Now I picture a concrete snake lashing out and hitting unsuspecting cars driving by… typical car-rotten-brain title. It should read: “idiots driving in a residential area cannot let their phones down and park their cars on concrete divider protecting the bike lane”

Looks like they just tried to grind it but didn't have enough speed. Practice makes perfect though, they'll be shredding in no time!

If you hit that thing you shouldn’t be driving anyways. So this is a pure win.

You can’t park there, mate.

Totally. As a driver, you need to see that barrier. And even if you do not see that barrier, you should also not be driving into the opposite lane. If you hit that, you are dangerous and can count yourself lucky that you only hit that barrier and not another car or people around you

Haha get fucked, bad drivers.

The primary complaint from the community is visibility. Because the concrete barriers sit extremely low to the ground

If they weren't low to the ground you would smash into them and die instead of climbing over them so, you're welcome.

Yeah, my first thought not having read the article yet is that the visibility probably depends on whether your driving a sedan or a much larger SUV/truck.

It's like the people who complained when they ran their car onto the big boulders in parking lots. The rocks aren't in the road... how did you manage to do something so dumb and yet blame the inanimate object that no one else seems to be hitting?

You don’t actually need to see the barrier, you need to see the white line marking the right limit of the lane, which you are not allowed to cross while driving a vehicle. That’s lower to the ground and anyone should and can see it.

I think smartphone use is more of a culprit than obese vehicles in this case (but then: “I need a truck so that if I run into a barrier, I just hop on it without even noticing!” That seems to be the raison d’être of most SUVs and crossovers in Europe: climbing up curbs)

Because the concrete barriers sit extremely low to the ground, neighbors argue that aggressively driving or distracted motorists simply cannot see them until it is too late. But is that even a bad thing?

What a stupid question. Yes. You want them to be visible. "Doing what they are supposed to do" shouldn't involve "causing accidents".

Sounds like they didn't even have reflectors on them at first? That borders on the malicious.

Sidewalks are low, better get some sort of markers to keep them off there otherwise how can you complain when they run down pedestrians.

Incidentally the line in the middle of the road is flat ....

No. It's still bullshit that they made the barrier the same color as the street and didn't add any reflective or bright coloring. There is no reason to make it more accident prone than it needs to be for bikers or motorists, and this is the type of "serves them right" and "superiority" complexes that make so many people hate bicyclists. Paint the damned thing instead of just being like "hur hur hur. Serves them rite fer not paying atentions"

People expect sidewalks and the center line.

They've added something new and unexpected to the roads and it's causing accidents. That's clearly a fail.

The barrier is concrete. The street is asphalt. Those are not remotely the same color.

Maybe new asphalt, but the old stuff is faded to grey.

Even if it weren't faded they still use reflectors on concrete medians on asphalt roads.

They're both gray.

It's a massive hunk of concrete in a huge double white line median. If they can't see that concrete they apparently also can't see the lines the on the road....

nah, drivers should be looking for stuff like that

getting them used to not having to look for stuff that's 3 ft tall is a net negative

edit: ok these are shorter than 3ft

If a driver can't see those, they can't see a child. If they can't see a child, their car is unsafe and should not be road-legal

The bizarre crashes have left residents scratching their heads. Holly Wagner, a Grant Park local, told WSB-TV that she heard a loud scraping noise and looked up to find a vehicle with two wheels on the ground and two wheels in the air, actively driving down the length of the barrier.

TF these drivers think they are? The Dukes of Hazard?!?

(Yes, I'm old - scram, kid! And stay off my lawn!)

Exactly what I thought. These things are the height of a kid, you shouldn’t be driving if you can’t see it. Also someone else pointed out that road lines are on the ground and don’t stick up and if you can’t see the barrier then you can’t see road lines and you absolutely shouldn’t be on the road.

Are y'all dense or just being purposefully obtuse? If you went out on your bike and there was a weird new obstacle on a road you've ridden on before that caused you to hit it you'd be apoplectic. And rightly so. People get used to things being in a certain way.

When you've driven for 20+ years you start to expect lines, curbs, etc. And so introducing something brand new like this can take some adjusting. Making it short, with no reflectors, and without a bright color, was simply a stupid idea with predictable results.

If you can't handle minor road changes like that you shouldn't be driving. The world isn't static. Do you drive through other vehicles when they turn in front of you because they weren't there yesterday? How do you handle road construction?

And if you put shit in the middle of the road and cause accidents then you have fucked up!

A taller barrier isn't the solution in the same way taller fire hydrants weren't; you just put some taller markers throughout and the problem is solved

It's actually completely legal to cross single white lines. Only double white lines and solid yellow lines are illegal to cross.

And also put the big water barrels in front of them, preferably safety yellow with high vis reflective tape or paint on them

It isn't.

Painted bike lanes offer absolutely no physical protection for cyclists

Just another cheap-ass city council avoiding payment to the Guild of Wizards. If they had paid the guild the magicks they would have cast on the lines would have superseded the need for inelegant concrete walls while protecting car owners from inconvenience. For shame!

What visibility is needed? Stay within your lines.

People get used to things being in a certain way.

If they've been driving in the bike lane all this time they deserve whatever happened to them.

I would love to have some magical walls on the bike lane here but the weather is so bad we can't find any newts teeths and they refuse to do the ritual without them!

Flipping the cars does seem like a dangerous risk that should be addressed, but the cars getting stuck ontop is great.

The heart of the matter

Painted bike lanes offer absolutely no physical protection for cyclists if a distracted driver drifts over the white line. While a car climbing a concrete divider looks like an infrastructure failure, it is actually the barrier successfully absorbing an impact that otherwise would have struck whoever was riding in the bike lane.

As Wagner pointed out to reporters after witnessing one of the crashes firsthand, if that barrier hadn’t been there, the distracted driver “could have killed somebody” because the car was right in the designated cycle lane.

It's not the middle. It's the edge. The walls are outside the road. Why are you driving outside the road?

Furthermore, American lanes are way too wide. Why do you need a lane that wide? How do you even manage to not stay in your lane when it is so fucking wide?

You can cross them if you have a valid reason to do that, my argument would stand also with a broken line: it delimits the driving lane you are to drive on. Randomly deviating from it is of course not allowed, only while passing or having another valid reason to do that, while making sure you don’t endanger anyone.

Infrastructure leading to accidents is bad infrastructure. A car flipping over can easily crash into other cars, cyclists or pedestrians.

Looking at the video it's obvious why this is happening, the barrier is juste there for 20m, before and after that it's just a painted, worse, it's right next to parked cars so cyclist can get doored.

Really here the city is to blame, they don't know how to build cycling infrastructure.

About that: If you take a look at the barrier:

It has reflectors on the front and it seems to have a big plastic reflector-pole-thingy on each side. The one in front was destroyed by the car running over it. It has reflectors on the side. It is also a low speed inner city road and that barrier is not coming from out of nowhere. You have to see that as a driver

They should fix this by painting it yellow.

It's never legal to pull into the shoulder?

Also would be good to put several yellow plastic bollards in a row several meters before the concrete barrier

is also a low speed inner city road

I don't have an exact way to measure but the road is almost as large as some highways where I live (France, not USA).

Yes any driver that hits it is at fault, but everybody would be safer if the road was designed thinner so cars would naturally slow down, having the bike lane behind the parked cars not in front to reduce the odds of being doored etc...

If the infrastructure treats people like they're robots that will perfectly respect speed limits because there is a sign, it will not work and just be dangerous. The infrastructure should be designed so that the most natural speed and the intuitive path is the right one.

FYI: I have a driving license, but I don't own a car and bike almost everywhere. I really don't like car, I also don't like infrastructure making cars more dangerous than they need to be.

This is a driver failure of paying attention, not a failure of design. People would complain about freaking guard rails and concrete posts in front of stores if someone hits it.

Depends what the shoulder is? The traffic rules for all EU countries still lack a bit of harmonization, but the general idea is that:

Our edge lines (used on smaller motorways) are usually spaced out, so you are able to drive over it. But it's still usually better you pull off somewhere instead if possible.

If you're driving on a large motorway that doesn't have an acceptable amount of space to pull over to the shoulder, it's usually a solid line with rumble strips. It's unacceptable to stand on the shoulder of a road with 110+ km/h limit.

And yes, solid line - even a single solid line - may never be crossed.

Many years ago I failed my license test only because of that: I merged off from the acceleration lane before it became a dotted line.

Somewhere in Germany, there is an inner city street corner. It has a pedestrian way, and a largish rock at the corner, that protects the pedestrians space. And regularly, cars drive into it.

I was trying to find my favourite example of car and bike lane bullshit on street view but it turns out I don't actually know where it is and google might be giving me a different route from my old work commute. Maybe it's been overhauled but thats probably wishful thinking

It was a stone wall just tall enough that you could jump off of it onto a semi trailer, maybe 900m or so long and it was separated from the road by a bike lane and a shoulder almost wide enough to be another lane, then the noisy grooved pavemment next to the paint line. There's a ditch on the other side based on before and after the wall, but I've never looked at what is behind the wall. For some god awful reason the concrete separator blocks only go up to just before the wall and the bike lane is fully exposed from the wall to the next real intersection where the bike lane ends. Many of those blocks are pushed as far as half way into the bike line. The road is straight for a long stretch before and after. Yet for some reason the wall has traded paint with so many cars that its really colourful. I swear people have an instinctive need to crash their cars and I would be surprised if none of the ones that left paint there blame cyclists somehow.

Roads should just be entirely separated from pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure and no amount of design fuckery will stop drivers from finding a way to crash.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of drivers, either.

Wow, lotta hate there. You doing okay?