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While the dude who pressed the button witnessed 100 able, adult people sitting in a polluting metal box instead of walking, cycling or taking public transport.
Raises a good point. So we should destroy those cars to make way for trams.
Trams that never brake because of the collective loss of efficiency that might happen. It’s like the trolley problem except there’s 50 people on the trolley and the amount of money lost by them being collectively late for work is worth the loss of life.
Ohh yes, +1 vote for the trams of death.
I can’t stoppher capin’ the economy just won’t let me.
Rvturn. (This was stopped because the trains kept killing children playing in the street)
Add a giant “cow catcher” to the front of the tram, reinforced so that even the car brain with the most oversized pickup is at the same risk as the rest of us
no… 30s of red light for cars, every 60s, fixed schedule… no wasted time since the drivers already calculated it in :D
Maybe I shouldn’t tell you guys this, but sometimes I press the button even if I don’t have to cross the street. Also sometimes I cross the street really slowly, drivers get especially mad about that. Obviously I’m not from the US, since I’m still alive.
Crossing suuuper slowly when there’s a suv waiting is my fav, especially when the driver didn’t want me to cross
My dad aways makes a remark when someone crosses tge street slowly. He’s fat and slow as gell himself. I don’t understand how you can get mad at sghit like that.
I know you meant to write ‘slow as hell’ but ‘fat and slow as gel’ brought up a mental image that fits the scene.
Movement speed of a gelatinous cube is like 3 squares per turn. It’s slow as hell!
I never cross the street slowly… but I never hurry, either, and even that annoys some car drivers 😭😂
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Lol wut. If a car doesn’t let me cross even though I have the priority as a pedestrian, I usually hit the side mirror or the car. They can go fuck themselves with their overpriced rolling boxes. People get so mad when you touch their cars. I like it.
You don’t even need to cause any damage or even leave a fingerprint and they get so angry. Its kinda funny.
I see so much road rage, but usually from extended family so I try not to start an argument that will lead to someone storming off in a strop. I find it funny that an adult can get so angry, but it upsets my partner.
There was a fight between 2 security guards for different gated communities when I lived in the US. One wasn’t letting the other go through the gate and “slapped his hand on the hood”, causing the other to get out and fight him.
I often walk or cycle past a school and a daycare, and here they have recently “upgraded roads” which means that they have scraped away a few pedestrian crossings. I 100% do shitty tricks to cars driving too fast or not giving enough space, especially if I am moving around the time kids are active. (Around here kids are still allowed to walk/cycle from school and often play around the town.)
I have made air kicks, always do when necessary, but sadly so far they have missed…
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You’re an actual psychopath and you should be locked away before you kill someone
Lol, if touching a side mirror gets you that angry you need to look in a mirror and think about whats wrong with you. Also I’m a carpenter, I most often have my tools with me, I could do way worse than “hitting” a side mirror if you really need something to get upset about. I bet you get half hard looking at your rolling box ^^
Unpopular opinion: Cars are expensive. Vandalizing them in response to an inconvenience seems like an overreaction.
It’s symmetrical though. Sort of like a pedestrian risking death if they inconvenience car drivers
Sure, attempting to murder a pedestrian over an inconvenience is also bad.
Not sure I’d consider them “symmetrical” though… Maybe I’m being pedantic, but murder seems a lot worse.
Regardless, both are overreactions, and varying degrees of crazy.
True. However given that they’re the largest “lifestyle” contributor to climate change (as opposed to things in the agricultural sector), vandalizing one in response to it simply existing seems like a slight under reaction, if anything.
Cutting the priority to pedestrian isn’t an inconvenience tho. It’s straight up code violation. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be a priority for the police 🤷🏻
Oh, I see. It still seems like an overreaction to a code violation though.
A medal for meritorious public service and right of first refusal to carry out the sentence against the ecocidal narcissists? That’d be a well deserved surprise for any non-carhole who’s been making carholes angry.
Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Carbrained psychopaths look a people crossing the street and think: How dare they make me wait a few seconds longer. I’ll fucking hit them with my car.
And they think that’s a proportinal response. It’s just deeply sick and twisted.
How dare they make me wait a few seconds longer.
…on purpose, just to cause a reaction. You missed that bit.
When i’m driving vehicles i have to qualms waiting for elderly or disabled people to cross the street, regardless of whether or not the crosswalk has a light.
Dipshits intentionally walking slow just to piss me off deserve to piss off someone who gets out of the car and demonstrates their discontent in a more direct manner.
If you want to label dislike for lack of civility as being a psychopath so you can feel better about yourself be my guest.
I’m going to walk slowly in front of three cars just because you made this post. It’s the only reasonable response to your lack of civility.
Seriously, you’re advocating getting physical with someone because of a perceived lack of civility — literally walking too slow. I drive almost everywhere, have done so for decades, and this is not a problem I’ve had, even once in my life. If “people walking too slowly in front of your car” is a regular problem for you, you may need to cultivate more patience. You have lost the plot. You sound like you are the problem in this social interaction.
You don’t get to hit them though.
Thanks for adding more evidence to support my central thesis: good people don’t drive cars.
Fucking drivers thinking they can assualt people with their cars becase they’ve been inconvenienced
When I’m filtering, I let my mirror scrape cars that didn’t leave enough room for bikes.
Mirrors are so breakable…
Why though, people have places to go and public transport might not be available to them. You’re punishing people for their lack of choices
Nah, you got it all wrong. I don’t punish them, I do them a favor. They mabe don’t know it, but it’s good for them if they stop occasionally.
On the other hand, they punish me, every day of every week. They punish me with pollution and noise and concrete and traffic accidents and oil consumption and heat radiation.
Deciding what is good for random strangers and then forcing them to enjoy whatever it is you came up with doesn’t sound like very good idea.
And how is this helping your situation? Breaking and accelerating increases noise and pollution. If cars have to spend more time on the street instead of being at their destination, they either need more road space or they spend more time in traffic jams that, again, increase noise and pollution. Cars are the least likely to be involved in accidents when they are cruising, so you are also making your city less safe.
Just to be clear: I’m absolutely in favour of banning cars in cities, but you are making the already bad situation worse for everyone.
Yeah, I guess I’m a litte bit accelerationist(1) with my take here. But the situation will not change if drivers have it more comfortable.
There is so much violence in driving a car, and you argue against me because I make them stop for 20 seconds. (Inner)Cities should not be build for cruising. They should be build for pedestrians. If you want to cruise, drive on the Autobahn or some Umfahrungsstraße.
Spoiler
(1) DuckDuckGo translated accelerationist with beschlagnaderungsorientiert. Since you german speaking I thought you might enjoy this.
You misunderstand me. I agree that being a pedestrian or cyclist should be more convenient and safer, and I don’t care if that means car drivers are inconvenienced by whatever it is that needs to be done to achieve that goal.
But you are inconveniencing car drivers while also making the situation worse for pedestrians, cyclists and everyone else. What you are doing has no positive effects for anyone, except maybe you feeling righteous for a moment.
Spoiler
“beschlagnaderungsorientiert” sounds like a dangerous words from the funniest joke in the world.
Are drivers not deciding and then forcing people to “enjoy” their cars ? ^^
No, they don’t drive their cars because they think it’s good for you, they drive them because they think it’s good for them.
Depends on the context I think, if you use even though you don’t need to then it’s a choice for you and people around you
But you are still driving your car because it benefits you. Nobody thinks they are helping others by driving through a busy city center.
Deciding what is good for random strangers and then forcing them to enjoy whatever it is you came up with doesn’t sound like very good idea.
The birth of an authoritarian.
The confusion I feel as a European about this post.
Despite seeing drivers enraged by road safety and basic courtesy frequently while walking, this remains confusing AND infuriating as an American.
I have no idea what is the supposed message of the “author”. Don’t cross the street?
Their logic: people in cars = captains of industry who cannot be delayed as they go to their power lunches
People on foot = slovenly, slackjawed peasants who are obviously wasting time
Only the poors walk. Don’t be poor.
Making ~100 cars drive 30 minutes to work every day is the destruction of 50 hour of human life, 100 hours both ways, almost every single day, but apparently cars are freedom so 🤷
Just for you, Jeff, I’m pushing every single walk button I see, especially when I’m not crossing the road.
I’m pretty confident pushing the button actually doesn’t do anything. You press the button and wait forever and eventually the lights change but they were gonna do that anyway.
It depends on the intersection. Yes, some are a placebo, too many are token, but some actually work.
I know for my nearby intersections, when the button is not pressed, even when the lights change, the walk signal will never illuminate.
I’ve started walking around my town a lot more since Covid, and see all three regulalrly
In college, I lived close to my university’s campus near an intersection that would get very busy during sporting events and other occasions where there would be many people in town.
The intersection would set all the lights to red if it had detected no activity for a good while (such as at night when it was rarely used) and would also immediately change the green light for cross traffic to red if you pressed the crosswalk button so long as there wasn’t any cross traffic for a few minutes.
It was surprisingly sophisticated traffic control considering that most of the other intersections were just on simple timers.
Yeah, a lot of the time they’re just there because people look for them if they’re not and then they fidget, don’t wait for the signal and dash into traffic.
The town I grew up in, the vast majority didn’t do anything but they gently beeped, and if you pushed the button it would tell you the sign status until it completed the cycle. Helpful for vision impaired people.
There were a few that shifted the traffic lights to a different cycle and otherwise it never did a pedestrian cycle.There was one though, where pushing the button nearly immediately started a pedestrian cycle.
There was a wide block with an apartment building in the middle on one side, and a grocery store directly across from it. Not long enough that people complained, but enough so that people still trotted across the otherwise busy street a lot. After trying nearly everything else they eventually put a traffic light in the middle of the block that was nearly entirely on demand for the crosswalk button, because almost any delay and the (college student) residents would just dash across.Watching confused drivers was fun.
Does the US not have traffic light controlled crossings at all then? In the UK we have multiple types of light controlled crossings for pedestrians and others e.g. bikes and horse riders (Pegasus crossing). These are always on demand from the button.
It’s less common to have a light or crosswalk away from a junction. Usually when you push the button it changes the lights to the crossing sequence on the next cycle so everything keeps flowing, so a pedestrian might hit the button, then wait for traffic to stop, then cross traffic, then a dedicated turn cycle. It can be a bit of time.
The light in question would turn yellow the moment you pushed the button, without integration with the nearby lights. Driver’s usually don’t expect to get stopped after being allowed to pass a red light after only about 100 meters.In general, there’s too much variation to say the US as a whole doesn’t do some traffic thing. If it exists odd are someone tried using it on a road somewhere.
In terms of animals, pelican can be quite common in urban environments, zebra in suburban. I haven’t quite seen a toucan other than separate signal fixtures in downtown Seattle (my memory is a bit hazy though). I have yet to see pegasus or puffin.
Ok good. I was worried for a moment there when the commenter I was replying to painted a picture of US drivers totally confused by traffic signals that weren’t part of a junction for road vehicles.
I also had never seen a Pegasus crossing in the UK until one appeared close to where I live, it’s between a suburban area and a national park crossing a 60mph road so it makes sense for horse riders to cross there. They probably appreciate it.
You might be a little far south for the Pacific Puffin.
The one near my work extends the red light for long enough you can cross on foot & makes the walking signal & countdown appear.
It does not stop left turning cars from running us over though.
In my country, if you don’t press it, you won’t get green. The intersection will still change, but the pedestrian light won’t. If the button isn’t pressed, the intersection light will change faster, since there won’t be pedestrians holding up traffic.
I know at least some of them work, because sometimes I’ll be waiting there for the walk signal and it never appears, and I go “Oh, I forgot to push the button.”
Where I live the major cross streets’ buttons are just placebo. They aren’t even connected. It just makes people feel better to push them.
The smaller streets, however, they are critical. You will not get the walk indicator without it.
I don’t understand, isn’t this the button you press if you want to cross? Are you not supposed to press the button?
In America pressing that button is considered a government handout. You’re supposed to cross the street using common sense and determination. Real men don’t even look to check when they cross the street because they have God on their side.
i’d like to see it the other way around, drivers have to get out and run over to press the beg button. At least they will be getting some exercise.
They’ll just arrive 30 seconds later at the next red light where they still have to wait for the same 5 phases
If it’s not satire, I’d love to see his reaction when someone presses the button then realises it’s clear and they didn’t need to and jaywalks 😅
I once saw a jogger push the crossing button on one of the busiest roads in the city and then continue on his way without crossing. I kinda respect that kind of mad-lad behaviour. :)
One hour commute to the office for a job that could be done from home is the real destruction of time in a human life.
This the same guy who made calls for child labour to be legalised and for the civil rights act to be repealed… I’m gonna go out on a limb and say this isn’t (deliberately) satire
Let me guess, he is driving an oversized pickup truck with view lines worse than a German WII tank, right? Or am I haunted by prejudices?
This is rage bait, right? What is this guy saying btw, when 10 car drivers are making 200 people in a light rail wait because traffic lights are completely car centric?
At least where I live, the traffic lights definitely favor the light rail.
I guess the pollution from idling cars… dunno.
