Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)



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Chalo wrote:

> [email protected] (sbirn) wrote:
>
> [re: neighborhood streets]
>>If you want to use it as a playground, you must do so with the understanding that it was not
>>designed for this function and you should yield to primary users.
>
>
> I would argue, and I bet I'm not alone, that the primary purpose of a residential street is to
> provide the people who live on it with access to their homes and a common space in which to
> interact. This is the basis of design for neighborhood streets for much, much longer than there
> have been cars to drive on them. To the extent that the law might give rights-of-way to cars that
> supersede those of the people who live there, it diverges from the traditional understanding of
> residential streets.

You're not alone. I agree.

People now assume that anyone passing by in a motor vehicle should have more rights than the
resident living on the street.

It's a relatively recent idea - and a foolish one.

--
Frank Krygowski
 
"Chalo" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> [email protected] (sbirn) wrote:
>
> [re: neighborhood streets]
> > But let's not kid ourselves as to why we laid down that asphalt. If it were a playground, it
> > would be so marked. Yes, traffic is reduced, yes it should be
slower,
> > and yes...people should be paying more attention for kids. But in the end it is still a road,
> > and roads were built to handle vehicles, be they bikes or cars. If you want to use it as a
> > playground, you must do so with the understanding that it was not designed for this function and
> > you should yield to primary users.
>
> I would argue, and I bet I'm not alone, that the primary purpose of a residential street is to
> provide the people who live on it with access to their homes and a common space in which to
> interact. This is the basis of design for neighborhood streets for much, much longer than there
> have been cars to drive on them. To the extent that the law might give rights-of-way to cars that
> supersede those of the people who live there, it diverges from the traditional understanding of
> residential streets.

I agree with this completely, yet how many motorists treat your street with respect? Whenever I
mention this principle to motorists with whom I'm travelling I get a confused look.

>
> The macadam itself may have been designed to support cars, but the street has always been designed
> to serve its people. Streets designed expressly for cars feature things like passing lanes, turn
> pockets, and sweeping exits. Homes are not built along such streets for good reasons.
>
> Chalo Colina

Robin Hubert
 
On Tue, 04 Nov 2003 01:18:02 GMT, "Pete" <[email protected]> wrote:

>5PM, dark, rainy afternoon, a person steps off the curb, directly in the path of a bus. Assuming
>that Planet Chalo exists in the same universe we do, the same alws of physics apply, and the bus
>cannot stop in time.
>
>Who is 'at fault'?

That's easy.

George W. Bush.
 
Mon, 3 Nov 2003 19:55:48 -0600, <[email protected]>, "Jeff"
<[email protected]> wrote:

>Zoot, before there were cars there was still the problem of excessive growth in cities. Consider
>London before the tube. The city had grown so large and so densely populated that there were
>traffic jams with horses and people. Even had cars not appeared in quantity, roadways would have
>had to been enlarged at the expense of neighborhoods. Cars are not truly the problem. We haven't
>really figured out how to build a large city and still rationally cope with the inherent traffic
>problems. There are some folks who've made suggestions but I've not heard of any attempt to put
>their suggestions into practice on a large enough scale to judge their efficacy.

London's congestion fee has helped traffic move again as fast as it did in the horse&buggy days.
Traffic had slowed to less due to the volume of motorised traffic. Milwaukee is tearing up one of
its expressways and that is revitalising their city. Vancouverites have been fighting freeways for
forty years yet our city consistently ranks among the top three cities in the world in which to
live.
--
zk
 
[email protected] (Chalo) wrote:

>Now put the beer-swilling moron on a Big Wheel trike,

(a good idea, BTW...)

>and the Infernal Weapons driver in an AMC Gremlin. (For the nerve gas, substitute a
>strawberry-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.) Who is responsible if somebody
>gets maimed or killed in the collision? You say it's the guy on the Big Wheel because he got in the
>way of a car. I say it's the guy in the Gremlin-- because a Big Wheel never killed anybody, and if
>the other guy had been using one to go visit his auntie, they would both have been able to ride
>away from a crash with no serious harm done.
>
>I suggest that the difference between our two conclusions comes from your unwillingness to see a
>car as tantamount to any other infernal weapon when it maims or kills.

Except that in your analogy, the "blame" is the same if the car is parked and the kid hits it (which
isn't too much different from what happened, other than the kid hit a moving target).

Mark Hickey Habanero Cycles http://www.habcycles.com Home of the $695 ti frame
 
On Mon, 03 Nov 2003 21:57:07 -0500, "frkrygowHALTSPAM" <"frkrygowHALTSPAM"@cc.ysu.edu> wrote:

>
>People now assume that anyone passing by in a motor vehicle should have more rights than the
>resident living on the street.
>
>It's a relatively recent idea - and a foolish one.

Once people started talking about "animal rights" the entire concept of "rights" was trivialized
into insignificance. The word "rights" has no meaning anymore.
 
Note: This message was queued when I expected it to be immediately sent. Sending much later now...

On Sun, 02 Nov 2003 01:15:59 -0800, Zoot Katz <[email protected]> wrote:
>Sun, 02 Nov 2003 07:34:46 GMT, <[email protected]>,
>[email protected] (sbirn) wrote:
>
>> If you want to use it as a playground, you must do so with the understanding that it was not
>> designed for this function and you should yield to primary users.
>
>That's the point - Get your fetid killer cars off my street.

No. The point is, get your house off the street full of fetid killer cars. The cars are there to
stay, and vastly outnumber you. You really ought to go where you'd be happy. That may result in
improved health.

>We aren't playing. Your game is up.

I don't think so. The game continues.

>People are more important than cars. People on bicycles are more efficient than any other form of
>terrestrial locomotion.

For which values of efficient? Only fuel-efficiency. We're certainly more time-efficient in cars.
For bicycles to be the main mode of human transportation, we'd either have to all live in dense
cities, or primitive villages (where the technology wouldn't exist to make bikes, nor the economy
that could support buying a bike).

>Car culture has destroyed our built environment by imposing the obscene proportions required for
>the convenience of cars.

We've built our environment for our cars. Move to an environment free of cars and you'll be all set.

>Cities were gutted by the road gang. You might say they paved the way for the drug gangs that now
>infest its decaying carcass.

I'm not sure what that means, nor how it applies to this discussion, but it sure sounds like a
really good reason for me to live far away from the city and drive a dinosaur-juice-powered vehicle.
--
Rick "Keep manhattan, just give me that country side" Onanian
 
On Wed, 05 Nov 2003 00:44:54 -0500, "frkrygowHALTSPAM" <"frkrygowHALTSPAM"@cc.ysu.edu> wrote:
>Rick Onanian wrote:
>> Chalo, if you don't already live in such a place, you should move somewhere where there are no
>> cars. The rest of us will continue to accept the risks involved in a car culture.
>
>Rick's world is very simple, very black and white. He doesn't realize that many people are capable
>of working with shades of grey.
>
>For example, I'm aware of neighborhoods that have implemented measures to slow traffic. Those
>people didn't passively accept _all_ the risks of the car culture; they decided some were
>unacceptable and found a way to mitigate them.

Unfortunately, such a place wouldn't suffice for Chalo. He wants a neighborhood completely devoid of
automobiles. He wants it black-and-white, not me.

My girlfriend lives in a neighborhood that has implemented traffic-calming. It works -- cars
speeding through are quite rare now. <sarcasm>The injury/death rate of children playing in the
street has dramatically dropped, too, from 0 per year to 0 per year.</sarcasm>

However, I can't understand why, when I'm stopped at the stop sign and about to go, and a kid flies
out of nowhere and lands on my hood, my drivers license should be revoked.

>> You know, I think I'm onto something here. I need not debate such major issues; they're not going
>> to change. The answer is for somebody who disagrees with a fundamental piece of our society to
>> move to a society which fits them better.
>
>Yeah, we heard this a lot in the 1970s. "America: Love it or leave it." Stated by people who
>couldn't conceive of improving anything.

Now who's thinking in black-and-white? You must have missed major pieces of what I wrote. I wrote
that fundamental pieces of our society won't change; the rest are worth fighting for. For example,
you won't get rid of personal automobiles. It would be a complete waste of your time to try. You
could, however, make a difference in safety or emissions.

>The idea was vacuous then. It's vacuous now.

I'm sure glad my idea isn't anything like it. Too bad your eyesight is blotchy, or you would have
been able to read (and quote) my words in context; then you wouldn't have confused my idea (ooh,
here's a nice analogy: you can't change a hard drive into a pine tree; you can change the capacity,
speed, and contents of the hard drive, though) with the idea that nothing can be changed.

>But you're right about one thing, Rick. You need not debate such major issues.

Ah, I see that you read THAT line more carefully.
--
Rick Onanian
 
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