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Any interest in separating Advocacy from Safety?

Old 12-13-21, 04:31 PM
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Korina
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Any interest in separating Advocacy from Safety?

Hi all. A&S is just a litany of crashes, deaths, and armchair quarterbacking, and I fear an Advocacy thread would get lost in the mire. I've been doing a lot of reading, watching, and listening lately, and I'm even on my city's Transportation Safety Committee (not as glamorous as it sounds), and I would love to talk with other people who are interested and/or involved in cycling advocacy. Is anyone else interested in starting a separate Advocacy forum or at least sub-forum? Thanks.

Here's a partial list of some of the things I've found interesting:
The War on Cars podcast
Walkable City Rules by Jeff Speck (I'm finally reading the first book, Walkable City.)
Copenhagenize by Mikael Colville-Andersen
Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles Mahron
And some YouTube channels:
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Old 12-13-21, 05:51 PM
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don't advocacy and safety go hand in hand? i'm not knocking your idea or concerns. i just don't see the admin's seperating the two. of couse, i'm not an admin so i can't speak for their ideas on it.
have you tried starting a discussion the A/S forum about your misgivings? i understand where you're coming from about it. safety discussions can get very, very heated.
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Old 12-13-21, 07:27 PM
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^^^Obviously has never participated in the A&S festivities.
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Old 12-13-21, 07:32 PM
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My personal favorite (probably just because the Peter Gunn soundtrack)

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Old 12-13-21, 08:59 PM
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Originally Posted by thook
don't advocacy and safety go hand in hand? i'm not knocking your idea or concerns. i just don't see the admin's seperating the two. of couse, i'm not an admin so i can't speak for their ideas on it.
have you tried starting a discussion the A/S forum about your misgivings? i understand where you're coming from about it. safety discussions can get very, very heated.
Like I said, A&S isn't really about advocacy or safety; it's more a blame game. The denizens seem happy with it as it is, so I thought it would be better to separate the two.
Originally Posted by ahsposo
My personal favorite (probably just because the Peter Gunn soundtrack)

https://youtu.be/znhXVVCkZ2I
Canada is better, as usual. And Peter Gunn is always good.

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Old 12-13-21, 09:26 PM
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Originally Posted by ahsposo
^^^Obviously has never participated in the A&S festivities.
Lol...oh, I've dipped my toes in the pool....and gotten them swiftly bitten.
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Old 12-14-21, 10:20 AM
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Originally Posted by Korina
Hi all. A&S is just a litany of crashes, deaths, and armchair quarterbacking, and I fear an Advocacy thread would get lost in the mire. I've been doing a lot of reading, watching, and listening lately, and I'm even on my city's Transportation Safety Committee (not as glamorous as it sounds), and I would love to talk with other people who are interested and/or involved in cycling advocacy. Is anyone else interested in starting a separate Advocacy forum or at least sub-forum? Thanks.

Here's a partial list of some of the things I've found interesting:
The War on Cars podcast
Walkable City Rules by Jeff Speck (I'm finally reading the first book, Walkable City.)
Copenhagenize by Mikael Colville-Andersen
Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles Mahron
And some YouTube channels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJkzX6sy6sE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM&t=3s
That's a good list. I'm also a fan of The War on Cars, but I'm way behind.* That Stroads video is excellent, I watched it and its whole playlist a few weeks ago because somebody posted it in another thread.

I was in Baltimore last week, and I noticed that quite a few intersections had soft bumpouts on the corners (paint, and 4ft white plastic bollards), and I liked how they increased driver awareness (or at least my awareness) to watch for cyclists and pedestrians.

* TMI: I wrote my own podcast-downloading tool in Perl (called plodder.pl of course), and it doesn't work with War on Cars, something about their website security setup rejects my wget requests because I guess I look like a bot. So I have to remember to go check for new episodes and download them manually, and I always forget to remember)
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Old 12-14-21, 10:29 AM
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Thread moved from Foo to Forum Suggestions.
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Old 12-14-21, 12:48 PM
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Originally Posted by cb400bill
Thread moved from Foo to Forum Suggestions.
Thanks Bill; I didn't know this forum existed.
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Old 12-14-21, 04:03 PM
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As Advocacy & Safety is one of our smaller forums already, I don't know that splitting it up is necessarily the answer
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Old 12-14-21, 04:22 PM
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Originally Posted by IBJoel
As Advocacy & Safety is one of our smaller forums already, I don't know that splitting it up is necessarily the answer
Plus members will likely post similar things in both without distinguishing.
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Old 12-14-21, 05:43 PM
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Originally Posted by IBJoel
As Advocacy & Safety is one of our smaller forums already, I don't know that splitting it up is necessarily the answer
That's probably because it takes a particular mindset to do what they do. I don't know if there are that many people wanting to talk about advocacy either; hence this thread. I just hope they find it.
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Old 12-14-21, 05:53 PM
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Originally Posted by Korina
Hi all. A&S is just a litany of crashes, deaths, and armchair quarterbacking...
Maybe we need a "something bad happened to me and I need attention" subforum.
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Old 12-28-21, 01:25 PM
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Originally Posted by IBJoel
As Advocacy & Safety is one of our smaller forums already, I don't know that splitting it up is necessarily the answer
Originally Posted by StanSeven
Plus members will likely post similar things in both without distinguishing.
Originally Posted by Korina
That's probably because it takes a particular mindset to do what they do. I don't know if there are that many people wanting to talk about advocacy either; hence this thread. I just hope they find it.
Originally Posted by bbbean
Maybe we need a "something bad happened to me and I need attention" subforum.

Maybe the way to save A&S is to go the other direction--stick all the crash dissections, which are clearly the worst the forum has to offer and, for me, by far the most off-putting things people post, into their own sticky thread (like the helmet thread), or their own subforum (like VC). Either way, that strategy seems to tamp down these repetitive fights that clearly alienate people from discussing anything constructive.

To me, advocacy AND safety are really more about structural issues rather than people's individual riding habits. Right now, the way the forum is structured, it's just a bunch of people arguing that "other people get hurt because they don't ride like I do".

I lied a little bit there, there's another bunch of people who argue that every bad thing in the world can be attributed to a driver using a cell phone. Maybe cell phones can get their own sticky complaint thread.

Last edited by livedarklions; 12-28-21 at 01:29 PM.
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Old 12-28-21, 01:31 PM
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Originally Posted by bbbean
Maybe we need a "something bad happened to me and I need attention" subforum.

Actually, it's usually "something bad happened to you (or someone else) and I need attention. Worship my wisdom, goldarn it!"
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Old 12-28-21, 02:25 PM
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We could have a peeing up a rope thread.

I had to take a defensive driving class many moons ago.

One of the first things the instructor asked was "who's fault do you think it is if you are hit by a driver running a red light when you have a green light?"

Everybody said it was the red light runner and we were all wrong.

The instructor explained that you bear some responsibility regardless of fault, all crashes are preventable to some degree and you can have a lot to do with it.

Having ridden motorcycles and bicycles most of my life I take this into account at all times, fault and blame may not or can't get you out of the wheelchair, bed or grave no matter how much $$$ you or your people get.

I have been plenty lucky many times when I was paying attention and avoided a potential problem by avoiding it all together having seen it coming before hand.

It never hurts to check the intersection for the red light runner before you proceed on the green.

Just my 2c, YMMV.
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Old 12-28-21, 03:17 PM
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And another thing, lights, cameras, front and rear, helmet and GPS 24/7, period.

Again, just my 2c, YMMV.
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Old 12-29-21, 08:14 AM
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Originally Posted by merziac
We could have a peeing up a rope thread.

I had to take a defensive driving class many moons ago.

One of the first things the instructor asked was "who's fault do you think it is if you are hit by a driver running a red light when you have a green light?"

Everybody said it was the red light runner and we were all wrong.

The instructor explained that you bear some responsibility regardless of fault, all crashes are preventable to some degree and you can have a lot to do with it.

Having ridden motorcycles and bicycles most of my life I take this into account at all times, fault and blame may not or can't get you out of the wheelchair, bed or grave no matter how much $$$ you or your people get.

I have been plenty lucky many times when I was paying attention and avoided a potential problem by avoiding it all together having seen it coming before hand.

It never hurts to check the intersection for the red light runner before you proceed on the green.

Just my 2c, YMMV.

My 2c is that this is just the kind of thing the A&S always degenerates into. Everything is looked at in terms of "fault" and "individual responsibility", and people lecturing other people about how they are more situationally aware than the person who got hit. Sorry, but that little anecdote about the red light runner is meaningless and not useful. I can think of literally dozens of scenarios where your checking of whether there's a red light runner before entering the intersection would not protect you. I remember one video where the driver actually changed lanes to avoid the car that was properly stopped in the lane and plowed right into the crosswalk on a red light, hitting a pedestrian. Other than never crossing the street, I don't see how there's any way to avoid that driver. The problem with A&S is that we'd now have this completely pointless argument instead of talking about structural things that might be done to a) stop the light-running behavior (except that someone will always say "banning cell phones") and b) protect cyclists from light-runners. Instead, everything ALWAYS degenerates into a debate about "how I would have handled the situation " and/or arguments about what actually happened based on hair-splitting parsings of generally vague news stories and poor-quality videos. Then comes the debaters who always want it to be the cyclist's fault and those who want it to be the fault of the driver (which contains a subset of people who will claim it's the fault of a driver on a cell phone no matter what the scenario).

I share OP's frustration with A&S because the forum just screams of lost opportunity and counter-productive fear mongering. "Advocacy" isn't JUST about safety (although there's a big overlap), it's about promoting bicycling. I have to say that if I had stumbled on A&S as I was considering whether to take up cycling, I probably wouldn't have taken up cycling. Unless something is changed, I think the best thing that BF could do for cycling advocacy might be to discontinue the forum entirely (I believe that isn't possible contractually, if I recall, hence the "ghosted" COVID forum).

I don't want to sound too harsh towards you, but seriously, literally everyone knows you need to be aware of your situation when you're riding, it's not anything people need to be told. The problems are that human perceptual capacities are limited and that everything seems obvious in hindsight.

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