Today’s Headlines

The guard rail is to protect the motorists, their vehicle, and the City’s property (in this case a fence).

Sadly, the engineers never even consider the need to protect vulnerable street users like pedestrians and cyclists. It is all about making sure the poor driver doesn’t get harmed.

There is no such thing as “an objective transportation news source,” but thanks for reading.

“Anti-car.” Why do people use this label, like cars are some kind of protected class that we should be protective of?

No one’s “anti-car.” We’re: anti-car pollution. We’re: anti-traffic violence. We’re: anti-unsustainable urban planning policy. But not “anti-car,” because that’s a silly thing to say. It just so happens that building transportation networks around facilitating car use is bad for everyone, including drivers.

I mean, if you could take off the windshield-colored glasses for a moment and observe – the deer-striking problem is just one aspect of the myriad problems caused by the way our highway network cuts across and through natural habitats. But instead of thinking of this like an infrastructural problem that can be solved with better planning, we treat it like a personal-protection issue – the linked story being representative of this approach. We have this highway network where drivers routinely and predictably are hitting deer, but the best we can do is… to tell them to drive more carefully. Doesn’t it seem like there could be a better solution than simply pushing the risk onto each and every driver?

Great example of what I mean, but even I’m not crazy enough expect objectivity in the comments.

The only one who’s nutty here is the one who thinks drivers constitute a class of people whose interests deserve particular consideration. Drivers are, in fact, just people, like pedestrians and cyclists. They drive because they choose to, or because we heavily incentivize them to do so, but they don’t in themselves deserve any more special consideration than any other person who chooses to get around in any particular way.

I mean, that’s just the thing. We keep seeing it, again and again. Bike lanes are treated as an amenity that are “awarded” to cyclists, who are deemed unworthy of the privilege of safe transportation because some of them break laws. Not just smart road design, akin to building sidewalks anywhere that you’re likely to have people who want to walk places. People who want safer streets are “advocates,” while those who want streets dedicated to driving and parking are “neighbors,” when there’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t design streets so that people don’t routinely die or get injured on them.

The only people interested in dividing up the population between “drivers” and “everyone else,” and calling for some kind of even-handedness in divvying up media attention or public resources between the two groups, are specifically those people who benefit from this zero-sum way of thinking and the politics it produces – namely, drivers. For the rest of us, the perspective you’ve described as “anti-car” is really just the perspective that views the car as one mode of transportation amongst many, and as the most inefficient and enduringly expensive one, at that.

I’m pretty damn anti-car (well, anti the overuse and subsidization of private automobiles) and I took issue with that one.

Deer get hit because their predators have been removed from the ecosystem, and they are severly over populated.

Deer get hit because we drive vehicles and hit them.

dumb headlines like that are exactly why nobody outside of our little clique will ever take this site, or its mission seriously.

In the absence of cars there are no car-deer collisions. That’s an objective fact.

In other countries highways are built with underpasses that allow animals to cross. Even in the Florida Keys there are fences and signage to preserve the Key Deer population. So it’s also a fact that design is a factor.

Stupid, asinine ideas that pop up on Streetsblog have a way of becoming policy. Ridicule from people who think something must be dumb because they don’t personally agree with it comes with the territory.

Let’s ignore this problem and it will go away.

The fact that there’s a guard-rail here at all, in what appears to be a fairly urban location, suggests that people do not drive safely in this location (and it’s dead straight), and something more than just moving the rail should be done….

[Around my house there’s a relatively large street, which for most of its length is just a normal street, with sidewalks, shops, homes, trees, etc.

But in one particular location, that street curves (practically in front of my house TT), and there the street is bounded by a ridiculous combination of guard rails, massive physical lane dividers, huge reflective warning signs, blinking lights, etc. It’s truly silly, but I’m guessing they didn’t just put all that crap there for yucks.

They’ve actually done quite a bit to try and calm traffic on this road in recent years, including halving the number of traffic lanes (the sidewalks were made much wider), and to my eyes, the curve appears just a normal curve, I’m not sure why people would drive particularly badly there… but apparently they do… ><]

And evolutionarily speaking, car culture might be pretty good for deer – from the deer’s perspective anyway! Sure, a lot of them die in agony because they get hit by cars, but the wolves, foxes, and bobcats that prey on deer never really carved out a niche in suburbia. Plus suburban flora just happen to be fairly similar to the kind of woodland/field borderland deer thrive in.

Deer aren’t victims in the current system. They are beneficiaries. As evidences by their wild overpopulation.

Hmm, perhaps you’re right. Wikipedia(tm) mentions ungulates as a rare prey for foxes, so they probably otherwise scavenge them. Deer may be beyond even bobcats. Perhaps the only native predator left in the northeast for deer is the coyote?

I don’t even regard myself as “anti-car.” I am anti-sprawl and anti-car culture. I chortle at the motorheads who accuse me of being anti-car, since I probably have a better grip on making cars useful forms of transportation than they do.

I mean, I don’t particularly enjoy driving them (though occasionally it can be nice on a quiet country road) – I think gas should probably cost about $6/gallon, that cities, towns and suburbs shouldn’t be designed around them the way we have for the past 60 years. But sure. They’re a tool that has many useful purposes and that could be considerably less environmentally and personally destructive than they currently are and we’re gonna be stuck with ’em for a long long time, since it will take at least another 60 years or urban design to fix the mess we’ve made.