OK
I was as diplomatic as possible.
I focused on infrastructure, taught him what a slip lane was, pointed out basic crossing safety equipment that our school (and district) are lacking by comparing it to Seattle public schools and asked him to poke the central office and find me people to collaborate with, basically threatening to be the angry guy at the city council meeting and school board meeting (which he should be as our principle ATMO) unless there is some official work being done that he can connect me to.
Got him to agree that no matter what if a driver hits a child in a school zone it is the drivers fault.
i know reading the news (and your local subreddit) is bad for your brain and all… but there have been quite a few road rage incidents involving carbrains shooting each other in denver recently, and one really close to my house from a couple months back where a cyclist got shot at by an angry driver. really makes me want to not ride my bike in the street these days
yeah he followed up by posting another incident of this exact type of assault- bunch of kids in a stolen Kia/Hyundai getting tiktok clout by braining cyclists with whiffle ball bats or ice scrapers
Weirdly it feels so much easier to avoid actual road ragers on a bike. You just turn quick in the opposite direction or off the street and it’s like byeeee
I’m still much more worried about some dipshit accidentally killing me because they were speeding, not looking, or both
I was thinking about this during a recent discussion here about traffic enforcement having racial biases, whether or not it is automated by speed cameras. I think that was right, but what do we do when minorities are also greater risk of being killed by automobiles?
I’m not saying they should just keep ticketing people in black and brown neighborhoods as I’m not sure that makes anybody safer in the grand scheme of things. I guess the idea is to keep hoping for more infrastructure and less car dependence across all neighborhoods but that just feels so “pie in the sky” most of the time.
It also has me thinking about a recent experience I had in my own neighborhood. We are finally getting more sidewalks along a sketchy stretch of road in the middle of the neighborhood! And I was walking up it I said hi to one of my neighbors whose house I would not have walked by without the sidewalk. She said she was not happy with the construction at first, and she was still planning to block the new sidewalk with her car (I didn’t touch that one), but now that people were using it, she was excited to meet some new people.
Don’t know exactly what I’m blathering about here. People across class and race want more human-friendly ways to get around but I’m not sure many people, especially around where I live, even know what that looks like.
Yeah, this lady has lived in the neighborhood way longer than I have so I wasn’t about to start proselytizing about wheelchairs and strollers but it was still frustrating.
As an aside, sidewalk blocking is a perennial problem on the few sidewalks we have in this neighborhood. Most of the offenders live in houses with a fuckton of other people and are trying to pack as many cars into a driveway as possible, so I try to remind myself that the situation probably sucks worse for them.
Length of time living in a neighborhood never becomes a pass for anti social behavior
Also, I recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles Marohn. It acknowledges and provides solutions for all the issues you’re having.
I’ve been passively considering getting cameras but I haven’t really looked into it. $562.44 is a bit too steep for me. Is there anything else to consider other than cycliq?
