Joe Bikerider

Step vans often have sliding front doors.

Which is why even though Fedex/UPS/Amazon vans are sometimes annoying for their driving at least I know they won’t door me.

livedarklions

Engineering a door handle to be difficult to find and reach doesn't raise huge safety/accessibility issues in your mind? There's a lot of reasons door handles are designed to be a) easy to open, b) easy to locate, and c) not likely to be opened unintentionally. On the other hand, if you figure out a way to make car doors pull rather than push, have at it.

BTW, about 90 % of the parking I do is in lots or on a driveway where passing traffic from behind simply isn't an issue. I don't think that's atypical. Lots of us avoid street parking on crowded streets.

UniChris

These are indeed concerns. Though it's worth noting that many cars can have a simple switch to entirely disable the rear interior door handles out of the latter concern.

Concerns have to be weighed in balance to each other. It may be that "dooring" loses as a concern to "crash escape" - but then we're not talking about lack of a handle as already accepted as a viable rear passenger configuration, but essentially a less "convenient" handle.

It was meant as more of a thought than an end conclusion though.

Plenty of cyclists see parking lots as through routes (with varying degrees of legitimacy), and while most parking lot spaces are perpendicular, more than a few have some parallel spots squeezed in.

Then there's the whole angle parking concern, a configuration commonly seen both in town centers and common in small-medium size lots of professional buildings and the like.

livedarklions

Child locks are switched on or off by the driver who has actual knowledge of who is in the seat and can calculate which risk outweighs the other. You're proposing a design change that is in its essence one size fits all. The fact is that it's probably a bad fit for the vast majority of actual parking situations. SO I think that's a pretty good answer to your title question.

UniChris

LOL, "actual knowledge" - in practice they tend to be set and forget. And guess who's most likely to be incapable after a crash? Yes, the driver.

In practice I've had to ask my several-years-younger brother-in-law to let me out.

livedarklions

Well, in theory anyway. I agree that it's very easy to leave them inappropriately set.
Point is that there's no theoretical reset of a handle position.

Also, no question that it's the risk of the being stuck after a crash, but the calculation is whether it's more likely that the kid is going to open the door while the car is in motion vs. the likelihood of having to get the door open after a crash.

If you want to get formal about the probabilities of the latter, it's actually probability of crash x probability of needing to get the door open after crash x probability that driver can't reset the lock to allow it to open after a crash. That's a pretty small subset,

CliffordK

Or you roll down the window, and reach out and pull the outside door handle, unless the crash disables the widow controls. Or, the vehicle not only has a locking door, but also locking rear window controls.

Mom likes the "Child Lock" while carrying her dog in the back. Probably not completely necessary. But, whenever she carries a passenger, it is usually the first stop before people remember to disable the child lock, although some of us are getting better at remembering being STUCK.
Mom's car has a manual switch that you have to open the door to disable the child lock, so no simply disabling the lock from the front.

I've been in cars that auto-lock the doors when driving, as well as cars that no longer have a pull plunger to unlock the doors. I wonder if we'll reach a point where too many safety features make cars more dangerous.

Well, I've also had a vehicle that auto-locks the doors when you turn the car on to idle, then get out to scrape the frost off the windows. Brrr...

DangerousDanR

I have seen plenty of people who were trapped in their seats. Between the Jaws and a Sawsall they can be extricated. We even made a Mercedes wagon convertible once to get a person out.

The sell will be that this feature is a freebie with the Blindspot warning system and that it can prevent damage to the parked car and injury to the driver. Designing a mechanism that can be opened manually should not be too difficult.

Doors being opened into traffic doesn't just happen to bicycle's. Knowing that this is an optional feature in some markets makes me think that it could be showing up in the USA sometime soon.

I-Like-To-Bike

Given that some people apparently think that open passenger door hazard is a phenomena that only applies to rideshare vehicles, perhaps you should modify your suggested mandate to only apply to cars for used for ride share vehicles.

Leisesturm

I'm just saying ... almost 1,000 people died in just two Boeing aircraft crashes because some wonder software put the planes in fatal dives due to faulty sensors. Deploy complex electronics, or even not so complex electronics, across a wide swath of the vehicle fleet and there WILL be failures. Re-design ergonomics and there WILL be consumer backlash. Boycotts. There is no mandating that people buy the re-designed cars and they mostly won't. Even when (if) re-designed cars hit the roads, the one that kills you won't be one of them. So rather than anxiously await the advent of advanced anti-idiot automation or any AI augmented automobiles affordable to the average mouth breathing cager ... <shrug> check speed in the door zone? Scan adjoining vehicle lanes for escape paths? You know, the stuff you do already?

livedarklions

Wow, thread-hopping troll with a lie about what I said in the other thread. You're true to form.

livedarklions

I tried to reach where you propose to put the handle on with each hand while driving the other day, and I couldn't figure out a position where just leaning a little inward and bending the arm on the latch side was not drastically easier than contorting my body into the "Dutch reach". In other words, every position I could come up with, it was easier to grab a left-side door handle with the left hand than the right--some positions were a little awkward with the left hand, but still much more awkward with the right.. Has anyone actually come up with a design that would make this otherwise?

livedarklions

I vote for fully automated ejection through a trap door in the roof.

Clyde1820

I'm assuming the solution will be something like that.

In my current vehicle, it's got a rear-facing camera and cross-traffic/proximity sensing. It's pretty good at detecting pedestrians who are disregarding of the fact the car's already backing out of the space. And it's (so far) error-free with detecting cross-traffic in parking lots where people are zooming through at unconscionable speeds. It can't seem to distinguish between 5ft off the bumper or 50ft, so it'll pick up normal traffic in the nearby street's nearest lane. But otherwise it's pretty great. That feature ought to be capable of being enhanced alongside the driver's side of the car, rearward-facing from the side-view mirror to pick up oncoming traffic, oncoming cyclists, a pedestrian right there, etc.

Of course, it's already possible for drivers to first visually check and to exit a car responsibly and cautiously, under the assumption there's a nearby risk that'll get someone injured or killed. But most people won't think so clearly about their own responsibilities. I'm pretty good about first checking, if parking on a road where immediately to my left is a bike lane; and I always first check the side-view mirror to ensure I'm not opening the door into oncoming traffic. (Lots of very tight streets where I live, so it's second-nature.) But, still, errors can happen.

Daniel4

The original question is " Why aren't door handles positioned to require "Dutch Reach"?

One can also ask why can't all parallel parking spaces be converted to angled parking?

With angled parking, the only thing being doored is another car. And when a driver is returning to traffic, he/she is forced to turn around to look and therefore will see cyclists, pedestrians as well as other cars.

livedarklions

In theory. I've seen a fair number of drivers skip the turn around a look part. I'm not a fan of angled street parking when I'm riding. We're generally approaching a vehicle on the blind side that's going to back out. I give those rear ends a lot more than a door zone amount of room.

Daniel4

Fair enough but those drivers also risk getting smashed by oncoming cars. Drivers like that are a hazard to everybody no matter how much precaution you take.

livedarklions

As a driver, I'm also not a fan of angled parking. No matter how diligent you are, if there's a car parked to your right, there is no way to see what's coming before you back out.

Iride01 

My car and probably your car beep or ding frantically when using a blinker to change lanes and a car is in that lane close enough to be an issue.

It wouldn't take much imagination to do similar when the door handle is touched and connected to a sensor that can pick out a BSO or other object that is nearby and moving fast enough to be a problem.

Clyde1820

Just today, I was parked along the curbside on a street with very narrow single lanes in each direction. Cars feeding into that lane from three different directions (all signal controlled, at an ugly intersection satan designed in concert with the street engineers). Out of self-preservation, the only choice was to strictly monitor the side-view mirror until all traffic was clear, and then to exit the car quickly in order to avoid the next flow of traffic. Clearly saw no traffic coming, no cyclists coming.

Of course, the likelihood of all drivers doing similarly, in such a parking situation, is nil. Still, it's about the only safe way to do it, to visually confirm via side-view mirror and turning to see. Even then, not fool-proof. But it sure beats blindly opening the door to get whatever you get.

Kat12

So do people who open their doors without looking.

Daniel4

That's why I was suggesting angled parking spaces.

livedarklions

My experience is that if there is anything larger than a very small car parked to your right, there is really no safe way to back out of an angled parking space because your view of what is coming down the street is completely obstructed. Your cure is worse than the disease.

And don't say "park to the left of a small vehicle." You have no control over what vehicle will pull out of and into that space while you're away from your car.

Kat12

Right. You suggested angled parking spaces. LDL said angled-parking drivers don't look, either. You replied that at least they would run the risk of being smashed by oncoming traffic, as if that would cause them to look. And I pointed out that people who open their doors without checking also run the risk of being smashed by oncoming traffic, so clearly this isn't a thing that causes people to check.


Or, sometimes, in which space you get. And if you drive a small car yourself, it's not going to be that much easier for you to see past another small car.

livedarklions

I can say from experience that even a large sedan won't be high enough to see around a SUV.

Yes, you won't get doored riding next to angled parking, but you're a lot more likely to get backed over. I don't believe for a second that's a good safety trade-off.