"Mayor Walsh says pedestrians, cyclists need to take more responsibility"

Al Bikedardi?

Before he starts lecturing Bostonians about something he seems to know so little about, the mayor ought to get better educated himself. As a pedestrian, cyclist, motorist and someone who rides the T, I was turned off by his condescending tone. I expect he has made things worse. Maybe he should get out more and experience the real Boston.

But the Globe seems to love this rage-inducing photo from 5 years ago because it shows the cyclists out in the main lane, not using the bike lane and wearing no helmet. They know the demographics they are pandering to.

Missing from this image? The out of frame car thats most likely blocking the bike lane.

Downtown is full of intersections with "don't walk, for no reason" pedestrian light timing. For example, traffic has a red light and a "no turn on red", meaning that no cars can legally cross the stop line, but the pedestrians have a "don't walk" for that entire part of the cycle.
Fixing that might be a nice move to encourage pedestrians to take the signals a little more seriously. As it stands, the city has trained us to completely ignore the "don't walk" lights and instead to watch the traffic itself.

...may profit by their example.

It was not all that long ago that a certain Mayor Menino was a car worshiper who disdained cyclists. He had a satori and became a multi-mode champion, leading Boston's advance to a bike-friendly city.

This is another area in which Walsh's head in on backwards. Sure it's true that motor vehicle operators considerably outnumber cyclists. It's also true that they are observably more reckless scofflaws than even youngish cyclists. Plus cops,prosecutors and judges seem to identify with and side with their fellow drivers. The stats show drivers as a group are most dangerous and most in need of law enforcement.

Rather than pit one kind of wheels against another, our Mayor ought to put his one-day-at-a-time butt in the saddle. When he groks cycling in Boston, he'd have the context he needs.

But this is ridiculous:

“There’s a lot of talk about what the city is doing to make everything safer — pedestrians need to be safer,” Walsh said. “Pedestrians need to put their head up when they’re walking down the street, take your headphones off … you’ve got to understand, cars are going to hit you.”

This is the whole point of Vision Zero, right? To eliminate the expectation that cars are going to hit you when you get on a bike or walk down the street? What a ridiculous thing for the Mayor to say.

Maybe the city should take some responsibility for their traffic enforcement and road design.

http://news.wgbh.org/2017/05/16/boston-public-radio-podcast/mayor-walsh-...

But it's so aggravating to pedestrians and cyclists because it assumes everyone should be held to the same standard. Yes, of course, people in general should try to behave in a safe manner, regardless of their mode of transit.

But the bar for drivers has to be higher because they are the ones operating the deadly machinery. The idea that a cyclist running a red light presents the same danger as a driver staring at their phone is a sick joke.

Out of context, his quote sounds somewhat reasonable. However, the main issue is that when someone asked him directly how he was planning to make the city safer for bicyclists and pedestrians, the very first thing he said was that bicyclists and pedestrians need to pay attention because cars will hit them, giving the example of pedestrians wearing headphones.

This was a softball question. All he had to say was that we now have Vision Zero and Go Boston 2030 and the City is committed to re-engineering our streets to be safer and that they plan work with BPD to ticket reckless illegal behavior on our streets. But nope. He decided that he would start his answer with a victim-blaming tirade about how pedestrians and bicyclists need to watch out for cars and that there's basically nothing he can do about our streets to make them safer. Never mind the fact that cities all over the US and the world have been making great strides to be safer through engineering and enforcement. (Heck even cities just across the Charles River are doing so.)

If he really thinks that pedestrians and bicyclists were the CAUSE of their own injuries and deaths, he needs to back that up with data. All the data I've seen has shown that reckless driving has been the main cause. The bicyclist killed last week? Rear ended by a speeding driver. Pedestrians killed on Beacon St a few years ago? Speeding car hopped up onto the sidewalk and hit them. And numerous cases of trucks turning across the path of bicyclists in bike lanes.

If he thinks we all need to behave better (which we definitely do), he needs to look into why people are misbehaving in the first place. Pedestrians jaywalk because the walk signals in Boston are horribly timed. Bicyclists run red lights (especially during all-walk phases) because there are no bike lanes and they would rather be in the gaps between traffic rather than in a pack of cars and trucks. And most importantly, drivers do all kinds of dangerous and careless things because they know they can get away with it. A certain amount of bad driver behavior is due to confusing streets (lack of signage and striping, poorly timed signals, etc) but a lot of it boils down to the total lack of enforcement. People know they can park wherever they want or turn without signaling or run red lights or turn from the "wrong" lane because there is no penalty for doing so.

The City has allowed a survival of the fittest situation to occur on our streets, and they have the power to fix it. But clearly, they'd rather blame victims rather than take responsibility. It's embarrassing and shameful.