I bob my head side to side when making turns, and even then I'm surprised how well those pillars are able to hide people.
Also FWIW in one of the news articles there the driver in the right most lane is quoted as saying they waved to the pedestrians to go. This was likely a contributing cause too, as people have a tendency to process "go ahead" from one party as if it reflects the whole situation. I've seen many near/crashes due to this phenomenon. (The pedestrians had the right of way and obviously they shouldn't have had to dodge oncoming traffic, but it would have helped)
When I’m driving in the US, I feel like the roads are somewhat naked in comparison.
When I went to Berkeley roads felt weirdly wide to me, and I could never put my finger on why. They just felt a lot less safe to cross than back home.
It took me a while after getting back to realize the big difference is islands. They're everywhere in France, and I haven't seen any in the Bay Area.
There's no case where you can blindly turn at an intersection just because you have a green light.
I get what the author is saying in terms of bad intersection design, but ffs bad design does not absolve the driver of responsibility for what they are required to do at every intersection. If you are making a turn, and you can't see that the crossing is clear you slow down. If you can't see it because of a neighboring car, you slow down. If you can't see it because of the weather or time of day, you slow down. If you are turning, and you do not have a green arrow in the direction of your turn you do not have right of way.
In the UK, zebra crossings (pedestrian crossings not protected by traffic lights) have two features which help make them safe:
1. Flashing orange lamps, which allow a driver to see the crossing from a distance, even if their view of the roadway is obscured by vehicles in front of them.
2. No parking zones for several car lengths either side of the crossing, which allow a driver to have an unobstructed view of the pavement (sidewalk) on either side of the crossing, so they can see if there are pedestrians about to start crossing.
In contrast, when I drive here, I have to be really vigilant to watch out for crossings that have neither a stop sign nor a traffic light. And then, because there are cars obscuring my view of the sidewalk and first few feet of the crossing, I have to slow down and look directly to the right as I pass, lest I see a pedestrian a second too late.
This poor design makes pedestrians distrustful (and rightly so) so, in many places, pedestrians will wait at crossings until there are no cars in sight, and only then start to cross, even though they had right of way all along.
- you must come to a complete stop before making the turn, and
- as your light is red, you know to look out for pedestrians or vehicles that have right of way
We have stop sign cameras here and a bunch of old people got annoyed enough about tickets to get a local news cycle claiming the cameras were unfair. Literally every single video they produced as evidence showed them rolling through without ever stopping, and what they were claiming was the their brake lights being visible meant they’d stopped. I don’t think any of them had paused to consider whether their subjective impression while driving actually matched the motion of their vehicles.
At least in my experience over the last couple of decades in the US.
Also no-stop right turns at red lights are made by putting a triangular island that forms a "protected" right lane. I put "protected" in quotes because it's protected in traffic engineer jargon but affords no protection to peds. Few pedestrians realise that the driver is not supposed to stop when making this turn, and that even when a crosswalk is marked there is no pedestrian signal. Super dangerous. With these it's often hard to even see a pedestrian even when you slow down.
Again, this is California; I don't know about anywhere else. CA has it's own traffic laws; for example I believe it's the only state in which it's legal to overtake on the right hand side (the equivalent is called "undertake" in the UK I believe).
Similarly, many places are taking up the "Idaho Stop law" for cyclists. Gets rather annoying to have to explain to random folks that you can, in fact, not fully stop at a stop sign as a biker now.
It's actually not that big of a problem - in the right situation. My country does something similar, but only in low-traffic situations and with good visibility.
For example, imagine a junction between a high-traffic road and a low-traffic street. A left turn from the low-traffic street might turn out to be nearly impossible without traffic lights. However, the right turn onto the low-traffic street does not warrant a dedicated turning lane, and in space-restricted environments that often isn't even a possibility at all. And even a moderate pedestrian volume will lead to the high-traffic road being severely limited in the straight-ahead direction just because a pedestrian wants to close the low-traffic street.
American officialdom is just plain pathological.
The system I'm proposing is like a prediction market. How do officials know what to prioritize when they have limited data? The signal to noise ratio likely improves when people have paid money to report a problematic intersection and are incentivized to only report ones where they actually believe danger is present.
My back of the napkin proposal suggests creating a market surrogate to provide information in a context where a market does not exist (due to the public monopoly on most roads).
I remember using these in downtown Toronto - they were fun and seemed to work pretty well.
>This is the site of heavy pedestrian activity at all hours of the day. If safety were at all the city’s top priority (rather than traffic volume and speed), they would have long ago implemented a solution such as a pedestrian scramble: a crossing phase in which people can enter the intersection on foot in all directions, and, at the same time, all motor vehicles have a mandatory stop.
1. 25mph narrow suburban street with pedestrian crossings in the middle of the block while cars are allowed to park all the way up to the crossing.
2. Protected bike lanes between sidewalk and street parking. Drivers absolutely cannot see bikes coming in at any point when they’re trying to turn.
3. Streets where one lane (next to the curb) turns into a street parking lane at night. Aka, you’re driving in a lane at night and a parked car appears out of nowhere.
There are many more examples in just my neighborhood, but a lot of times it feels people designing the cities have no experience as a user themselves. The best move here is for everyone on the streets to always be vigilant and never assume everyone else will be vigilant too.
Half the problem is, when you are tiny in height, you cant see past parked cars, or get a proper sense of whats going on around you.
I think people with dwarfism can explain this better than me, but it might explain why kids like to sit on the shoulders of adults, they can see and take in much more, making understanding of risks easier!
