https://momentummag.com/bicycle-culture-war/
Here are some key reasons why a safety and efficiency issue is turning into a bicycle culture war.
Because the cities are being actively altered in a way that transfers space and other resources from cars, to bikes.
Zero sum game, resources being reallocated, obviously the people whose resources are being taken away are going to view that as a war.
Won't anybody think of the poor cars? But seriously, resources are better utilised by bicycles to the benefit of all. There are no losers here other than the oil companies and car manufacturers.
ironically, they win.
whenever the road diet where i live, traffic improves. because it slows down to one lane and it prevents accidents.
Oops sorry I just noticed your last sentence. Yes there are losers. They include all the people whose lifestyles involve driving.
Pretending otherwise is childish and lame.
And what exactly are those people going to lose if they get on a bike sometimes? Their diabetes?
I'm going to lose my lifetime, literally, by biking a total of 80+ km to work and back. And public transportation takes 2+ hrs one way.
Then when you get into the city, you'll benefit immensely from 80% of the people being on separated bike paths rather than cars on the road.
There's no realistic plan where cities become carless, but can they not be the default?
I don't disagree with the plans to make the city careless. I answered the question what would be so bad about cycling. I think the time factor is often forgotten when talking about cycling and public transport
The time factor is always forgotten when discussing ways to make society more efficient. As if the primary thing that the working poor are poor in isn’t time itself.
Time, as a resource to be paid for these various solutions, is treated like a throwaway resource. IMO it’s positively dehumanizing to wantonly allocate other people’s time like that.
How is a driving person going to benefit from there being more people biking exactly?
Think that through. Why are there more people biking? Because the cost of driving went up.
If those who drive benefit from this system, it will mean more people choosing to drive as a result of driving being more valuable.
Don’t think you’re making the utility of cars better by this. If it made cars more useful it would result in more car trips. If it makes cars more useful and doesn’t result in more car trips, it must have forced some subset of people to stop using cars for the other drivers’ benefit.
The costs don't have to go up at all. Merely uncover the costs that are already there but hidden. Everything from noise, space usage, wars in far off countries, lack of exercise, or just the surprise $1200 repair expense.
No, lose it making money to maintain and feed the car ( how many working hours a year that is?) and sitting in a car for an hour in one direction. Correct time of commuting is time spent in traffic + time spent to earn the money for fuel. If you bikemute, you can actually consider a part of that time as free gym.
They’re losing the ability to use their car with the same level of utility as before.
You’re squirming to not recognize this basic fact. It takes a lot of energy expenditure to not acknowledge this fact.
Just be okay with what you’re doing. Own it.
I think that the problem here is that your definition of "losing" equates to "slight reduction in the massive subsidy that society provides to drivers, and forcing them to drive slower in cities because the lanes are narrower so that other people don't have to die." Yeah, technically "losing," but it still sounds pretty childish to complain about.
You have no idea how ableist you're being right now.
Even ignoring the jab at diabetics, what about other disabled people? Not everyone can just get on a bike.
It's always so funny when car brains suddenly discover their heart for disabled people when they desperately reach for arguments against non car centric traffic planning. If you're genuinely concerned about disabled people and those who can't drive for other reasons (poverty springs to mind) you should advocate for transport options besides cars.
A variety of transport options for a variety of preferences and disabilities. Some people have a disability that prevents them from cycling, others from walking, others from driving. Only building car centric is still unfair to those who cannot drive due to disability, age, or skill. Only building bike lanes and no transit or car lanes can also be unfair. Multiple options is the most fair in most scenarios.
Exactly. We need multiple options and realistic options for people with limitations. It's way too common on this community for people to call everybody a car brain just because they have trouble riding a bike.
It's always so funny when car brains suddenly discover their heart for disabled people
This is viciously insulting. What the hell are you talking about “suddenly discover their heart”. What do you know about my heart?
You really think the only people to disagree with you are ice cold monsters? That’s a crazy way to see this scenario: you versus the cold blooded shade demons who don’t like being forced to change their lives.
I am a disabled person and I vote for transportation levies and taxes every time they come up, but nice trying to pretend that I'm a car brain just because I happen to need one.
Once again, ableism. Don't assume everybody is not disabled just because you don't see them in a wheelchair.
You're a car brain because you jump from "we should build more bike lanes" to "they want to ban cars". Nobody is saying that.
Yes there are losers. They include all the people whose lifestyles involve driving.
However, they'd on average be healthier and happier, that's not losing.
I don’t really know that taking a person’s chosen lifestyle away is gonna make them happier, or that we have the right to force people for the sake of happiness.
Health wise, maybe. Maybe they have more stress because they spend more time in their car due to reallocation of road space from cars to bikes.
You’re dancing around the fact that you are taking from and giving to. It’s a reallocation of wealth from one group to a different group.
The group with wealth taken away loses.
I don't see how this isn't a win for car-people and bike-people.
I don't get why people are just one or the other. I use a car, a bicycle and I walk. I experience shitty cyclists when in my car, shitty car drivers when I'm riding the bike, and as a pedestrian, usually both groups can be shitty lol
Whenever I tell people I like to walk places they always say something along the lines of "aren't you wasting your investment in your car and insurance?"
No, I'm not. I have to pay for my insurance to get to work most days. I can still save money on gas/wear and tear by walking. This also saves carbon from the atmosphere, in theory lets me keep my car for a longer period of time, and walking is better for my physical and mental health.
By giving more space to bicycles, that space can be used by many more people at the same time. Wherever this was done, congestion reduced and traffic improved for all participants.
It's only a zero sum game if they view driving as an essential and immutable part of themselves, and even then, not really.
Charging adequate prices for street parking, for example, guarantees that you'll always be able to park easily if you need to, a luxury not provided by free parking.
And then, of course, they could always just get out of their cars and immediately start benefitting from the changes.
zero sum in that there is limited amount of space… so space from something but be subtracted in order to add it to the space of something else….
it’s not a metaphor, it’s about the total being the same. it’s mathematical and squarely fits the definition of zero sum.
That accepts the framing that we're designing for cars/bikes/peds. We're not. We're designing for people, whether they're in a car, on a bike, etc.
In that sense it's very much not zero-sum.
Yep. Lots of times road traffic is worsened in order to improve bike infrastructure with no simultaneous improvement of non-bike alternatives like public transit. Not everyone can replace their cars with bikes, especially not in America.
In my city the transportation infrastructure decisions are made by a car hate group. We have 400 miles of bike lanes and polling shows 3% of the population use. Bike infrastructure isn't installed for bikers, rather bikers are the excuse to obstruct and restrict vehicle traffic. As long as they use the word "safety", they get away with really dumb stuff.
I wouldn't have nearly the problem I do if bikes USED the lanes, but I guarantee I can go out right now and not see a single bike. They are entirely vacant.
To add insult, the bike I've seen at a newly converted intersection with dedicated lanes, bike turn box, and no right on red sign didn't give a rats ass about anyone or any rules, drove on the wrong side, ran a red and drive into active traffic; all the cars stopping for this moron. There is no shared responsibility and no enforcement of rules. That is my liability the biking idiot was messing with. Yes, he'd be at fault if he was hit, but the city stistics would mark that as dangerous intersection and crack down on cars harder.
So yes, I see this as a war. In my city, we coexisted before, but it wasn't a problem until this turned this into a mine vs yours situation. The passion driving fuckcars communities to take over is matched with my passion to retain functionality. You are the invading force in this war, we are playing defence. I see paths of scorched earth like scars; barren and void of purpose for which it was designated.
There is compromise, yes and I agree some can be made, in return, I want to see utilization, coexistence, and shared respect for the rules.
I see $150 million a year wasted for a incredibly small but disproportionately vocal group of radicalized individuals to actively make things suck and in their wake, after the construction, abandoned by those for whom it was built.
Maybe at 3am, but no, my routes during the day take me on roads with other cars doing grownup stuff. Bike utilization is a drop in the bucket.
Get out there and show us you use the infrastructure built for your peace of mind.
Now it is a drop in the bucket, but with a good bike road (which is secure from cars and actually go somewhere, like workplaces, schools, groceries) people can finally take a bike or a scooter instead of their car.
If you want personnal example, I go out and make grown up stuff everyday on my bike, like going to work, groceries and taking kids to the school, cause I know how to mix in traffic (and most of people in cars here are respectful).
With a secured bike road my kids could go by themselves, and my wife could go by herself to groceries, now she is too afraid of cars, fortunately city is spending millions to build that so in few years it will be allright.
And I see plenty of roads empty during the day which is used only twice a day during workdays by a couple of resident (if they work), and you still pay for it without thinking about it.
Had to hit the hardware store again due to a defect in product and I passed a bike. Wow! More news at 11!
Sorry I couldn't reply right away, I hit a grocery store and hardware store for work tomorrow.
It was 6.5 miles, took 20 minutes, had bike lanes continuously with half being protected to a grocery store like you want. And no, the supplies I need don't fit on a bike.
Not a single bike on this warm night perfect for a ride. Anywhere.
All I hear is bikers want want want. Well my city has it, and has for almost a decade.
Complaining is easy, it's time to use the infrastructure bikers confiscated (yes, bike lanes here are at the expense of what were vehicle lanes) and get out there. Show us there is utilization that follows all this vocal demand.
I honestly think conservative media just tries to start as much shit as possible so they have something to talk about.
At this point they probably start out by picking some slightly complex idea that's objectively correct and then work backwards to find a way to disagree with it.
The issue is that these changes are beneficial to society but detrimental to them personally. So they try to rationalize their stance without sounding like selfish assholes.
I think it's more that the right wing media tries to identify grievances and then provides rationalizations for them. I don't think this is an organic, ground-up process.
It isn't even detrimental, it is just different from what they prefer. How does a bike line on a road they probably don't even live on really effect them? It doesn't.
The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, argues that the costs of such green initiatives outweigh their benefits, suggesting that they impose unnecessary economic burdens (Heartland Institute, 2017).
Guess some people see everything in a cost-profit margin only.
Guess some people see everything in a cost-profit margin only.
Especially when it's convenient. I'm sure they would happily look the other way if you showed them the economic burdens of having a car-centric society.
Auto industry manipulation of government is a big part of the reason the US has such awful, car-centered infrastructure.
And thinking that way about everything is obviously the wrong way to go about life and will end up failing.
Being European, there are plenty of profits to be made by switching to bikes. Well, unless you're a petrol station, fuck you then.
Anything the Heartland Institute publishes should never be treated as anything but toilet paper.
Same goes for any and all think tanks
They're all horseshit perversions that exist to push out mountains of academic-seeming material to legitimize whatever positions their funders want to legitimize to advance their interests
Man I am so tired of the endless parade of articles with the premise "How could conservatives possibly think this?? Surely if we just take the time to carefully understand their reasoning we can blah blah blah...."
Here I'll answer the the "why" right now:
A) Most US conservatives live in suburbs and rural areas and generally hate and fear inner cities and the people who live there. They also generally hate and fear environmentalism. They also greatly resent the idea that the USA isn't the best country on earth at literally everything. They're also violently homophobic and have such deeply toxic ideas of masculinity that they consider it to be weak and "gay" to drive a smaller vehicle.
So when an urbanism advocate says they want people to give up their lifted truck to live in a city and ride a bicycle so the US can be more like Europe and East Asia to help the environment how in the world do you expect them to react in any other way?
B) This is a population that's addicted to hate, fear and opposition like a drug, and conservative politicians and news orgs are the dealers. They need to periodically find something new to tantrum about. If there is no reason to hate something then a reason will be created. This was the case with LED lightbulbs, with COVID, with Romneycare, and so on and on and on. The 15 minute city conspiracy theories are not some sort of new unprecedented pattern of behavior.
I don't have or want a lifted truck but I also don't want to live in a city. If that means biking a hundred miles to get anywhere I'll do it.
Historically, rural towns had walkable centres and access to rail. Throw in a comprehensive bike network and you can live without a car easily. And I agree, I'd personally be willing to bike pretty long distances when I visit rural towns if it's safe and pleasant.
There should be zero delivery trucks clogging city streets. Zero.
Good luck with that. And the bike-riding population will do all their shopping far outside the city, where shops still survive? A cargo bike is nice for personal shopping, for deliviering letters or small packets, but you won't be able to fill the shelves of a supermarket this way. And whoever thinks about using freight trams for this, sit down and actually think this idea through for a change.
Delivery trucks are fine. They don't contribute to sprawl, are driven by professional drivers, and don't need parking lots.
It's personal automobiles that are the problem.
I was bout to write the exact same.
Cargo trucks cna also be limited to specific times, like 6am when most people arent in the street yet
Shall we take a guess at who the poor fella will be that has to work night shifts only because some bourgeois shoppers can't be bothered with the fact that full shelves don't appear through magic?
If I had a dime for every time somebody made this reply, I’d have a lot of dimes.
Nobody has ever said that. What people are saying is that the private automobile is the worst way to move masses of people in cities. They command ungodly amounts of space, make everything more expensive thereby, and aren’t even good at moving masses of people.
You want to increase the capacity of your road? You can:
Adding another lane never helped, it usually does the opposite. People will see there is "more" capacity and more people will use the road, causing even more congestion
Yes, you are right. You are talking of moving people inside cities. I am talking about a) getting in and out of the city and b) moving goods into and out of cities. None of the usual demands in this group ever even starts to address this.
What usually works better for moving people in and out of cities is park-n-ride setups where you setup a giant parking lot in the suburbs next to a metro station. People can just ditch their car outside the city and proceed using public transit. I often do this in Montreal, for example.
For goods, it's a similar setup but with big trucks transferring cargo to smaller trucks; this is already pretty common.
Just use busses and trams
And once people use bikes all over and you can get rid of the 10.000 parking spots, you can build much more local small shops. Nobody loves going to Walmart and nobody will if there are small local shops around the corner where you can simply walk to
Bikes ain't gonna work for people coming from far outside the city. I'm not talking about commuting distance, I'm talking about people who live in rural areas 2+ hours away from a city that need to come in occasionally. Having them make the whole trip by car necessitates maintaining car infrastructure in the city center, which will soon be co-opted by suburbanites. This use-case needs a bi-modal strategy.
You think that doesn't happen in the Netherlands? It's called public transportation. Trains, busses, trams, metro. People take their bikes onboard if they have to, get into the city, cycle the last little bit, and it's done
Also, if you gotta commute 2 hours you need a different job
I'm not talking about commutes, I'm talking about going to the city for an appointment/shopping/conference/concert/sightseeing/etc.
But yeah, cycling the last mile works in the Netherlands between cities or suburbs because they are relatively well served by inter-city transit, but what about places like this random dairy farm . Can this guy just take his bike to downtown Amsterdam?
In theory, P&R is fine.
But my experience with P&R is that they are generally so far out of the city and the bus/tram/tube/whatever connection is a normal "outside the city" link which goes every 30-60 minutes if one is lucky (during the weekdayday, evenings and weekends are way worse), and then stops at every lantern on the way to the city center. And still costs a fortune.
Additionally, the tram stop at our next P&R is not exactly handicapped-friendly. So I have to get my wife somehow into the tram, which involves a number of high steps at the trams' doors.
Yes, of course delivery trucks need access to cities, some goods are not practical to move by cargo bike. As do emergency services and buses. Nobody disagrees with this. The problem in many cities is that streets are clogged with useless private cars. So the obvious solution is to ban private cars.
Private cars in general are not useless, but private cars in the center of cities should be useless if the city is designed well. The space-transportation trade off does not make sense.
...if the city is designed well. You got the problem of the next city right on.
But even if I was living in a well-designed city, I would still use a private car, as moving handicapped people (like my wife) around on public transport is quite a nightmare. Yes, we have tried.
Sure, if you focus on the "zero" part of the phrase you can score a cheap point. Now focus on the "trucks" and the "clogging" part. A van can stock up a small to medium store just fine, and a walkable neighborhood doesn't need big box stores to begin with (and small business ownership is a plus for economic conservatives too). And with fewer cars carting individuals around, delivery vans can move in and out much more efficiently without clogging up anything.
Perhaps the idea is to find ways to articulate things that don’t lead to such obvious cheap points being scorable.
“Zero trucks on our roads!” <—- stupid idea that enables the cheap point
“But zero is a stupid number to aim for” <—- cheap point
“Well obviously not zero”
Then don’t say zero! Use your words precisely, as if you had some responsibility for what’s going on. Be more like an engineer, and less like a kid, with your speech.
Many smaller businesses could be served just fine with cargo bikes. And once every inch of free space is no longer clogged up by parking cars, it'll be easy to assign loading zones for bigger vehicles that supply supermarkets and the like. Now make those electric and everything becomes much quieter and less polluted. Then people will actually enjoy coming to the city centre again so business there can thrive.
Yeah I can only think of people envisioning small downtown stores only using small trucks/vans or the weird one underground cargo tracks (there is a startup in Texas pushing for that one).
Even then trucking tends to just make more sense from everything I've experienced, but what do I know
Underground cargo tracks is a nice idea, but hardly realistic. Can you imagine ripping open the whole city to build that, and the cost of such an undertaking?
If I remember right they were planning smaller deployments (think building scale, neighborhood scale) with boring tech being the solution to installation.
This can only provide a local solution. To make this work on a larger scale, you need the city to be built for this. So basically, this is a very long term thing.
I think last mile is probably the most problematic part of delivery anyways since it effects how the places we live are actually built the most.
Trains, ships, planes, and semis are all the solutions for the backhaul at the moment
It's not exactly some unsolvable logic puzzle. This is a problem not everywhere has, it's pretty simple.
Two solutions.
First, you create a second way in. It can be anything from dedicated streets for cargo with all the loading docks to shared warehouses at the edge of the city and underground tunnels like Disney. The main idea is to dedicate most streets to people and bikes, which can have all the storefronts
Or the easy way we could do far more quickly... Instead of slicing space you slice time. Limit deliveries from 4am to 7am, maybe an afternoon slot if necessary. The idea being people get the prime time, and you work out the logistics with that constraint
For better logistics, limit the size of the trucks and do shared distribution centers as a buffer for normal shipping times.
Ideally, you do #2 while transitioning to #1. Put a slowly increasing off hour delivery tax and create an incentive. The logistics will magically come together as the tax grows
Limit deliveries from 4am to 7am
Oh boy I sure do love being woken up at 5am because the loud-ass delivery truck is restocking the grocery store.
I don't know what it's like where you live, but I do sometimes get woken up by the garbage truck. Not often, but it's loud as shit and comes just before 5am... IDK if it's bad luck, but everywhere I've ever lived seems to have garbage trucks that came well before sunrise, and they're about the loudest trucks before you get up to construction vehicles
Unloading a truck isn't even on the same volume scale. Especially if we used small trucks from a distribution center outside the city. Other countries do it, and we do it already, just not in the same numbers I'm proposing
This doesn't sound like an actual issue to me
So, why do we need a supermarket? Is there any reason a supermarket couldn't be replaced with it's contingent parts? A butcher, a veggie shop, a convenience food shop, a pharmacy, a bakery, and a condiments shop?
I don't see why they have to be stapled together when separate works just fine. All of which could fairly practically be stocked individually by small light duty trucks, or even a bike with a decently sized trailer.
I also don't see why even if you staple everything together, a cargo tram wouldn't work. Have two, a passenger tram that works one route, and a cargo line that runs by the loading bays of local stores. They can be switched on and off the overarching infrastructure without interfering with each other.
It would be a paradigm shift for the US, but I fail to see how it would be an unworkable one.
How do you think any of those are getting goods? If you ban trucks you'll just get cargo vans and then lots of smaller cars. Or they'll go out of business and people will complain you can't live in the city and move to suburbia. Again.
Ooh, how was that called again, proxy-arguments? They were answered 10 years ago already.
Is there any reason a supermarket couldn't be replaced with it's contingent parts?
Mainly just economics. Supermarkets tend to have cheaper prices, and it’s probably a result of consolidating the operations to share resources (loading docks, refrigeration, payroll, etc)
Supermarkets should have cheaper prices, but now that they have formed a monopoly of just a few companies they are not.
Small shops keep supermarkets competitive, without them they become monopolistic.
That's not what I see here in Seattle. Yes, the supermarkets are monopolistic, but they are still significantly less expensive than going to a butcher, a baker, etc.
It's mostly an issue in rural and suburban areas. The grocery store closest to me feels like it's price gouging (Safeway) , and I try and go to other grocery stores for bigger trips like Wegmans or H-Mart.
Meat is especially bad, like $10/lb for ground chicken bad. Meanwhile at H-Mart it's $3/lb.
I see. I do live in an urban area these days. Anything specialized is overpriced (or maybe not overpriced, but expensive).
I agree. Which is why it was such a tragedy when we deliberately killed so many small shops in 2020.
And, all in all, they will need the same amount of goods to supply the same amount of people. And they will be substantially more expensive in comparison to a big box supermarket.
A large part of this is about control. E-bikes are affordable, easy to use, and make it easy and cheaper for anyone, even poor people, to get around. The upper classes do not want the lower classes free on any level.
I LOVE my e-bike. I just got a tern NBD and I can finally ride on my own with a bike that fits me even when my disability flares up and I am at my most limited.
Now that my bike time has increased dramatically I have noticed aggression towards me has also increased. I've had people yell slurs out of their car windows, people rev threateningly behind me when they couldn't pass, people speed around me through intersections, etc. Mostly I've noticed it from class traitors.
In my area especially people tie cars to freedom. Public transit is practically non-existent so kids and teenagers never ride a bus or a train and assume cars are the only way to get around. This seems to be especially strong among the lower and lower-middle classes, where people struggle to get and keep their cars, and seem to have an unhealthy emotional attachment to them.
If only there were a way to allow bikes on roads without directly impeding car traffic...
My country has the most ridiculous ebike rules. Speeds are limited, and it needs to function as a bike at all times.... Among others.
This means even if you have one of those moped style ebikes, you have to unnecessarily carry around pedals (which would be impractical and awkward to use), despite having no intention of using them. Cops can just stop you and ask for them. If you can't produce them, then you're getting a ticket.
Stupid.
But I agree, I would liken it to the electric vehicle problems. Though fundamentally different due to several factors, the motivations are the same. People are making money continually from the use of automobiles. Automotive repair and maintenance shops, gas stations (or EV charging stations), all the way to road maintenance and such.... It's a monster of an industry. Nobody wants to stop that gravy train, so they keep fighting against these alternatives that save us lowly "poors" some money. (Only considered to be poor because we don't drive dinosaur burning monster trucks everywhere, so we must be too poor to afford it)
those people want you out there spending your money (aka giving it to them), all the time. This doesn't make them more money, so it's bad.
Sorry this is just bullshit.
I don't think the upper classes spend any time thinking about us at all, certainly not thinking about how to prevent us being "free".
Ask yourself this: if these e-bikes were extremely expensive and so expensive that only the rich could use them, would rich people complain?
The upper classes do not always explicitly think about things, like "oh, a Democrat is in power, seems like a great time to price gouge" or "hmm, all the other top leaders are firing people and price gouging since there's a liberal in power, I should do it too" but these things do happen. Doing things to treat lower classes harshly isn't always specifically talked about and planned, it's just something those at the top do because they know others will as well and they also don't believe the lower classes will recognize it and fight back politically, especially when the more religious party always favors the rich and religion helps increase class complacency.
I'm not against people making money or being successful, but there is a certain level of exploitation that goes on and it's not always explicit and it's not always planned out in clear language and it still happens
This is just nonsensical.
Of course no one would complain about e-bikes if no one was using e-bikes.
You're unable to demonstrate a causal link between upper classes hating e-bikes and upper classes wanting to prevent the poors being free because there just isn't one.
Honestly, I dislike being poor and I dislike wealthy people but making up ridiculous accusations like "they don't want us to be free" is just plain silly.
Most wealthy people get their wealth from the labor of poor people. If poor people have easy lives, and need to work less hard for fun and to enjoy life, then they are less likely to work hard and wealthy people are less likely to stay wealthy.
I can't demonstrate a causal link because it would be impossible to design a study really showing that.
To demonstrate anything, I'd have to get a group of wealthy people and determine which of them don't want poor being free (and just asking them wouldn't reveal that).
Then I'd have to determine which of the wealthy people hate e-bikes by asking them.
Then I would have to see if there was a correlation.
If you use Democrat versus Republican as a proxy for the first inquiry, it would be an easier but less approximate estimation.
In order try to show causation (and it would be a iffy showing), you would have to take wealthy people and measure their views of e-bikes, wait a week, divide them in three, and show them films of poor people. One film would show poor people disliking ebikes and being unhappy. One film would show poor people feeling free after using ebikes and having nicer lives. One would be a film of a a film that showed something as neutral as possible, like a show about how to do math problems. That wouldn't actually be neutral, so if a budget allowed there would be a fourth group with no tv show at all. Then measure their views of e-bikes again and see if they changed.
I can't prove any of this, but the wealthy people shown groups of poor people happy using e-bikes would probably have more negative views of e-bikes after on average because this is a control issue. E-bikes are cool and great for the planet and rich people who don't like them only have 1 rational reason: wanting to maintain their lifestyle and concern that the lower classes finding more fun may reduce that. (And alcohol is fun and promoted because lower classes who use it a lot are more likely to have less intelligent children who will lack social mobility and can be exploited more easily.)
So yes, I don't have a budget or inclination to prove this, but it's not an impossible thing to prove nor is it irrational.
I don't have the budget nor inclination to prove that the sky is purple, I'm just going to keep saying it because it makes me feel better about myself.
So you're saying that my position is clearly evidently wrong, just like purple is not the color of the sky and therefore that's clearly wrong.
I get it, but the easy lifestyles of the rich come from the suffering of the poor. The poor doing well is always a threat to that lifestyle and it's naive to think the wealthy don't often have a deep-seated gut reaction to anything that could threaten that. Even if you think it's a stretch, it certainly isn't as evidently wrong as a purple sky.
This just isn't how wealthy people think though, even if it's correct.
They think they became wealthy through hard work and good decisions. They think of themselves as benevolent and generous. They think they're using their wealth to improve the lives if the have-nots.
Because everything is a culture war.
What's your favourite colour? Whatever your answer to that question is, it will determine the side you're on for a culture war next week.
To add to that, it's all to distract everyone too. If I'm busy hating on your shitty choice of color, then I'm not thinking about how my true least favorite color is wealth hording.
I live in a rural area, driving is basically a requirement. I've gotten to the point where I've driven for so long that, I don't really want to drive in cities anymore. Too many stupid people. I'd be happy to drive to the city limits, then hop a bus/train/subway/bicycle/scooter/electric riding thing to where I need to go.
I only still have a car because I live in such a remote area and there's literally nowhere nearby to go if you can't drive. It's literally an all day outing if you want to go to the nearest city by any method other than a vehicle.
I've been working from home the last few years and my car only really gets use when I'm called to a site for work, or running errands on weekends. I literally only travel maybe 30 hours of driving a year. This is in contrast to doing more like 60 hours behind the wheel every month before COVID...
IDK what you people are doing in cities, but "bike friendly" shouldn't be a conversation or debate. It should be the rule. However, far be it for me to tell you city folk what to do.
Consider this dichotomy:
i have never been called a cockroach. i have been called gay a lot though by truck drivers.
Read the fucking article. It defines specifically what it means (civic engagement/interest in the common good, basically), and it is measurable.
It’s not that there are measurable things about people that I doubt. What I doubt is that you can scientifically demonstrate that someone is better than someone else.
Humanities students don’t read any more and it shows
There have always been jerks. I had things thrown at me from cars and cars swerving at me 40 years ago. Back then they were just random jerks and no part of some us/them mind set.
Forcing bikes into conflict with cars is of course going to create problems. When I first started riding being on a sidewalk was fine. If that wasn’t available there was usually a sufficiently wide breakdown lane. Only fools and couriers rode in busy urban environments. But with the big push for bikes both municipally and on the basis of personal preference they had to get bikes out of conflict wirh pedestrians on sidewalks, but in built-up urban environments where there isn’t any room to put in proper bike lanes. It’s just a recipe for inflamed tempers. Even on roads that are more suburban, a couple of 18mph bikes blocking a 45 mph road is stupid even if they have a right to be there. But we need more bikes.
Why is that crazy? Busy roads in suburban areas are quite often in the 45-35mph range. My street is 30. The main road it connects to is 45. The major road that connects to is also 45. Where I lived previously was 40.
it's far too fast for residential areas, even for access roads they should probably be restricted to 30mph until you get out of the residential area. The main problem is of course the high speeds are dangerous, discouraging mixed use of roads in residential areas. it's one of the reasons americans in suburbs can't imagine walking somewhere, along with zoning law issues of course.
it's really part of a couple of interconnected issues with american suburb design (in my opinion as a non-american who has only visited some suburbs in the us)
I literally said we had to remove the bikes from sidewalks to separate them from pedestrians. What’s crazy about that?
No, we'd want cyclists going a sensible speed on the sidewalk when the road is too dangerous to cycle on.
Frankly if a road has traffic going >30mph on it, I'm not cycling on it without a dedicated cycle lane, and I don't just mean a thin line painted in the gutter.
No, riding on the sidewalk was never "fine". I know it FEELS more safe, but cyclists are struck more often and killed more often per km of sidewalk than road. And I am never okay with pushing risk off on other people because I'm afraid to accept it myself; even if riding on the sidewalk were safer for me, it is less safe for everyone else, so I don't fucking do it.
Dude(ette), I’m over 50. It was “fine” in the sense that it was what we all did and there were rarely any rules against it. I don’t know where you’re getting that I said it was acceptable in the modern context, in fact I stated pretty much the opposite. You’re making controversy where there really isn’t any.
Apologies as this is off topic, but does anyone have suggestions for how to minimize the extremely intrusive advertising that kind of ruins reading articles like these? 2/3rds of my mobile screen is covered with ads. If it matters I'm on iOS and use Chrome for my default mobile browser. I'm aware of the privacy implications of those choices.
Firefox with uBlock Origin or Rethink DNS on Android cab block ads, the best you can do on iOS is DNS adblocking with something like Adguard
You can use DNS based adblock, but this tends to break on public WiFi networks.
One other option is to use brave as a web browser. It's a chrome derivative with a built in adblock. Most browser extensions don't work on iOS so there's not many options.
I am not sure if this works with Chrome on iOS but there is an app called Hush (yellow icon with face having tape over mouth) that works with Safari to get rid of popups. I’ve not had it very long but I tried it on this article and had no pop ups.
It's not as good as a real adblocker but you can install "ad guard" from the app store (you have to enable it in settings -> safari -> content blockers)
Because cyclists are narcissistic people who think the vast minority of people who live in cycling distance of their work and everything else and never get enough from the store or anywhere else that is problematic to carry back home (seriously, do these people ever actually get anything of substance?) think they need entire city blocks completely dedicated to them while giving a big middle finger to people who just want to get to where they're going directly because they CAN ferry any decent amount of goods back and forth.
Not to mention their massive ableism that ignores people who cannot easily walk or ride for any decent distance and denies them direct access to places. Cities already do this to a point where there's no actual free parking anywhere for people, even parking dedicated for them which, in the suburbs, every single parking lot has spots right next to the building for them so it's as easy as possible to access. Most cities rely on garbage paid parking decks and lots far away from most things people need to get to, and even if they have spots for those people, they're still not as accessible as the vast majority of places in suburbs.
Cyclists are basically like vegans and religious people: ignorant, hateful, and annoying. It's not "turning" into a culture war: it is a culture war, with rich, fortunate elitists on one side and the rest of us on the other.
Yes the "rich, fortunate elitist" trying to commute on a $200 bike instead of a $60,000+ SUV that spews noxious gases.
Because the powers that be created both r/fuckcars and pushed anti 15 min city bullshit. They now play both sides using research done by former wall street quants now working for major think tanks
Yeah I'm the entitled asshole with my bike because I wanna go from A to B
Not the person who takes up 8 times as much space as me to transport the same or more often less cargo than me, poisons the air I breathe, pollutes my drinking water, endangers my life because they're busy reading texts or think their time is more valuable than everyone elses, uses my tax dollars to fund massive roads I'm not even allowed to use and, best of all, honks at me to get out of the way on the narrow streets I live on as if I'm the uninvited guest.
But one dude in spandex made you swerve a little some 2 years ago so go off queen
your not. but drivers thing anything/anyone that inconveniences them is 'entitled'
a lot of streets in my city are putting up speedbumps to stop people blowing down side streets at 40mph while trying to cut around main street traffic. drivers scream at how 'entitled' the residents are being. because the road is 'for them to go places as fast as possible'.
Lmao. Calling other people 'entitled' because they're an inconvenience to them. Sounds like entitlement to me.
Bicycles on their own don't turn people into assholes, the same way toaster ovens or flip-flops don't do it, so we have to assume there is some percentage of the population that are assholes no matter what they drive. So before letting them loose in the city, would you rather equip an asshole with a multi-tonne metal murderbox or with a bicycle? The more assholes on bikes the fewer assholes with the means to murder people.
Counterpoint: r/idiotsincars (or !idiotsincars@lemmy.world)
Also there's a whole dictionary term created for car drivers called "road rage".
So going by statistics, car drivers are entitled assholes.
We want the opposite of "protection laws" in roads. We want separate paths so we never have to share a road with cars. Just give up one of your fucking lanes and you won't ever see a bike in yours again, I swear.
come to the Netherlands. we welcome all cyclists.
Amsterdam reduced vehicle traffic to 30 kph for most of the city
While that's cool, I'll rather stay in my home country and try to change things here, I've already lived close to the Netherlands for some years but ended up going back to my country.
This is exactly the attitude I'm referring to
No, it's the cyclists that feel that only some of the laws apply to them
Let's not get all impressed with ourselves again....
There are both car drivers and cyclists who feel like some laws only apply to them, the difference being that cyclists don't kill anyone and car drivers do.
As I said to another guy, give us one of your lanes and put a concrete barrier between it and the road, and you won't share road with a cyclist ever again.
Oh no, they want protection, how entitled can you be! Everybody in traffic breks traffic laws, you too.