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nonitalic t1_ivamavt wrote

Reply to comment by broke_cap in Cambridge City Council to consider citywide ban on ‘turning on red’ by superfakesuperfake

  1. Drivers turning right during the leading pedestrian interval. LPI is far less effective at increasing safety where right on red is allowed.
  2. Pedestrian scrambles/all walk phases, as mentioned.
  3. Drivers failing to yield to pedestrians who are crossing the right turn lane.
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ThePremiumOrange t1_ivb46k2 wrote

Right turn on red isn’t just “go on red”. It means you are allowed to turn right if you have a clear turn without interfering with someone else’s right of way.

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CriticalTransit t1_ivc5ols wrote

That’s not how it’s practiced though. Cars roll right up into the crosswalk and get in everyone’s way.

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coweatman t1_ivffbjc wrote

that's an enforcement issue.

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CriticalTransit t1_ivgboaq wrote

Good luck with that. We don’t do much traffic enforcement here. The city has explicitly focused on street design and regulations in place of enforcement. I think both are important. What we also need to do is move the traffic signals back to the stop line so that cars can’t see it if they go past it and into the crosswalk. That’s standard in Europe.

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ThePremiumOrange t1_ivdaepc wrote

Bikers don’t stop at red or stay in their bikes lanes and they’ve got earbuds in both ears. Pedestrians jaywalk. Plenty of examples of things not working in practice but right turn on red atleast allows smooth flow of traffic.

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CriticalTransit t1_ivgbyee wrote

No it doesn’t allow smoother traffic. They just cut off the car going straight and there’s still a big line. Or they can’t go anywhere so they just block the crosswalk. P.s. a lot of bike lanes are dangerous so yes sometimes people can’t use them. Every biker I’ve ever known wishes they could use the bike lanes all the time.

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crazicus t1_ivy9zu4 wrote

It’s fully legal to ride a bike in a travel lane, even when a bike lane exists.

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nonitalic t1_ivdgydr wrote

There are a large number of drivers who would never blatantly run a red light, but who routinely fail to yield to pedestrians. Drivers legally have to stop for pedestrians at all crosswalks, but how often does that happen? Studies show less than half the time.

Banning right on red turns "failing to yield" into "running a red light". That's why it makes people safer.

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ThePremiumOrange t1_ivdh7kx wrote

Don’t just say “studies” without citing them.

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slimeyamerican t1_ivbj745 wrote

This is one of the big problems with this argument. Right on red is only unsafe if people are driving badly and failing to check their mirrors/blind spot before turning. It’s true that people will always drive badly to some degree, but it’s not clear what the limits of that line of reasoning are. Cars are dangerous-we accept this because of the level of convenience they afford. You decrease their convenience, then you decrease their danger, yes, but at a certain point you’re just preventing them from carrying out their function. I feel like the priority ought to be on finding ways to improve people’s driving ability, because at least in Cambridge it’s often pretty scary (source: I drive a truck around Cambridge most days of the week).

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IntelligentCicada363 t1_ivbwqw5 wrote

Saying people accept it is a bit extreme. 40,000 people die every year in the US and over 1 million are sent to the hospital. My mom was rear ended (she was in a car) over a decade ago by a car going 30mph and had neck pain that lasts to this day from the whiplash.

Their convenience inside a dense city like Cambridge is questionable at best.

Finally, I appreciate that you are proposing a solution, but I don’t see any plausible way that is going to happen. Everything in our society follows a bell curve — and driving is no different. There is always going to be shitty drivers and in a city that means there are hundreds or thousands of shitty drivers.

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slimeyamerican t1_ivc5luy wrote

I’m all about sustainability and the desire to make neighborhoods more livable, but the idea that cars aren’t still needed in a place like Cambridge requires a pretty extreme ignorance of what many people’s daily lives are like. Setting aside contractors and the need for trucks to get in and out to make deliveries, it’s also just the case that many of the people who work in the Cambridge area don’t live there or anywhere near it, because we can’t afford to. There’s lots of demand for manual labor of various kinds in the city, but nobody seems to consider that if those laborers want to be able to afford a family and a house, that requires moving 25+ miles away, and a schedule that totally rules out relying on the commuter rail. I grew up in Somerville and I work as an arborist out of Malden-most of our clients are in Cambridge. If I ever want to buy a house in the MA area, I’ll be forced to do what basically everyone else at my company has done past a certain age: move to NH or RI and commute every day. I’m fairly confident the same can be said for quite a few people who work in Cambridge. That’s obviously a broader problem and not one that can be solved at the municipal level, but at any rate I suppose that’s why I suspect this will remain an ongoing problem for the rest of our lives, or at least so long as Cambridge is a desirable and thereby unaffordable area and cars don’t fly.

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IntelligentCicada363 t1_ivycry5 wrote

Honest to god I appreciate what you are saying and how it affects you, but then you are only for sustainability and livable neighborhoods in theory and not in practice.

You mention multiple times that you want to buy a house, which I presume means a SFH. That is a choice that you make, but inherently imposes your car and its associated pollution and deadliness on the population of the city whose housing isn't acceptable and/or affordable to you. This is a systemic problem over the entire region -- and fighting Cambridge over making its municipal roads safer for its local residents isn't the way to change things.

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slimeyamerican t1_ivze841 wrote

Assuming you’re actually responding to my comment and not the general noises you perceive me making, you’re not talking about making municipal roads safer, you’re talking about completely eliminating cars and trucks lol. Not only would that destroy Cambridge’s economy, it would remove the livelihoods of everyone who depends on those roads to make a living. I get the problem, but part of living in a complex society is compromise.

I’m not only for sustainability and livable neighborhoods in theory; the problem is always one of implementation in a complex and multifaceted reality in which things are already operating a certain way. If what you really mean is I’m only for sustainability and livable neighborhoods for overpaid tech workers and college students, and not for anybody who’s been priced out of the area by said people, then no, I’m not even for that in theory, nor should you be. It stuns me how quickly self-proclaimed progressive people will all but tell working class folks to go fuck themselves as soon as tolerating their existence becomes even slightly inconvenient. If one wanted to reduce cars, the answer is not merely changing infrastructure-you have to totally restructure the economy such that those cars aren’t necessary, not just pretend they’re already unnecessary and willfully ignore anyone for whom that isn’t already true. This is sort of like trying to end police violence by defunding or disbanding police departments without doing any of the other things necessary to prevent the obvious bad consequences of taking such a step. Changes like these aren’t simple, and trying to skip to the end goal from day one always results in disaster.

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crazicus t1_ivyacg8 wrote

Cars became king decades before RTOR was allowed nationwide. Removing RTOR in an extremely dense city for pedestrian safety makes sense, and if that alone can make driving not worth it, I’d argue it already wasn’t.

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