I was expecting this to be the “carry a brick”-trick.
Am i the only one that finds this terrifying as a pedestrian? All the people in the video had to stop when they arrived at the intersection and wait for a car to allow them to cross. If someone were crossing here unaware and started crossing immediately, this thing could hit them anywhere up to the face. And that is if it doesn’t have enough force to make one loose their balance or straight up catapult them. I refuse to believe this thing is actually just active and without supervision. I think they just deployed this thing for an afternoon to get the shots and coached the pedestrians. I find this anything but brilliant
It’s a controlled film set…Every single face you see is a unionized actor, any “candid” feelings are purely manufactured for effect.
in Turkey, we pedestrians always yield to cars.
Sort of unrelated but what is Quebec like to live in? I ask because my wife and I may take refuge there in couple of months with the way things are going here in the states. I don’t speak French and the only language that I speak, besides English, is Spanish.
Depends where. Most places around Montreal and Laval are pretty bilingual. The further you get away and eastward (3 rivières, Quebec City, etc. ) the more French it gets, even as close as 30 minutes out you might find there’s no English speaking folks at all, you will still be alright at most tourist destinations though. Not sure how it gets more westward towards Ontario.
Quebec is notoriously difficult for immigrants to Canada. Highly recommend heading toward Toronto or Ottawa instead
Here in Denmark I can basically just jump in front of a moving car on a crosswalk (one without traffic lights) and if the car so much as touches me they risk losing their driver’s licence.
I know The Netherlands is the same like that. Not sure about other EU countries.
In SEA, the vehicles don’t stop, but they will try to go around you. So the key is to walk at a constant pace.
The graveyard is filled with people who had the right of way.
In the US, you can only get them to stop if you get hit. And that’s only a maybe.
Pedestrians and bicycles aren’t even second class citizens in the states.
In Germany I’d say in nearly all occasions cars would stop if I actively walk towards the crosswalk. If I just stand on the side and look and wait its not that uncommon that cars still don’t yield even if they should
Same in Norway. The moment the walker puts a foot on the crossing they have the right of way.
Remember when at uni a exchange student from Luxembourg and one from Russia was discussing that one big cultural shock for them was how cars stopped at crossings in Norway. I drive quite a lot and its so ingrained in me to watch for walkers and to yield if they want to cross,
Yeah, it seems like if you even look like you might be approaching the crosswalk, the cars come to a halt in Germany.
In the USA, cars will actively run you over in the crosswalk and likely face no negative consequences.
It’s the same where I live, and yet i have been almost run over twice in the last two weeks alone
Carry a brick.
it’s cute and all, but the real reason they don’t stop is because the authorities aren’t enforcing that law effectively. the places where people stop crosswalks do so because they’ll get a ticket if they don’t.
this may raise awareness, but won’t change behavior in the long run.
when i lived more in the city and didn’t own a car i would make hard eye contact with drivers when crossing. my logic was that if they kill me I’ll at least haunt their dreams with that look.
You can do the same thing without cops more cheaply in the long run. Just raising the crosswalks to sidewalk height completely changes driver behavior, as it’s both a speed bump, and it’s clearly communicated that the crosswalk is the pedestrians’ territory that the driver is crossing through.
We can deal with most of these issue through design rather than a threat of fines.
I’m curious how this impact snow plows. Every speed bump I’ve seen in the region I live in that gets a few feet of snow each winter will have little flags that should stick out over the snow to indicate to plows where they should lift up for a speed bump. I should look sometime to see how scratched to hell they are though to see if plows hit the bumps a lot
Cyclists have a name for that and I think it’s something like “the life saving look”. Usually used when changing lanes or at an intersection.
Motorcyclists have a name for that, it’s “What the fuck you looked right at me!??”. Usually used when a car is taking a left turn directly infront of a bike.
As a cyclist it was mainly for me to make sure the driver saw me.
As a pedestrian I do it were I am living nowadays when I’m about to cross the road on a pedestrian crossing, but that’s mainly because around here people’s behavior is mainly moderated by public shame and drivers tend to feel anonymous behind the wheel, so the point of looking at the other person rather than the car is to get them to feel seen and judged.
Can’t be sure if this latter use of looking actually works, but the one I do as a cyclist definitely works and has saved me from accidents multiple times, for example from drivers coming from a side-street into a T-junction and not looking properly hence not seeing me on a bicycle coming towards them on the main street.
They need proper bollards.
Some places know their drivers and have some serious barriers popping up.
Holy shit how many idiots had to turn themselves into pancakes for this level of barriers to be justified? Insanity.
I kind want to see what that does to a car that doesn’t stop. Probably rips their front wheels off
Just need a bigger car, then it’s fine
There shouldn’t be any barriers at railway crossings. Let natural selection win. Do we really want a future full of people who don’t have the brains to give way to a train?
A car on the tracks can cause the train to derail, potentially killing many people.
The barriers are to guard against the delays, traffic jams and paperwork a crash would cause.
And the trauma of the train driver hitting the car.
It’s cute but this is from the same province that would rather blame immigrant drivers for road fatalities than the failing, inconsistent infrastructure and terrible driver training.
In Montreal, the drivers are bad enough that turning right on red lights was banned because we couldn’t stop killing pedestrians.
As a headsup, pedestrian deaths at crossings is consistently higher in places where right on red is legal. It’s not bad drivers, it’s a bad law enabling bad driving.
Montréal never banned right on red.
No right on red was the default, then most of Canada enabled right on red in the 1970, but Québec did not. Québec later enabled right on red by default in 2003, but Montréal (island) retained no right on red.
And RToR is bad everywhere. We’veknow it for a long time, but have jsut collectivelydecoded the cost was worth it. Here’s an article from Victoira in 1981 talking about it https://www.newspapers.com/clip/107821508/times-colonist-victoria-may-5-1981/
Thank you, I learn something new everyday 🚦
I stand by one of the greatest difficulties for everyone on/around the road in Montreal is that they don’t consistently follow traffic conventions accepted across the rest of the country (almost continent). Makes decisions less confident, less predictable and less safe across the board. I love their unique take in most other areas.
Turning on right policy was never enabled in Montreal. And wtf you going on about blaming immigrant drivers? Source please, because this sounds like some divisive bullshit from the ROC.
Maybe immigrants from the US. I’d believe that they could be worse drivers.
You’re literally the idiot the comment that you’re replying to is making fun of.
Yeah literally every time Quebec is brought up people say shit like that it’s insane
Definitely not my opinion about immigrant drivers being a major source of accidents …our elected officials on the other hand…
Québec restreint l’accès à la possibilité de conduire pour les immigrants
I mean, I might be wrong, but from a quick research, it seems that our program is still more lenient than (most?) other provinces. e.g. :
- people from non-reciprocal jurisdiction can drive for 6 months with their permit from their country of provenance. Alberta is 90 days. Manitoba is 3 months.
- Like in these provinces, you now gotta take a driver’s test. If you fail, you get demoted to apprentice, not completely permitless. Sure, being an apprentice driver can be constraining - more or less depending on your situation - but it’s not something that can’t be remedied in the following year.
I am in no way knowledgeable of the intricacies of policies on the right to drive a vehicle, but from what I gather, it seems to all be pretty regular and taking into account data. Now, is the data good? I am not in a place to say, so if you’re educated about that let us know what you find reprehensible in there.
And all that doesn’t removes from the fact that our infrastructure is not properly maintained and developed, and hat many people in the province are not courteous drivers, in some region more than others (from my experience growing up outside of Montreal before moving to the city - where I come from, most drivers seemed to be motivated to make your life miserable).
Because Ontario doesn’t test truck drivers, Quebec wanted to ban them.
On paper we test but it’s really corrupt and companies are basically given x number of licenses.
I imagine this person took it to thinking they were mad that they are majority immigrants rather than living in Ontario and seeing how unsafe our roads have gotten.
Oh look. A canadian pissing on Québec just because. I’ve never heard a single person mention anything about immigrant driver.
I can already hear the carbrainrotten screaming “But thats dangerous, what if i run into it” as if the danger wasnt their own fault for going too fast and not yielding.
These are just for the ad. They don’t exist in the wild.
They might get a few scratches from those flimsy flexible plastics but it’s not dangerous.
They’ll definitely compassion about the possibility for scratches screaming, “that could damage my property!” though.
Make them metal bars that rise up, like those that are placed at the entrance of some stores to deter vehicular raid. That will quickly make them re-evaluate.
Bollards
Thank you! Learned a new word.
Yeah make them reinforced barriers.
I’d be more worried about them coming back down on pedestrians.
Yeah ofc this specific implementation was just supposed to be an art piece i guess. In practice you just have to use those concrete pillars or ramps that come out of the ground.
Many drivers won’t stop unless they’re forced to by a physical barrier, and some still won’t stop. Ever seen those videos from Europe of bus lane bollards that retract when a bus approaches and pop back up again after the bus passes, and the cars wrecked on them? Those are much more solid barriers than these plastic things.
I remember a driver on Reddit losing their shit about bus-lane modal filters - the kind that will wreck the underside of your car if you ignore all the signs and drive over them anyway. They could not imagine the cruelty.
Those plastic things are just for show, as part of the campaign, which is why the drivers seem surprised that they’re there. They’re not actually installed on any roads. But having them pop up as the car approaches if there’s a pedestrian on the corner makes it obvious that the car needs to stop.
The drivers are actors, and the pedestrians probably are too. It would definitely be illegal to jump this sort of thing on drivers without their consent or knowledge.
Imagine if all painted infrastructure did this haha.
Right at the end there it shows a side effect of this installation that by itself is useful in bringing the cars to a reasonable speed when approaching the crosswalk every time, not just when there’s a pedestrian: the crossing is raised.
Off the top of my head I can’t remember how common raised crossings are in Montréal, but they are effective. This demonstration is quite fun though, I was expecting a bunch of body guards to pop out and create a wall across the roadway and the instant fence caught me off guard.
Just For Laughs gags meets traffic engineering.
Raised crosswalks weren’t too common in most burroughs of Montréal when I left, but alternative road surfaces for slower zones we’re gaining popularity.
My goodness do we ever need this in BC
Only enforcement will help. And consequences.
There are plenty of structural changes that can help.
Raised crosswalks are a major one.I hate those, you have to know where they are. We need to develop some standard way for marking them, so drivers know ahead of time what’s coming. And we have to re-mark them before the paint or whatever fades. We want drivers to have reason to decide for themselves to slow down and be alert for other road users
This could be a lot more effective than a gimmick like this video, while lasting longer and requiring less maintenance
It’s pretty easy to tell where they are. They’re at intersections.
Except for the ones not at intersections and of course all the intersections that don’t go that
For example in the 3.5 mile drive from the grocery to home, I drive through quite a few intersections, but the only raised crosswalk is not at one
Except that it will take much more than this to ‘motivate’ any car brain here to actually stop. Those stopping for pedestrian crossings here are the exception. So much so that some towns “don’t know what to do” about it and ask pedestrians to wave orange flags to cross busy streets.
Carry a closed umbrella and hold it out in front of you as you approach the crossing.
This triggers the car brain’s panic button, since it would scratch their paint if they hit it, which is much, much worse than endangering a human.I had to calm myself down when I realized how right you were and how fucked up that is.
I’m sorry if this uncalms you again, but I find it hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ0HBd_u-Fs
Really shows that drivers do see you approaching a crosswalk but just decide to ignore you, unless you equalize the power imbalance.
We have those where I live. Crosswalk compliance is decent here, but these don’t get anyone to stop who wasn’t going to stop anyway, and they get stolen all the time.
