10 Cyclists Struck by a Taxi on the Causeway to Miami Beach

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=457751


"A civilized society cannot let the law of the jungle rule its roads;
if we want to ensure fairness, government must act to protect the
weak."

And why should we protect the monkey, not the lion? Because then the
lion will eat the monkey, stupid. And that keeps the other monkeys
terrorized, which is not what we want. We want them to come out,
right?

Here's a smart comment on the subject...

"The purpose of the police power is to protect public health, safety,
and welfare. When it comes down to cars vs. bicycles, the latter need
greater protection than the former -- after all, cars kill more
Americans than guns do, whereas beds kill more Americans than bikes
do.

That's why places which truly embrace bicycling as a valid (and safe)
mode of transportation have laws that aren't fair: bicycles get more
rights than cars. In many northern European countries, the driver is
always at fault in a bicycle-car crash. Some municipalities even
completely exempt bicycles from many road regulations (like one-way
traffic flow) -- since such regulations are often intended to regulate
cars (in the one-way example, that street might be too narrow for two
cars to pass but plenty wide for two bikes to pass).

A civilized society cannot let the law of the jungle rule its roads;
if we want to ensure fairness, government must act to protect the
weak.

The #1 reason that people cite for not bicycling more often is that
they feel that biking is unsafe. It isn't, really -- in fact, not
bicycling degrades your life expectancy more than bicycling -- but it
can be made much safer through good policies, enforced fairly."

Posted by PCC | June 25, 2008 8:30 PM

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.c..._hierarchy.php