ASHLAND — Twenty-six Amish who refused to pay their fines for violating a law that requires flashing lights on their buggies appeared in court on Friday.
Once there, Ashland Municipal Court Judge John Good ruled out the possibility of jail time for them and instead said he would impose liens on their real estate.
Wouldn’t reflectors work and be low-to-no technology to allow Amish to keep to their tradition? I’m thinking similar material to diamond grade street signs.
No. I live in PA, and we have a similar law. I remember before it was passed, and seeing buggies with just the reflectors.
Close up, directly in front of lights, you can see reflectors fine, but your lights aren’t always pointing at them. Maybe it’s a curve or a hill, maybe they are approaching an intersection, but flashing lights can be seen from all angles.
Also, most Amish have no problem using modern technology when required. It’s not like a pathological fear, it’s a religious devotion to self-reliance. They use cell phones and power tools when they need to, and they hire “English” (non-Amish) to drive them in cars. Some are more insular than others, and they rarely get involved in politics, so they mostly just do whatever is required.
Note that this law requires Amish use lights even in daytime, which won’t be visible around a bend or hill at such times. What’s next…telling bikes/peds they also have to go around wearing lights?
Bikes should have daytime strobes and headlamps. Cars should always have their headlights on. Visibility reduces accidents.
You can be on a curved road or a hill and have vehicles you can see that are not within your headlight beams. Further, if a vehicle is obstructed by a curve or hill, you may see lights illuminate the dark ahead of you before the vehicle comes into view.
There’s no reason not to have lights on vehicles on the road.
Plus this sometimes works during the day in shadey areas or when it is very overcast.
Or when people are idiots and just don’t turn them on when they’re supposed to.
You’d think with how prevalent automatic headlights are nowadays there’d be a lot less people driving with them off in the rain/dark, yet every single night I see at least one idiot doing it in a car that I know has automatic headlights.
Why do they turn this feature off? It’s mind-blowing.
There are some very edge case scenarios where you’d want it off. Ex: a while back I was sitting in a parking garage and my headlights were shining right into some poor dudes face 0.5 floors below me.
But I think it mostly comes down to these people are fucking morons and probably shouldn’t be allowed to drive on public roads.
The issue could be solved with something similar to what ford does with their shift lever. If you turn the car off when it’s in drive and try to get out the car puts itself in park and the shift lever moves into the park position. Just do that with the headlights and snap them back into auto every time you turn the car on.
For sure. I turn mine off in parking garages. Then you know I turn them back on auto because I’m not a total idiot haha.
The idea of having lights on these buggies is literally counter to their whole belief system. You or I might not share the same world view but it is mind-blowing that you wonder why the Amish would not run electric lights on their horse and buggies…
Wait… I am an idiot and this was not the right statement to make in this case. Please point and laugh at me.
☝️😂
It probably has more to do with always on dashboards and infotainment systems in SUVs more then anything else.
This is so utterly car brained. Bicycles and Amish buggies aren’t even remotely the ones making the danger here. Are we going to require stupid flashing beacons on pedestrians now to?? No, the solution here is a road diet, traffic calming, speed governors on SUVs, and modal separation.
Because it costs money to run lights, and good lights cost money. (https://www.bumm.de/en/products/akku-scheinwerfer/parent/1922/produkt/1922qmla.html)
Yeah, and we should fit all the wildlife with strobes too, because drivers should absolutely not be responsible for driving slowly enough to actually be able to see an obstruction within the range of their own headlights in time to stop without smashing into it.
Right, because that’s entirely the same thing.
Vehicles on the road are there intentionally, operated by humans who are respon- You know what, man? You win. I really don’t care enough about this to keep arguing with you. I’ve explained this, and if you still don’t get it, that’s on you.
I honestly can’t tell if this is sarcasm since motorcycles and cars in the US have required daytime running lights for a couple decades.
Nowhere in the US are cars required to use daytime running lights…certainly not in Ohio.
Daytime running lights are required on large sections of the highway in Alaska. It’s posted on signs on the road and you can get ticketed for it.
“( c ) Every vehicle traveling on a highway or vehicular way or area must illuminate lights when traveling on any roadway that is posted with signs requiring the use of headlights.
(d) For the purposes of ( c ) of this section, lights include low intensity headlights and daytime running lamp devices…”
https://dot.alaska.gov/stwdplng/hwysafety/headlights.shtml
Wow, totally not being misleading here. /s The place we’re talking about is in the lower 48 smart guy.
I was responding to a previous comment that said “Nowhere in the US.” Alaska is still the United States.
Car manufacturers are required to have daytime running lamps on all the cars they sell.
While many car manufacturers provide this feature, it is not required. See 49 CFR 571.108 (Table I-a—Required Lamps and Reflective Devices).
The Amish actually do use technology, but they can’t use it unless there’s no other alternative, for example word processing.
Also, they tend to use Linux.
That’s a broad statement. Different sects and communities have different levels of what they consider acceptable.
also very true.
I’m assuming only Gentoo, right? Compiling libraries you will never need is the height of decadence.
They use Linux From Scratch and build from source. Bring it on, OSS world! Total control.
They already use those. This goes a lot deeper than “buggies are hard to see” and gets into governmentally preferred classes. Requiring the Amish switch from reflectors to lights is an act of both victim blaming and attempted cultural erasure
Horse-drawn carriages are slow-moving vehicles just like construction or agricultural equipment, or stationary obstacles. They present a danger if visibility is limited by weather or the road’s curvature.
Where I live, every vehicle is required to be illuminated when outside city limits, including carriages, and the horses themselves.
I hate this framing. The danger doesn’t come from the slow moving buggies, it comes from cars moving too fast to stop within the driver’s line of sight. Instead of a buggy, the “obstacle” could also be a pedestrian, a deer or a fallen tree. Should blinking lights be required for those, too?
You can hate it all you want if that makes you feel superior, but it’s still true.
High-vis equipment is required here when a person has to spend an extended period on roads outside inhabited areas (actually high-vis gear is mandatory in all motor vehicles), and are required to walk on the left side to always have oncoming traffic in sight as opposed to behind. Larger roads have mitigation structures (mounds, fences, warnings signs, speed limits, or grade separation) where wildlife is known to cause problems. Our taxes pay for road inspection and maintenance services to clear natural or manmade obstacles.
If there are people on the roads they aren’t uninhabited.
“She was asking for it going to that neighborhood dressed like that.”
What’s the equivalent of rape culture but for cars mowing people down left and right?
Reminds me of this: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
Wait, what? All this time I’ve been breaking the law by riding in cars without my high-vis vest?
Is “deliberately misunderstanding a sentence” a new olympic sport or something? Because goddamn, I’m putting bets on you winning at least silver (not gold though, that one goes to the crayon muncher that brought up rape for some weird reason).
I’m sure this will be shocking to you yankees, but not everybody is an American. Over this side of the Atlantic we have actual traffic laws to regulate how multi-ton death machines are operated, and they require certain safety equipment to be present in all vehicles. Things like:
Since you’re not an American, can you explain why you feel the need to comment on this when you don’t really know what you’re talking about?
The fine is from an Ohio state law that is (imho) unconstitutional in the United States. These people have been using their horse drawn buggies on these roads for centuries. The roads they go on are rural. Not interstate highways or autobahn or whatever.
It’s not economically feasible for every country road in the USA to have wildlife mounds/fences because of how vast our country is. Drivers here are required to stop for obstructions, fallen branches and wildlife and if you can’t you’re going too fast. I just don’t buy excuses about this, the Amish aren’t going down the road at 4 am in a blizzard. They’re way more visible than a deer and they have reflectors. I live around here (not Ohio, but basically Ohio), this law is inexcusable and targeting a religious group. It’s also legal to walk down these roads or ride a horse or drive your tractor at 20 kilometers per hour dragging a combine or something. It’s farmland.
The entire county this takes place in has only 50k people. Rural area.
I found that other commenters post about rape distasteful by the way. There are better ways to point out victim blaming.
…or it’s an effort to save lives…