Installing counter-airbag systems on my car, roughly like ERA (explosive reactive armor), to make sure that onlylarge cars trigger it and that they lose their advantage.
There’s some areas in the Netherlands and Germany where they removed all signage, traffic lights and sidewalks to create an open, shared traffic area where all participants need to be careful, alert, and communicate with each other to determine right of way and avoid accidents.
The idea was to create uncertainty about who gets to go first and force drivers to slow down.
It reduced the number of accidents and injuries.
We have this in my town. Ambiguous zones. The idea is it creates confusion, and slows traffic. However, in my state, pedestrians have right of way on ALL roads. So the car simply slows. Mostly.
I live in Washington, and people just walk into the road as if it was nothing. People be like “pedestrians have the right away”, but they forget that the rule of tonnage still applies.
I feel this would work in some areas in the US, i.e. smaller towns, possibly in the residential areas of larger cities. But in rush hour type areas? Hell no, it would be a massacre after people got used to these spaces.
This suprised me when I read Killed by a Traffic Engineer. But in hindsight it makes sense. The road is not a regular, never-gone-wrong place despite our best effort to make it looks like one
They did something similar in a big refurbishment of the town centre of the place I grew up in (in the UK). No road markings, roads and pavements both done with Belgian blocks, and just some big stone bollards to separate the pedestrians and traffic. Turns out drivers kept hitting the bollards so now they all have hi-vis reflective strips on them. Which definitely did not grant me much confidence in the driving skills of my town.
In my town they replaced the metal bollards with bendy rubber ones to reduce accidents that cause damage.
But 1 in 4 or 5 bollards is still metal, and looks just like the others from a distance.
I can only assume it’s to keep drivers from just running over the bendy ones.
As a us citizen I can’t speak for everyone but I feel like the majority of drivers are responsible enough for it to work with only a few zooming BMWs
Meanwhile I’d probably hold up traffic because if I feel like I can’t make a decision with 100% certainty on the road I don’t execute, better safe than sorry
I may be over exaggerating a bit but mostly with stuff like unprotected left turn and matters that aren’t time sensitive and I have time to analyze I feel like if I have to ask myself “can I make this” and usually the answers no if I’m even asking
It has made me look like an idiot at some blinking yellows but it’s better than being t boned
But seriously, though: if it were hand-to-hand combat, cyclists would have an advantage, on average. That’s both because of better physical fitness, and also because they can pick up their bicycle and throw it.
I bring my kid to school on a bike. I follow the right-of-way rules at the 4-way stops and at left turns. But every day there are 1-3 drivers who wave me ahead, and refuse to move until I go first. I don’t care what the rules are - I just want consistency!
Oh man, that’s also my pet peeve. And it’s a no-win scenario, too: either you go out-of-turn and contribute to normalizing the bad behavior, or you refuse and make them think cyclists are ungrateful. Either way, it makes things worse for cyclists in the long run.
Once, a month or two ago, someone gave me the right of way when I wanted to cross the road next to a blind corner, and I stood there and refused to cross, the driver became visibly agitated, but then another car came screaming around the corner the other way and it would’ve shot me into orbit had it hit me.
massive traffic delays as every right of way takes a minute or two or longer if it goes three rounds. I mean I assume the game is booted up and ready to go and the network links will work from the get go. if not oof.