PedestrianError :vbus: :nblvt:

@DrunkEngineer A normal company fires its CEO and cleans house after something like that. Instead Tesla just offered him a big new compensation package to encourage him to stay and keep destroying their reputation and any shred of morality they may claim to have.

@VinesNFluff @A_Random_Idiot Yup, and yet the US and its consulting firms desperately try to export this failure to other countries and expect to be paid for their “expertise” in how to destroy cities.

@Cypher @Hawke So if you were to lose your vision or develop epilepsy tomorrow, you would prefer to be dependent on family, friends, or personal servants to drive you everywhere rather than having options of accessible trains and buses and being able to walk to nearby destinations safely?

@TheTechnician27 @Vittelius Why bother vandalizing something that’s just going to fall apart on its own within a few weeks or months?

@x00z @talzag Traffic engineers often consider themselves much more expert than they actually are on a lot of things and their traditional methods of setting speed limits are little more than astrology which all but ignore the needs of non-car road users, but if there’s one group less expert than traffic engineers on safe driving speed, it’s cops.

@NarrativeBear @lnxtx No, people have a right to use legally owned weapons in self-defense, so a driver has no right to drive recklessly and endanger random people and can only use their car as a weapon if their life is in imminent danger from someone else’s assault, such as a pedestrian standing in front of their car firing a gun at them.

@FireRetardant @LifeInMultipleChoice If you have to drive regularly you should also write to your local politicians that your needs are not being met safely because it’s too difficult for you to travel in ways that are safer and more efficient.

@huginn @vividspecter It’s not like the potential for another Trump administration wasn’t foreseeable. Hochul and her allies should have considered that and Pete Buttigieg and others at USDOT should have reminded them. Then again, when I started urban planning school in 2005, the potential for congestion pricing in New York was the talk of the town so it’s not like these centrist cowards are the first to delay it.

@beefbot @TheTechnician27 Firetrucks are inanimate objects. Humans make decisions about how to design, deploy, market, and accommodate them. A local fire chief just parroting industry dogma may be less responsible than someone with more power who chose not to sell reasonably sized fire trucks for suburbs and small towns in the US, but the trucks aren’t buying themselves or testifying against safe street designs at the planning board.

@SqueakyBeaver @ji17br Funny how such items enter chats a lot more frequently than they enter the bed of the typical suburban driver’s pickup truck.

@apfelwoiSchoppen @ByteOnBikes Active voice would be, “A driver killed…”

@mondoman712 @zelifcam If we’re going to blame people for using badly designed roads, why don’t we ever blame motorists for that?

@li10 @mondoman712 All the driving video games made driving feel like playing a video game. I grew up playing games like Simpsons Road Rage and Crazy Taxi because I wasn’t allowed to have first person shooter games. All that did was normalize violence of a kind a kid raised by middle class suburban liberals was a lot more likely to commit.

@fruitycoder @Leviathan Not as harrowing as being stuck in a traffic jam with reckless monster truck drivers trying to weave through the traffic at high speed while livestreaming on Facebook.

@Leviathan @DrunkEngineer The American political class lives primarily in car-oriented suburbs and those who live in cities are so rich they can afford to use a car even where it’s woefully inefficient. Our urban policy is run by suburbanites who white flighted out of the cities last century through various state, federal, and local mechanisms (like MPOs) and even city politicians live in fear of the mythical stroad-loving suburban swing voter.

@jabathekek @Flax_vert “preserving acceptable facility operation” = continue killing & injuring the same number of people we currently are, or increasing it a bit since there will be more people driving on the expanded facility

@Kaboom @Max_P Do you really think that car-centric two hour cities in which a typical grocery shopping trip involves sitting in a traffic jam aren’t already enshittified?

@Humanius @praise_idleness That and shared car ownership is an important part of the picture. When everybody owns a private car, everyone has taken on the sunk costs of ownership and feels an urge to drive more to justify it, plus cars dominate the landscape. Having to walk a few blocks to pick up a Zipcar and then pay a rate that to some degree reflects the cost of the trip significantly reduce discretionary driving by those who can walk/bike/use transit.

@FireRetardant @Zoot In fact, narrowing roads and reducing speeding makes it easier for seniors to keep driving as their vision and reaction time decline. Older drivers tend not to feel very comfortable driving on 5 or 6 lane wide stroads.

@FatLegTed @DrCake When I went to driver’s ed, the instructors repeatedly reminded us that we had to be prepared to stop at any time because the driver in front of us could brake for a squirrel or encounter debris in the road or stop for any reason. Most drivers don’t seem to understand the basic physics that stopping distance increases with speed. A key feature of driver assistance systems should be speed-based tailgating prevention.