JoeyBike

There is this new device called a "smart phone" you may have heard of. Most motorists are staring at a tiny screen INSIDE the car and not looking through the windscreen to the OUTSIDE.

Then there are the old school methods of alcohol, drugs, sleeping pills, and good old fashioned distracted/daydreaming motorists or just falling asleep at the wheel.

Ever driven a modern SUV or pick-up truck? Anything "right in front of them" less than 30 feet away is invisible due to vehicle height and hood length.

It's amazing more peds/cyclists don't get hozed on the daily.

Gear_Admiral 

We have a winner here.

Yep. As much as we may get angry, usually rightfully angry, at motorists, we can't make hundreds of millions of car drivers in America become masters of automobile operation; we have to take issue with bad street designs dumping humans on foot and on bikes next to big steel boxes racing by.

The best way to stop these incodents is to stop subsidizing car-centric living and making our distances between buildings and our road infrastructure hostile to anyone not in a car ... and Southerners need to stop building every damn street like an airport runway, because Florida is really bad, too.

On a technically 30 mph street by the University of Florida (that is basically a five-lane airplane runway) a driver at night can fly onto a sidewalk and kill two youths and then the Dean of Students sends an e-mail to the faculty to let us know of "an accident."

Yep, a little boo-boo, an act of God that no one could have predicted happened again. And ... after four years of undergrads cycling out, no one will know for the next first time surprise.

The damn UF student newspaper blames victims, too. One student had a motorist drive into her on a MUP in the town (why was the car there? oh, yeah, that MUP intersects with car roads a dozen times -- I have been on it). Of course, *she* was hit by a car and then her head broke the windshield. The driver-less car was minding its own business when this cyclist actively instigated this, apparently. Reality: the driver crashed his car into her so hard that the windshield broke against her head. I am not beying for blood. I don't think this particular motorist is an anti-social menace, but I don't want to default to letting him off the hook. As Shaun Pegg's character in _Hot Fuzz_ noted, it is a collision because "accident" assumes no one is to blame. Just keep it neutral. Not murder, not an accident, a collision or a crash.

A story like this one here should lead to more than ad hoc crime scene investigation. You don't see these numbers in Japan or in Switzerland, and their drivers aren't all magically better.

Yeah, I too am cheesed that the cops didn't arrest the driver and the DA didn't file charges, but a public lynching of this or that driver really will not save lives to an appreciable degree.

Gear_Admiral 

A lot do. Hundreds and hundreds of people everyday are hospitalized from car crashes. The only reason so many of them live (and still on average over *100* people *die* every day on American roadways) is that they are also in big metal boxes.

To my shock and horror, in the past decade, parents driving their kids in a car to and from every single day became the majority mode of school transportation. Not plurality, majority. Talking to younger people ... this is somehow normal.

However, even back in the early 2000s, in K12 schools, having parents chauffeur you to school was only done very rarely and one way (get the bus home) due to dentist visots, emergencies, etc. The only times you saw daily chauffeuring by car every day was at a private school where one or two kids lived outside if the walkable or busable area or the slightly handicapped kids at public school who could get a 10% or a 59% on every other test but who couldn't navigate social settings and should not have been in general classes at all, but who had parents in denial. That was it.

If we responsibly took keys away from drunks, people who are 85+, etc. and had even 5% of Americans commute by foot or bike tomorrow, deaths would skyrocket. Shlepping kids to and from school every day by SUV is the only reason school shootings narrowly became the #1 killer of school-age children.

I am not saying this to rail against old people on the road, blah, blah. We shouldn't make it so that people have to drive when they are uncomfortable or unable to do so well just because the alternative to driving daily is becoming a recluse who maybe gets occasionally chauffeured around by friends and family. Already in America in most parts, a kid's social life before age 16 and access to a car equals playdates, parents driving you to the movies, and hanging out with whatever peers may live on your suburban cul de sac.

Gear_Admiral 

I recommend people ignore UniChris. Almost everything he says is factually wrong and disproven by reality. Slowing down drivers saves lives. Off of highways, total speed itself is the greatest predictor of injury. And people subconciously drive more slowly when they feel uncomfortable, when there is no massive "clear zone," when the street is narrow, etc. If you have these obstacles and visual cues (tree placement, curb cuts, bollards) and the "maniac behind the wheel" still feels good going fast, then he or she will soon crash into a bollard and be unable to get up to 55 mph and run over a group of cyclists.

I assume this another case of someone from North America or Australia or NZ assuming that the whole world is like his town and that kids these days don't learn proper biking and that's why only 1% of adult Americans bike regularly.

UniChris is also chastising a dead child for not minding proper arcane rules of Texan traffic codes.

Who cares? Kids mess up. We don't expect kids to repair circuit breakers or wash windows. We all have to look out for kids and be on the lookout. That is the responsibility of adults living in society.

base2 

By the content of your response & the inferred underlying logic, it's obvious you've never been anywhere with proper street design.

I forgive your ignorance on this topic. Though I do not feel compelled to educate you, I do encourage you to seek out an education on proper people centric urban planning. Retired land use planner Chuck Marohn might be a good place to start.

UniChris

On the contrary, I ride all over the place on streets that are wonderful for cycling.

The ones that aren't are those that are:

A) Too narrow to begin with

or

B) Were wide enough, but were made too narrow with intentional obstructions that keep forcing cyclists back into conflict with other traffic

C) Were wide enough, but were made too narrow by taking away the on-road deconfliction space that cyclist were using to instead build a second set of sidewalks that have intersections even more dangerous than the first, which make it both more dangerous and more frustrating to cycle there - you can identify those because cyclists keep riding on the narrowed road rather than the dangerously unsafe second sidewalk, or opt for another road that hasn't been ruined instead.

I think the real question is, have you looked at map of where housing, commerce, and workplaces are actually built in the US?

Because what you are proposing just does not work to connect the things that are there on a such a scale of distance - while what I am using every day very much does. I've pointed out the aspects of the location where this tragedy occurred that actually need changes to support cycling - how those are not about re-designing neighborhood streets to make cycling more dangerous, but about providing the missing deconfliction space on the main road that connects the neighborhood to the commerce in a way that leaves its intersections still as usable for cyclists as they are for drivers, or using the disused rail corridor to provide a way to skip interacting with that road and its intersections entirely. Actual cycling improvements are ones that provide solutions to the key actual problem points and so make it more possible to actually use a bike as part of your life, versus anti-cycling designs favored by people who imagine biking without actually doing it.

base2 

You keep using the terms "road" & "street" interchangeably. Those words do not mean what you think they mean.
A road is a high speed wide & safe connection between 2 destinations for moving a large amount of people efficiently. A freeway is a road. A road for trains has rails.
A street is a dense urban environment for people, shops, commerce, community. A street is a destination.

In America, streets are designed as roads. This is why the 8 year old was murdered by poor infrastructure design. The traffic engineers valued the convenience (30mph speed suggestion) of the SUV driver over the life of the 8 year old.

The Dutch have 2 words for bike rider: Fietser which is this 8 year old. It literally means "bike rider" & could literally be anyone on the street doing their daily errands by bicycle.

The other word: Wielrenner literally means bicycle racer. In America, you must be a Weilrenner to be crazy enough to even ride in a painted bicycle gutter with cars on roads to do any sort of cycling at all outside of a designated Parks Department funded MUP. Is it any wonder cycling in America has such low adoption numbers? Everyone looks at the physical fitness & equipment requirements; The hostility & potential for car violence says: "No thanks, not for me."

Why do you feel that the dead kid *must* be a Weilrenner just to exist on the roads outside their front door but not be angry about the road outside the kids front door? It should be a street. It should be uncomfortable, neigh impossible for the SUV driver to achieve an unsafe speed in a destination environment.

The presence or absence of a stop sign begging driver compliance should be immaterial. Yet, there it is being discussed & waggled about like some sort of panacea when the problem is entrenched design philosophy.

UniChris

No, the child died failing to follow the basic rule all children are taught: look before crossing the place where traffic is.

Children who cannot yet reliably follow such rule should not be exploring the world on their own, period - you can't "design out" the need to understand and obey rules of behavior.

And adults who insist on pretending that such a rule is not basic only embarrass themselves by proclaiming their ignorance.

You keep proving over and over again that you do not understand the first thing about where the danger in cycling actually is.

Remember, this child was killed at an intersection precisely because they did not understand the nature of the danger that's present anywhere the existing physically protected network they were using must cross paths with other traffic.

Building a second sidewalk won't change the basic fact that a physically protected path is not protectable in intersections - it fails users in the one place they actually need something, and it lulls them into feeling safe and entitled in precisely the spot where they are in the most danger.

Nor the fact that the forced mis-positioning to be through traffic makes those intersections actually more dangerous - you only get to be through traffic if you are in line with, or on the traffic side of, vehicles which turn. If you want to proceed through an intersection in the wrong place to be through traffic, you have to pause and look for any such turning traffic before entering the intersection, just like a pedestrian.

You need to spend some time learning how to actually ride a bike safely.

Actually, drivers yielding to bicycles when they're not supposed to is huge problem - this forum is chock full of threads where people complain about how "helpful" drivers insistently try to put them in danger by insistently yielding where they're not supposed to and the cyclist taking that extra-legal invitation from one driver would put them into conflict with the rest of traffic that is following the actual laws.

Anyway, you're stuck in irrelevance, because nobody is ever going to build "protected" bike lanes on a residential street like that - they might paint some, or they might paint sharrows, but neither has any great consequence, since those areas are already safely rideable by cyclists with basic safety skills.

The actual area where there might be policy debate would be North Park Drive. The safest and most cycling-friendly thing to do there would be to add a shoulder to it, so that cyclists have a way to be safely passed by other traffic. Politically, to build that at this point it would probably have to be called a bike lane, though designating it that way can create an erroneous expectation that cyclists should be in it at times where safety demands that they leave it, which is why creating the space but not designating it can be better. Still, that's just paint, if there are or aren't outlines of bikes painted in it doesn't really matter much in practice - it's having that critically needed de-confliction width that is key to making the area bike friendly.

The contrary, appealing but actually deeply misguided idea would be to build a sidewalk-like path along that road, and typically cost considerations mean it ends up a bi-directional one on one side. Such a route is appealing to those who don't really understand the nature of danger in cycling, because it feels like it's away from the cars. Unfortunately, it becomes far more dangerous each time it crosses one of the side streets, since it's not properly routed for through traffic (doubly so for the cyclists going "the wrong way" for the side of the main road on which it's placed). When such a path is built honestly, it gets stop signs at each crossing of a sidestreet, hopefully making users aware of the reality that it is the cars on the sidestreet, and those turning off the main road, rather than the cyclists who have the right of way there. When it's built dishonestly, it's done in a way that falsely suggests cyclists riding through in that dangerously incorrect position have a right of way that in actuality they cannot. Neither sort of parallel construction is anywhere near as suited to practically and safely covering the distances of American lives on a bike with the sort of efficiency that riding on the actual surface of a road of sufficient width is. It's an example of design by people who don't bike, for people who don't actually bike.

Additionally, there are the assorted virtues and complications of building something as well or instead along the disused rail corridor. Although that's more out of the way, and may involve night-time safety concerns, mix of bike and pedestrian concerns, and (in other areas) snow removal issues, it does have the huge advantage that it almost never has to interact with a road traffic flow at all. That's something you just can't achieve when building alongside a road. When you can go really long distances between any road interaction at all, then (and only then) can segregation's inherent cost of being disadvantaged at the very infrequent intersections you have to treat in a pedestrian-like manner be a worthwhile tradeoff.

Personally, I'd widen North Park adding shoulder type deconfliction space to make it effective and safe for all-hours use by commuting, utility, and recreational cyclists, but also build the rail trail for daytime recreational use by families and those newly interested in the possibility of cycling, but not yet having developed key cycling skills.

base2 

UniChris
No man is so blind as a man who refuses to see.

You continue to prove why car dependent suburbs & decades of entrenched poor road design does everything other than move people or create dense vibrant community.

Continue yelling at clouds defending establishment causes or work for structural change to support financially viable, walkable, communities with a sense of place & purpose. The choice is yours.

UniChris

You continue to prove that you do not know how to safely ride a bike (or apparently even safely walk on a sidewalk) in the environment in which your profile claims you live.

But this forum is chock full of people who do know how to ride here safely. Some of us actually accomplish our lives by walking and biking - we already live what can only be an unattainable dream for you, because you refuse to learn how to use a bike safely (or for that matter even how to cross a street on foot from sidewalk to sidewalk safely)

So go ahead - continue to ignore what the rest of us know about biking, and what our parents taught us as small children about walking.

The person who loses out is you, the rest of us get to enjoy great cycling on the roads that work, and to push for the sorts of improvements that would solve the actual problems of the minority of roads that don't - in the area of this tragedy, the actual issue would be North Park Drive, not the already very bikeable neighborhood routes.

FBinNY 

If this is the same event I read about, some FACTS my help clarify the situation.

The intersection had stop signs in two directions, and was unregulated (engineer speak for no light, stop or yield) in the other. The motorist was coming through the unregulated side and had right of way over the bicyclist who was obligated (by rules of the road) to stop, and/or at least yield. I'm willing to trust that had the motorist seen the cyclist in time she would have stopped rather than insist on her right to proceed.

So, legally fault was on the cyclist, and technically the motorist could file a claim for damages to the front end.

As for the traffic engineer's statement, that could be read two ways (you'll have to ask him).

1- either that there should have been all-way stops there, based on the area and traffic patterns.
2- as a general statement that road design cannot guaranty safety in and of itself. Some responsibility has to fall on users, regardless of their age.

Fir my part, I don't have enough info to determine the first, and regardless am 100% in agreement with the 2nd.

Nobody likes to blame a dead child for his death, or tell parents they should have taught him better, and I'm certainly happy not to have that responsibility. However, the takeaway here (for me) is the reminder to make sure our children have the necessary street smarts to see to their own safety, whether walking to school, riding a bike, or playing ball on or near streets.

base2 

Entire nations that are not the United States do this. This is what I am asserting here. It's nothing unusual to have safe street design.

I know, I know. Slowing the cars is just a bridge too far for American traffic designers. The minor inconvenience to the driver is more important than the life of a child.

It doesn't matter that this street or any North American street is designed in accordance with the latest & greatest North American traffic manuals. The standards themselves are focused on the wrong priorities. Moving cars & not people. This has to change.

But we can always blame the victim & let the licensed responsible person off the hook & ignore any sense of responsibility for the non-places & non-society we've created. Reality is too harsh & world view is too entrenched to face to acknowledge that.

I'm suggesting that the driver was set up for failure & we need systemic change. What I'm getting in this thread is a lot of hand wringing & excuses why this deadly, disempowering equilibrium where the innocent are murdered through systemic failure of proper design is ok. It isn't.

Miele Man

The bicycle was jammed under the front wheel and thus the driver didn't have much choice but to remain at the scene.

Cheers

UniChris

When you've claimed that you target is 20 kph (12.4 mph) indeed, your goal of 12.4 mph is absurd for the scale of american geography. I can pretty much guarantee that even the parents of the victim would not be willing to confine their speed to that for long it just doesn't work for the kinds of distances involved here. Nor would you even find many people who use bikes in their lives who would be willing to agree to such a speed limit on the bike.

That's nonsense - cars are presently the only realistic way you can "move people" in that environment.

Moving away from designs that are so inherently car requiring would be a good thing, but if you're serious about actually doing anything rather than just screaming at clouds, you focus on the things that are possible evolutions of the housing already built, and that actually help - rather than what you've been doing, when you've been demanding things that actually make life even harder and more dangerous for those of us who actually bike.

So first, you recognize that the residential street itself is not the problem, rather the actual issue is that you can't get there without a car.

Why can't you get there? Because as I've been explaining all along, North Park Drive is too narrow - it needs a shoulder so that cyclists can safely be passed. So for the umpteenth time, you widen North Park Drive.

Then, because indeed not everyone wants to take the direct route beside traffic, you also turn the disused rail line into a rail trail that manages to almost entirely avoid any interaction with roads at all, and where it has to and you can't build a flyover, you build good intersections with great sight lines that give trail users equal priority with drivers - basically, you treat the trail at the intersection as a road (just one that happens not to be available to cars).

Of course, only a fraction of your population is going to be willing to bike American distances, especially in Texas heat. So if your goal is actually reducing the use of cars, far more important than cycling, is adding transit.

And much as North Park Drive or building the rail trail are great for getting to the grocery store and movie theater, that's not where most of the people who live in that housing work. Some will be lucky enough to commute virtually (truly the most useful revolution in "transit" planning ever). Many others will unfortunately have to travel to other areas only reachable by car. You can start the process of building transit, and widening the key regional roads to make them more bikeable for 5-10 mile commutes, but the reality is that bicycles are not going to solve the problem of sprawl for most of the people who live there, because the places they need to go are just too far away. One of the key problems actually is the suburban office park - instead of just having the housing sprawled and people trying to commute "in" someone ends up with a home that's sprawled in one direction and a job that's sprawled in another, which changes public transit from the borderline untenable time sink it would be with a traditional commute, to an utterly untenable 2+ hours in each direction.

Still, even though you can't make biking work as a major transit mode over the distances of American communities and lives, you can at least recognize the distinction between what actually helps the people who will bike, vs the outrageously anti-cycling mis-designs you keep ignorantly calling for.

The very least you can do for those of us who actually bike as our primary transportation is to stop trying to making things worse.

FBinNY 

We don't disagree in principle, but may not always agree in specific cases.

But that's OK. As I said, I can't know what the engineer or the people who designed this intersection were thinking. I can only join those seeking to design smarter roads (smarter for everybody) and as I did< remind people that ultimately, safety is dependent on individual actions, and always will be as long as people, runners, bicyclists, and motorists are moving at speeds where there's risk of collision.

I've stayed alive and uninjured over 55+ years of riding roads shared with motor vehicles, most of which were not designed with bicyclists in mind, by focusing on myself and what I can do to ride smart. That would apply no matter how safe a road design would seem to be. I live by the engineers credo that nothing is foolproof because fools are too ingenious.

Those focused on the lack of a third stop sign might remind themselves that neighborhoods like this have hundreds of driveways, many with poor sight lines that children can zip out of.

UniChris

That, indeed, is how you use a bicycle safely.

It starts with following the actual laws, for example recognizing when one must yield the right of way to another road user

It continues to recognize things that are perhaps legal, but widely known to be inadvisable because they place unrealistic reliance on other's perfection - for example passing vehicles on the right in anything other than a very slow and hyper cautious way

It ultimately comes to include nuances of strategic best practice, for example recognizing that when there's not car behind you, it can be useful to ride further out into the road where you're more visible to drivers (or even pedestrians and other cyclists) who might try to enter or cross the road you're on after an overly quick glance that might at best detect a giant car, but could too easily miss a cyclist lost in the visual curb clutter (and would be beyond certain to miss one in a misplaced roadside path!)

Which gets us back to the issue of remembering not to do things which create danger - such as barge into a street without looking, doubly so when one would not have the right of way, or even when one could, not when others are too close to react. All of those incidentally things spelled out in the actual laws.

UniChris

It's a sure sign you've checked out of reality when you literally re-post another verbatim copy of your already comprehensively debunked nonsense...

UniChris

There are two facts of basic reality here:

First, the driver had the right of way. There is no crosswalk, marked, or unmarked, so a person wishing to cross the street on foot must look for and yield to traffic. Alternately, a northbound cyclist had a stop sign (while the driver did not).

Next, from a position at the end of Gallant Knight where one can take a proper look down Kings Mill Lane, one would be looking at a car approaching down a 770 foot straightaway. Streetview readily confirms that if you look from where you need to, you can see all of that, all the way to the curve over 770 feet away, and the house outside of the curve, too.

Nevermind that the driver's left turn onto Gallant Knight couldn't be taken at such a speed, if we were to assume for sake of argument that the car was approaching at an improbable 40 mph, it would have been visible for over 13 seconds before reaching the location of the collision. Actual slowing to take the turn would only have increased that.

You don't actually look for traffic to which you are legally obligated to yield, and then get hit over 13 second later.

FBinNY 

We're down to a difference in Weltanschauung (world view).

Some people are highly focused on systemic considerations, and prefer to assign responsibility on what they see as system failures. Others including myself prefer to focus on individual actions, and how to negotiate a world where the systems are less than ideal.

This isn't binary and in the big picture is that both are right to an extent, but wrong when they favor one view at the exclusion of the other. It isn't about blaming the victim and excusing callous, uncaring, ignorant "murderous" drivers, or the opposite. It's about recognizing that responsibility isn't binary or polar, but falls to some degree on everybody. Even in a perfect world, there will be situations that demand an approach focused on self preservation, and accepting that ultimate responsibility falls to ourselves.

My earliest memories of living in the USA go back to when I was 4+ years old. We had come form "safe" Switzerland, and living in the Hotel Forrest in Hell's Kitchen, NYC. I still remember my dad taking me on walks along various routes and drilling me on what I needed to know. So, after being shown the right and wrong things to do, there I was, 4 years old, speaking no English and walking around the area crossing some of the busiest (at that time) avenues in Manhattan. (of course, if my parents raised kids today, the way they raised me in the 50's they'd be arrested)

As an adult, I engage in many activities that have people asking "isn't it too dangerous?" Including bicycling. Personally, I don't like the concepts of "safe" and "dangerous" and prefer to think about managing risks, and the degree to which things are forgiving or unforgiving. I consider road cycling to be generally safe, but not very forgiving of stupidity.

base2 

UniChris
Once again you are not reading.
No body is disputing that America has a car-first anti-human design that places the burden of consequence on the weak.

The problem is you seem to think dead children is acceptable. And you seem to think that infrastructure design that prioritizes driver speed & convenience over safety/lives of all other street users is acceptable.

I can totally see why you believe this way. It's not hard to imagine you think children are dumb. The weak/old/infirm just don't matter. It makes sense that you have a vested interest to maintain hopeless car addiction & just can't imagine any other way. America is the best at everything & infallible in any way.

That's fine. I get it. But to disregard the reality of 10's of millions of people who experience actual human centric street design as unachievable, lofty pie-in-the-sky fantasy is to ignore the reality that is there & could be here with just a little bit of effort acknowledging the problem...You are selling America short & blaming the victim as being a less than human inconvenience, an acceptable consequence of business as usual. Your posts make it seem that anything to keep mowing down children (or cyclists) with impunity to avoid change evidently is perfectly acceptable to you. It's no wonder prosecutors always let the car driver off. Only cars matter in America. That's a shame. It's sad you don't seem to believe things could be better. It's an even bigger shame you can't even acknowledge there is a problem.

Victim blaming a child for failure of grown up groupthink decisions made by committee makes you look like a terrible person.

The SUV driver is just as much a victim of bad urban planning & wrong headed infrastructure as the dead child. Am I wrong?

UniChris

On further research, it turns that if one is trying to reach Wagner Pond (as the child reportedly was) there actually is a proper, efficient, and safe way to do it, which was first made clear on the Strava heatmap, and then confirmed on Streetview - a fact that is surely well known by anyone who lives there.

Specifically, one shouldn't be crossing Kings Mill where Gallant Knight tees into it at all, rather one should turn right on Kings Mill (or if using the sidewalk, turn right on that sidewalk) and proceed 202 feet east, to where there actually are a pair of curb cuts creating an unmarked crosswalk to legally cross Kings Mill with pedestrian right of way. That's not just a legal formality, it also matches where one can take the actual provided path into the pond between houses, rather than cut across somebody's lawn.

In that proper crossing position, there's still 568 feet of visibility to where a car would approach around the corner. That's ample time to make sure a car isn't too close to stop, as pedestrians are required to do before entering a crosswalk.

And if one uses the unmarked crosswalk at the pedestrian speed for which it is intended (rather than at the biking speed for which it is neither intended, nor even legally in effect) it's also ample time to be see by an approaching driver. For a cyclist on the road, it's also far more than ample time to determine if it's safe to make a left turn into the path entrance, or as is required of anyone making a left turn, if there is oncoming traffic too close.

The layout of the neighborhood isn't actually anywhere near as problematic as one might naviely think - but one does indeed have to follow the rules, which includes crossing at the proper, rather than improper place.

Reality is that bad things happen when people fail to follow the rules. Children who have not demonstrated a multi-year reliability in doing so so must not yet be out unsupervised.

Families that are serious about safety model this behavior, rehearse it hand in hand, verify it not holding hands, and only after the children prove they can reliably follow the rules do they begin to contemplate letting them venture into the world without an adult along.

base2 

FBinNY
I don't disagree.
Nothing is absolute & all actions have risk & consequences. This is sensible.
Peoples actions tend to be predictable given a defined array of choices. The crux here is to remove the bad choice from the array through human-centric urban design to achieve a desired user behavior. That is all I am advocating for. Infrastructure that serves all equally. It's a big ask, apparently.

UniChris

Parties who are have acted in accordance with the law are not getting "let off"

Rather, the rule of law (the most basic human right) is that you cannot charge someone who has not broken a law.

If you want to live, you start by following the rules - which is to say, accepting your own responsibility in at least the situations where the law makes that explicitly clear.

You probably want to do many other things as well out of recognition that others are imperfect and the reality that it is yourself, not random others, who you can reasonably trust with your life.

But at the very least, you need to follow the laws, and stop trying to blame those who have followed them for the consequences of what happens to those who have violated them.

UniChris

And that is exactly why you don't want to be building segregated routes which send through bicycles on the deadly mistaken curb side of turning traffic!

FBinNY 

It isn't a big or small ask. Life isn't binary, so it's about working within the grey zone. One can design and build safer roads (on a spectrum of comparative safety), but one is also constrained by concept of practicality. And, while safer is both desirable and possible, safe isn't either. The necessary trade offs to achieve "safe" by removing the possibility of "bad choice" are simply too great, and ultimately unworkable, and unacceptable to just about everybody.

It's fine to talk about improvements for the future, but we all live in the world as it is NOW and have to adapt to that reality, because it's the only one there is.