90,000 Responsibles
MoBikeFed President Rachel Ruhlen is a community blogger for Gatehouse Media. This article appeared May 16, 2015.
Let me start by saying that people who are walking, which is everyone who can walk, have a responsibility for their own safety and a responsibility not to involve an innocent driver in their own unfortunate tragedy.
I wanted to start with that, because every time I try to explain what I'm about to say, the first and only response is, "Pedestrians have a responsibility, too." This is victim-blaming.
This is the sort of thing that has been on my mind that prompted my last post, "A hard conversation". This is the actual hard conversation. I'm about to explain why people driving have 2,848 times more responsibility for safety than people walking. People driving need to be 2,848 times more careful than people walking. If "Pedestrians have a responsibility, too," I agree. Pedestrians have 1/2848th the responsibility that drivers do.
When two objects collide, such as a person and a car, the amount of energy released and the damage caused are a function of mass and velocity: how heavy the two objects are and how fast they are moving relative to one another. KE = ½mv2.
Let's take a 158 pound person walking at 3 mph. Let's call this 158 X 32 = 1,422 Responsibles. I made up the unit "Responsibles". (Don't worry about the units or the 1/2, it's all relative so they'll cancel out.)
Collide her with an oncoming car that weigh 2000 pounds and is traveling at 45 mph. 2000 X 452 = 4,050,000 Responsibles.
4,050,000 Responsibles divided by 1,422 Responsibles is 2,848. When you are driving a 2-ton killing machine at 45 mph, you have to be 2,848 times more careful than I do, I mean than our 158 pound person does, when walking.
A pedestrian has 1/2848th or 0.000351 times the Responsibles of a driver. A bicyclist on a 25 pound bicycle moving at 10 mph has 1/221th or 0.004519 times the Responsibles of a driver, and 13 times the responsibility of the pedestrian. The pedestrian and bicyclist have virtually 0 the Responsibles of a driver.
What does 2,848 times more responsibility look like? If our walker's responsibility means looking up from her phone and looking both ways before crossing the street, our driver should operate his 2-ton killing machine with the utmost caution and extreme vigilance, constantly alert. He should scan the road for people and check for people at crosswalks.
By the way, if he slows down to 20 mph, he can reduce his responsibility to merely 563 times that of a person walking.
"With great power there must also come great responsibility" (Spiderman)
Read more of MoBikeFed President Rachel Ruhlen's articles on the President's Blog page.
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