They can walk then. There’s no religious requirement to use a buggy instead of walking. The horse and buggy is to be used instead of them driving a motorized vehicle. And there’s always the possibility that members of that sect have family members who are not of the same religious persuasion and who might be more than happy to sue.
We had a kid near here hit by a car and killed iirc when he was snowboarding down his driveway into the road, on a blind curve. I heard many people say they’d almost hit this kid or his siblings many, many times as they rode their snoboards, sleds, bikes or just ran out into the road apparently playing chicken. It still didn’t stop the authorities from coming down hard on the guy in the car, as apparently he had been smoking pot the night before (not sure how they found out, he was not high at the time of the accident.) Now, sure, marijuana is illegal here and the law says he deserves punishment for using, but they made sure to tie it to the accident charges >_<
Have you notice that windshield washer fluid doesn’t work on blood? I am SO tired of having to carry bleach around in the summer for my windows. And I’ve lost track of how many radiators I’ve gotten bone fragment punctures in.
You think runners, on the road are annoying? Where I live, (and we have especially narrow streets, causing city buses to require two lanes to turn), there are disabled people, on those scooters, who prefer the road to the ramped sidewalks and don’t even go facing the traffic or make any attempt to stay to the side. It’s not as bumpy, I realize, and they can reach top speed, no pedestrians or Mom’s with baby carriages, but you gotta know that every driver is thinking to themselves, “Why am I not surprised that this person is disabled? Maybe they have a death wish?”
In fairness, there are plenty of roads where it is essentially unsafe to travel by any means other than motorized vehicles, including walking. Everybody pays for the roads; everybody should have the safe use of them, or of alternate public paths.
We ought to be building roads with separate lanes for different classes of wheeled vehicles, plus pedestrian-only paths, or else overlapping networks of paths for non-motorized travel.
Many roads really don’t. With absent shoulders, steep banks, fences and overgrown vegetation, there are many public roads that are literally unsafe to travel by any means other than motorized vehicles (and motorized vehicles above a certain speed, at that).
Fine, and those vehicles don’t include unlit horse wagons. My point is that some Amish are driving unsafe, illegal vehicles on the roads, and apparently getting a pass. It’s unfortunate there aren’t paths and options for everyone on every road, but they need to stay off the ones they can’t operate on legally.
I bet they also assumed that drivers would take the posted speed limit as a binding regulation, not as a joke.
In other words, it doesn’t sound like it’s the pedestrians who are rendering this arterial through “a very populous subdivision” so perilous. Maybe it’s time to start writing some citations.
Walking against traffic, if you see than an oncoming car is about to hit you, you can jump to the side of the road. That’s not so easy riding a bike, and in addition, as a bike rider, you have a duty to avoid colliding with pedestrians. They won’t see (or hear) you coming if you ride up behind them on the same side of the road.
I’ll give you one practical answer, and one more legal theoretical answer.
If you’re on foot and a car is approaching, you can step up onto the curb very quickly to avoid it. The same is not true of a bicycle. It’s too cumbersome to get out of the way quickly. especially in cities where there are raised curbs more often than not.
Also, a bicycle is a vehicle. It is a lot easier for the lawmaker types to deal with classes of things – laws for pedestrians, and laws for vehicles. It doesn’t make w hole lot of sense to legislate a bicycle as if it were a pedestrian, or a pedestrian as if it were a vehicle.