Not all of Europe has such a large cyclist and pedestrian movement necessarily.
Everybody understands each other's movement patterns and grasps how we need to treat each other on the road. I live in the Netherlands, we have an exceptionally pervasive pedestrian and cyclist culture and everybody who drives a car is probably also a cyclist and/or pedestrian at least a couple times a week. It's just a big difference in how we view traffic. First of all, let me be clear that this isn't some black and white thing. Why? It's a culture thingThis is a great example in my opinion of the difference between American and European car culture. How is there any debate here?Controversy all around, with almost a down-the-middle split of people who either (partially) condone or dismiss the driver's actions. Lots of people defending the driver! Comments range from (quotes from Reddit): The angry reaction of the pedestrians and their touching of the car was possibly threatening and not very nice, but expectable for somebody honking their horn and forcing their way through a crowd of squishy bags of meat with a 2-ton motorized lump of metal.īut then I look on reddit and see. He clearly had lots of room to back up and wait for the crowd to disperse and he clearly didn't have any reasonable opportunity to drive forward.
#Carmageddon max damage flip car driver#
If you ask anyone here, that driver at the Zombie Walk is 100% guilty of attempted murder with a deadly weapon or at least the highest degree of hit and run.
(funnily enough this is actually a picture from Belgium) Cyclists at an intersection get positioned in front of all motorized traffic so that they get priority on the intersection and motorized traffic cannot intercept or surprise them in any way Here's an example of such a construction for cyclists: A great deal of our infrastructure is based on this implicit assumption that nobody in their right mind would even start running over a pedestrian or cyclist, even if that person really hates zombies and the pedestrian is dressed up like a zombie. Around here, it's engrained in law and culture that you never endanger weaker traffic participants. Understandable, right? The controversyTo me, as a Dutch citizen and part of our culture, it's absolutely unimaginable to even start thinking that any aspect of what this car driver did is acceptable. That's when the driver saw flashes of the coming zombie jesus apocalypse, hit the gas and ran over a couple of people to get to where he had to be. They started touching his car and eventually sitting on the bonnet. So he inched his way through the mass of zombies, and people started to be a bit aggravated by his shenanigans. So first he stopped about a foot in front of the crosswalk, honked his horn to signify that he wanted to go through - but with this kind of mass of people that kind of fell on deaf ears. He needed to be somewhere, but in his way was this Zombie Walk. Then came a deaf driver who probably hadn't seen this happen at all in his life. People in zombie outfits walked (or Rascalled) a couple blocks through the city center to show their undeadness to the world. To add to the traffic, as per tradition every year a Zombie Walk was organized. Central San Diego was pretty much on lockdown roads near the event grounds were closed to accomodate the huge daily in- and efflux of convention attendees and most other roads were also pretty much clogged up with pedestrians. During the past weekend, San Diego was flooded with all the weird and wonderful people that like comics, animated series, cosplaying and such fun things.