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twblalock commented on USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/latchkey

jacquesm · 3 years ago

What would you propose they do instead? Stay at home? Use public transport? Also drive a car?

It isn't realistic to counter a biking accident with claims that people are sacrificing their kids and that they are idiots for biking, for some people there simply are no viable alternatives that they can afford, and so they take the risk. The blame should go to the drunk drivers and the idiots, not the cyclists.

twblalock · 3 years ago

> It isn't realistic to counter a biking accident with claims that people are sacrificing their kids and that they are idiots for biking

Who said that?

Again, people seem to be reacting to something that was not said by anyone in this thread.

twblalock commented on USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/latchkey

mslate · 3 years ago

Thank you for admitting that you don’t live in San Francisco. The fact is you don’t know who this parent is. You have made the assumption that they are taking unacceptable risks. I don’t know your motivation, but your criticisms aren’t constructive.

twblalock · 3 years ago

> The fact is you don’t know who this parent is. You have made the assumption that they are taking unacceptable risks.

What on earth are you talking about? Who the heck is the parent here? I am merely defending someone who is being dogpiled by trolls for the outrage of pointing out the fact that cycling in SF is dangerous. I am familiar with SF even though I don't live there, and I know that is the case.

twblalock commented on USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/latchkey

jacquesm · 3 years ago

Of course, there are also places where the risk is higher. SF is just an example used because someone prominent died in SF whilst on a bicycle. The easiest thing the USA could do to make cycling safer without investing a cent in infrastructure is to adopt the rule that by default if a car hits a cyclist the car is at fault. The effect of that would be instantaneous, every bike would have an invisible force field of liability around it. Sure, some might abuse it, but nobody in their right mind is going to play chicken with a car.

twblalock · 3 years ago

> The easiest thing the USA could do to make cycling safer without investing a cent in infrastructure is to adopt the rule that by default if a car hits a cyclist the car is at fault.

That would obviously be an unfair and dumb rule because fault should always be determined on a case-by-case basis. We would also have a massive amount of fraud caused by cyclists intentionally hitting cars, just like the rash of pedestrians running in front of cars in Russia.

I ride bikes and I also drive cars, and I've seen a ton of dumb behavior from both cyclists and drivers. Nobody is immune to being a dumbass in this category. They just shouldn't mix.

The problem is infrastructure. In the places where cycling is safe and normally practiced by normal people, the bicycles and cars are mostly separated. US cycling advocates have been pushing for the wrong things for years, asking for rights on the road as though bikes are the same as cars, when in reality the only thing that works is separate roads.

twblalock commented on USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/latchkey

mslate · 3 years ago

It is literally victim-blaming.

You are choosing to frame a reality where transiting by car is the only acceptable way to live. Many don’t bike by choice, they bike because of economic reality—especially as parents.

San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities on earth, and you must cover rent for cars in addition to yourself. If you want to discourage family formation then go ahead, make it prohibitively expensive to exist as a family in our cities.

twblalock · 3 years ago

I don't run the world and neither does the OP. I don't even live in San Francisco. It's not our fault that things are this way, and it's really dumb to blame us for pointing out facts.

Is it now also victim-blaming to tell people to wear seat belts, or to look both ways before crossing the street? Telling people about danger is not a form of blaming.

People seem to be reacting to something the OP didn't actually write. Stop ascribing beliefs and motivations to people you don't know based on a few sentences of written text.

twblalock commented on USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/latchkey

trgn · 3 years ago

I disagree with you, but I wouldn't downvote your thoughts for sure.

It really is a catch22. Biking is often not safe on existing roads. But what is the alternative? Not bike at all and wait until we have bikelane utopia? It's just not going to happen. What about people who don't have an option, aka no money? What about people who do not need a car because they live close enough to their destination? What about the cosmological stupidity of only having one viable option for personal mobility in face of climate change, rising fossil fuel prices, local and global pollution due to cars, ...?

Something needs to happen, shaming people for trying to get around on bike, such a small thing, yet, so odious to so many, it isn't helping.

twblalock · 3 years ago

The OP didn't shame anyone. Why are you making this wild accusation?

Read what was written. No shaming is there.

You seem to be reacting to something you ascribe to the OP, but there is simply no logical path from statements in the OP's post that leads one to assume anyone is being shamed or blamed.

twblalock commented on USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/latchkey

jacquesm · 3 years ago

Cycling is dangerous everywhere there are cars. SF is not unique in this.

twblalock · 3 years ago

Danger is a matter of degree. There are plenty of places where the risk of getting hit by a car is lower than in SF.

twblalock commented on USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/latchkey

jmoss20 · 3 years ago

The Presidio is not dense.

twblalock · 3 years ago

Most of San Francisco is not really dense either. Outside of a few well-known areas the entire place is a suburb.

twblalock commented on USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/latchkey

jacquesm · 3 years ago

> I get scolded every time I bring it up.

Then stop bringing it up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35239672

You get scolded because you are victim blaming. Regardless of whether or not you support better bike infrastructure or limiting cars or whatever measures: it should be safe to bike around town, and if it isn't blaming the cyclists isn't going to help, it will just cause the cyclists to remove themselves from traffic after which there is even less of a reason to do something about it.

twblalock · 3 years ago

This is not victim blaming. Nobody blamed cyclists here. It is a true and obvious statement from an observer that cycling is dangerous in San Francisco.

twblalock commented on USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/latchkey

sidfthec · 3 years ago

And yet, I see parents riding bikes on the roads of SF with their small children on board. Makes absolutely no sense to me, and I get scolded every time I bring it up.

twblalock · 3 years ago

It's sad to see this comment being dogpiled by trolls, including the standard and annoying responses like "wrong takeaway" or "bad take" or the sarcastic "how dare people do X", or the standard European city defense, or the most annoying type of response: rephrasing the original post to make a maliciously bad argument.

We don't live in should-land. We live in reality. Parents who live in reality need to protect their children from the dangers that exist in reality.

Parents who live in reality in the city of San Francisco know that it is a dangerous place to ride bikes. It is not ok to tell people to ignore those dangers because they should not exist, or to scold people for making those dangers known. It's also not ok to tell people that they are responsible for solving problems they did not create, and it is really not ok to equate warning people about danger with victim blaming.

sidfthec, you are right and you should not be getting this kind of response.

twblalock commented on If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed sbstatesman.com/2023/04/0... · Posted by u/raybb

thaumaturgy · 3 years ago

You'd be betting wrong. Even a casual skim of the Archive's blog will show that the Wayback Machine isn't their primary focus, and hasn't been for ~20 years. It may be their most important aspect to you, but the Archive is comprised of a large network of people working together to make all kinds of information available on the internet that wouldn't otherwise be accessible. To those people, those repositories are far, far more valuable than the Wayback Machine (and I promise they care a lot about this issue -- possibly more than HN does, given the timbre this topic has received here).

There is nowhere else that you can browse for example a Byte Magazine from 1984 (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-12/). This is what the Archive is about, from their perspective -- along with music, video (including broadcast video), and a whole lot of other projects: https://archive.org/projects/

twblalock · 3 years ago

What I'm saying is that the things the people who work at Internet Archive care about may not be the same as what end users care about. I think the end users care mainly about the Wayback Machine.