I mean your partner could be leaving you because you can't go to the bathroom by yourself because you are permanently disabled for the rest of your life? You'd live to 90 but unable to move by yourself?
So yeah I guess you could have a brain chemical imbalance that tells you pain is lucky because it could be worse or permanent and you might get away with it being temporary?
Somewhere between overly positive and depression is the right balance.
The author was hit by a motorist. As a road cyclist, I ride predictably, visibly, and legally. Yet every close call or collision has been due to motorist impatience, inattention, and/or lawlessness. By over-emphasizing the "luck" factor and using the narrative of some inanimate force of nature "a car" causing the harm, we continue to fail to hold those directly causing the problem responsible.
Nowhere in the article does it mention that someone was driving the car. It's just an inanimate car with no driver. It absolves any responsibility to the human behind the wheel.
---
Luckily I got hit by a driver.
Luckily I got hit by a car.
I got hit by a driver on Sunday
I got hit by a car on Sunday.
---
No less catchy. It's why there are media guidelines around reporting on collisions.
No, I do understand. I'm as anti-car as the next guy. It's absurd that we have normalised multi-ton death machines travelling at high speeds within arms-reach of pedestrians. One of the first things I said after it happened was "fucking cagers", which is a phrase I picked up years ago from DIY electric bike forums. I don't own a car and hope I never have to.
But it's also not as simple as driver hits pedestrian.
Two drivers were involved. The resulting wreckage slid into us. I am reasonably confident that one of those two drivers is at fault - distracted or not paying enough attention and straying into the wrong lane, but I have no idea which. Maybe I'll find out eventually, when the police finish investigating.
If I was reporting on the crash, then sure, maybe "a driver slid into me after crashing into another car in a collision that was maybe his fault" would be a better title.
Should and is are different. Humans aren’t perfect, so you assume that risk by being unprotected near cars. Taking that risk is permitted and thus bikes are allowed on the road, but don’t confuse that for equity.
Humanity has collectively decided cars have more utility than bikes. It’s possible to completely isolate bikes and cars onto separate networks that don’t overlap but humanity decided it’s generally not worth the investment. Thus you’re given the freedom to take risks, but the general assumption by juries etc is you’re partially at fault in any collision.
Disagree and downvote all you want, but that’s simply reality whatever you or I personally prefer.
> Thus your given the freedom to take risks, but the general assumption is you’re partially at fault in any collision.
I guess you mean because you suffer more, rather than legally? Because I'm pretty sure if you hit a cyclist with a car in the UK, you're almost definitely at fault (in the car).
Not that it matters if you're heavily injured. Similarly I hate being a pedestrian in the US. It's terrifying with the turning on red, even though I know I'm in the right, I don't trust the car to stop.
This is not a decision that 'humanity' took, only poor planning of cities which now many people take as just the way things are, their lifestyles largely determined by a very few number of men 70 years ago. There are many places that do it better. Bicyclists are often forced by law to take the unnecessary risk of riding with cars (e.g. by making it illegal to ride on sidewalks).
I have to admit that personally I find there's literally no topic like bicycles that gets people to jump from logical arguments to just spewing hatred (or total disregard) and your comment is just the precursor to the literal dehumanisation that cyclists face on roads.
Completely banning the sale of cars was and still is an option.
The possibility of doing so in any but the most limited situations is currently unthinkable by most people. If I could wave a magic wind I would ban all cars and Taxi in NYC, but that’s a seriously minority opinion.
This is likely a regional thing. I assure you this is not the attitude in the Netherlands and other central European countries. Legally speaking it is also completely incorrect here.
But different regions will have different laws and public opinion.
Yes, and the thing is the US is just a bigger place where things/people are more spaced out.. so the distances travelled tend to be much greater.
Even within cities it's pretty normal to have a 10+ mile commute each way. My commute would be about that far and include crossing 2 bridges, one of which would be a not insignificant climb (350ft). And I live relatively close to the office relative to many of my over-30 peers.
My wife & I both have our parents "nearby" or at least, relative to most of our friends.. nearby. That is to say, 75 miles away. My siblings live 200mi away in different directions, about 400mi apart. Etc.
Just a big place, some stuff works different. :shrug:
Annnnnd why is it that cities aren't building denser housing?
(it's because it's illegal. Because of parking minimums, density maximums, and level of service rules. Which exist because of cars. Which you need to go 10 miles because everything is so far apart. Because of those rules. Because of cars.)
> Humanity has collectively decided cars have more utility than bikes.
No, humanity has collectively definitely not decided that. Bikes have utility, so do cars. Their domains of utility superficially overlap ('transportation') but both serve well in different contexts. Where it goes wrong is where faulty reasoning such as this is used to prioritize one kind of traffic over another, which especially given that it is nearly impossible for a cyclist to kill a car driver but trivial for a car driver to kill a cyclist (or indeed any other user of the road) is kind of bizarre.
The road is a shared resource and traffic rules and infrastructure should be 100% based on inclusivity and safety for all participants. And if one class of participants routinely endangers the others then they should be held accountable, no matter what the perceived utility.
To speak for all of humanity is ridiculous, humanity isn't that homogeneous and besides you can be a driver today and cyclist tomorrow or the other way around.
The whole comment shows a locally centered viewpoint that somehow gets blown up into worldwide support. I don't buy that. There are plenty of places where the bicycle is the dominant mode of transportation. And what's with the 'downvote all you want' nonsense.
Compare the population of all bike friendly areas with the global population it’s clear what’s the dominant situation. Overall things are improving, but most of the world isn’t currently particularly bike safe.
Also, it’s a bike friendly thread. I am well aware of the audience reading the post, the point was to encourage discussion rather than unthinking reflexive action.
There are many 'bike friendly areas' outside of the West notably in Asia. Obviously all of this is dynamic but to present it as a 'done deal' because we have made a decision, especially as 'humanity' is ridiculous. And pre-emptive bitching about downvotes is not something to expect from an account as old as yours.
Who said it’s a done deal in the future, things can change. I would personally ban cars, Taxi, Uber etc in NYC, but that’s currently a minority opinion.
Also there are a few bike friendly areas inside the US, it’s just uncommon.
Sure, but one way to ensure that is for them to think in terms of what is rather than what should be. I would love to buy my niece and nephew a bike, but doing so would be a serious risk to their safety.
There’s awesome bike trails near them but they have no way to get there safely on their own.
Yeah, that's sort of where I am on bikes v cars debate.
There's reckless bikers and reckless motorists, but the reckless motorists are obviously far more dangerous to others.
However, the rationalizing I see from some cyclists is like "just world fallacy" level stuff to me. I've seen enough stupidity on the road to understand that using a bike in mixed traffic is an extremely at-your-own-risk situation, and regardless of what the laws are, it doesn't matter if you're dead. Drunks/distracted drivers and random accidents don't care what the law says.
NYC has a half decent (especially in North Brooklyn) network of concrete barrier protected bike lanes, and yet I still see a tremendous number of cyclists going wrong way, and/or on unprotected roads literally 1 block from the pristine protected bike network, helmetless, playing with their phones, etc.
As someone who occasionally drives in the city (in order to exit/enter on weekends), the reckless disregard for their own lives is.. to me, poor risk management. And my driving is all of 1-2 miles to get from my parking garage to the nearest highway onramp (which some activists want to abolish.. which would leave me to.. drive locally, further, in more mixed traffic, for longer? lol).
I operate in the world as it is, not in the world as I imagine it should be. Cyclists are too small a minority of road users in US, even in most dense urban cities where it could/should work, for us to upend the entire transport infrastructure for them.
It reminds me as well of the Zoomers who only want climate change solved if it overturns the entire socioeconomic order away from capitalism, lol. Cool story, but do you want a solution or to be mad?
"
Humanity has collectively decided cars have more utility than bikes.
"
I don't think this can be taken at face value. Cars make the road (or stroad more often) worse for biking and walking, so more people drive, in a self reinforcing feedback loop.
I shouldn't have had to move to the Netherlands to be able to ride my bike for my daily needs and feel safe.
> Humanity has collectively decided cars have more utility than bikes.
Humanity has not "collectively" decided to prefer cars over other modes of transit. Other countries, most notably the Netherlands, do in fact prefer a much more multi-modal transportation system over a car-centric one like in the United States.
Moreover, your comment ignores the contentious history about this decision in the United States, which was very much imposed on many communities without their consent and to the advantage of a select few who benefited from private automobiles over public transport and other modes of transportation like bicycles. I suggest reading historian Peter Nolan's book "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" if you are curious.
The Netherlands is unusual in instructive ways here. If everywhere were an extremely flat high population density area we would already have noticeably different infrastructure globally. I suspect E-Bikes will do quite a lot to increase bike infrastructure over time, but that’s the future not how things are today.
As to the decision making process, it’s very true that humanity doesn’t hand out power equally. But, while we can strongly disagree with the system that doesn’t actually change what currently exists without action.
The Netherlands also had a lot of pissed off moms who were furious that drivers kept slaughtering their children. It didn't come easy, there were fistfights over it.
"""
In 1969, 48 percent of students in grades K through eight (ages 5 through 14) walked or bicycled to school.1
In 2009, only 13 percent of students in grades K through eight walked or bicycled to school.1
In 1969, 89 percent of students in grades K through eight who lived within one mile of school usually walked
or bicycled to school.2
In 2009, only 35 percent students in grades K through eight students who lived within a mile of school usually
walked or bicycled to school even once a week.
"""
From an American perspective the temptation is to bring up suburbs etc, but being bike unfriendly is a global thing. It’s really about the physical effort to travel X distance and therefore the reasonableness of biking such distances to see a friend.
You still wouldn't want to be hit by a moving bicycle though, regardless of speed. People can act recklessly when they perceive themselves to be invulnerable and this applies to everyone, cyclists included.
I’m a cyclist, and have experienced plenty of bad behavior by drivers.
But cyclists also do incredibly stupid things, and I witness this almost every time I ride. I’ve had to make extreme evasive maneuvers on my bike to avoid a serious accident caused by inattention or dangerous choices made by other cyclists.
One day, I was driving my car, and after stopping at a stop sign, began to make my way through the intersection.
A moment later, a cyclist landed on my hood. They had - at full speed - gone the wrong way around a roundabout covered by dense foliage in the middle, and exited the roundabout the wrong way down a one way street, where my car was just beginning to roll.
Maybe this circumstance doesn’t fit the “if a car driver hits a cyclist” criteria (the responding police officer and later, the insurance company agreed), but every collision is unique, and the cyclist plays a part.
Cars are overwhelmingly at fault in most cases. Cyclists often contribute to or directly cause extremely dangerous interactions.
I clipped a bicyclist once. He was riding on the wrong side of the road, along a chain link fence, and rode into the intersection after the light turned red. What would have prevented that was there was another car stopped at the light and when it turned green he didn't go. Today I would've slowed way down.
I find I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for bicycles. They're small, fast, and often not where they are supposed to be.
Also there is a lot of talk about cars but in my extended friends groups I know of a number of non-car related accidents. And a couple of cyclist hitting other cyclists. And I think we don't keep statistics on those.
My take is the system wasn't set up for bicycles and it'll take a lot of time and money to fix that.
> By over-emphasizing the "luck" factor and using the narrative of some inanimate force of nature "a car" causing the harm, we continue to fail to hold those directly causing the problem responsible.
See also:
> Before the labor movement, factory owners would say "it was an accident" when American workers were injured in unsafe conditions.
> Before the movement to combat drunk driving, intoxicated drivers would say "it was an accident" when they crashed their cars.
> Planes don’t have accidents. They crash. Cranes don’t have accidents. They collapse. And as a society, we expect answers and solutions.
> Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by dangerous streets and unsafe drivers. They are not accidents. Let’s stop using the word "accident" today.
> we continue to fail to hold those directly causing the problem responsible.
That would fun to deconstruct....we've got the driver of the vehicle, (possibly) people that may have agitated the driver contributing to their carelessness, their parents for raising them the way they did, the driving instructor, those who design and oversee training/testing for drivers licenses, the same for enforcement of laws, nosy (or not) journalists who keep all of these officials on their toes, all of us for complacency with how all of this complexity is run....tricky business, maybe too much work to even think about when one can just blame the driver and be done with it, "close enough".
It is not at all rare to encounter a human who refuses to consider complex causality....in fact, I don't know if I've ever met a single one who can....and this is a smart forum, relatively anyways.
This relates to something I’ve thought a lot about, which is how to have a healthy relationship with regret. I think it’s easy to get caught up in the kind of reasoning the author gives here and to end up feeling like regret is a fundamentally pointless thing. After all, if I go back ten years in a time machine and fix that mistake, I’m not only completely “re-rolling” every good thing in my life after that point, but I’m also replacing every child born in the last nine years or so with different people. What am I, history’s greatest monster?
Which is why useful regret is forward-looking. It makes no sense to entertain a regret like “if only I’d left the house one second earlier,” because there’s no systematic connection between leaving the house slightly sooner and not getting hit by a car. It really is just wishing you could redo a specific dice roll. There’s no actual lesson.
But a regret like “if only I’d noticed the warning signs” is different. That’s a functional, forward-looking regret which you can learn from. You don’t have to want to get in a time machine and redo your life from that point, and you can acknowledge that you simply didn’t have the experience needed to make the right decision at the time. But the feeling of regret can still help you to internalize the systematic relationship between that decision and its outcome.
That matches my perspective perfectly, in a much clearer way than I've been able to express. As much as we may think we could change one event in the past to fix one problem today, it doesn't work like that.
We are, as you say, pining after the chance to re-roll every event since that point in history, in a futile attempt to try and fix one small problem today.
I think there definitely are situations that would warrant the desire to re-roll your entire life. But I'm nowhere near that point today.
Your point about forward-looking regret has definitely given me something to think about.
I will warn against “if only I knew the warning signs” in situations where you actually cannot reasonably predict or it isn’t reasonable to take initiative in preventing. This is common with anxiety where something awkward or weird happens and, at some point in the past it might’ve spun out (especially in childhood where children also don’t have the capacity to gracefully handle another awkward kid), but generally most people can laugh it off and promptly forget it— treating small awkward moments as warning signs a friendship is over isn’t actually true for most friendships.
(This also happens about more serious circumstances like domestic abuse, where most partners aren’t abusive but due to experiencing abuse in the past suddenly normal things are warning signs of oncoming harm that isn’t actually happening.)
The author is saying that everything in their life is shaped by the events they have experienced up to this point. It doesn't matter whether or not the individual event was good or bad at the time, because we ultimately can't know what impact it will have on our future.
This is reminiscent of the Alan Watts parable of the Chinese Farmer (probably adapted from a Chinese parable):
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
This parable is linked in the article, actually. Also Derek Sivers (CD Baby) posted about it in 2009 and I rather like how it's presented there: https://sive.rs/horses
I think the point is that part of luck is made of just attitude. "Lucky people" may be even able to transform their bad luck into good fortune.
You go to the bank, there is a heist. Somebody get shot in his left arm. The unlucky will think: "Why so much bad luck? Went to the bank and got shot!", lucky people will think: "Just a few more inches and I was dead! How lucky am I?".
Perhaps unlucky people tend to concentrate on the negative aspects of the events and think about how the outcome could have been better. Lucky people tend to see the more positive side of things and reflect upon how the outcome could have been much worse.
I’ve tended toward this viewpoint myself as I’ve grown older. Just this week, our AC went out for 3 days (I live in Phoenix), and I got a pretty nasty head cold at the same time. My past self would’ve been so bitchy and moany about the situation, but my current me was more “what can ya do?” I did what I could to try to keep my family as comfortable as possible and we got through it. Turned out to be a pretty incredible week by the end of it.
Side note: I truly do not mean to be flippant or victim blaming in any way, but honestly, OP, how did you get hit by a car? I’ve never even come close to getting hit by one, and I’ve changed tires on a freeway during rush hour. I mean to receive a genuine explanation here, because my children are young and I want to teach them how to be safe around roads. (I’m assuming this was a pedestrian-vehicle incident because the article is light on details)
Two drivers crashed into each other head on (but offset, corner-corner) and the wreckage slid into us on the pavement. Not something you could realistically blame me for or avoid.
I got hit by a car when i was a kid (as a pedestrian), and I have pondered the exact same things before. It was bad luck that I got hit, but was it good luck that the injury caused a coma, which helped my brain protect itself? Very quickly the good/bad binary becomes nonsense.
This reminds me of the quote from Star Trek, “There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of. There were -- loose threads; untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads, it unraveled the tapestry of my life.”
69 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadI mean your partner could be leaving you because you can't go to the bathroom by yourself because you are permanently disabled for the rest of your life? You'd live to 90 but unable to move by yourself?
So yeah I guess you could have a brain chemical imbalance that tells you pain is lucky because it could be worse or permanent and you might get away with it being temporary?
Somewhere between overly positive and depression is the right balance.
The parable in the article is also used at the end of Charlie Wilson’s War by the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Nowhere in the article does it mention that someone was driving the car. It's just an inanimate car with no driver. It absolves any responsibility to the human behind the wheel.
---
Luckily I got hit by a driver.
Luckily I got hit by a car.
I got hit by a driver on Sunday
I got hit by a car on Sunday.
---
No less catchy. It's why there are media guidelines around reporting on collisions.
https://www.rc-rg.com/guidelines
But it's also not as simple as driver hits pedestrian.
Two drivers were involved. The resulting wreckage slid into us. I am reasonably confident that one of those two drivers is at fault - distracted or not paying enough attention and straying into the wrong lane, but I have no idea which. Maybe I'll find out eventually, when the police finish investigating.
If I was reporting on the crash, then sure, maybe "a driver slid into me after crashing into another car in a collision that was maybe his fault" would be a better title.
Humanity has collectively decided cars have more utility than bikes. It’s possible to completely isolate bikes and cars onto separate networks that don’t overlap but humanity decided it’s generally not worth the investment. Thus you’re given the freedom to take risks, but the general assumption by juries etc is you’re partially at fault in any collision.
Disagree and downvote all you want, but that’s simply reality whatever you or I personally prefer.
Not humanity only the planners of unwalkable/uncyclable sprawling towns with bad public transportation...
I guess you mean because you suffer more, rather than legally? Because I'm pretty sure if you hit a cyclist with a car in the UK, you're almost definitely at fault (in the car).
Not that it matters if you're heavily injured. Similarly I hate being a pedestrian in the US. It's terrifying with the turning on red, even though I know I'm in the right, I don't trust the car to stop.
I have to admit that personally I find there's literally no topic like bicycles that gets people to jump from logical arguments to just spewing hatred (or total disregard) and your comment is just the precursor to the literal dehumanisation that cyclists face on roads.
The possibility of doing so in any but the most limited situations is currently unthinkable by most people. If I could wave a magic wind I would ban all cars and Taxi in NYC, but that’s a seriously minority opinion.
But different regions will have different laws and public opinion.
Even within cities it's pretty normal to have a 10+ mile commute each way. My commute would be about that far and include crossing 2 bridges, one of which would be a not insignificant climb (350ft). And I live relatively close to the office relative to many of my over-30 peers.
My wife & I both have our parents "nearby" or at least, relative to most of our friends.. nearby. That is to say, 75 miles away. My siblings live 200mi away in different directions, about 400mi apart. Etc.
Just a big place, some stuff works different. :shrug:
Cities are expensive and not building enough housing
People move further out due to cost
(it's because it's illegal. Because of parking minimums, density maximums, and level of service rules. Which exist because of cars. Which you need to go 10 miles because everything is so far apart. Because of those rules. Because of cars.)
https://youtu.be/bnKIVX968PQ?si=BdOqmdqkVj5oN7I6
The law may not make a distinction, but prosecutors and juries definitely do.
No, humanity has collectively definitely not decided that. Bikes have utility, so do cars. Their domains of utility superficially overlap ('transportation') but both serve well in different contexts. Where it goes wrong is where faulty reasoning such as this is used to prioritize one kind of traffic over another, which especially given that it is nearly impossible for a cyclist to kill a car driver but trivial for a car driver to kill a cyclist (or indeed any other user of the road) is kind of bizarre.
The road is a shared resource and traffic rules and infrastructure should be 100% based on inclusivity and safety for all participants. And if one class of participants routinely endangers the others then they should be held accountable, no matter what the perceived utility.
To speak for all of humanity is ridiculous, humanity isn't that homogeneous and besides you can be a driver today and cyclist tomorrow or the other way around.
That doesn’t make anything in your response less valid about how we actually should treat these resources.
Also, it’s a bike friendly thread. I am well aware of the audience reading the post, the point was to encourage discussion rather than unthinking reflexive action.
Also there are a few bike friendly areas inside the US, it’s just uncommon.
There’s awesome bike trails near them but they have no way to get there safely on their own.
However, the rationalizing I see from some cyclists is like "just world fallacy" level stuff to me. I've seen enough stupidity on the road to understand that using a bike in mixed traffic is an extremely at-your-own-risk situation, and regardless of what the laws are, it doesn't matter if you're dead. Drunks/distracted drivers and random accidents don't care what the law says.
NYC has a half decent (especially in North Brooklyn) network of concrete barrier protected bike lanes, and yet I still see a tremendous number of cyclists going wrong way, and/or on unprotected roads literally 1 block from the pristine protected bike network, helmetless, playing with their phones, etc.
As someone who occasionally drives in the city (in order to exit/enter on weekends), the reckless disregard for their own lives is.. to me, poor risk management. And my driving is all of 1-2 miles to get from my parking garage to the nearest highway onramp (which some activists want to abolish.. which would leave me to.. drive locally, further, in more mixed traffic, for longer? lol).
I operate in the world as it is, not in the world as I imagine it should be. Cyclists are too small a minority of road users in US, even in most dense urban cities where it could/should work, for us to upend the entire transport infrastructure for them.
It reminds me as well of the Zoomers who only want climate change solved if it overturns the entire socioeconomic order away from capitalism, lol. Cool story, but do you want a solution or to be mad?
I don't think this can be taken at face value. Cars make the road (or stroad more often) worse for biking and walking, so more people drive, in a self reinforcing feedback loop.
I shouldn't have had to move to the Netherlands to be able to ride my bike for my daily needs and feel safe.
Humanity has not "collectively" decided to prefer cars over other modes of transit. Other countries, most notably the Netherlands, do in fact prefer a much more multi-modal transportation system over a car-centric one like in the United States.
Moreover, your comment ignores the contentious history about this decision in the United States, which was very much imposed on many communities without their consent and to the advantage of a select few who benefited from private automobiles over public transport and other modes of transportation like bicycles. I suggest reading historian Peter Nolan's book "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" if you are curious.
As to the decision making process, it’s very true that humanity doesn’t hand out power equally. But, while we can strongly disagree with the system that doesn’t actually change what currently exists without action.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
But a lot of kids are alive who would be dead without their efforts.
The difference is how much kids where biking, which has a lot to do with the utility of biking in a flat high density country.
Utility -> Use -> Risk -> Deaths -> Change
https://www.walkbiketoschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/...
""" In 1969, 48 percent of students in grades K through eight (ages 5 through 14) walked or bicycled to school.1
In 2009, only 13 percent of students in grades K through eight walked or bicycled to school.1
In 1969, 89 percent of students in grades K through eight who lived within one mile of school usually walked or bicycled to school.2
In 2009, only 35 percent students in grades K through eight students who lived within a mile of school usually walked or bicycled to school even once a week. """
From an American perspective the temptation is to bring up suburbs etc, but being bike unfriendly is a global thing. It’s really about the physical effort to travel X distance and therefore the reasonableness of biking such distances to see a friend.
This reminds me of how every driver thinks they are at least above average and most people think they are even an excellent driver.
I guess the same applies to cyclists.
I’m probably not going to attempt to draw any policy or broader conclusions from this.
Even at, to guess, 10 mph, I don't recommend it. Wrote off my bicycle.
But yeah, small samples are bad to draw conclusions from.
It looks like there was one pedestrian death caused by a cyclist in around the last 10 years.
If a cyclist hits a pedestrian, they have failed in that duty.
If a car driver hits a cyclist, they too have failed.
But cyclists also do incredibly stupid things, and I witness this almost every time I ride. I’ve had to make extreme evasive maneuvers on my bike to avoid a serious accident caused by inattention or dangerous choices made by other cyclists.
One day, I was driving my car, and after stopping at a stop sign, began to make my way through the intersection.
A moment later, a cyclist landed on my hood. They had - at full speed - gone the wrong way around a roundabout covered by dense foliage in the middle, and exited the roundabout the wrong way down a one way street, where my car was just beginning to roll.
Maybe this circumstance doesn’t fit the “if a car driver hits a cyclist” criteria (the responding police officer and later, the insurance company agreed), but every collision is unique, and the cyclist plays a part.
Cars are overwhelmingly at fault in most cases. Cyclists often contribute to or directly cause extremely dangerous interactions.
I find I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for bicycles. They're small, fast, and often not where they are supposed to be.
Also there is a lot of talk about cars but in my extended friends groups I know of a number of non-car related accidents. And a couple of cyclist hitting other cyclists. And I think we don't keep statistics on those.
My take is the system wasn't set up for bicycles and it'll take a lot of time and money to fix that.
See also:
> Before the labor movement, factory owners would say "it was an accident" when American workers were injured in unsafe conditions.
> Before the movement to combat drunk driving, intoxicated drivers would say "it was an accident" when they crashed their cars.
> Planes don’t have accidents. They crash. Cranes don’t have accidents. They collapse. And as a society, we expect answers and solutions.
> Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by dangerous streets and unsafe drivers. They are not accidents. Let’s stop using the word "accident" today.
* https://crashnotaccident.com
* https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/travel/safety/road-users/crash...
That would fun to deconstruct....we've got the driver of the vehicle, (possibly) people that may have agitated the driver contributing to their carelessness, their parents for raising them the way they did, the driving instructor, those who design and oversee training/testing for drivers licenses, the same for enforcement of laws, nosy (or not) journalists who keep all of these officials on their toes, all of us for complacency with how all of this complexity is run....tricky business, maybe too much work to even think about when one can just blame the driver and be done with it, "close enough".
It's pretty straightforward for me. You hit me, I sue you. Not your driving instructor. Not the license administrators. Not your parents.
I sue you.
Which is why useful regret is forward-looking. It makes no sense to entertain a regret like “if only I’d left the house one second earlier,” because there’s no systematic connection between leaving the house slightly sooner and not getting hit by a car. It really is just wishing you could redo a specific dice roll. There’s no actual lesson.
But a regret like “if only I’d noticed the warning signs” is different. That’s a functional, forward-looking regret which you can learn from. You don’t have to want to get in a time machine and redo your life from that point, and you can acknowledge that you simply didn’t have the experience needed to make the right decision at the time. But the feeling of regret can still help you to internalize the systematic relationship between that decision and its outcome.
We are, as you say, pining after the chance to re-roll every event since that point in history, in a futile attempt to try and fix one small problem today.
I think there definitely are situations that would warrant the desire to re-roll your entire life. But I'm nowhere near that point today.
Your point about forward-looking regret has definitely given me something to think about.
(This also happens about more serious circumstances like domestic abuse, where most partners aren’t abusive but due to experiencing abuse in the past suddenly normal things are warning signs of oncoming harm that isn’t actually happening.)
The author is saying that everything in their life is shaped by the events they have experienced up to this point. It doesn't matter whether or not the individual event was good or bad at the time, because we ultimately can't know what impact it will have on our future.
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
You go to the bank, there is a heist. Somebody get shot in his left arm. The unlucky will think: "Why so much bad luck? Went to the bank and got shot!", lucky people will think: "Just a few more inches and I was dead! How lucky am I?".
Perhaps unlucky people tend to concentrate on the negative aspects of the events and think about how the outcome could have been better. Lucky people tend to see the more positive side of things and reflect upon how the outcome could have been much worse.
Side note: I truly do not mean to be flippant or victim blaming in any way, but honestly, OP, how did you get hit by a car? I’ve never even come close to getting hit by one, and I’ve changed tires on a freeway during rush hour. I mean to receive a genuine explanation here, because my children are young and I want to teach them how to be safe around roads. (I’m assuming this was a pedestrian-vehicle incident because the article is light on details)
"Assume that everyone that can see you wants to kill you."
It's not bad advice elsewhere, either; but its the only realistic attitude on public streets.
A collision occurs - a twist of fate's dance,
But let us embrace the hand we've been dealt,
With gratitude and contentment deeply felt.