I worry about egg stains on sweatshirts too. Some folks join us with age. Others live life right up to the brim, good for em I say. The world needs all kinds.

Reminds me of Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake. It's this race in Gloucester, England. It's been going on since the early 1800s. Folks run down a 45 degree hill for 200 yards to catch a 10 pound rolling cheese wheel. It's as dangerous as it sounds, but fun to watch [1]. Medical staff is onsite and ready for the inevitable hospital visits that follow. They swapped out the cheese for foam a decade back for safety reasons, which makes me chuckle for some reason.

If anything the SF hill bomb tradition should get adopted by the city. Give it a date and time, close down the street, get medical staff and police on site, get some minimal safety measures in place, and give residents some notice. Then is there anything to be upset about?

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEh3wz-92i4

I'm not sure your comment about swapping out the cheese for foam is true. I did the roll a few years back (in fact I'm sorta in the Netflix We Are The Champions episode about it). The cheese is basically wrapped in a wooden wheel, and let loose.

Best I can find is that in 2013 [1] it was swapped for foam. But I don't think they continued that decision.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/27/gloucestershire-c...

Or we can just install speed bumps/dots on every hilly street and let young people figure out a different way to being needlessly reckless.

You're saying "good for em I say" to people who give themselves traumatic brain injuries and kill random innocent people:

https://sfist.com/2020/07/20/city-installs-raised-dots-on-do...

https://sfist.com/2019/07/20/well-known-skateboarder-tomoko-...

If they have some private hill they want to go kill themselves on, then go for it. But we shouldn't be shutting down public infrastructure for this. It would be like saying we should shut down I-95 so douchebags can drag race down it. Horrible idea all around. Having the state encourage this behavior is a great way to get more people TBIs.

So.. public streets aren't for public use? You need to own your own private property to make any use however temporary?

Safety measures are good but this is one of the purposes of public infrastructure; to be used by the public.

A random group shutting down a roadway for their own purposes does not make it "used by the public".

Do you think they let random cars drive down the streets they're bombing on? No, they decide that they enforce their own laws.

Your two examples have nothing to do with “kill random innocent people.” Both of them were actively doing the hill-bomb.

No bystander has ever been killed in this event.

I REALLY don't understand appeals to safety when you then fail to mention the astounding death-toll of car transportation.

Perhaps that's because cars have a far higher utility than throwing yourself down a hill, or watching people throw themselves down a hill.

Lots of places in Europe shut down their public roads for a day so some people can race in them.

One famous example: Monaco.

I was one of the neighbors. I actually loved this event. The first time I walked by was right around the George Floyd protests and it was refreshing to see the police working with the local community (blocking off the street). So kids (and some adults) could safely use the space in a unique way.

In an age where people are as lonely and isolated as ever and rightly complain about the ubiquity of car-based transportation, here is a group that has built an actual community around practically carbon-free transportation.

Though, yes, even as a skateboarder I don't condone the hill-bombing as it is legitimately too dangerous.

Skateboarding culture is really stupid about safety gear. If they wore the same stuff longboarders wore when going down big slopes, the sport wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous.

Cars kill a million people every single year. And seriously injure 100x many more.

I can't really care about skater safety equipment when we allow cars to exist.

You really need to look at incident rates rather than totals when making comparisons across categories like this. Plus, no one is suggesting banning skateboards, just participating in the sport as safely as possible. There is likewise an ongoing effort to make cars as safe as possible, and indeed they have gotten much safer for both passengers and pedestrians over the years.

> You really need to look at incident rates rather than totals when making comparisons across categories like this.

Depends on what you want to figure out. For finding out the comparative danger of an individual doing activity A versus activity B, sure. But if the group doing something exceedingly dangerous is quite small, it might not warrant an intervention as far as public health etc is concerned. Scale matters (sometimes).

On the flip side, you can of course argue that the individuals who just happen to be in proximity of the dangerous activity are being unfairly exposed to risk they haven't consented to (if the activity poses a danger to bystanders, that is). We don't let people do whatever they want just because the people it affects are few, either.

Really I should have just said that the rate of injuries in cars is irrelevant to safety considerations with skateboards. If there are dangers in skateboarding that can be reasonably reduced with better safety, that would be a good thing to do. Likewise with cars. If one is more dangerous than the other, it's not a logical reason to focus solely on that one.

curious how cars have become safer for pedestrians? i've anecdotally absorbed the opposite, but maybe i'm a biased bicyclist. Cars have only become increasingly massive; an arms race to "protect your family!" meaning the passengers.

I believe EU regulations lead the way here. Basically, part of crash testing now involves impacts with pedestrians. My understanding is that the primary effect is on the front-end shape of vehicles. When striking a pedestrian, you want them to roll up onto the hood, into the windshield, to spread out the impact as much as possible (in area and time). More recently, systems like automated emergency braking have helped too.

Here, this wikipedia page gives an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_safety_through_vehi...

This is a weird take. Should I also not care about rock climbing safety and just free solo because cars are so dangerous?

Skateboarders want to skate board. And if you participate in this activity, put on a helmet.

There’s a good reason old people sound crotchety. We look back at what we used to do and realise how stupid we were. So many risks taken that had no pay off.

This is called a strawman argument.

Yikes, please don't take HN threads into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Cars taking over public streets happened because drivers just started killing so many people. It had nothing to do with people choosing cars over walking rather than living over being run over.

Skate or Die!

I worry about the fact that those are raw non pasteurized eggs.