I think you're reaching for something to be angry on this one. I read the title as "[car] crash [involving a] bike". Shorthand is not at all uncommon in headlines, which need to be snappy. They're not trying to frame the incident as caused by the bike or anything.
They’ve been doing this talking about e-bike fatalities non-stop. “E-bikes are dangerous…. 42 people died on e-bikes…” they cite the statistics, but never mention how many of those people were ran over by assholes who don’t respect the danger of their cars.
Authorities allege that Hammons left the scene after the arrival of medical personnel but before law enforcement arrived. He turned himself in the next day and was lodged in the Marion County Jail.
Just after 7 p.m. Saturday, police say they responded to the collision in Marion County on Hwy 64 near milepost 5. According to investigators, the bicyclist, Harley Austin, 42, was riding south in the bike lane on Hwy 164 through the intersection of Talbot Rd SE when Hammons, who was driving a Dodge Ram 3500, turned onto the highway and collided with Austin.
Why is there a bike lane on a highway?
To be clear, I’m not taking the side of the driver. Fuck people with unnecessarily huge vehicles. I side with cyclists almost 100% of the time. But this just sounds unsafe.
To me, a highway means speeds in excess of 50mph. That isn’t a place where we should have a body unprotected sharing the road.
Bikes are fine on highways. On freeways that are enclosed and its impossible to roll onto ground or terrain probably not, which is why freeways have rules against it.
In California, if there is not a parallel alternative route for bicycles to take, they are allowed on the freeway. Many parts of the 101 freeway fit this exception. State highway 130 (look it up on google maps) is a favorite of cyclists. It is a two lane state highway with a 40 MPH speed limit. for most of its length, there are no shoulders. In many places, the white line on the edge of the lane is also the edge of a vertical cliff. There are places where I have seen an SUV in front of me with one wheel on the white line, and the other on the double yellow line because the lane is so narrow. The road is so winding that there are very few places where you can even get to the speed limit, let alone exceed the speed limit. But bicyclists love it because it was built to allow horse drawn wagons to haul heavy loads to the top of a 4000’ peak, so it has a very gentle grade, and there are great views along its entire length.
Huh. I use “highway” and “freeway” interchangeably. Just did a search and found the following, so thanks for enlightening me:
Highways have controlled areas, and traffic lights, tend to be placed in rural areas and always allow you to drive off. Freeways have higher speed limits and are, in essence, a faster way to get from one city to the other with minimal traffic control.
I guess maybe this is a result of my having grown up in a midwestern state where both could exist without distinction. TIL.
In some rural areas, the “highway” is literally the only way to get from point A to point B. Many businesses and homes are directly on the highway. It’s not the same as Interstate 5 which is a few miles west of there.
Unlike a freeway, which has bigger speed limits, a highway is just any road designed for high traffic. It still has intersections, traffic lights, and driveways into properties.
I suppose it’s perfectly fine that it means that to you, but US highways run through every little dying town and the speed limits are usually 25-35mph in town, usually for the sole purpose of being a revenue generating speed trap. In fact I just looked it up and this intersection is a school zone with a 20mph speed limit.
usually for the sole purpose of being a revenue generating speed trap. In fact I just looked it up and this intersection is a school zone with a 20mph speed limit.
You think maybe there’s other reasons bar revenue traps at play here then?
I’m an urbanist, I live in a dense city, I literally do not own any motorized transportation
There are hundreds of shitty little towns across America that survive solely off of ticket revenue by putting up a gas station, a church, and a dollar general on a road that’s primarily designed for cross-country travel by slamming the speed limit from 65mph+ to 25 within a 200 meter distance, and anyone who lived in that area without a car would literally die due to lack of a job, income, access to food, etc etc etc so I’m really not buying this argument
Braking really isn’t that hard in a car and it’s not like you lose a meaningful amount of time doing the speed limit for a podunk town. This entire argument can only begin to make sense with a lot of carbrained entitlement
To be fair calling it just a “crash” implies car vs car so calling it a “bike crash” conveys more i formation but makes it seem like only bikes were involved.
I’m not angry at the headline. Just. Not a god damned thing is being done to slow down pedestrian and cyclists death on our streets and roads. Not a thing. All we get is a fucking painted line and hope that some asshole doesn’t hit you. Start impounding peoples cars for traffic violations. Increase fines so luxury car drivers think twice about driving on the sidewalk.
No, no, no: manslaughter prision sentences for those who choose without real proven need to get a vehicle which is much more dangerous for pedestrians/cyclists and then end up killing a pedestrian/cyclist.
If I went around running on the sidewalk holding a fucking spear (properly sharpenned) in front of me pointing forward, with no care in the World (for no reason other than wanting to look manly), and ended up goring and killing somebody with it, I would be fucking rotting in jail for it and rightly so, so the exact same logic should apply to people who knowingly choose the vehicular option most dangerous to others and then use it without “due care and attention”.
(PS: Sorry for the foul language, but the double standards of the Law on this versus every other single situation out there were people knowingly endanger the life of others with no need, really anger me).
Honestly you could do a lot by simply charging people the same as non car related crimes. Like if you or I got pissed/trashed/inebriated and killed a person we would get a totally different outcome if the tool used was a brick or a car.
If you got drunk, tossed a brick into the woods hit someone and accidentally killed a person it would be treated very similar to vehicular manslaughter in most states in the US.
Your issue is that don’t bump up manslaughter charges to a second degree murder cause car?
Most times (at least around these parts I am) manslaughter hardly ever gets applied. They seem to treat it as an unrelated death. Jim has an “accident” and sadly Sue has passed away. Maybe if the police are feeling frisky we might get an “unsafe operation of a motor vehicle”.
You lose just about anyone willing to listen to you (outside this echo chamber) when you go off the rails about how they have no use and none needs them.
Eh, you need them for work and someone who lives out in the countryside probably could make regular use of them.
The blame rests on the automakers though, pickup trucks used to have the same cargo capacity but were smaller. This lack of visibility is 100% an aesthetic choice. Look at the sprinter truck as an example, it can pull and has great visibility.
Larger boats, RVs, helpful if not strictly required for plowing. A 3500 is definitely on the side of specialized though. These are far rarer than a half ton (1500 in dodge branding).
The reason these have no practical purpose is because all the things it does are done better with a lower bed. Having the bed so fucking high up makes it significantly harder to load and unload. If you’re actually carrying cargo that’s burdensome, you want a low bed, not one of these monstrosities.
Sure, they can do things, but the alternatives that are nearly gone from the market, and these replaced, did the work that a truck is “supposed” to do better. There isn’t a purpose behind making it bigger besides aesthetics to appeal to some people who need to feel bigger for whatever reason.
The issue is not so much size but height. These things are all over where I am as fleet vehicles and even the good ol’ type will comment that they can not see anything in front. Just look at the door or normal car in the background of that picture and you get an idea. These hoods are no joke 1.7 meters high for no other reason then to look mean.
But I’m a poor, blue collar worker who lives in the country side and need to carry my very heavy tools (6 hammers and a wrench) that a truck from the 2000s cannot handle
GMC named their bro-dozers AT-4. AT as in anti-tank. They’re marketing to the suburban tacticool jackasses. Loud exhaust and parking in crowded bus shelters. Yeah fuck these guys.
So it would’ve been fine and dandy if the cyclist had been killed by someone driving a Prius?
'Cause that’s what you imply by placing this bullshit emphasis trying to single out big trucks in particular. Comments like yours reek of implied small-car apologism, and I, for one, am getting sick and hired of it!
There’s a reason this community is called “fuck cars,” and not “fuck big trucks” or something. it’s because the problem is cars — all of them!
Any car, even the smallest, can turn a pedestrian or cyclist into a red smear when driven negligently.
Every car, even the smallest, takes up an entire lane on the street and an entire parking space.
Every car, even the smallest, contributes to car-dependent urban design.
Singling out big trucks as if they’re materially worse than all the other death machines is nothing but a distraction from the real problem at best, and an active disinformation campaign at worst. Our goals should be to get people out of cars entirely, not just into smaller ones!
You know what increases pedestrian fatalities? Vehicles that are too tall to reasonably see pedestrians immediately in front of you. Make better arguments instead of “trucks don’t kill people, all cars do” because it’s absolutely not equal, and there’s real reasoning as to why.
The thing is, they are materially worse than other consumer vehicles. They do all the bad things but more, and their normalization makes it all worse for everyone – have you seen the size of parking spaces in Europe?
they are materially worse than other consumer vehicles
Not in the way that actually matters, which is their effect on low-density zoning and minimum parking requirements. A parking space is a parking space is a parking space — they’re all (roughly) the same size!
no they arent lol, you try parking one of those american cars in this city…
you can get away with owning one in the suburbs, but just parking on the side of the street like most people do? forgetaboutit
i do agree with the wider point though. get rid of all of them, nobody needs private cars. in fact, life on earth desperately needs us to ban private cars.
Have you never had to street park a vehicle or are you a complete moron?
2023 Dodge ram 3500 shortest length is 232", longest is 260.8". 2023 VW golf is 168.9".
That’s over 5 feet longer at minimum and over 7.5 feet longer at worst. That’s a huge amount of wasted space.
They’re wider meaning they cramp the roads horizontally as well (while driving or parked).
There’s no logical defense of these compensation-mobiles other than “I like them” and that’s fine, you’re allowed to like them. Leave it at that. They’re objectively terrible for the safety of everyone around them and are a complete waste of space.
I drove a Jeep Comanche for years and that’s as big a pickup as 99% of pickup owners would ever actually need.
Have you never had to street park a vehicle or are you a complete moron?
Have you stopped beating your wife yet? (See, two can play the “bad-faith compound question” game.) Now fuck off with the childish insults.
They’re wider meaning they cramp the roads horizontally as well (while driving or parked)
A lane is a lane! The narrowest car and the widest car both take up one whole lane each. Unless it’s narrow enough to split the lane two abreast, it doesn’t fucking matter how wide it is!
There’s no logical defense of these compensation-mobiles other than “I like them” and that’s fine, you’re allowed to like them. Leave it at that.
Get some reading comprehension skills! The claim that I’m defending compensation-mobiles is a goddamn lie. I’m not defending large automobiles; I’m attacking all automobiles and questioning why others are not.
What’s actually happening here is that others are trying to conjure up some artificial distinction between big trucks and the rest of the automotive infestation, most likely in order to deflect blame for their own still shitty and car-dependent midsize sedan (or whatever) lifestyle, and are butthurt that I’m not uncritically accepting it.
The bottom line is that cars ruin cities. All cars, without exception! Anybody who denies that — i.e. anybody who tries to only complain about only a subset of the cars — is part of the problem.
I find as cars get either bigger or more expensive or both, the driver’s get proportionally more reckless, ignorant, and entitled. It’s always the big trucks, bmw’s, and teslas that seem intent on running me off the road or flat when I’m biking to work. I don’t know about the more recent ones but the early Prius I rented on a vacation before had shit visibility so I wouldn’t give that one a free pass at least. All this shit seems so futile though. I just want the jumbo sidewalks with a bike lane to be everywhere.
All this shit seems so futile though. I just want the jumbo sidewalks with a bike lane to be everywhere.
Sidewalks and bike lanes don’t get used unless (a) destinations are packed closely enough together for enough trips to be in reasonable walking or cycling distance, and (b) the experience is reasonably pleasant (i.e., not a no-man’s-land sandwiched between a stroad and a bunch of parking lots).
In other words, it’s the zoning that has to be fixed first, by increasing density and removing minimum parking requirements.
A subcompact takes up exactly the same “one parking space” as a truck
Yes, short term that is absolutely correct. What the other person meant makes more sense long term.
When parking lots are built, or design specifications are layed out, the size of cars in use is taken into account. If average car size increases, average parking lot size follows. Just recently I heard that parking lot size has to increase due to the increase in car sizes, driven by SUV popularity.
There are also parking situations where there are no discrete parking spaces, but one continuous space to park, for example along a street. In these situations, bigger cars directly translate to more space being occupied.
Who cares if the parking spaces are 8x18 or 10x20 or whatever? That doesn’t matter. What matters is dipshits continuing to insist on building fifty of them when they ought to be building zero!
Switching fifty people from driving big trucks to driving small cars does nothing but chip around the edges of the problem because they’re still fucking driving. That means, for example, you’re still building suburban-style strip malls for them when you should be building walkable main streets instead.
The issue here is that we need to switch (back) to an entirely different style of urban development, and the size of cars does precisely fuck-all to help with that!
Switching fifty people from driving big trucks to driving small cars does nothing but chip around the edges of the problem because they’re still fucking driving. That means, for example, you’re still building suburban-style strip malls for them when you should be building walkable main streets instead.
The issue here is that we need to switch (back) to an entirely different style of urban development, and the size of cars does precisely fuck-all to help with that!
Very true, you have the correct long-term vision. If we compare the two “strategies” (smaller cars vs urban design), the latter clearly has the bigger impact, big time.
But it’s also more costly to reach. It requires much more time, more political effort, infrastructure changes, …
Opting for smaller cars has none of these strings attached. And they aren’t mutually exclusive.
It requires different strategies that efforts toward smaller cars (or electric cars, or autonomous cars, for that matter) do not contribute to and could in fact distract or detract from.
After all, folks might think “why keep trying to make me change my car centric lifestyle when we’ve ‘already solved’ the pedestrian safety problem (or the environmental problem or whatever),” not realizing there are so many more interconnected problems that only a change in development patterns can address.
Yes, it is funny that folks here apparently just want to circlejerk scapegoating big trucks while downvoting any actual urbanist who dares to point out that they’re focusing on the wrong problem.
No, it probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place, because the driver of a sensibly-sized car can see things that are less than fifty fucking feet ahead of the dash.
Monstrous behemoths like this should be prohibitively expensive to own for personal use and/or be restricted to industrial/ag use only. Fuck your camping or hauling one chair or whatever the fuck you do twice a year. You can rent for something that seldom.
They are last time I checked “prohibitively expensive” but people are dumb enough to pay $100k over 8 year financing. These things are also no better for “industrial/ag” then a truck from 30 years ago that was 4 feet less tall, had an 8 foot bed and a similar towing capacity at a fraction of the price.
These things are the crystallization of our hubris.
No, it probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place, because the driver of a sensibly-sized car can see things that are less than fifty fucking feet ahead of the dash.
[X] doubt
If big trucks were banned, muderous MAGA psychopaths would just mow down cyclists using Dodge Chargers or whatever instead.
I’m pretty fucking far as anti-car sentiment goes but to think that a meaningful amount of cyclists killed via cars is people doing it intentionally is insane. You can kill a man dead in a Smart ForTwo easily but let’s not pretend the giant driving blind spots and especially the cultural messaging that goes along with HUGE ANGY TRUCK (/ CAR) doesn’t help
A used ranger accommodated all of my hauling needs with room to spare when I needed it for work. I drove the company pickup which had the double rear tires once and it was awful and I couldn’t recommend it even just for doing pickup truck things.
It’s so fucking annoying when I’m trying to turn and check for oncoming traffic and one of these or its smaller cousins pulls up next to me so I can’t see
We’re lucky as fuck to have you here to assess the needs of the entire population. Here’s an example. I do concerts for a living. We haul mobile stages. They are quite a few tons. What vehicle to you recommend we tow them with? And should we bring a second vehicle to drive around while the stage is in place for the weekend instead of using the truck that’s already there?
Do you think you’re the only roadie in the world? These vehicles don’t exist abroad. Just check what the fuck they’re doing in Europe. Also you can get a van that doesn’t block your pov (see image) but that wouldn’t look cool would it? Please get your head out of your ass before you comment next time.
It’s wild how there’s this kind of evolutionary pressure to turn the grills into ever bigger and more menacing threat displays and it just keeps spiralling out of control because the cars in the rear view mirror only keep getting bigger and more intimidating and you constantly need to buy a new ego prosthetic in the form of a suburban tank like this to keep up with the other drivers that signal “I’M GONNA EAT YOU ALIVE” to you during every commute and grocery run. I’m sure manufacturers love that.
I need a pickup truck for farm work, but I hate how big these things have gotten. I wouldn’t buy anything made in the past 20 years. All this height for no practical benefit.
Old trucks are actual working trucks. The bed is low enough to easily lift heavy objects into. Modern trucks have no practical purpose in mind. They’re purely aesthetic. Nearly any load you’re lifting into that thing can also be hauled in almost any other vehicle easier. You’d need a forklift to load anything substantial, in which case an old truck or a van would be easier.
in case anyone does not want to click the link here is the whole article:
Brian Hammons, 55, faces hit-run and criminally negligent homicide charges.
SALEM, Ore. (KOIN) — A man turned himself into investigators on Sunday after fatally striking a bicyclist on a highway, then leaving the scene, according to Oregon State Police.
Brian Hammons, 55, faces hit-run and criminally negligent homicide charges.
Just after 7 p.m. Saturday, police say they responded to the collision in Marion County on Hwy 64 near milepost 5. According to investigators, the bicyclist, Harley Austin, 42, was riding south in the bike lane on Hwy 164 through the intersection of Talbot Rd SE when Hammons, who was driving a Dodge Ram 3500, turned onto the highway and collided with Austin. New Level 3 ‘Go Now’ evacuations issued for Bedrock Fire
Austin was taken to Salem Hospital, and was later pronounced dead, OSP said.
Authorities allege that Hammons left the scene after the arrival of medical personnel but before law enforcement arrived. He turned himself in the next day and was lodged in the Marion County Jail.
The investigation is ongoing. Any witnesses of the incident are being encouraged to contact OSP, referencing case SP23-252845.
The article seems fine to me…the title is just a little bit strange probably because they wanted to mention “bike” in it to differentiate it from a crash that doesn’t involve a cyclist.
I am a bit lost, the articles title is “Driver faces hit-run homicide in Marion County bike crash”. This seems to not put any blame on the cyclist. It seems much like any time a car hits and kills something, what am I missing?
Some people get upset about the emphasis on the victim’s vehicle. Title ends with: “Media calls it a ‘bike crash’.” They seem to imply the title implied the bike was at fault. Victim blaming.
Other people disagree and see the inclusion of “bike” as useful information, to differentiate from car-to-car crashes.
I meant as the tone of the article, this post was about the media miss handling the homicide. I thought it was a good no punches pulled short write up, hence “what am I missing”.
There may be dodge ram drivers that aren’t pricks, but the majority of them are pricks. My neighbor just acquired a Dodge ram to add validity to this equation. He was pressure washing it before sun was through the windows on a Monday morning.
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