Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[ijmorlan]

I actually consider this much more appropriate than the deflators. It’s an actual protest, with people congregating on the scene and making their demands known, rather than simply doing what is indistinguishable from random mischief other than the leaflets left behind. Also, if any one protester goes too far, they can be admonished by their fellow protesters or, if necessary, arrested; whereas if a tire deflator decides they’re not doing enough and smashes a window, it’s a lot harder for their compatriots to tell them they’ve crossed the line.

My only concern is that they don’t seem to be leaving any way for the stopped drivers to leave. If the car in front, for example, is just stuck there for hours (days? weeks?) I can’t agree with that. Street closing protests need to open a lane to allow stopped cars to leave. Better yet, block the entrance to a road segment, not the exit. It will cause traffic chaos, but not effectively imprison some people.

On the second paragraph...they were not stopped for weeks, nor days, nor even hours...it was all of a few minutes. But even if it was hours, this kind of thing happens all the time with car crashes. If they did block it for hours (never mind days or weeks) and drivers somehow miraculously did not choose to just murder a couple dozen cyclists instead of be delayed, they would have been able to turn around and reverse out, as would happen if there was a crash closing a road for an extended period.

Honestly...I don't know what to make of this paragraph, to me it sounds like fear mongering claiming people were "imprisoned". the only thing they were imprisoned by are their cars.

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I’m not going to reply to everything because I don’t have time right now. You do make a lot of good points, especially about where violence actually comes from in many protest situations. I would mostly say that overall I’m expressing an attitude, and I don’t know the details. For example, you indicate it was only for a few minutes. That puts a completely different spin on the whole situation. So to ascribe excessively precise motives or conclusions to me isn’t really accurate. I’m certainly not fear mongering, just saying that if the protest completely closes the exit from an area that people are trapped.

I did want to make one specific point: You might want to consider if you’re now making an ableist assumption; for some people who are driving, if their vehicle is immobilized they’re pretty much immobilized too. And even for others, if ones vehicle is trapped then one is pretty much trapped nearby, because it’s not really feasible to leave the vehicle behind; one won’t know when to come back and pick it up as the protest is ending and the police will be forced to tow it, leading to large impound fees.

Also, pointing out that car crashes can have a similar result isn’t really on point. Just because bad things sometimes happen doesn’t mean that anybody is justified in making sure those bad things happen.