Captain Aggravated

How many months do you leave them in the water? 50? 60? Or do you ever take them back out?

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I always heard that quote attributed to Joseph Stalin, re the T-34 vs the German Panzer. I’m not one of the two worst men in history, so a pissing match between the worst man in history and the second worst man in history does not impress me, a better human than both. My name isn’t in a single social studies textbook printed anywhere on earth. Get on my level, noobs.

They get shot just for going to school. Or being brown.

There’s a lot of "should"s in there that just don’t reflect reality. Because of how so many American towns and cities are built, you’d have to bulldoze entire cities to do things like eliminate small traffic lights from residential neighborhoods. And we’re not gonna do that. We’re not going to tear down the entire fucking nation for some retards on bicycles.

In my area, there are very few cyclists who actually bike to get anywhere. They do it for exercise and/or to be allowed to wear their little padded shorts in public. So get the exercise from peddling away from a stop sign. The reason to choose that route instead of the others? To not get hit by cars.

And what exactly is the pedestrian excuse? Why do people insist on walking on the sidewalkless busy roads when in between them there’s a sidewalkless non-busy road?

There’s something about the damn things that makes people think they can do vehicular parkour.

At that point, you can do things like pedestrian bridges, over/underpasses with roads and streets, or level crossings with signals. Instead of trying to mix traffic everywhere, have the two systems meet at certain well designed controlled spots. Instead of bikers being in a near constant state of “I am in traffic”, have certain points along their journey be “I am crossing a road.” These areas will almost certainly drive both cars and bikes to stop, and then one or the other gets to go at a time, rather than both are in motion failing to predict the other’s movements.

Or you do what I’ve seen some cities do and you close certain roads to car traffic entirely, and then send the bikes down there. Further increase the efficiency of both modes of traffic while eliminating collisions. Create walkable and bikeable sections of town that cars can travel between.

Why the fuck would you have right turns on the same signal as straight?

Your parents didn’t even try to educate you, did they?

There are a lot of different kinds of intersections. Simple two-lane meets two lane where each kind has a stop-go light, up to hugely complicated intersections with multiple turn lanes in each direction.

At a small stop-go light, like you might find in a residential neighborhood, there’s one travel lane in all four directions, and each one is a left, straight and right lane. Going left is a yield across oncoming traffic, a green light gives you right of way to go straight or right.

A more medium size intersection might have left and right turn lanes in addition to one or two travel lanes. Let’s say Some Road (N/S) is crossing Another Street (E/W). Some Road is a four-lane divided highway, and at this intersection it has both right and left turn lanes. Another Street is a 2 lane road with much less traffic than Some Road, so it comes out to a left turn lane and a straight/right turn lane.

A typical light cycle will go Some Road gets green circles and green right arrows. Straight lanes bound North and South get to go, as well as those turning right onto Another Street. The through traffic on Some Road blocks any other right of way that could collide with those right turn lanes.

The through lights will turn red, possibly the turn lights will stay green, and the left turn lanes on Another Street will turn green. They can now make a protected left across the intersection, again this blocks any other traffic from colliding with the right turns from Some Road to Another Street, so they retain the right of way.

Finally, those will turn red (or sometimes flashing yellow meaning yield) and Another Street’s straight/right lanes get to go. This cycle will then repeat.

This is for an intersection that doesn’t have sidewalks. You’ll find these out in the middle of nowhere where a state route crosses a federal highway. Interstates and highways built like them will have overpasses and non-blocking intersections.

Where you DO have sidewalks, such as larger intersections inside cities, there are signals for the crosswalks. Those are interlinked with the traffic signals, and depending on the implementation there won’t be any straight and turn signals because “cars go straight” is when the pedestrians cross. When turn lanes are on, all pedestrian traffic is stopped.

Note that these are two different environments; at an intersection in a city center, the speed limits are often 20mph, and frankly, bicycles should not have their own lanes there. By law they’re vehicles, they should be in traffic behaving the same as cars and have the right of way that cars do. Where they get themselves killed is trying to weave in and out of traffic, or insisting on putting in a parallel bike lane pretending it turns off friendly fire. “Just add to every driver’s cognitive load and make them responsible for my safety.” Fuck off.

Meanwhile, back out on Some Road and Another Street, these have 45 and 55 mph speed limits, you’re traveling from town to town here, and these places pretty much should not see bicycle traffic. Here we’re really in the realm of discussing better public transportation and rail service than pedestrian and cycle routes.

The United States isn’t Denmark or the Netherlands; we have been building bike unfriendly roads for a century, and it’s not going to be trivially undone by painting a white line on the side.

It is my assertion that bike lanes, as implemented, are a rock chewing stupid idea.

For about a century now, we’ve had two kinds of travel lane: Sidewalks, and traffic lanes. Sidewalks are for WALKING, traffic lanes are for all vehicles of every description. Every vehicle is supposed to behave the same way following the same rules, regardless of performance. A bicycle, moped, motorcycle, car, truck, all of them are supposed to follow the same rules.

When there are traffic lanes only, no sidewalks, we have rules for how traffic flows. For example, right-turn only lanes at an intersection are right-most, followed by turn-or-straight lanes, then straight only lanes, then straight or left lanes, then left only lanes. Having a lane that goes straight to the right of a right-turning lane is a recipe for collisions.

We do that all the time with sidewalks. Pedestrians are expected to exercise a lot of caution when entering crosswalks to avoid conflict with vehicle traffic. Pedestrians are expected to treat EVERY intersection as if it has a stop sign for them, or they are expected to obey crosswalks with signal devices that are interlocked with traffic lights.

Bike lanes as I have seen them implemented are a lot like sidewalks; slower traffic is placed to the right of traffic lanes…except they do not expect to treat every intersection as a stop sign, and they interpret green lights for straight through as for them, even in conflict with right turning traffic.

So we have a travel lane positioned similarly to how sidewalks are positioned relative to roads, but without the rules that make sidewalks safe. It doesn’t help that, where they do implement lights or whatnot, they increasingly do so in non-standard ways that generations of drivers have not been trained on. There are new kinds of lights at crosswalks, new and weird nomenclature at intersections rather than "No Right On Red 🔴 " signs that have been around for years. It’s not implemented well, and it’s getting people killed.

As for e-bikes: They’re basically not regulated, there’s supposedly a classification system for them, which people ignore. There’s no enforcement, and they do whatever the hell they want, including riding at travel lane speeds on sidewalks, which causes collisions because no other traffic, vehicle or pedestrian, is expecting 20+mph traffic on the sidewalk. They either need to be regulated like mopeds, or they need to go away. “But the motor is electric not gas” fucks with people’s brains. Somehow people aren’t riding Honda Metropolitans or Yamaha Zumas on the sidewalks at 20 or 30mph but that’s happening with e-bikes.

Yeah go die in traffic with all the other zealots.

Having a quasi-religious hatred of automobiles only causes people to demand things like bike lanes right the fuck now, paint the lines on the asphalt, NOW. They don’t put in traffic lights with dedicated bike lane lights that would stop car traffic to let bike lane traffic safely cross, they don’t close some roads to automobile traffic, they paint the lines on the road. And then cyclists think that white line on the pavement somehow keeps them safe when they cross paths with a sedan, when the presence of those lines fundamentally breaks the safety algorithm the roads are built on in the first place.

e-bikes should be outright illegal. We should be imprisoning containership crews for landing with them on board.

I’ve seen a few other factors that might contribute to increased pedestrian/cyclist deaths on our roads:

1. e-Bikes. e-Bikes are mostly a goddamn mistake. The ones that don’t make the bike go any faster than you yourself can pedal it, just make pushing the pedals easier? Those are fine. Anything else should be classified as a moped, and I don’t know why they aren’t. People are riding them at 20+ miles per hour on sidewalks and getting backed into out of blind driveways that weren’t designed with traffic that speed on the sidewalk. Plus you’ve just got more people on 2-wheelers mixing with car traffic, which is a game they lost at the character select screen.

2. Half-assed attempts by DMVs to add bike lanes and walking paths. All the squawking about walkable cities this and fuck cars that you bots have been bitching about has been heard. In my area, where new housing developments or shopping centers are going in, the DOT now requires bike lanes and sidewalks in such places. They connect to nowhere because the main roads aren’t all being modified to add such features, not until they need major modifications themselves. So you’ll see bikes and pedestrians on highways they didn’t used to appear on.

Another problem I’ve seen is the mixing of bike lanes and turn lanes. Our roads have long been built such that any lane that is allowed to turn right does not have lanes that can go straight to their right. So if you have the right of way to turn right, by green circle or green right arrow signal, it is logically safe for the driver to proceed. Until they added bike lanes to the extreme outside next to the curb. We didn’t add signals for these bike lanes, they’re supposed to follow the same signals as cars. So. You’re sitting at a red light with your right turn signal on. It turns solid green. You go. The cyclist overtaking you in the bike lane also saw the light turn green, he tries to go straight, he is crushed to death under your right rear tire. This didn’t used to be a problem, it is now.

3. Walkers and bikers be out here going full retard. My neighborhood is a grid system full of stop signs. There are two North-South streets a couple blocks apart where all the stop signs are crossing, so these are main thoroughfares through town. Cars go the posted speed limit of 35 along there. Between these two streets is another that has stop signs on most blocks. Cars don’t tend to travel down that road because they constantly have to stop. Guess where everyone decides to walk and bike? EVERYWHERE EXCEPT THE ROAD WITH NO CAR TRAFFIC. People go out of their way to play in traffic. I guess you can’t earn a living by getting a job anymore, so you’ve got to get your pelvis crushed to have your day in court.

The one that comes to mind for me there is Army of Darkness. Army of Darkness came out in 1992 and is rated R. Why? Its content is similar to a lot of PG-13 movies, including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which came out 3 years earlier. Army of Darkness is appropriate for the same audience as Indiana Jones. It’s rated R because it’s a sequel to Evil Dead.

Saving Private Ryan features some pretty realistic scenes of combat wounds. Not 10 minutes in, we get a shot of a man’s guts hanging out of his torso while he’s calling for his mama. That movie came out in 1998 and is rated R. Showgirls came out in 1995, and is rated NC-17 because it’s a skinemax movie. This isn’t an original thought by any means, but…are those backwards? Why are we more comfortable showing children war than sex?

I understand it just fine, but as implemented it’s useless for the purpose its supposed to serve.

Further evidence that the rating system is bullshit.

And Disney owns 20th Century Fox. Granted they didn’t when the movie was released.

My point is, the comedy movie that features nudity and consentual sex acts is considered less acceptable for young people than the movie with graphic violence, murder and body horror.

Movie ratings are kinda bullshit anyway.

Airport, one of the movies Airplane! spoofs, features an almost explicit scene of a suicide bombing aboard an airliner in flight. A pregnant woman is injured in the explosion, and a plane load of people spend the entire third act in immediate mortal danger. This movie is rated G.

Ice Age, the Disney (somehow not Pixar) movie whose plot boils down to “Three Men And A Baby, Except Animals” is rated PG for “Mild Peril.”

Raiders of the Lost Ark features explicit scenes of people being shot including blood flowing from a bullet hole, and the climax of the film features a shot of three characters’ faces melting. This movie is also PG.

Caddyshack is a comedy movie about wacky characters around a golf course. A couple women get topless, so this movie is rated R.