The Streetsblog echo chamber
SF Streetsblog's account of this accident simply assumes that mom and her toddler were the latest victims in the war between wicked motor vehicles and cyclists. The wisdom of taking your child on your bike and riding on Geary Blvd. is not questioned. Nor is it questioned in any of the 38 comments to the story that mostly wonder what the proper punishment for the driver should be.
If the law requires special safety seats for small children in motor vehicles, why is it still legal for parents to take their children with them on bikes? I guess we'll have to wait for some children to be killed before we have that public debate.
Labels: Anti-Car, Cycling and Safety, Streetsblog
posted by Rob Anderson @ 12:23 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
To be fair, the news accounts, if accurate, point to a red-light-running SUV driver as the cause of the accident. And the cyclist was not riding "on" Geary but across it, on an avenue.
At the same time you gotta love Supervisor Eric Mar's clueless referral to "another example of the culture of speeding" when no account of speeding is being offered in this case. "Culture of impatience" would be more apt and would also apply to a lot of dangerous motorist, cyclist and pedestrian behavior I observe.
Although I am a committed, high-mileage cyclist I would never ride with my own or anybody else's child on a bicycle. That kind of load makes a bike very top-heavy and challenging to handle. I could not live with myself knowing that, when the inevitable fall or crash happened (and it does, if we ride long and far enough) that I contributed to a child's injuries and trauma.
It's legal because as laws were being written, we assumed people would follow them.
This driver on Geary has proved us wrong. People are idiots.
The most idiotic thing is that we figured out that people are idiots yet we keep giving them car keys.
"To err is human," like the man said. That's why Vision Zero is nothing but a slogan: some people will behave recklessly regardless of how good our laws are. People will have and cause accidents sometimes with unfortunate consequences.
But putting a small child on bike even if only to cross Geary Blvd. seems like child endangerment to me, but then I'm not an adherent of BikeThink.
Your "carthink" of anything being an accident is ridiculous. Again you put the onus on the people getting hit by cars, rather than any responsibility of the person who chooses to drive a large 2 ton vehicle and disobey the law.
There are places in the world where these are not problems and people can bike, walk with very little risk or injury.
But sure, boil it down to "bikethink" rather than a city's desire to be able to traverse a small dense urban environment without being struck by a vehicle.
"Vision Zero is nothing but a slogan"
OH! How I wish!
It is in fact a new faith-based millenial vision and is being used as justification by our brain-dead suopervisors and overpaid MTA bureaucrats to devolve our surface transportation utility to sub 3rd-world levels.
The MTA's latest V.Z. scheme is to ban red-light right turns from Irving Street onto 19th Avenue, an intersection at which the most recent pedestrian injury took place in...2008.
Of course what will more likely happen is that pedestrians will be lulled into a false sense of security which will make them more vulnerable to the inevitable scofflaw drivers who disregard the no-right-turn signs.
More rules and more signs means more rule-breaking. It's a mentality that ignores evidence of how much safer anarchy can be than regulation.
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/04/lots-cars-and-trucks-no-traffic-signs-or-lights-chaos-or-calm/5152/
"Your 'carthink' of anything being an accident is ridiculous. Again you put the onus on the people getting hit by cars, rather than any responsibility of the person who chooses to drive a large 2 ton vehicle and disobey the law."
Commander Ali of the SFPD, in his analysis of the 2014 traffic fatalities on city streets, found that half of all pedestrian deaths were the fault of those pedestrians themselves, which of course means that the other half were the responsibility of people driving those "2 ton vehicles."
All of those deaths should be called "accidents," since none were deliberately caused by anyone.
All three of the cyclists who died on city streets last year, by the way, did so due to their own reckless behavior.
"But putting a small child on bike even if only to cross Geary Blvd. seems like child endangerment to me"
The most likely place for a child to die in the US is the inside of a car. Child endangerment indeed.
I continue to be stunned by the sickness of anyone who thinks a car is an appropriate vehicle for a dense urban area like San Francisco. This driver should be jailed for 5 years for the near murder of two innocent people.
It's just disgusting that we allow this city to be overrun by these horrid, horrid machines.
When are we going to require helmets for car passengers? Until then, people will keep dying in cars.
The last three commenters popped over here from the Streetsblog echo chamber. Of course they're anonymous. Interesting to note that people willing to risk their lives on bicycles don't have the moral and intellectual courage to take responsibility for their opinions, especially when those opinions aren't controversial here in SF.
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