Cars are unsafe at any speed. Get them off the roads.
While I am massively pro human centric transpiration (walkable cities, bicycle infrastructure, public transport), this take makes no sense.
Cars have their place, for certain deliveries, disabled people, emergency services.
Cars are unsafe at any speed, but we can’t just get them off the road tomorrow. We need to stop over funding more road projects and instead plow it into overhauling our infrastructure.
Bob and Betty citizen living in the outer suburbs because we keep building detached houses can’t afford to not drive. There’s no bloody train.
More trains, more apartments (with better Owners Corporation laws), more bike lanes.
Bit by bit, we can take the cars off the road.
One of my favourite songs to quote is Courtney Barnet’s Dead Fox:
More people die on the road than they do in the ocean. Maybe we should mull over culling cars instead of sharks, or just lock them up in parks where we can go and view them
A couple of weeks ago, they closed off one side of a dual carriageway in Perth for a horse race. No, the horses weren’t on the road, but the approach to the racecourse was open only to VIP members of the racecourse who had special parking permits. Hundreds of cars stuck using a lane each of the other side of the road. While I sat in that traffic for 20 minutes, exactly zero VIPs came along to use that other side of the road. At least half a dozen people holding half of a main road closed just in case a VIP driver comes along. It does your head in.
“There’s no blame. We really need to throw our arms around each other. We need to show what a strong community we are,” [the Mayor] said.
The blame is the fact that cars are allowed on roads being used for a race at all. I’ve had the privilege of participating a few times in Brisbane’s Tour de Brisbane, and also in some other events around SEQ. The closes roads of TdB are an absolute dream. The events on open roads are absolutely miserable if you’re not good enough to keep up with a big pack.
We need to make it easier for these kinds of events to fully close the roads for them to be able to happen safely. The blame is firmly on our politicians and their constant obsession with never inconveniencing cars in any way, even to the expense of people’s lives.
Weird because I used to live in Armidale. I was a part of SES and one job I did for them was traffic control for a bike race similar to what you mentioned. Sounds like either SES were busy or more likely the organisers didn’t bother getting them out this time? At the very least you’d think a car would lead and follow the group. Definitely tempted to send the mayor a letter or get my remaining family down there to, since the mayor has taken it upon himself to defend dangerous driving occasioning death. Especially given the New Englands obsession with road cameras and “road safety”.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the cost of closing roads has gone up enormously as governments and councils prioritise cars more and more, and as they increase requirements of how much security & police you need to pay to manage closed road events.
The mayor is apparently a keen cyclist himself, so I think it’s quite possible that there’s a genuine belief that this may have been some other cause…it’s unlikely for a driver to end up hitting a tree if they’ve attempted a dangerously close pass and misjudged how close they can get, for example. Possibly a medical episode or dodging a roo. I’d wait for the coroner’s report or some other evidence before passing that kind of judgment.
But there’s no need to wait for that kind of thing to point out that no crash could have occurred if the driver were never near the cyclists to begin with, which is why I wanted to concentrate on that.
