What made me extremely disheartened in my neighbors was joining Nextdoor.com and seeing what the majority of my neighbors thought was "bad" for our neighborhood. They literally complained about loud birds in the morning and tried to organize a protest against a stop sign due to fears of "increased urbanization." Also lord forbid you sit in your car while Mexican, very suspicious circumstances!! Turns out it was just dudes eating lunch in their truck between jobs. This is in the Bay Area Peninsula.
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Try the city-data.com Baltimore or Chicago forums. Really interesting insight into how racist peoples' thinking becomes when issues of neighborhood and kids' school come into the picture.
>This is in the Bay Area Peninsula.
Or any other wealthy area.
>Also lord forbid you sit in your car while Mexican, very suspicious circumstances!!
Only on weekends, the help doesn't come on weekends...
Nextdoor is much the same in Seattle; not as asinine in my area, but... heh... yeah. It generally represents the distillation of NIMBYism.
Yeah. I was actually shocked that they were bothering to try and organize a protest against a stop sign- at an intersection where there are always accidents from people not merging correctly! - of all things. Unhappily for them, the stop sign was ultimately installed.
Wonder how effective that turned out to be in preventig accidents. I don't drive so I really have no clue but a stop sign seems like something that wouldn't influence me much - then again that's mostly why I don't want to learn how to drive :)
Do you not know that you're required by law to come to a complete stop before a stop sign? It's legally not up to you how much a stop sign "influences" you.
From what I've seen when I pay attention to someone driving it seems more of a judgment call - but then again I don't usually pay attention because I find driving boring.
It obviously sets the rules so you can assign blame easier but is it really effective as a prevention tool ?
> it seems more of a judgment call
Ummmm maybe things are different where you live, but I certainly hope whoever drives you around doesn't drive near where I live. Here it's definitely not a "judgment call" and people will be quite angry if you ignore stop signs.
If you've ever observed drivers, you will have noticed that stop signs and traffic safety laws in general don't influence any of them much.
The Washington, DC, neighborhood Hawthorne (a triangle along the city line with Maryland, running east from Rock Creek Park) for a while had many signs reading "no sidewalks in Hawthorne." Among the arguments against sidewalks was that they would attract crime. I don't know how many criminals are willing to commit felonies but not to walk in the street.
And yes, our neighborhood (not Hawthorne) listserve now and then has stuff about "African American male walking down the alley." This usually brings on a quick email storm, since a fair bit of the listserve is AA. Then everyone calms down for a few weeks.