These San Franciscans blame pedestrians for traffic deaths
sfstandard.com
San Francisco’s Vision Zero data suggest that in recent years, motorists were at fault in most pedestrian deaths by car. Still, some readers think city safety measures do more to inconvenience drivers than to protect those on foot.

Daylighting, which involves removing parked cars from around crosswalks in order to improve visibility and just wiped out about 14,000 street parking spaces, has proved especially controversial.

“If someone doesn’t die because of it, we will never know, while the living have to suffer,” Nina Geneson Otis wrote in an email to The Standard. The real estate broker said daylighting is the kind of policy that makes Democrats lose elections.

Others say the city’s actions remove responsibility from pedestrians to look out for their own safety. “A pedestrian can do anything, and be irresponsible, and no harm will come to them?” Brandi said, describing the policies as “idiot-proof.”

  • @DomeGuyEnglish
    109•3 days ago

    The idea that a pedestrian walking anywhere but on a limited access highway would ever be at fault for a collision with an automobile is a direct result of century-old propaganda by the moral equivalent of the NRA.

    If i made a self-propelled battering ram with remote controlled steering I would rightly be held to strict liabily if anyone was hurt. But if we put a a chair in the same thing and call it a “vehicle”, suddenly the rules change in our favor.

    I like cars and driving, and can easily imagine a number of mitigating circumstances that would shift liability away from the driver, but the presumption that once-walkable city streets are for cars is the result of fierce industrial lobbying and not a reasoned public policy process.

    • Rhaedas
      45•3 days ago

      The origin of the word “jaywalking” is exactly that. Blame the victim.

    • @[email protected]English
      22•3 days ago

      Always remember that “vehicular manslaughter” was created with lower penalties than manslaughter, because juries were consistently not finding motorists guilty of manslaughter.

      It was too easy for jurors to identify with the driver, and think, what if it was me driving that car, killing that person by accident?

      We need safer infrastructure in this world than one allowing anyone to be a killer just by being distracted.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•2 days ago

      For all its faults, the NRA knows that guns are unsafe. It promotes “gun safety” not “shirt safety” – it doesn’t blame people who get shot accidentally because they were wearing the wrong kind of shirt. Whereas cities around the world talk about “bike safety” when the unsafe element is not the bike at all.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•2 days ago

      In my country its normal for pedestrians to walk in highways. The result is that drivers expect pedestrians everywhere, and collisions are rare