Deme

Well, yeah. I can kick a dent into a car, but mostly I just raised crumple zones to emphasize that these are inelastic collisions we’re talking about.

And yes, the breaking distance is pretty much the only way that vehicle mass is relevant for pedestrian survival.

You are thinking of perfectly elastic collisions. That’s a fantasy and not applicable to the real world. A human body isn’t a beach ball and cars have crumple zones (although I believe pickups suck in this regard as well).

And your comparison isn’t applicable in terms of masses either. Both a sedan and a pickup are way heavier than a person.

Edit: Without getting too deep into the math, let me put it this way: The energy of the impact is equal to the energy that the car loses during that impact. The car doesn’t lose mass, so it depends instead on how much the car loses velocity. That depends on how the mass of the other object stacks up against the mass of the vehicle. Car hits something much heavier than itself? It stops and all of it’s kinetic energy is expended. Car hits something much lighter? A bug on a windshield. A human obviously isn’t quite as neglibly light as a bug and the mass of both the human and the vehicle do factor into this, but with both a sedan and a pickup truck, the speeding vehicle never expends more than a fraction of it’s kinetic energy on the impact itself. The rest of it is dealt with via breaking, and a pickup will have a harder time slowing down due to it’s kinetic energy.

Not all of that energy is transferred. The car doesn’t stop as if it hit a wall. Usually it barely slows down. The human on the other hand gains at most the kinetic energy corresponding to their body mass and the speed of a human bouncing forward off the car at around the same speed as the car was going, so a tiny fraction. Of course impact geometry will determine the specifics and pickups suck there too. The important thing about kinetic energy is that it’s dependant on the square of the velocity. That’s why speed kills. The mass is just a linear relation.

I think I read that the pro-car candidate in second place there was wanting to change that. Edit: Oh, or do you mean that there’s still too much cars around that they all get stuck in traffic? Yeah I can imagine.

Huh, either I’m completely blind or then op edited the picture 15 minutes ago.

How’s the person who’s currently leading the polls?

Yes, there’s nice dedicated bike paths where only bicycles (and also e-scooters and such) are allowed, but there’s not enough of them to be able to get everywhere.

The main network of wide bike paths is nice, but outside of that the painted on lanes and gutters can be unreliable. At times a lane just ends or abruptly turns into a one way lane. While bike infra is being improved, the city itself is still very much designed cars first. I suppose it’s definitely not the worst, but I am at least disappointed if there’s no more cities with better bike infra than that.

I cycle to work out of town when there’s no snow on the ground (I’m lucky in that it’s mostly parks, with only a couple of roads to cross on the 15km route), but it’s a lot easier to take public transit when heading downtown.

Oh yeah and Oulu in northern Finland should be mentioned for their exceptional winter maintenance of bike paths. Check out https://mas.to/@pekkatahkola

Helsinki? Lmao no.