Meh, shits actually quite rare. https://one.nhtsa.gov/people/outreach/traftech/1995/tt086.htm

When folks are talking to you in percentages and avoid absolutes you can assume they are massaging the message to be more palatable to the intended audience.

Hate to break it to you but that link is talking in percentages. The only absolute number the give is number of fatalities, everything else is a percentage. Specifically, it claims that because turning right on red represents a small % of overall injuries from all traffic it’s not unsafe. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s literally the conclusion they give.

In conclusion, there are a relatively small number of deaths and injuries each year caused by right-turn-on-red crashes. These represent a very small percentage of all crashes, deaths, and injuries. Because the number of crashes due to right-turn-on-red is small, the impact on traffic safety, therefore, has also been small. Insufficient data exist to analyze left turn on red.

A bullet to the arm is safer than a bullet to the head but that doesn’t make it safe.

Approximately 84 fatal crashes occurred per year during the 1982-1992 time period involving a right-turning vehicle at an intersection where RTOR is permitted. During this same time period there were 485,104 fatalities.

Thus, less than 0.2 percent of all fatalities involved a right-turning vehicle maneuver at an intersection where RTOR is permitted. FARS, however, does not discern whether the traffic signal was red. Therefore, the actual number of fatal RTOR crashes is somewhere between zero and 84 and may be closer to zero than 84.

They literally use numbers in their report.

That data source does not include accidents that are not fatal. Do those not matter? The report also clearly identifies limitations of both data sources they use: what I read from that is we don’t have sufficient data

You people won’t stop until folks are living in a bubble under gun point. There is always another low value crusade that most people don’t want to hear about just shoved in their faces.

Compelling argument. Counter-point: what the fuck are you talking about and how does it relate to people’s right not to be run over in the street?

If you drive a car, there’s no issue. Since it’s only pedestrians and cyclists getting hurt, the real solution here is simple: they should drive a car. This woke culture is all worked up about keeping their organs safe, because heaven forbid your skull gets cracked or shaken about and you end up with a little bit of permanent brain damage! Here’s an idea: if you don’t want a boo-boo in your head, try protecting yourself from two-ton hunks of rolling steel by moving around in one yourself!

Besides, on the grand scale of the inexcusably high number of automobile related deaths in the US, it’s only a relatively small number of people getting hurt or dying in right-on-red accidents. After all, if people aren’t sufficiently getting maimed, this is really not an issue worth discussing. Let’s see these numbers go up first to an arbitrary threshold before having a constructive conversation about actionable ways that the US can take from developed countries where this problem doesn’t exist in the first place.

Now we agree that the current status quo doesn’t need to be changed, let’s move on to debate unrelated challenges our society faces, like figuring out why American cities are so unappealing and what some significant causes of climate change are.

I guess it wasn’t abundantly obvious that this is written tongue in cheek.

it is hard to rely on comedic appeal, for a somewhat random and unknown audience, to make up for a kind of sarcastic and mean set of writings, even if you’rr not being “serious”.

but, we’re also just getting some poe’d law in there. I think you’d get the point across better if, say, instead of just reccomending that everyone drives, you reccomended that everyone drove as large a car as possible in order to “beat everyone else” in a crash. even that might not be enough, though, I’ve definitely seen people who actually believe that.

Counter point to your counter point, bikes kill pedestrians as well. You going to ban those?

bikes kill pedestrians

Exceedingly rarely, almost to the point of not happening. You know this is a braindead argument.

ThatsThePoint.jpg.

Just like cars killing people on right hand reds. It’s a very low occurring incident.

We should advocate for having dedicated biking lanes to reduce these kinds of accidents, and redesign intersections to create a buffer space between pedestrian and bicycle crossing areas.

While fatalities are rare to the point of non-existence, it’s certainly a fair concern that bicyclists have too much difference in speed and maneuverability from pedestrians, risking too many accidents/injuries. That’s why we separate them: bicycling is not allowed on sidewalks

Accidents are rare, sure, and fatalities are rare because the relatively low speed impact. We can nevertheless aspire to create more inclusive infrastructure where pedestrians and cyclists can feel a sense of belonging. The car-centric roads we have in the US today could be better for everyone.

And banning right in red ain’t it. It’ll be ineffective, piss off drivers, and have little to no meaningful effect. If you want to blow political capital in this worthless shit more power to us but I’ll prefer a pragmatic approach that has a chance of being effective.

If making people feel safer walking and biking in cities = “worthless shit” to you then why are you even here? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been honked at or yelled at or nearly run over while walking or on my bike by drivers who refuse to stop at red lights at all because of the right on red rule.

Cars don’t belong in cities at all, with the possible exception of delivery/commercial vehicles and vehicles for disabled people. Banning right on red is just one part of a multi-pronged approach to get us there, together with better bicycle infrastructure and public transit, etc.

piss off drivers,

oh no their precious feelings, once again taking precedence over human life

Yes. Guess what, you have to live with those people and you have to convince them to vote on your policies.

If you’re going to sit there nagging them over stupid rare occurrence shit and piss them off you don’t get your policies. So go ahead and waste political capital pissing off voters with inconsequential shit that pisses them off.

Pragmatic politics is dead replaced by whiney absolutism.

Edit: the best part is even if you go ahead and get to piss everyone off is it’ll never ever be enforced except in certain high traffic intersections.

you have to convince them to vote on your policies.

no I don’t and won’t because they don’t listen. If you want to get something done in politics, you lobby local politicians directly.

For the record, we don’t have right-on-red, here, because we’re not insane enough to think that’s a good idea. Bicycle lanes stop ~2 meters in front of cars so they’re visible and get to enter the intersection first because it literally saves lives. Fuck car-owners feelings.

You talk about being pissed off and having others cater to your fee fees and then call out others for whining and having entitled behavior ….mmmk. The hypocrisy is rather thick in here today.

I guess you don’t know what political capital is and how it relates 🤷‍♂️

As stated before. Pragmatic politics and policy making is dead.

You missed the salient point in your knee jerk reaction about ‘carbrain feels’

if you want to spend political capital Is this fight worth it more than getting cycle lanes or pedestrian zones?

Or phrased differently, unless you’re the road dictator who defines policy in a vacuum, you will have to get buy-in or agreement from the primary roads users - drivers. Which will involve compromise on your goals.

Right on red does provide (limited) ecological and congestion benefit by limiting idling at otherwise clear intersections. Inattentive drivers are not a new problem, but I would much rather have cycle lanes physically segregated from vehicles as a priority for road reform

I think you’ll find that the amount of emissions saved from idling at these intersections would be paid for a hundred-fold by just leaving the car at home for one short trip once a year. It essentially doesn’t exist. Additionally, fuck your congestion, I don’t care. You chose the car, you get to be stuck in traffic in it. I won’t accept any risk to my body because you can’t wait an extra minute.

Ahhhh. You didn’t miss the point about ‘an okay compromise today, instead of utopia never’ you willingly ignored it

It’s incredibly ableist and ageist to demean drivers as a whole. Public transport is not a 100% coverage map, let alone timetables. Telling a wheelchair user/someone living with cerebral palsy/etc to move themselves three km start-and-finish to a bus stop to do their bi-weekly shopping is not a solution. Get real, or everyone else will see you for an extremist and ignore you.

I think the general point people are making to you is that, in many municipalities where right on red would be bad, there are enough voters in the pedestrian base alone that nobody has to “appeal to drivers” in order to win a majority. The issue itself has validity on the basis that the health of the pedestrians should be a higher priority than the feeling that drivers are being impacted negatively by not being able to perform this maneuver. You could maybe make a counterargument comprised of economic impacts, as a couple people have tried to do, or a counterargument about how it saves emissions, but I’m sort of inclined to think that caving and giving it over to cars is sort of an approach that has diminishing returns in both of those directions, compared to the alternative.

You absolutely do not have numbers and do need to consider what hills to die on. Otherwise you’d have basic crap like bike infrastructure in those cities.

Ehh, lot of “those cities” are getting better, if you wanna get more specific as to which one, you know, less general terms, we might get into it and how there are different, you know, ruling party apparatuses that people have to maneuver around and population demographics, I dunno. Mistakes into miracles of covid was that a lot of streets could get shut down and turned into temporary pedestrian streets for limited run studies, or for some amount of days of the week or what have you, so that’s kind of shown people what’s possible.

A lot of it is also that people who live within city limits and benefit from public services/would benefit from stuff like this kind of lack political will. The drive among most urbanists is less to compromise with drivers and is more to educate/appeal to the population who lives in these cities, is what I’m saying. Which, you know, it’s a safer strategy, those are easier people to convince, you’re having to compromise less on goals. I’d generally agree that maybe things like larger traffic engineering standards in these cities need to change, because standard practice is what tends to shape the built environment rather than one-off projects or even kind of broad legislation like banning right on red, but you’re seeing those happen rather than changing standards becaude one of those tends to be much easier.

Yes. Getting better. Because, and this will shock you, local politicians and people voting for them.

Being pissed is the wrong framing of the issue. There’s a legitimate issues with gimping our infrastructure. Nobody would die if we all drove 5mph, but the personal and economic losses to millions of people would be catestrophic.

piss off drivers

you need to have your licence taken and put into anger management. That is not how you formulate laws and it should never be the motivation. Own your own fee-fees.

Being pissed off at stupid policy has ZERO relevance at anger management. Try to stay on topic next time.

Fatalities are one thing to consider. Another is injuries that can range from minor to life changing.

I don’t know the stats on this but pedestrian injuries would be something for policy makers to consider as well.

And in general:

If deaths are up it’s safe to assume injuries are up as well
Good policy making also involves preventing problems, and educating people on the issue. If 0.2% of deaths is acceptable and trending up at what point do we take action? 0.5%? 1%? 5%?

I don’t think that the US even tracks injuries at least I can’t find anything from a cursory search. But according to Vancouver RTOR is 13% of all deaths and serious injuries. https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2022/08/23/rethinking-the-right-turn-on-red/

Ninety-three percent of RTOR pedestrian or bicyclist crashes resulted in injury.

So, one of the data sources they use is for fatal injuries only and it appears that right turn on red accidents are not usually fatal. Ok, but look at that injury rate; injuries that are not fatal but could still be life-changing.

That article also talks about the limitations of the second data source they use

My overall reaction to that article is not “meh, no big deal”, but “crap, we should have better data on this”. Anecdotally, I’ve seen much worse driving behavior since COViD, where it’s becoming all too common for cars to not even slow down for right on red, and people here online are trying to defend that you don’t even need to stop despite that being clearly stated in the law. I do have a nice walkable downtown, but walking it has been getting more dangerous in recent years: if you hit my kid because you didn’t feel like stopping, it won’t be at all comforting for you to say “meh, it’s not a fatality”

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