and other leisure stuff.
Sounds great but not really applicable to the photo, where a driver and pedestrians are trying to use the space, “today”
I couldnt disagree more with you. If there are pedestrians nearby you drive slow and keep your distance regardless of where you drive.
The same goes for pedestrians, though. Don’t walk where it’s not safe, for everyones safety. Like the interstate. It’s a shared responsibility.
This, however, is in the middle of a neighborhood where a ball and a kid could come flying at moments notice…
Posts like this are part of the reason why the rest of us don’t take you people seriously.
Closely related to, “I abuse animals because a vegan was mean to me once.”
Comments like this are part of the reason why the rest of us call your delusional state of mind “car brain”.
I kinda understand him. If I have a sidewalk, I use it, simply because I don’t want to fucking get run over by a car. However, the comments are also quite disgusting.
I do that all the time here in Europe and nobody gets mad. It’s such an immense space and I don’t want to be relegated to 30cm of sidewalk. People hang out in the streets and car drivers are chill
I think it still very much depends where in Europe you do that
Italy, to be exact. Maybe doing the same in Germany would make me end up with a fine
Yeah, in Germany you would maybe get in trouble, however this really, depends on where you’re walking. But usually our sidewalks are big enough(as long as it isn’t completely blocked by parking cars) so that you can walk there safely.
This is more a case of Germany’s excessively law-abiding culture, IMO. It’s the same in East Asia: people waiting like zombies at a red pedestrian light even tho there’s not a car in sight.
That’s also true
Definitely not true in residential areas of Germany.
I don’t know where you live, but for my village I can say, that our sidewalks are big enough to comfortably walk there.
Unfortunately that is very likely.
I do the same in Japan. Most residential streets don’t have sidewalks so we share them with cars, pedestrians and bicycles. Some of the bigger streets have quite wide sidewalks (one car lane’s width or more) so I would use those.
But in this photo, the sidewalks are minuscule. I especially understand the dog walker choosing the road instead.
I’m happy that my town has started to widen sidewalks and reduce the width of roads to promote more foot traffic in the downtown area.
I lived in Morocco for three years and there it’s more common to walk in the street than on the sidewalk. Compared to the other places I’ve lived (Northern Europe), it’s strange, and the driving is more reckless, but no drivers got mad. Walking in the street is just what people do.
We need a “fuck pedestrians” instance for this one guys
But there is a sidewalk. I’m also wondering why these people are walking on the street
If they’re gonna walk in the street, I guess I’ll drive on the sidewalk. 🤷🏻♂️
All for reducing or eliminating cars; but I’m not going to act like this ain’t fucking stupid.
People from Bakersfield walk on the street, all over. Once you get used to it though it’s really not that difficult to live with. I imagine if people still used roads for walking like before cars, we could figure it out.
There are so many worse things about Bakersfield, this doesn’t even rank.
Hay man, one of the lowest costs of living and average income ratios in the county. Also people get all ‘‘oh no’’ about crime rates, but it’s really not significant for people who go to bed at 9pm to 10pm and aren’t actively entrepreneurs of the night in any capacity. A lot of crime is criminal on criminal.
I feel like many people commenting are not familiar with walkable streets. They have however been very common for most of the time in history. Using the sidewalk is not really a good substitute for that. I used to live in a neighborhood where there were so many people on the streets on weekends, that u wouldn’t want to drive there even if it was technically a street. The quality of life there was amazing especially in the evening and on weekends.
Not enough context is given to know if weather or not that is true here or not. Such roads are rare, while I like them, this does not look like one of those situations froma glance. Therefore cars kill, gtfo the road.
Maybe they do it to slow down traffic. It’s clearly a residential area. It could be that speeding is a problem.
It’s been tried and tested. Human bodies barely slow a car down. It’s much better to place something solid, like a concrete block
Part of the problems is humans won’t damage the paint on the cars. You want drivers to slow down, make them worry about their paint tends to be more effective than making them worry about hitting a pedestrian.
Just fill your pockets with balloons full of brake fluid. That way when someone hits you their car gets covered in brake fluid, ruining the paint job.
I was assuming a rational driver who would slow down to avoid hitting people.
And the accidental driver? A life is lost.
Using a human body as traffic calming is psycho mode zoning use change
I’m wondering if this is sheer desperation on the part of the locals. Maybe speeding is a problem, but the town refuses to install speed humps, so people do this to make the neighborhood safer for children. I don’t know.
I recommend tires and rebar impregnated concrete rubble. Not human lives.
You don’t deserve more space just because you bought F150.
This lack of self awareness always astounds me. You are in a car, it transports you way faster than your own two legs, it protects you from elements with tons of steel and glass. The same steel that has tons of potential energy. Carless pedestrians are your inconvenience?
Well, they slow you down and get your car all dented and bloody
Something Americans don’t know about is that streets were shared spaces between pedestrians, cars, bikes, everything. Then cars got a bigger role and pushed everyone else to sidewalks. Then bars and restaurants also wanted part of that space for outdoor serving. Now pedestrians, bikes, bars/restaurants, bus stops, e-scooters and parking spaces, advertising signs, and trees share the side walk, which in turn has become much more narrow because of car lanes…
If there were a bunch of cars in the driveways blocking the sidewalk I would agree, or if they had strollers or something with wheels that could get bumpy on the cracks, but since neither of those are true I’m with OOP on this one.
