Train can’t stop like a vehicle does.
I live in California; many drivers here make it seem like regular cars can’t stop either the way they roll through stops.
Idk if this is more of a local thing but in Ohio we call rolling stops a California stop
I’ve always heard it called the “California Roll” from other Californians. I like the pun. A California roll is also a local kind of sushi.
KY/OH here. It’s not a Cali thing, it’s an American thing. Almost daily I have people rolling through stop signs or just straight up not stopping at stop lights if they’re turning right.
Story time: drove in Europe for the first time this year. Totally different. Lower speed limits even with that weird metric system. Way less lights and more round abouts and stop signs.
not stopped at stop lights if they’re turning right
That’s because it’s actually allowed in the majority of the US
While not legal in many places to do a rolling stop, for the most part I find them safer if done correct. It allows you to get up to speed quite a bit faster while using a bit less energy. Something good for the environment and can keep traffic flowing better.
Also a full stop is harder on your vehicle. It puts more force on your bushings and brakes. You notice it on a hard stop where you feel that brief reverse movement. It rather minor if your not overly aggressive.
It rather small stuff but the flip side is some people will do aggressive rolling stops negating much of the safety factor. Thus the rules are enforced black and white.
To be fair, when your doing 40 and you are 50 feet from the crosswalk, you can’t stop either.
To be fair, hitting meat bags on the road or a tree could make you stop in less than 40 feet.
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Trains have right of way. Cars do not have right of way at cross walks.
Not in Mexico. Well it is kind of fluid anyhow.
I do find that it rather works well though. People don’t automatically assume they have right of way and this don’t just walk out in front of cars. Ignoring the tourists that is. It actually allows for better traffic flows and I find cars stop when it makes sense. Ie. You might see people wanting to cross and you know the traffic ahead is stopped so it makes sense to use that pause to let people cross.
And because the rules are a bit fluid, people and cars seem more cautious. People in particular. It seems more chaotic but the fatality rates are still quite low while maintaining good flow.
As said, it is a bit fluid. If you just walk out into a crosswalk and get driven over then likely won’t be any charges. If you enter a crosswalk reflecting all cars to stop, that is rather risky. If a car has time to stop but doesn’t, the driver will be getting charged. Generally people wait for traffic to have a pause before they use a cross walk. In some really busy areas down town there will always be people waiting at a cross walk. Literally there would be near zero movement of automobile as you could spend an hour waiting for a crosswalk to clear.
Personally from a person that walks often, I rarely wait anytime to cross a street. Traffic flows a best it can but stops enough I can easily cross. At a controlled intersection in Canada you can wait two, there, four minutes till you get a walk for example. Waiting that long is very rare as you take your turn first chance you get.
For lack of better description, they put a higher expectation of personal responsibility. Someone walking should easily be able to tell when it is safe to do something and can easily change their path to ovoid an unsafe condition. They use this same logic in shipping and flying. The smaller vessel typically gives way to the larger less easy to maneuver vessel.
When I was in Nepal, busses would round blind corners on barely-two-lane cliffside roads - meaning 100+ metre cliffs above AND below - at full speed, and their only warning was just a bunch of honks. The problem is there’s so much honking it’s hard to imagine anyone can tell where it’s coming from, especially given the people you’re trying to warn are around the corner and can probably only hear you due to echoes coming from the far side of the valley.
The game for me became, count how many busses were destroyed at the bottom of the cliffs, or hanging precariously over the edge having punched through the concrete barrier, or tipped on their side in the lowlands, or just… fucking INTEGRATED with one another after a head on collision that definitely killed both drivers and anyone sitting in the driver’s quadrant of each bus.
I definitely lost count, except for that last example of which I saw exactly one (1), and I learned that honking is no substitute for real infrastructure. Structural adjustment policies killed those people.
That’s the thing, I live near train tracks/station. The fucking train honks incessantly. There are like 4 or 5 intersections that train crosses in pretty quick succession, plus the station, so they just lay on the horn for a good mile. No one pays attention to it. It’s like the boy that cried wolf. It totally defeats the purpose of it’s trying to alert anyone to anything. Not to mention the noise pollution it needlessly creates. Idk who decided that was a reasonable solution, instead of putting up the people gates, but fuck them. That law needs to be completely abolished imo.
In addition to the whole ‘a car is diffent from a train’ aspect; trains don’t always ‘honk’ in the US
Trains only honk because they can’t stop, so all they can do is warn. Cars should not be going so fast they can’t stop on city streets. Also, trains always have the right-of-way, but cars never do, even on roads without crosswalks or sidewalks. They must always yield to all pedestrians in any situation.
