Fuck your existing lanes and fuck your 1.5-tonne beasts. Make some space, it won’t fucking kill you.
There are bike lanes here. They are even better off than the road in some places (the road and the bike lane were built at the same time, but the road is suffering from the trucks coming from the quarry).
Normal bikers use them. But some wannabe-tour-de-france idiots in spandex with bikes that are not traffic worthy (no lights or reflectors as the law demand for roadworthyness) - they drive on the road instead of the bike lane.
Say it with me:
Cars do not belong in the city, sensible transit system and infrastructure does
What kind of sad sack is so anti-bike that they run a whole “no bike lanes” social media account?
Someone who needs to justify their big truck who both complains about taxes and gas prices. 🇺🇸
i had to stop biking in my area because it’s too dangerous :(
Cars don’t belong in cities
I’m on the bicycle commission for my city, and I’m constantly hounding the engineers for any kind of hardening of their planned class II lanes. They had the gall to say that they didn’t like flexi-posts because they got hit and needed replacing too often and we were like “yeah, how do you think the cyclists feel?”
They feel entitled to other people’s lives.
I drive, and I disagree with the quoted post about not removing driving lanes.
I live in a fairly rural area, we have no bike lanes, and everything is too far away for it to be practical to get there by any other method than to drive. Though, I used to live in a major metro, and I drove when I was there too, mainly out of convenience.
As someone who travels primarily by driving, I want to see more bike lanes. Not for my benefit or convenience, but for the safety of those that travel by bike. I’ve seen the close calls that some cyclists experience daily, and it’s unacceptable. The current set of drivers includes a nontrivial number of folks who have no regard for cyclists and their safety. The courts have proven time, and time again that they will not uphold laws meant to protect cyclists. So the only path forward to preserve life and limb for those that use a bicycle to travel, is dedicated lanes.
Having bike lanes put in without affecting the number of driving lanes is ideal but when that is not an option, then reducing driving lanes to create bike lanes is necessary.
I’m fucking tired of all these fucks thinking that more lanes somehow makes traffic flow better. It really doesn’t. It can help when people are turning or something, but so can dedicated turning lanes. At worst, you’ll have to wait for someone to turn and though that’s an inconvenience, it’s hardly a problem. In any case, fuck these fucking fucks and their metal boxes burning prehistoric forests.
Fuck bike lanes. We need to dedicate a percent of the roads to be cycling-only roads
The zero sum game conservative mentality rears its ugly head again to yap some heinous shit.
My neighborhood is one of the poorer ones, and it’s got more people taking bikes than most other places I’ve seen in LA, yet the only places that get dedicated lanes or bike paths are wealthy areas where I don’t even see recreational bikers, let alone those getting to work.
That said, I’m 98% certain my local conservative city council is skimming the coffers, so I’m not expecting much.
I don’t want to disagree with your experience but I did want to inquire if are you in the wealthy areas during the morning commute times for their work? Most of the bikers I see in Denver are either retired MAMILs heading to the greenway trails for a 40-60 mile exercise ride or the health conscious tech/finance bros who are heading to gym then work at 6-7 AM. Then you get the next batch of wealthy dads on their $5-10k minivan-esque cargo bikes at 7:30-8 AM, then it goes dead until the evening commute. At the end of the day you then get the group rides like critical mass rolling through. The wealthy/poor divide on bikes is always interesting: If you’re poor it’s seen as “Broke ass can’t even afford a car” but the rich treat it like the people in the 2000s treated owning a Prius, and the people who show up to the city council meetings treat it as such.
No, I went to school (k-12 and later, uni) in the bike friendlier upper-middle neighborhoods but your observations do stand. Every neighborhood is different. I do teach in both downtown and in the mountains, too, although in the later one kind of has to drive because it’s both very vertical and very narrow roads so it’s basically suicide to bike there.
In Santa Monica, you do see much of what you’re referring to plus their city is heavy in anti-car for eco reasons. I heard from someone at city hall that they purposely reduce parking in venues to encourage biking, so even during rush hour you’ll see electric bikes pretty regularly-- even going to surrounding cities since they made driving unbearable.
In Orange County, you don’t see the same trends… but Irvine, where I attended grad school, is a planned corporate community with extra wide roads, lots of parks, and man made trails. Biking is strictly a recreation to them, and 90% of the bikers I saw on trail were grey hairs with extremely expensive bikes zooming way faster than my used mountain bike could ever go.
Somehow, though, my neighborhood with none of that still has so many more bicycles and walkers than either of the places actually trying to encourage biking. Necessity is simply going to beat desire, even for people who prefer biking — 100% is always higher.
They only way to remove conflict between bikes and cars, where the bike usually loses, is to remove cars or bikes. Giving the road to cars is tried and always runs into standstill traffic and stupendous infrastructure costs. Bike infrastructure turns out to scale more and is cheaper.
The irony of the idea that cyclists are “taking lanes” can only come from the mind of a motorist ignorant that roads in North America only started getting paved with smooth asphalt due to a campaign by what is today The League of American Bicyclists. It was only due to the hard work and advocacy of cyclists that roads ever became hospitable to colonization by machines in the first place. If motorists were ever honestly adamant in their demand that no lanes ever be “removed” then it would mean undoing every single car lane.
your Noita profile picture fucking slaps
In an effort to improve riding conditions so they might better enjoy their newly discovered sport, more than 100,000 cyclists from across the United States joined the League to advocate for paved roads. The success of the League in its first advocacy efforts ultimately led to our national highway system.
https://bikeleague.org/about/equity-and-history/
TIL
In Tokyo the bike lanes are all loading and unloading parking for the large trucks, taxis, and private vehicles. Means you gotta merge into traffic because none of the bike lanes lanes are enforced. I see a lot of cops stopping cyclists to check their registration, but I’ve never seen them ticket the trucks and taxis illegally parked. Tokyo needs better enforcement and separate bike lanes like Amsterdam (with a physical barrier or different grade from the street), otherwise its really dangerous to bike on streets even with bike lanes.
Bicycles are registered in Tokyo?
Sounds like a good set of laws to me - especially registration (mostly to help drive down bike theft rates).
Good point, but it might be used against cyclists by the car lobby, and perhaps even a future bicycle manufacturing lobby.
also e.g. “From now on, police can seize any bike with a tire pressure over 5% the recommended maximum.” or “But your honor, I didn’t realized I had to register my bike, and I think the confiscation and fine are racially motivated.”
In South Africa roads are not even designed with pedestrian walkways. I would hear all the time in the news about drunk drivers hitting a group of cyclists or pedestrians. Its genuinely unsafe to go anywhere without a car. I now live in the Netherlands and I only bought a car 3 years after I moved here, because there is actual working public transport and even the rural areas have bike lanes.
Why did you buy a car?
Basically for carrying goods, doing long drives, or comfort in bad weather. Public transport works well here but you can still end up having to do a lot of waiting and walking if you are doing a trip somewhere. Also the more connections a trip needs then the higher chance something can go wrong. For example, missing a train because the connection was late. There are car sharing services here too, and there is one of these cars right next to my house. I would rent that when I wanted to go to an appointment somewhere. But there were enough times that the service was unreliable or booked out when I needed a car urgently, that I got annoyed and decided to get my own car. I think a mix of cycling, public transport and having your own car is best.
Pretty handy to have a car. I have one too, for the first time in 10 years. But I don’t use it to commute and I actively try to avoid using it.
But sometimes you need to take the wife and kids to visit some family out of town or go down to the local hardware store to pick to materials. There’s a lot use usecases
