Of course, there are also places where the risk is higher. SF is just an example used because someone prominent died in SF whilst on a bicycle. The easiest thing the USA could do to make cycling safer without investing a cent in infrastructure is to adopt the rule that by default if a car hits a cyclist the car is at fault. The effect of that would be instantaneous, every bike would have an invisible force field of liability around it. Sure, some might abuse it, but nobody in their right mind is going to play chicken with a car.
> The easiest thing the USA could do to make cycling safer without investing a cent in infrastructure is to adopt the rule that by default if a car hits a cyclist the car is at fault.
That would obviously be an unfair and dumb rule because fault should always be determined on a case-by-case basis. We would also have a massive amount of fraud caused by cyclists intentionally hitting cars, just like the rash of pedestrians running in front of cars in Russia.
I ride bikes and I also drive cars, and I've seen a ton of dumb behavior from both cyclists and drivers. Nobody is immune to being a dumbass in this category. They just shouldn't mix.
The problem is infrastructure. In the places where cycling is safe and normally practiced by normal people, the bicycles and cars are mostly separated. US cycling advocates have been pushing for the wrong things for years, asking for rights on the road as though bikes are the same as cars, when in reality the only thing that works is separate roads.
This is a profoundly bad idea whose negative implications and undesired second order effects would be intuitively obvious even to the most casual observer.
jacquesm|2 years ago
twblalock|2 years ago
That would obviously be an unfair and dumb rule because fault should always be determined on a case-by-case basis. We would also have a massive amount of fraud caused by cyclists intentionally hitting cars, just like the rash of pedestrians running in front of cars in Russia.
I ride bikes and I also drive cars, and I've seen a ton of dumb behavior from both cyclists and drivers. Nobody is immune to being a dumbass in this category. They just shouldn't mix.
The problem is infrastructure. In the places where cycling is safe and normally practiced by normal people, the bicycles and cars are mostly separated. US cycling advocates have been pushing for the wrong things for years, asking for rights on the road as though bikes are the same as cars, when in reality the only thing that works is separate roads.
augment001|2 years ago
And consider the less malicious case of an out of control cyclist leading to cars swerving into pedestrians to avoid hitting the bike.
singleshot_|2 years ago