base2 

Which is why I believe you have never seen proper street design.

Design where there is a protected bike lane subject to conflict points at every driveway entrance is stupid, improper, & like you assert, dangerous.

On properly designed rights of way, there is a 2 lane road right up the center of the right of way. Then a separate curb protected cycling path on either side of the road.

Outboard of that and access limited to once per mid-block is the street that feeds individual city blocks.

This method of design takes no more right of way width, than American design. It separates out the traveling people from the destination people & limits intermodal conflict points to intersections & 1 per block.

Furthermore, the middle road section should have speed humps to slow cars prior to the intersection crossings. At crossings, the road is narrowed visually by converging lines, & often physically by other means.

The intersections & the crossings themselves are at sidewalk level to assert the vehicle is crossing people space. Not the other way around. A vehicle simply must slow down to avoid harm to itself. So there is an imperative to safe operation.

Stoplights are on the near side of major arterial intersections. This ensures that to see the signal, one must stop well short of the intersection & generally before the people space that is crosswalk.

Right turns are not permitted. But that is of little consequence because each flow of traffic is individual & coordinated in real time based on the traffic actually detected. This works fantastic for cars drivers. But also serves all other users with near zero delay as they are prioritized over motor vehicles.

When you get to destinations like apartment blocks, shopping malls, industrial warehouses, factories, or other use, the street is ~8-9 feet per lane, the lanes are brick so there is a transmission of different spacial purpose into the drivers physical senses.

For streets with a design speed of 30kph or less, (above paragraph) no special cycling infrastructure is needed. However, the road is narrowed by a variety of car affecting means until car drivers speed complies with the streets intended use.

This design is actually cheaper to build, & maintain as there is really only road wear in the road section. The bike lanes & unit access streets see very little wear owing to vehicle speed & size.

In an earlier post, I said I had no intention of educating you. Yet, here we are. I wish you good luck & hope that someday, you are able to travel so that you can see the system & design philosophy in use.

UniChris

Finally! We agree that trying to build alongside a road, rather than create de-confliction space as an integral part of it, is destined to fail!

Reality is that simple - either you understand it... or perhaps given the endless ineffectual and irrelevant nonsense mumbling with which you followed that admission of reality, you still do not understand reality at all.

At any rate, those of use who understand how to bike safely are already doing so, and we'd really rather that you took your ignorance elsewhere, rather than insisting on ill-conceived changes that will put our lives at risk in ways we have so far been privileged to avoid.

Why are you so insistent on getting cyclists killed?

Or, if we're going to survive the deadly hazards of your absurd obstacle course, restricting us to a grandmother pace that's untenable in this geography?

At the end of the day, the question is simple - this goes beyond mere ignorance to actual pathology: why do you hate bikes, so much that you insist on destroying biking in precisely the places where it actually works?

Because what this thread has made undeniable is that you are speaking from the perspective of someone who does not know how to use a bicycle.

base2 

Ignore list.

UniChris

Given your ignorance of reality, you should have removed yourself from the conversation long ago, as you had nothing meaningful to say.

Every fact that's surfaced in this discussion has turned out against your false claims: what happened, what the law says, what would be safe, what responsible parents teach their children and need to see years of proof of before letting them venture out alone, and indeed how the desired trip to the pond could have been both safely and legally accomplished.

Those of us who understand how to bike safely will continue doing so, the last thing we need is you pushing for nonsense designs that get people killed.

base2 

You are simply incapable of understanding how 18 million people in an area the about the size of the greater Houston area actually live &/or the design of the systems that make that kind of density work.

Explaining the ways others have avoided the pitfalls & failure of American traffic design to you has fallen on deaf ears.

Imagine: Houston with 10 times the population, no 20 lane freeways, and mostly rural farm land. You say it can't be done. You say I'm in denial of reality. Yet, there it is. The Nederland, Switzerland is doing well. Their bicycle ridership is only "low" because the trains are so good. Copenhagen? Super achievable by American standards. The reinvention of London. It's amazing. It's only an $1800 plane ticket away for you to see & compare/contrast for yourself. Go see what works & what doesn't.

Go see it first hand & in person. 750 million people live in Europe...Surely with 3x the population & 1/3 the per capita pedestrian death rate meaning 1/9th risk...(not even factoring in the fact that nobody walks anywhere in America)...You & you alone must know better than they do about urban planning & street design. You've explained your understanding as much. In summary it is: "Get out tha way." Sorry, I find that lacking.

What I do know is 30 meter wide roads in low density single family zoning begs for high speed car dependent, non-economically viable, wastelands that causes people to be so disconnected from their neighbors that a 2nd grader can be killed by a 6000 pound box & nobody cares to do anything more than stand up for the systems that make it so.

I'll be in Sicily tomorrow. Pardon the travel related delay in responding to your victim blaming incorrect, pro-status-quo nonsense.

himespau 

When I was hit, I was stopped, at a stoplight, just to the right of the left wheel track of the left turn lane where I could be the most visible. The driver behind me suddenly got it in her head that the light had changed when it hadn't (maybe the people in the right turn lane rolled forward a bit out of the corner of her eye, I don't know), and she accelerated through me.

When the cop got there, he decided not to give her a ticket and encouraged me to work with her outside of insurance because she had been a well respected high school history teacher in the community for 30 years before retiring and he didn't want her to have to lose her car if her insurance went up.

No amount of situational awareness was going to protect me in that situation. Sometimes **** just happens, and, when it does, the cops almost always come down on the side of the cagers.

It's not about skill that keeps us safe on the road many times, it's just luck that we're not in a situation with a distracted/bad/drunk/malicious driver. If you've made it 10's to 100's of thousands of miles an years or decades without being hit, some of that may be skill, but a lot of it is luck. When I got hit, that year, I'd put in nearly 3,000 miles on the trainer and probably less than 100 on the road (it was early May). It can happen to anyone at any time. Yes, skill can keep you from running out into the path of moving traffic, but when you're stopped in the middle of a turn lane with nowhere safe to go, there's nothing you can do if someone decides to drive through you. All this argument about, "oh it's my skills that keep me safe no matter the road as long as I ride vehicularly and am aware of my surroundings" just mean you haven't gotten unlucky...yet.

work4bike

So True! I like to think that my skill on the roads and my situational awareness keeps me safe. However, if one is honest with oneself, you have to admit, many times it's simply plain luck that keeps the rubber side down.

UniChris

You exercised good strategy

Now you're making a a gigantic mistake of invalid logic.

Yes, there is a component of random risk in the world - you can do everything right, and be killed in all sorts of random ways.

But that is not a reason not to recognize the huge difference in risk you can create by your behavior.

And it's especially not a justification for going ahead with choices that are not only known to be unsafe, but are also actually illegal.

Yes, you can still end up unlucky - but by riding wisely, with an understanding of how roads work, you can avoid countless traps which ensnare less aware cyclists.

UniChris

When you have 10 times the density, indeed, you have an entirely different transit planning problem! Look at the tiny distances people in the Netherlands are bike commuting, then look at where people in Houston need to go (also, don't forget the summer temperatures). Even more importantly than biking, when you compress things that much, transit works in a way it doesn't in most of the American landscape - and it's actually transit, not bikes, that has mass potential.

But I'm in no way dismissing of the values of being able to access at least some parts of life without a car (I often go weeks between using one myself). That's why I keep trying to steer your attention away from the already wonderfully bikeable residential street, and to how a solution needs to be found to make the (remarkably short in American terms) mile and a half trip to the nearby grocery store or movie theater something people will try. How many times now have I pointed out that it's necessary to widen North Park Drive giving it a shoulder so that cyclists have a space to ride that isn't literally the pavement of one of the two car-wide and heavily car-occupied lanes it has and also turn the disused rail corridor into a path that doesn't interact with cars at all. That's the sort of infrastructure that when done properly can actually start to make an area incrementally bikeable.

But incremental is all you're going to get - we're not going to bulldoze the country and rebuild everything.

You obviously have not bothered to inform yourself by looking at a picture of where this tragedy occurred. The road is somewhere between 35-45 feet wide: feet, not meters - there are more than three feet in a meter. Look at a picture of a car on the road in question, and ask yourself how many you can jam mirror to mirror from curb to curb.

And more importantly, it's an appropriate width, because it means that a driver can pass a cyclist with amply safe room, without needing to cross the center of the roadway in potential conflict with other traffic. Park a car on it as indeed pictures will show people occasionally but not oppressively do when visiting family or friends it would be impractical to reach by any other method, and it gets a little bit tight to be passed exactly were a parked car is, but both parked cars and traffic are sparse enough one can usually avoid having both at the same instant. What I like about riding on a road like that is exactly the de-conflction of its appropriate width - it means I'm not needing to manage constant background conflict in the way I am when I ride a narrower road where I'm trying to create a safe passing opportunity before a driver passes unsafely (typically giving me plenty of space by dangerously and illegally pulling into the opposing lane even where they can't see if there is any oncoming traffic). But even though it has sufficient width for its present usage pattern, it's actually not wide enough to put in that dangerous second set of bicycle sidewalks you want to install. Nevermind that doing so would only re-create the specific danger of crossing between sidewalks that was at actual issue here, it would also make the remaining ordinary lanes narrow enough that those of us who continue to do the safe, efficient, and proper thing of riding in the ordinary lane would now be in much more conflict with drivers - and those would be drivers incensed that we're not using the pretty (but deadly at every intersection) "bike lane".

I'm talking about changes we can make that will help. You are talking about fantasies out of touch with reality of the need - if you look, the places where a bit of your fantasies have been tried here, they were a problematic mistfit that have turned out to be hated by people actually trying to use them to make trips by bike. What experienced cyclists immediately recognize is that physically segregating lanes traps cyclists in the dangerously wrong place at intersections, while giving a false impression of safety precisely where there is the most danger. This child wasn't killed because there isn't a protected network - there is one, and he was using it. He was killed because he did not understand what he needed to do in the gap in that protected network that exists to let cars through. Even for cyclist who are aware of the danger present at teach gap, physical segregation makes it harder to see and be seen by the traffic with which there is potential for conflict. It also makes it hard to avoid out-of-place pedestrians, debris, potholes, and illegal parking - yes, drivers manage to park even in bike lanes walled off by concrete (depressingly often, the people doing it are the police themselves). These designs are falsely sold as making unskilled cyclists safer, but what they actually do is try to trick even skilled cyclists into dangerously assuming that they'll be seen and respected as through traffic. People who actually know how to safely cross paths with cars know that you can't assume that, and instead make a point to be where drivers are already looking for traffic, and to consider the likelihood that we haven't actually been seen - infinitely moreso if we're forced to enter an intersection from a a fundamentally improper lane position.

It is possible to use sidewalk-like infrastructure safely on a bike, but given the very high likelihood of not being seen when outside the travel lanes, to survive doing so, you have to remember that a sidewalk is designed for pedestrians, not cycling movement, and so you have to act like a pedestrian, not a cyclist at every intersection. Instead of getting into the proper position for your intent relative to that of other road users, preserving the potential for conflict right up to the intersection itself means you have to drastically slow there and check before actually entering it. That's not only a terrible slow and frustrating way to cycle any meaningful distance when the existing through routing offered to drivers is so much easier and more enjoyable to bike, it comes right back to the actual failure at issue here: failure to look before crossing the street.

No doubt you'll say that in a civilized country it would be the driver's responsibility to look not the cyclists - but trusting that idea with your life fails for a number of obvious reasons, including realities that a car is far easier to see than a curbside cyclist or a pedestrian, and the basic fact that I care far more about my safety than anyone else does, so I keep my ask to drivers simple - instead of asking them to have 100% perfection in looking for me in an illogical place, I ask them not to hit me when I'm already in the place they're used to looking for threats to their own safety. Most glaringly in the US, you can't change the rules in an obscure minority of the streetscape, while those everywhere else remain in accordance with lifelong habits of using road designs that have correct, rather than insane lane routings. Especially when it's actually the incumbent right of way and lane position rules that are the safest for cyclists. Deeply erroneous laws purporting to assign blame to a driver when a cyclist causes a collision by passing on the wrong side at an unsafe speed end up creating the deadly feeling of entitlement to treat mis-routed bicycles lanes as through routes and do just that - cyclists who don't understand how roads work get into collisions riding into easily recognizable conflict situations more aware cyclists well know to avoid - that kind of misbehavior might unfortunately now be legal, but can never be safe.

As an American cyclist, it's triggering to my collision avoidance to see drivers in Europe pull right up to a piece of occupied cycling infrastructure and stop very close to it, even though the rational mind says that 99.9% of the time those drivers there actually will stop. In the US, when a driver keeps moving right up to an occupied crosswalk, it means that they either haven't seen the pedestrian or intend to violate their right of way. Since in most of the US drivers aren't required to yield to cyclists who want to use crosswalks anyway, cyclists on our protected infrastructure learn to read driver behavior before we even get to the intersection - if an American driver is not yielding to a cyclist while still far away, they're barreling right through. In many situations, that's what they're actually supposed to do relative to a cyclist who isn't already on the road.

The cute but slow and inefficient cycling infrastructure in a place like the Netherlands is a red herring. Adjacent countries without that get nice cycling numbers and low fatality rates, too, despite having far more mixing between cars and bikes on the same roads. It's not the cycling infrastructure - it's the attitude towards cars and driving. An American driver in northern Europe would be a hazard to cyclists there, while a northern European driver would be just fine around cyclists on American roads. And I completely agree with you that reducing the emphasis on cars would be great - but it can't be done in gross ignorance of how on the ground reality forces people to drive even when they neither want or can afford to. Those 13 mph speed limits you keep demanding don't work when people's required trips remain as along as they are.

Before you can get people out of their cars, you need to give them a replacement - either a life with closer destinations, or mass transit that goes where they need to and does so as quickly as a car would, at the hour they need to actually make the trip.

Far from the luxury of the privileged that cars are in Europe, in the US, it's building a life where you don't need a car that is often a consequence of privilege - being able to afford to live walkably or bikeably close to the destinations you need to reach (or at least the transit hubs to them), having the time to make needed trips more slowly, having the flexibility to simply not make trips when the weather is unsuitable - those are the luxuries, while all but the very poorest here have cars because the more desperate your economic situation is, the more you're forced into things that cannot be accomplished in any other way than with a car - take some theoretically transit rich city, and then notice how those with cleaning jobs often have to do so after transit ceases running, and may be coming in from affordable communities well outside its range.

rydabent

The fact is ANY TIME you see a kid on a bike, slow down and be prepared to instantly stop.

UniChris

The fundamental problem with bicycles, is that we can go from being visually occluded by roadside obstacles, to right in the way, far too quickly.

That's why pedestrian style design doesn't work for cycling - only traffic style design actually works.

If cyclists are going to use pedestrian style infrastructure, we have to take care to exercise the same caution as pedestrians - which means not only complying with the law that requires pedestrians not to enter an intersection when there's a vehicle too close to stop, but also remembering that we cyclists are not granted the right of way in situations where pedestrians would be, and finally recognizing that even a pedestrian would not have the right of way in this improper crossing location.

There is a proper place to cross that road, and that place is a bit over 200 feet to the east of where the collision occurred - specifically, the provided pedestrian crossing location coincides with the actual path into the pond.

If someone were trying to reach one of the houses to the west of Gallant Knight, the temptation to cross improperly could be understandable - but this is a case where the provided sidewalk and its crossing curb cuts actually match the user's intent - only the user did something else anyway.

Just got back from a ride on a mix of roads and a little rail trail, and it's a jungle out there, because some follow the law, and others insist on unpredictably going beyond it. Where the trail crosses a road, some drivers know and follow the law and keep going, others precautionarily stop far from it, even when the cyclist has themselves come to an all-but stop far short of the intersection so as to arrive behind when the car would have.

Once on the road and in a proper lane position for a left turn, some drivers proceed normally, others stop to accommodate even though the cyclist hasn't actually signaled one.

Drivers going beyond the law can be helpful, but the flip side is that it all too readily tricks cyclists into expecting something that's not reliably available - and even where the closest driver in question is clearly going beyond the law, one can't assume that all of the others with which there is collision potential will do so as well.

base2 

UniChris
So in re-reading your posts from the Airport here in Munich, I see your frustration. You are stuck on 2 things. 1, being the obvious typo of conflating 20mph with 30kph which is functionally the same speed in real life.
2) SECTION 5. Sections 552.003(a) and (b), Transportation
Code, are amended to read as follows:
(a) The operator of a vehicle shall stop and yield the
right-of-way to a pedestrian crossing a roadway in a crosswalk if:
(1) no traffic control signal is in place or in
operation; and
(2) the pedestrian is:
(A) on the half of the roadway in which the
vehicle is traveling; or
(B) approaching so closely from the opposite half
of the roadway as to be in danger.
(b) Notwithstanding Subsection (a), a pedestrian may not
suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and proceed into a
crosswalk in the path of a vehicle so close that it is impossible
for the vehicle operator to stop and yield.

Yeah, we all get it. The little girl darted out of a speeding car driving an inappropriate speed for a destination street. How fast was the driver going in a 30mph zone to cause fatal injury? The odds of fatality at ~40 mph is ~50/50. That's only 10 over the posted speed which is 10 over an appropriate speed for a street. For scale at about 20mph the odds of fatal injury are less than about 1:10

So let me get you and Texas Law right. It doesn't matter that the driver was being negligent in her command of the vehicle so long as she was negligent enough to not be able to stop when the unexpected happened...It's the kids fault for darting in front of a speeding vehicle, but the drivers fault when going an appropriate speed? That creates a perverse incentive to just drive recklessly fast at all times. Way to go Texas.

The fact that people need their cars at all to participate in society, they need their cars for food & they need their cars for basic essentials of life is not a policy failure? You call it a luxury? I call anything other a failure.

Beyond what distance in the urban planning does the cost of infrastructure exceed the wealth created by said infrastructure? Inside of the bound, smart urban planning builds up, densifies, dedicates transit, gives transit preference & designates right of way. In this model wealth is created & multiplied through a self-reinforcing economic feedback loop. Outside of that bound, it lets the boonies to be non-viable low density land for which a road is the proper use.

I really think you are well intentioned & believe I am seeking a complete tear-down & rebuild of everything. I'm not. I am for steady incremental change that de-prioritizes automobile dependency.

Traffic engineers given no other design requirements will express the values of the design manuals & do so with great priority. The problem is they are also gate-keepers of the information contained in the manuals & arbiters of the execution of the values expressed. It's a self reinforcing loop of road dependency & increasing project scope. This has to stop.

City managers, city planners, city councils...Those in charge of identifying needs, setting priorities, defining goals need to do those things. The engineer then needs to design to those priorities; To be subservient to those whose job it is to manage growth & create a desirable community for people to live in.

The development should not have been in a place where a car was needed in the first place. The hollowed out & blighted core of the city would've been a better place to start. All the poor you say that are dependent on cheap housing to exist would be better served by a high quality of life in a vibrant desirable area that has a lower total cost & generates personal wealth instead of simply generating financial transactions.

I want a safe street. This kid was killed by roads, policy, automobile dependency. The difference is you have "strategy." You shouldn't need "strategy" to negotiate human habitat.

Neither you, or I are traffic engineers. But we are concerned citizens. Have your city council draft a set of product (design) requirements & direct the traffic engineers to design a product (street) that conforms. Iterate & reiterate until the desired result is achieved.

JW Fas

We may see that within a generation but not necessarily out of safety concerns. The cost to buy and fuel motor vehicles is gradually outpacing the average person's ability to do so, particularly when accounting for the recent jump in housing costs. If we don't develop a cheap renewable energy source soon, we will see fewer people driving cars simply because they can't afford them.

UniChris

I didn't "conflate" anything - you posted: "Drivers need to feel unsafe at 20kph"

If you're going to insist on oddly using the metric system in a country which doesn't use it for such purposes, I'm going to read that as you doing so because you have a strong familiarity with those units and so are using them correctly. If you erred in your statement, that's you error, not mine. Was your absurd mention of a 30 meter wide residential street also an error on your part? Because 30 meters is what you wrote.

How many times have I pointed out that is irrelevant because there's no crosswalk there. Not even an unmarked one.

The actual unmarked crosswalk is a bit over 200 feet east, coinciding with the path to the pond the boy was heading for. Since he was already on the sidewalk, correct usage was to make the right turn remaining on the sidewalk, and only leave it in that location opposite the pond path where the curb cut to reach it is.

But even if there were a crosswalk, Texas does not appear to be one of the minority of states in which right of way must be yielded to a cyclist wishing to use one.

And that's most likely, because as you admitted, even a pedestrian is prohibited from entering a crosswalk when there's a vehicle too close to stop. Crosswalks aren't designed for bicycle type movement, so most states wisely do not grant cyclists the right of way at them. We don't actually prohibit riding through a crosswalk the way much of Canada does, but we keep it the cyclists's responsibility to wait for a gap in traffic - on the responsibility to first look for traffic.

You keep trying to imagine driver negligence here, despite having no evidence of it.

Tell me again how someone who actually looks for traffic before entering the road ends up getting hit 13 seconds later?

Even a car going absurdly faster than it should (of which there is no evidence) would have taken that long time to cover the 770 feet from where it rounded the far corner and became visible to someone who actually looked for traffic, to when it reached the collision location.

I'm not denying that it's a problem, what I am pointing out is that it is a fact of reality only changeable in incremental ways.

No read again - I said that being able to exempt oneself from the fact of car dependence is indeed, often a luxury. The housing where you don't need a car is more expensive. The jobs where you don't need to commute or are commuting to locations well served by transit are often the more privileged ones, while many of the least privileged jobs are exactly those which most require driving to reach, due to things like odd hours and inconvenient locations.

Yes, these things are problems sustaining our car dependency - but they are also facts on the ground not changed overnight, but only chipped away at in incremental ways and in trying to build new construction in a better way.

But sadly much of the space where new construction can be built is at distances only the most dedicated road cyclist would contemplate, and often a handful of units here and a handful there which challenges transit as a solution. Near me we have a few "co-housing" developments where everyone cutely leaves their cars in a common long garage shelter and walks and uses a grocery cart to their door - but the reality is that the location of those "innovative" developments means they're fundamentally car dependent. In contrast, the neighborhood of this thread actually is at a location where one could do key non-employment things by bike, if the actual cycling problem of North Park Drive were fixed.

When you reject working to improve the situation within the existing facts, you are indeed being unrealistic and expecting a tear down and rebuild.

I keep trying to turn the discussion of the location where this happened to what would be needed to make relatively reasonable distance trips achievable by bike in a way they aren't - widening North Park Drive with a shoulder, and turning the disused rail line into a shared use path. But no, you want to take the one part of the trip that actually is bikeable, and tear up the neighbourhood street to make it narrow and dangerous and force cyclists to use a frustrating, inconvenient, and fundamentally dangerous second set of sidewalks instead.

At a very fundamental level, you don't understand where the actual challenges to someone who lives there trying to practically use a bike are.

Until you understand the actual challenges, you can't make helpful incremental changes - you'll just keep screaming at clouds about the need to bulldoze it all and start over.

In contrast, I do understand the challenges, because I actually accomplish an American life by bike - I can look at a picture of a street, and categorize it as one that's easily workable, workable in some situations of traffic volume and rider skill but not others, or unworkable (the absolutely critical Northpark Drive connecting falling between those but largely to the unworkable). And I'm focusing on the need to fix the parts that don't work like North Park drive - rather than break the bikeablility of the parts that already have it for those who understand the most basic rule of using a road: look before crossing the street.

base2 

You're right. I did type that. I also corrected that to clarify that I meant 20mph/30kph.

Because the street in front of my house (that is in a school zone) has 2, 30 foot wide lanes with a 3 foot wide sidewalk and an 18 inch strip of grass on either side with an additional 1 foot of city right of way on either side of that. 30+30+3+3+3+2=71 feet. At 4 feet per second a child takes (worst case) around 18 seconds to cross the right of way. Best case of curb to curb is about 15 seconds...& this is in a school zone.

Every place I have ever driven, every intersection is a crosswalk. Either way, it doesn't really matter. If the kid had 13 seconds to look, the driver had 13 seconds to drive a non-lethal speed..

200+200+30(your number btw)=430 feet divide that by a child's pace of 4 feet/second equals ~108 seconds. Nearly 2 minutes at each crossing every single time...just to cross the street. Come on. Get real. No pedestrian or little kid is ever going to do that. The destination is 30/4=5 seconds away.

It does if you'd read the whole law. It excuses doing so too close to react. Giving every driver a free pass.

Crosswalks are designed for human movement. Every time a car crosses a crosswalk, it is crossing people space. To assert otherwise is to disregard the responsibilities of being licensed.

I never said driver negligence. As I've said multiple times, the driver was set up for failure. I've also listed a whole host of reasons why the driver was set up for failure & detailed a bunch of changes to advocate for the child's safety through different street design. This sub is aptly named A&S after all.
Tell me again how a car driving an appropriate speed for a street has enough energy to kill. Roads sure. But a street?

Evidence being a human was killed.It didn't cover 770 feet. That is how long the street is.


Indeed. That's the only way we work back 7 Decades of wrong design & policy with unacceptable unintended consequences.


Great. You've identified why America is a car infested wasteland. Are you going to advocate for change, or not?

I agree.

"New" construction. Meaning government subsidized cheap land. We're broke because typically the Federal Government pays the bulk of the city's cost or the developer builds the street for free & then hands it over to the city for maintenance. This encourages sprawl & a high expansion dependent cash flow for continued solvency. The problem is when each subsequent generation infrastructure comes due for replacement there isn't enough density (tax base) to cover the bill. The inevitable result after a ridiculous amount of debt to limp along a generation or 2 then municipal bankruptcy. The inner city land becomes cheaper when taking into lifetime cost & ultimately builds community wealth through a reinforcing feedback loop. This is what should matter to local government officials interested in actually serving the people in their community.

I am working to get you to understand that this is bigger than a single incident.

Into peoples front yards. Property owners have rights, too...and the rail line should be used. One possible use, as you suggest could be a bike path. It could also be a street car/tram/trolly to move massive amounts of people where they want to go. The question is then: Is there anything at the other end that people would want to go to? If not, what policy needs to change to encourage development there? for cars Not sidewalks, dedicated separate traffic lanes on roads, not streets. On streets, cars travel slow enough there is no danger to cyclists. Roads, by definition are high-speed point-to-point connections between places with few, if any, access points or crossings. On properly designed streets the danger perceived to the driver through proper infrastructure design causes slow & responsible (safe) behavior.

Or, I do absolutely understand that they are too far from anything worthy of biking to, it's too hot, the physical fitness requirements are too high, & the environment is too hostile for any mode other than a car to be viable or feasible for the general public. The solution to that is policy changes if we are to Make America Great Again.

I would love nothing more to re-invent our hollowed out & blighted inner city urban cores with reinvestment guided by 7 decades of lessons learned.

That makes you a truly rare exception. We'll good because North Park Drive is a street designed wide, flat, with no speed calming devices & ample room for driver error & too high of a designed speed standard like a road. Anybody brave enough, to make cycling an integrated part of their lives in our current poorly designed cities also has that "skill."...and anybody using the road, (street in this case) needs to understand the most basic rule of driving: Don't drive cars into people.

(Please excuse any edits. I am in Sicily right now. Although it is a ridiculously dense and crowded with pedestrians & so, so many slow speed cars, no traffic controls, & no sidewalks...Nobody is getting hurt in spite of what looks like chaos. Here, it seems like everybody owns a car. Unlike America, there is understood & respected a basic humanity to all road users in the shared public space. Nobody is entitled to free unfettered use (or abuse) of the publicly owned resource like an American entitled by a green light.)

UniChris

You made that correction only today - after not admitting the error when I quoted what you originally said numerous previous times as an example of the absurdity of your expectation. It seems like you've been posting without actually reading what you're responding to.

Never mind that is your street NOT the street in question, nevermind that sidewalks and grassy margins of the right of way are not space available to drivers, 71 feet is 21.6 meters, not 30 meters as you earlier posted.

This is nothing less than an admission that you haven't a clue about the applicable laws. Because this is very much NOT TRUE. Only some intersections qualify as unmarked crosswalks, and in the north south direction this one does not.

The actual law says it does - a pedestrian crossing where there is not a crosswalk is either breaking the law entirely, or (as in this case) obligated to yield the right of way to vehicles. This is a fact - but your biases prevent you from understanding what the law actually is. The more you deny the reality of what the law says, the more you only prove that you're posting from a position of ignorance.

That would only be true if you believe the child were just standing in the road and not moving. In reality, the primary cause of bike/car crashes at intersections is that the cyclist rapidly moves from a position where they were not visually obvious (if visible at all) into the driver's path. A car proceeding down a 770 foot straightaway is very visible. A cyclist entering the roadway is much less visible.

This is a problem even in spots where it's legal for the cyclist to enter the roadway - but it's an even greater problem is spots like this where they are not supposed to do so, and if they chose to anyway, the law makes it their responsibility to yield to traffic.

Don't forget the stop sign at the end of Gallant Knight applies to the cyclist.

There you go again making up nonsense numbers. You should try riding a bicycle at a mere 4 feet/second - you might barely able to do it, but you'll find it challenging to remain stable, and no, the pictures of the bike as it is being photographed for evidence show it does not have training wheels. I have actual recent experience riding with 8 year old children, and their actually speed tends to be in the range of 8-15 feet per second - amply fast enough to ride into danger if they do not exercise the basic rule: look before crossing the street.

They've been doing that on family rides for years now internalizing it as a behavior, but they're still not allowed to proceed through the rail trail's road intersections until an adult arrives and says it's clear. Putting the observation into words is an intentional part of it too (you'll see that in some job safety requirements sometimes as well - the worker is required to actually announce the findings of a critical check as they make it)

Quote:

430 feet...

Now you're proving that you neither read what I wrote, nor have you looked at a map of the location.

As I've repeatedly explained, the child's destination was the pond, and the proper crossing point is at the very location of the pond path. The boy would have had to travel the 200 odd feet east regardless, the problem is that he should have turned the corner remaining on the sidewalk and walked the eastbound part of his trip before crossing, then crossed at the actual unmarked crosswalk created by the curb cuts opposite the pond path, rather than crossing the street in the wrong place before going east. Had he done so, he'd also have spent a decent fraction of the time it took to cover those 200 feet actually looking in approximately the direction of the approaching car.

On the way home, he could still potentially have flown out of the pond path without looking (which is a problem, remember cyclists don't get the right of way at crosswalks, and even pedestrian's don't get to use them without looking) but this happened on the part of the journey where using the infrastructure correctly would have entirely prevented it - and at no inconvenience, because the official crossing is exactly where he was headed anyway.

The law recognizes that reaction times are a reality. You cannot safe the world against people who fail to follow basic rules. And again, even that is not applicable here, because the boy was not a pedestrian, and even a pedestrian wouldn't be due the right of way in that location, but only in the proper crossing location - the proper crossing location that happened to be located exactly on this route.

You continue to ignore both physical reality and law. Crosswalks are designed for pedestrian movement, and cyclists are not pedestrians - even little child cyclists can easily be too fast to safely use pedestrian crossings, unless they actually act like pedestrians: they have to stop and look for traffic, just like pedestrians do. Doubly so when getting to go in the presence of a car is up to the driver deciding to ignore the law and yield out of turn. I've already mentioned an existing thread here where assuming that a driver was yielding at an improper crossing location got a boy hit, because in fact that driver was forced to stop in traffic due to the presence of rapidly oncoming vehicle blocking another driver's left turn.

Negligence is exactly what you argued in your excessive speed claim against the actual evidence - and here you go doing it again:

You are alleging the driver was driving at an unsafe speed. Driving at an unsafe speed is in fact illegal, regardless of signage that could offer something faster under ideal conditions.

Assuming that the fact that the collision was fatal requires a high speed is an absurd stretch. Have you read the corners report? Pedestrians have been killed when struct by bicyclists moving at fairly median cycling speeds - far more factors than speed are involved. Also take note of where the bicycle ended up.

You make this very stretched argument while ignoring the fact that the driver preparing that sharp turn would have had to limit their speed - even if you want to assume from prejudice that they treated some of the preceding straightaway like a dragstrip, by the time they reached the crash location they'd have had to be moving at a reasonable speed for their own purpose of making the turn.



Where do you think the car came from then? I think it most likely came into view when it rounded the corner 770 feet before the collision location. I can't prove it wasn't parked on the street or came out of a driveway, but such an origin would have actually increased the time it would have been visible to a person actually looking before crossing the street. This continues to suggest that you've not actually taken time to inform yourself of the layout of the location. I made a point to do so before first commenting in this thread, and have continued to discover additional relevant details about it.

You haven't been reading - I've been doing so in every post here:

1. We need to address the parts of otherwise viable bike trips that have particular problems - for example the lack of any deconfliction space on North Park Drive
2. We need to not break cycling with dangerous and discouraging anti-cyclist measures in the places where fortunately it does work. The residential roads in question already have protected infrastructure in the form of a sidewalk, if one is willing to treat every intersection in a sidewalk type routing in the pedestrian manner such routing requires, then one can use the sidewalk - the route is there, but we know from the location of the collision that it was not used properly. In contrast, people actually going American distances on a bike require the efficiency of being able to utilize roads that offer de-confliction space, great sight lines, and intersections that prioritize the through routing. The only way a cyclist gets to potentially enjoy actually being through traffic at an intersection to be in a through lane position on the favored roadway. The solution to the intersection danger of sidewalk cycling demonstrated here is NOT building a second sidewalk for bicycles, nor is it narrowing the roads to force bikes and cars into conflict and remove the sight lines that are so fundamental to safety.
3. How many times did I mention that transit would be even more key before you even acknowledged it one bit?

And of course, I'm actually living a car-independent life. And to a drastically greater degree than even my immediate neighbors - even though we share the same location, it's takes a fair amount of time and strategy to get one person's groceries by bike and takes even more to get a whole family's.

No. Continued development of suburban sprawl is not a result of the government giving away subsidized cheap land. Suburban sprawl is a result of that being the land that's available for developers to purchase, and of everyone wanting their little single family house with a yard and driveway and garage, because that the image they grew up with. I have no desire to mow grass, but just getting a tiny bit of unfinished space to store and maintain my bikes likely means I'll be having to move further out than I'd like.

But even that isn't dominant in current building - actually what's happening is developers are buying up older houses, bulldozing them and building condos that are convenient and have some of the density you want - and sky high price tags - reinforcing the unfortunate fact that walkable location turns out to be an expensive privilege. Even when young adults with privileged careers can afford to live in a close in location, once they have kids they tend to realize that even with two privileged professional incomes they can't afford enough space there to raise a family in the lifestyle the desire, because that close in space is renting at astronomical rates to younger professional singles who have high incomes to spend on their own needs alone.

If you'd actually read my posts or looked at a map, you'd know: the grocery store, movie theater, restaurants etc are at a very bikeable (and for some even walkable) less than two miles to the west, but not currently very reachable because of the narrowness of busy North Park Drive. I'd actually assumed I'd find no useful destinations within five miles, but I actually looked, and that knowledge informed my first post in the thread.

I also pointed out that while that's a location of commerce, is not where most of the people in the neighborhood are going to actually work (what I perhaps didn't explain is that the jobs there would not generally pay enough to afford this housing). The people who live in the area of this tragedy are car commuting to jobs elsewhere, and the people who work in the stores that serve them are car commuting from cheaper housing elsewhere, too.

base2 

UniChris
You know what? You are right. Cars reign supreme. Full speed wide roads for everybody. No limits. Let 'em drive everywhere they want at any speed they want. Bigger is better. More horse power equals more power. Might makes right. The solution to driver safety is bigger bigger more more. Silly pedestrians. Stupid neighborhood. Community? That's just silliness. How dare the public owned infrastructure be used by non-automobiles? Now, outta my way you stupid cyclist. I can't believe you have the nerve to be on MY ROAD! Hey pedestrian! Get in the non-existent sidewalk. I'm important & have places to be.

Eff the children. Eff the neighbors. The only correct solution is a dedicated lane 30 feet wide that lets me drive 60mph to the strip mall parking lot where I can dine & shop in the bright sterile lights & be served by the lower class minimum wage nobodys.

Oh, the city's broke? We'll, it's a good thing they're paying for my road to the countryside where I can truly be free & revel in my riches & righteousness. Suckers. The city sucks, anyway.

Maybe little Billy's parents should've been less stupid & taught their stupid kid to beware of my indifference. I'm not a horrible person. Little Billy just got in the way. It's a good thing too. Another future cyclist has been removed from society. Any infringement of my free travel is an infringement on my freedom. Maybe I'll get a GoFundMe to get my truck fixed. It's a great thing the car dependent voters added a mulligan to the law. They understand the plight us freedom lovers face against the tyranny of the majority. Good people such as myself could really get our cars be hurt by others irresponsibility or attempts at insurance fraud.

Thank Goodness.






JFC. I'm obviously not serious. Have you actually read what people think of us, though? I have read all of these things on various websites. I have been told these things to my face by co-workers after 27 mile commutes, each way, 5 days a week. People are serious when they say those things. It's a shame you are on their side when it comes to infrastructure informing desired behavior in an environment only when it slows cars down because you have an elite "strategy" & above average "skill" & will never be rundown or right hooked by somebody as they use the full engineering safety factor afforded to them. Heaven forbid an entitled motorists forget the power they wield.

You're right. Policy needs to continue to be an ever increasing donut hole of bankrupt high cost infrastructure feeding dead places subsidizing private land developers building low density car dependent isolated developments in the cheapest cow-pasture on the edge of town. It's been good policy so far, right? Car dependency is a drug no society needs to be free of. I mean, how else are we going to ensure the masses are cost $700,000 per person of lost wealth by vehicle ownership over their lifetimes? Why would they use that savings on transit or rent or to live in an interesting place? That's so weird it just can't possibly be true.

Finally. You got the truth out of me. Shucks. It only took 3 pages. All the traffic engineering books & Urban Planning books & Urban3 revenue per acre reports, and YouTube channels like NotJustBikes & CityNerd & The Armchair Urbanist I read/watch were only so I can be a better, more informed jerk on the internet against some guy & his opinion.

I don't know anything. I'm out. You win. I'm an idiot for wanting better & seeking informed solutions from credible sources. That my town is actively engaged in actually implementing the solutions is only coincidence.

UniChris

If you're going to continue to insist on ignoring the facts, and throw up your hands emotionally when called on your falsehoods, then indeed, it's best you leave thread.

There was in fact a sidewalk in this location, but it was misused.

Crossing incorrectly between sidewalks and without looking is known to be dangerous. Doubly so on a bike. That's why they're the worst sort of bike routing - but if someone wants to to stop at each intersection and really look as required, that choice is already already there.

And that width you keep ignorantly demanding to eliminate? That width is exactly what keeps me safe on the bike - because it's precisely what lets me not be fighting the cars for the same space, while still being able to be through traffic and take advantage of the efficiency of the road's design, all while being a mutually visible enough part of the whole traffic flow that I can typically just by a riding a little or slower and changing my position appropriately work out the conflicts between driver's intentions and my own long before even reaching the intersection, rather than having to effectively stop to check and resolve conflict at each one.

These are the things you start to learn when you actually use a bike in practice, rather than just in theory.

base2 

Dude. I already said I agreed with you. You made your case. It took me a while. But, you convinced me. Per Texas Law the child's death is perfectly acceptable & justified.

Human persons must break the law & scurry like animals to cross the street. That's how we do freedom, here. Whatever was I thinking?

All my talk about how tearing down a blighted urban lot & replacing/densifying it with say 4, $100,000 dollar units for a taxable land value of $400,000 to the city at a significantly lower personal cost (1/3rd) & no car dependency overhead; An interesting vibrant place with lots of human interaction, culture & no life threatening risk to residents..All that pales to your assertion that a single structure of $300,000 on the edge of town, massive car dependency bills, at great individual personal cost (3x) and not enough tax base to cover the infrastructure when the replacement bills come due is somehow the cheaper option. Man, I offered a whole lot of wasted breath. I apologize.

My efforts to strive for a city where killed children and crashed cars are not a necessary and acceptable consequence of car dependency caused by poor policy are obviously mis-guided and wrong. The math of financial solvency recreating a world where childrens death is unacceptable doesn't work because you said so. I am wrong & I now believe you.

I mean: Why would a city manager forgo a dense urban lot with 25% more taxable value when he can have a lot with 30% lower value and negative cash flow, great individual tax payer obligation & high cost infrastructure that sets people (SUV drivers) up for failure? It's a win-win if the city manager wants to keep the population disempowered & to cater to developers with someone else's money, right?

...And you're right. We need lots & lots of high speed wide multi lane straight roads with incredibly high design speeds to encourage as many drivers as possible to pass you at the highest possible speed while you enjoy your child's toy in the cars dedicated space. That's the only way to be safe. No, no. Not a lane for you. You don't like those. A super fast lane for cars with enough room to go around.

It's so simple.
Thank you for being patient & educating me.

UniChris

No, you wrote those words but you did not mean them - in reality you continued to ignore the facts and make false claims based in emotion rather than reality.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It is entirely unjustified - because the actual laws of behavior taught to every child are sufficient to prevent it.

And families don't let children navigate the world alone until they've demonstrated a multi-year track record of obeying those rules.

The kid was headed to a pond - ponds are dangerous too, should we fill it in? Or should we supervise children as they learn about the world?

There are no walkable/bikeable $100,000 units. They just... don't exist. Even "affordable" housing costs more than that - actually, it tends to be priced out of reach of the people who could meet its income limitations.

And private development of parcels that actually are convenient to things of course focuses on maximizing profits, which means high prices even for spaces cheek-by-jowl with neighbors.

In fact, such housing that actually does exist is cheaper than close in units that go for a fair fraction of a million dollars. But what was a fairly $250K house five miles up a narrow road I'll happily bike on a nice day but would not enjoy at night is now a $320K one, because demand exceeds supply.

It happens I'm house hunting for a space where I can live and actually wrench on my bikes, which means I'm intimately familiar with the reality of housing prices.

base2 

What you are looking for is known as "missing middle" housing. It doesn't exist because misguided city councils don't (or well at least didn't) understand the concept of a "walk shed" whereby all land area within about 5-10 minutes walk was to be up zoned to provide the greatest possible transition between low-density single family housing & high density urban housing at the transit stop. Instead, they only "upzoned" the city blocks directly adjacent to the transit station.
The obvious failure to this is with the desire for walkable neighborhoods & dense spaces so ridiculously high, 20-30 story condominium towers are the only structures profit motivated developers are willing to build. It was a classic misjudge of market demand by local councils. Breaking from the way things are done Carrie's a lot of risk. The councils were too cautious, too timid, too safe. Now it is too late for the likes of Vancouver & Toronto. Else they'll crash condo tower demand for decades to come.

This is also a policy failure in the other extreme.

Come to my town just North of Seattle. My city council has twice now rejected 2 different 12 story towers from 2 different developers owning the same plot of land (It sold more than once) 5 minutes from the transit center & light rail station.

The city council has smartly upzoned everything in the walk shed to no more than 5 stories. Built both a bicycle gutter & a multi use path to the transit station. Made a lot of traffic calming changes. Upzoned Main street to allow 3 story mixed use commercial development. Eliminated set back & parking requirements. To encourage a diverse middle ground catering to all income levels. $350-400,000 single family houses are being ripped out left & right only to be replaced with 8-16 unit condominiums with 1car garages accessible only via a narrow common 1 car wide driveway at an alarming pace.

People want this. 10 years ago there was never any pedestrians on my street 15 minutes from all the action, if ever there was a place action could be said to be had. Now, there are too many pedestrians to count & the sidewalk cafes, the owner/operator restaurants are abundant & overflowing.

Alternatively, you can petition your city council to make the same changes.

Anyway, I didn't mean to be emotionally frustrated & turn flippant with you. I genuinely lost my patience. There is a book called: Thinking Fast & Thinking Slow. Perhaps I should recommit myself to learning the lessons contained therein.

Cheers,
Base2

UniChris

Uh, nope. It doesn't exist because that land is worth too much.

Upzone it, and you see either demolish and rebuild units that developers can profit from, which are premium - a fair chunk of a million each, maybe more... for a condo.

Maybe in a very large project you get a handful of set-asides as allegedly affordable, but that's very pricey units that only match their very low income limitations at an extreme stretch of the mortgage concept that's basically paying rent to a bank.

Or infill rentals between the existing housing stock which are great for young professionals with high incomes, but don't really work for families or to build ownership-based neighborhood stability, and instead only perpetuate high rents.

Walkable / bikeable distances aren't worth a small fortune, they're worth a large one.

GamblerGORD53

I don't know why you 2 guys are nattering on and on in this thread. The neighborhood in question here is EXACTLY like ALL the new streets in almost ANY city in America. All with front garages that are patently unsafe and UGLY. Even worse in winter with no place for snow. Nothing is straight, connected, walkable or bike/ bus friendly. Neither are they set up to accommodate small businesses, except in malls. These loopy NIMBY streets FORCE you onto the few thruways to get anywhere else, and not many ways out of these corn mazes. You need to go 3 miles to go to the next crescent in many cases.
Here they do come with MUP sidewalks and paths on all new layouts.

UniChris

Eye of the beholder, I'd covet one of those garages to store and work on my bikes. The lack of that sort of unfinished space is exactly what's wrong with where I am now, and while I'll ultimately have to move to an at least sometimes car-using distance.

We'll, it's Texas. But actually there is space just as there is in northern cities, between the road and the sidewalk.

Many would argue that not using neighborhood streets for through traffic is a big plus. Not wanting to live on the route of someone else's commute is a fairly legitimate form of NIMBY.

People who live in places like this want their own little bit of a street to be quiet, but when they have to go through miles of other people's little bit of a street, that's just their frustrating through route, not their quite little neighborhood. The kinds of low speeds being proposed only work the for hyper local. This isn't the sort of road that only services a dozen houses where people know each other, this is still a substantial chunk of someone's car trip from their home to the closest anywhere.

But yes, in this location the road you'd need to use to get anywhere (including the mile and a half to major shopping, restaurants, movies, etc.) isn't very bike friendly, because it's too narrow to have any space to be safely passed.

This location HAD a sidewalk that was being used as a bike route. And it has paths away from the roads into places like the pond.

The problem is that the provided path layout wasn't used correctly - even though the proper crossing exactly accommodated the user's intent, they crossed in the wrong place instead.

Building a second sidewalk for bikes won't fix misuse of the road interactions of the first - all it will actually do is frustrate cyclists who ride on the road for safety and efficiency - because the real danger - as shown here - comes from having to cross roads when not already on them, not from operating on the road properly.

For those who are willing to exercise actual pedestrian habits at sidewalk crossings, the sidewalk option is already there as a fact on the ground.

But so is the roadway width that's absolutely key to safe and efficient cycling for those of us trying to actually go somewhere - we get to use the benefits of the road network, but the ample passing room means we get to do it without having drivers stuck on our tail or passing unsafely when there isn't enough room.

The change that's needed is to fix the connector roads like North Park that don't have that critical deconfliciton width, and to build something for those who'd rather take an indirect route that avoids cars entirely - converting the disused rail corridor to trail.

One of the things that's becoming clear in all of this is that those who consider cycling from an armchair perspective are afraid of the speed of cars, but those of us who actually go out and do it find that's not really the issue - it's lack of safe passing width that causes most of our problems on existing roads. And we find that to have anything approaching a safe, efficient, and enjoyable ride we need to be able to use the same options offered to drivers at each intersection - being special-cased at intersections just creates a dangerous and frustratingly stop and go trip that's only warranted to avoid the the busiest roads.

The bike infrastructure that's actually useful is that which routes around whole chunks of traffic, and goes a mile or more between the road crossings where it always ends up disadvantaged.

If you're going to build an optional and fundamentally dangerous sidewalk like routing, you need to make users aware of how dangerous each of those intersections fundamentally is unless used with pedestrian caution (the obvious lesson of this tragedy) and you need to not do it by taking away the width of the roads themselves that's what's actually key to cycling anywhere in a safe, efficient, and enjoyable manner.

And't don't forget that a substantial and growing part of the "bike" uptake in such an environment consists of throttle electric things that go 20-25 mph or more and have as much in common with motorcycles as they do with bikes - sidewalk-style misrouting of those at intersections is not just dangerous but deadly. There's a fundamental failure to think among so-called advocates who both argue that electric is part of the solution, and insist on building intersections that only work for pedestrian movement, not not even child-on-a-pedal-bike speeds.