[upofadown]

In the end though, Homer Simpson is still a bad safety supervisor. Just telling people to "Safen up!" is pointless and in this case is a way of distracting from an important truth ... that the problem here is cars and their drivers, not the pedestrians and cyclists. The legend of the reckless everyone else but drivers is less accepted these days and people tend to get called on it.

[magduf]

I'm not disagreeing that cars and their drivers are the real problem, but this whole thread is about someone saying that pedestrians and cyclists need to watch out for cars, even if they're in the right, and someone else calling this "victim blaming". Call it what you want, but it doesn't matter if you were completely within the law when a car hits and kills you: you're still dead!!! Getting on some high horse about the car driver being "wrong" isn't going to bring the pedestrian back to life.

And sure, maybe (maybe) the legal system will penalize the driver, but is it going to change anything? No, because our society has decided that cars are more important and we're not going to curtail our usage of cars at all, and accidents like this are unavoidable because of the nature of cars and ever-increasing traffic. If we built more trains/subways to take the load off the roads, we really could reduce the cyclist/pedestrian fatalities, but the US isn't going to do that; it's proven that it's completely incapable of building new public-transit infrastructure.

[jgys]

> And sure, maybe (maybe) the legal system will penalize the driver, but is it going to change anything? No, because our society has decided that cars are more important and we're not going to curtail our usage of cars at all, and accidents like this are unavoidable because of the nature of cars and ever-increasing traffic.

Yes, this is the problem that is being discussed -- and the problem that we really need to solve, for a host of reasons ranging from public health to climate stability -- and it is a distraction from discussions of this problem (and also, condescending and unnecessary advice) to suggest that the victims of reckless motorists try harder to not be victims.