How are you pro-bike and anti-bike lane???
That's like saying "I'm pro-life and anti-gun control".
Oh. Wait.
Edit: Guy confirmed that he is, indeed, pro-life and anti-gun control.
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Comments114View original on lemmy.world
That's like saying "I'm pro-life and anti-gun control".
Oh. Wait.
Edit: Guy confirmed that he is, indeed, pro-life and anti-gun control.
Always check twice whenever someone claims "it's simple math"!
the simple math supports the idea. the normal math does not.
😸
Right? If it’s so simple, show me the damn math! I’m happy to check your work, it being so simple.
If it is simple, it is often an oversimplification
"It's simply meth"
They're still on xitter, and they paid for blue checks. Who cares what opinion they hold on literally anything?
please call it Twitter. just to piss elon off. Xitter sounds even worse than X honestly
I read it as "shitter" and it makes me chuckle. Is that not how you're supposed to say it?
Sadly, a lot of people on that platform do.
I'm anti bike lane. Roads should be for bikes and pedestrians. Cars should get their own single separated lane on the occasional road.
Bike lanes are car infrastructure. They are not needed unless you consider the entire street to be for cars by default.
Also dave is an idiot. Maximum capacity would be a cycle and transit only street because those have the highest throughput per lane. Cars are incredibly space inefficient.
Slight disagreement there. Streets are for pedestrians and bikes and trams and the occasional car (in a dedicated car lane). Roads (as in large arterial roads in very limited areas, meant for fast travel between faraway zones when trains are inconvenient, or highways between cities) can be considered as intended for cars, and even those should have pretty good space dedicated to bike lanes and pedestrian sidewalks.
Given that a car is a priviledge in most (all?) of the world, I'd argue there should be absolutely zero car-only infrastructure because it creates second class citizens for which some parts of the street are inaccesible.
Think of it this way, would you support the creation of a sidewalk in which only people who own a 50k ring can go?
A bus in a kind of car. Biking 30km in one go is a bit much too.
@Tlaloc_Temporal @stevedice One of those carries 30-100 people with lower carbon emissions, using significantly less road space, is highly affordable, and is driven by a professional driver.
The other is a private car.
Busses use car infrastructure, is my point. Almost all car infrastructure can be used to run busses. You can expand that to most utility vehicles too, postage trucks and garbage trucks need to get around too. There is no such thing as car-only infrastructure. Car-centric, sure, but not car-only.
Busses can use car infrastructure, but sometimes they use mode-specific infrastructure that cars cannot use.
Like what? Are there special roads that busses can drive down but a sedan gets stuck on? Some kind of road made especially for the tires of the bus and no other vehicles? Like a tram system, or gondolas maybe?
Cars and busses are both road vehicles, and roads serve them both. We can put up signs and write rules about which vehicle can go where, but those are basically free to change.
"Robert Moses" has entered the chat
I very clearly meant private cars, friend. Come on.
Private jets are also a privilege, should we demolish all airports? Private schools too, should we have no education-only infrastructure?
The issue with car-centric infrastructure is that it prioritizes expensive and inefficient systems over others. It's the priority that's the issue, not the existence of roads at all.
What would car-only infrastructure even look like? A highway that busses aren't allowed on? No utility vehicles? No firefighters?
Public airports aren't exclusive to private jets and private schools aren't publicly funded.
Please be more careful next time, you're scaring all the birds.
Every single road where pedestrians or alternative modes of transportation aren't allowed and isn't part of a public bus route is car-only infrastructure.
These exist. You are aware these exist, right?
Roads aren't exclusive to cars and most of the private schools around here do receive public funding. Just because something is used poorly doesn't mean it's completely useless.
The only road around here that pedestrians and bicycles are explicitly barred from are the freeways, where blocking traffic is very dangerous, but busses, utility vehicles, and industrial vehicles use those all the time.
No, I'm not aware of public roads where it's physically impossible to run a bus line or ride a bike. If a sedan can use it, a bike can use it. If a delivery truck can fit, so can a bus.
I am aware of roads too dangerous to bike on and roads too sparce of destinations to run busses on, but that's because of how roads are used, not a condemnation of roads themselves. If the city decides to add a bus route to a road, no infrastructure needs to be changed. If someone decides to send a charter bus or shuttle, the roads are open to them.
Only because its funny. Yes.
Relevant not just bikes about the streets in Tokyo that prioritise pedestrians: https://youtu.be/jlwQ2Y4By0U
They're better when they protect cyclists from cars with more than paint. I ride, and I'm less of an arsehole to drivers when I have a separated lane with as good or better rights than the cars
I would like to see streets slowed down and bike infrastructure better protected on roads. I don't need bike lanes on streets, as almost all of them are pretty safe for cyclists — drivers seem happy to go slower and leave metres of space when passing
I’m stealing this.
Bike lanes suck. Separated bike paths are much better. Or just streets without cars at all, no need for a bike lane if there are no cars.
In this paradise, where are the Rollerbladers?
Rollerblade lane.
Separate but equal. /s
4 wheels bad.
2 wheels good.
8 wheels, mmmm OK, over there please.
Nah nah nah, rollerblade path. No need for a rollerblade lane of there are no bikes.
In this paradise, where are the pogo sticks?
Next to the unicycle path.
Dead since about 1990.
Vehicular cyclists are the fucking worst. I find that they fall into two groups:
Either way they're almost 100% athletic white men who for some reason never picked up on the fact that cycling in a car culture is a near-perfect analogy / example of what it's like to be a marginalized minority and a first-hand demonstration of privilege. Instead they're defenders of the status quo - By way of their own athletic, gender, or monetary privilege - All the way to their bloody meat crayon deaths. They're that one asshole who shows up to the community board meeting about a new bike lane that will make cycling accessible for children, the elderly, and any person in between who is more risk-averse or less athletic than they are in order to speak against it "As a cyclist". Because to them battling for your life in traffic, being on the bleeding edge of death, breathing in truck exhaust from the shoulder of a stroad is a gatekeeping measure. They're masochistic elites, they rake pride in the danger that they put themselves in so much that they'd deny accessibility to anyone else unwilling to accept that danger.
Gordon Ramsey is an example of someone in the dentist group. A few years ago he very nearly got meat crayoned by a car while cycling in the US. He didn't provide the details of the crash but it was obvious from his injuries that he'd been hit from the side by a car or truck and likely went over the hood. His public plea in revealing this wasn't that the US needs to make roads safer for cyclists, or more accessible to people who don't have a group of equally wealthy friends to peloton around a foreign country with, maybe separating cars from cyclists so that the two may never conflict. His one and only adamant request was that we all wear a helmet. Cycling is wasted on these myopic asshats.
Oh bother, I've gone and ranted again.
Hey, i fall into the dentist group! But i totally advocate for bike lanes, and i'm not white...
There are dozens of us at the local critical mass ride!!! I make it a point to show up in my ridiculous spandex gear to show people the dentists aren't all assholes. Also, good spandex is really comfy.
Why the hate?? Yeah i sunk a lot of money into my hobby, but thats what people do. People spend tens of thousands on camera gear, gaming rigs, etc. Why hate on others' expensive hobbies?
I'm actually not that rich, but living car free and biking every day has allowed me to allocate a lot of money towards my hobbies. Cars are a total money sink... 10yrs ago it was around $6k/year TCO. I'm sure it's more now...
You should put an additional qualifier on your dentist description.... Carries their $20k bike on top of their $80k SUV. Drives 2 hours out of the city just to ride around for an hour...
I didn't say that all dentist-types are vehicular cyclists, just that all vehicular cyclists seem to fall into those two groups. One-way taxonomy. If you advocate for accessible bike infrastructure, good!
I'm actually white and male, myself. Fit, though I'd stop short of claiming athletic. But for me, taking up cycling was an eye-opening first hand example of disperate privilege. Both in how cycling is treated compared to driving, and how level of access to cycling itself changes depending on who you are. While I was already primed to understand social justice, cycling is a small way for white bros to really emphatically experience it along one vector, even if temporarily. Some of us gatekeep it as a result, but like you or I some of us use that experience as motivation for advocacy.
Car drivers telling cyclists they spend too much :D
I'm living proof that a helmet will do nothing to protect your pancreas; sure it coulda been worse, but as an 8yo kid I had a tough recovery because they wouldn't give pain medications until the last minute, but I guess that's just another rant for another place and time.
Someone has never been to Europe.
I have though. Go on, I'm interested to hear about the demographic difference.
17% of adult males and 36% of adult females use a bicycle to get to and from a work or education site. 45% of all Danish children bike to school.
Oh, I was not referring to cyclists in general. I was referring specifically to cyclists who gatekeep access to cycling by restricting it's recognition to sport athletics only, or opposing cycling-specific infrastructure. Europe certainly does have a much higher percentage of daily cyclists than the US but that is not what I was talking about. Though since you have more women cyclists, I imagine some of them do inevitably behave in this way.
Ah. Yes. Gatekeepers of any sport are cunts. Only excusable when safety is involved.
Have you been outside of the first world recently? Here in Mexico, cyclists are mostly old people with backpacks filled with tools on their way to fix a sink.
No, but I'm speaking specifically about US culture. Sorry, I know this community is international and so I should have stated that.
Hell even where I am about 60% of cyclists are kids. This is some basic internet strawman if I've ever seen one.
Cause and effect. When you make cycling a challenge, the only cyclists will be the most radical/motivated. If we had the infrastructure to make cycling safe and easy, many more casual cyclists would exist. Europe proves that
“If you build it they will come”
As it is, building it doesn’t even work so well because we are so starved for opportunity that so many “bike paths” are overwhelmed by pedestrians that also never had options
Yup, it definitely has snowball potential in either direction. Build more infrastructure, incentivize more advocates. Build less infrastructure, incentivize more privileged subcultures.
Ahh a classic vehicle cyclist!
I can hear John Forester screaming in his grave
Hey I get it though, bike lanes are expensive new infrastructure. So pro-bike, anti bike lane just means all roads are now for bikes, cars not allowed. Ban cars and you don't need expensive new infrastructure! Sounds great!
Yes but then we would need to kill children manually. Have you ever tried to hack up a hundred pounds of meat with a machete? Its quite the job.
The fact us; we need cars. They just save so much labor.
"it's simple math" - read about that expression on Facebook, never actually had math themselves as they were home schooled in creationism and flat earth.
Wtf even is simple-math? Arithmetic? Logic? The 2006 Kansas middle-school curricilum?
You all need to visit the Netherlands.
NL is flat, Switzerland's a much more convincing example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pWnreLG_cvc&t=837s&pp=ygUOY3ljbGluZyB6dXJpY2jSBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D
The cycling infrastructure in Switzerland is good, but the Netherlands are on a whole different level.
The video is ok, but contains incorrect information. Fines aren't scaled by income, they're fixed. Only for major infractions that go before a court of law is the penalty scaled.
Also, there is a shot from Bern saying "look people don't cycle when it's unsafe" but what is being shown is the roundabout of the motorway exit Ostring. No one cycles around that as there is no point. Cyclists would bypass that ugly sin from the 1970s.
It's also funny to hear Basel being called a small city, in Switzerland it's considered one of the biggest, like Genève, Zürich, Bern, Lausanne.
That’s kind of amusing to me as I was recently in an online debate about whether the state of New Hampshire could support passenger rail. It’s a rural state but the population centers you’d connect aren’t all the much smaller.
For posterity: yes it’s worthwhile. Normally (especially in the US) you’d think the population is too small, but
So MBTA could extend one of their lines, on existing track to capture thousands of additional car commuters literally ten miles to the border. And New Hampshire could get useful rail service by paying them to go an extra 70 miles. Zero infrastructure cost and NH doesn’t even have to figure out how to run a railroad
The town I grew up in has approx. 4000 inhabitants. It is served by a railway station with 4 trains per hour (one per direction every 30min), all day, from 05:00 to 24:00. On top of that it has four bus lines with frequencies between 30 and 10 minutes. It lies next to a medium sized (for Switzerland) city of 55k inhabitants, which has much much more public transport, like 20+ trains an hour in 6 directions and dozens of bus lines.
Just for comparison.
A 55k community in the USA would probably be considered a very small town, I guess. Not worthy of even a single railway line.
We do have our share of actual small towns, but in the sense of rail investments yes that’s way too small. All too many major cities still don’t have rail here.
My town is 60k but we have two (soon to be three) stations and regular service by virtue of being a suburb of Boston. That’s a lot tougher of an argument for a rural state like New Hampshire, but they’ve been facilitating freight rail and preserving track so they’re in a good place. Most importantly this is an opportunity to take advantage of the “network effect” of just extending an exiting line rather than starting from scratch. All too much of the US can’t do that
Bostons commuter rail network has really been expanding for the last couple decades and this would be a natural extension
A related initiative has been to organize the region’s airports to take some of the air traffic off Boston. We already have commuter rail and Amtrak service south to Providence to help with that: not just to go there but to make it easier for more people to use that airport when they have to fly. Including Manchester New Hampshire Airport in Boston’s transit network would be a nice win.
All your arguments might be invalid, because:
Rails, even with overhead wire, may be cheaper to maintain than roads in that climate.
I’m not sure what your point is. Are you arguing that Switzerland is cold, snowy and mountainous, or that New Hampshire is cold, snowy and mountainous?
The maintenance cost is a particular blind spot in the US. Maintaining rail seems excessive, because we really haven’t done any in over a century and somehow think it must pay for itself. Maintaining roads is cheap because there’s always money to build a new one and cost is no object. It’s not a sustainable way of thinking.
I had been hoping Detroit’s plight would open some eyes. Among the many problems that city had was maintenance. No one can afford to maintain infrastructure for 1,850,000 on a tax base of 630,000 and still shrinking. It’s a similar deal with our road system everywhere. We build for max population, assuming cars are the only possibility, without considering that people move and that other forms of transportation may be more scalable and maintainable
Yeah. We should increase surveillance on cars to block freedom 0f movement, and militarize roads for freedom.
That’s your argument against rail?
Or did we slip into the RoboCop universe?
I'm pro bike and anti bike lane.
The entire street should be for bikes only
That's what happens in my city, people hella mad about it
Car users arent people.
Some of them are against bike lanes because they say it gives drivers a false sense of entitlement and cyclists a false sense of security when they're supposed to be sharing the road.
That doesn't sound like this guy, though.
I ride an odd bike, a recumbent. I have seen a few cars watching me rather than the road, which is good for me — they give me loads of space — but bad for anyone ahead of me as the drivers show no lane control for a good 50m after they pass me. Where that happened most recently is also where a driver killed a cyclist by wandering into the bike lane despite having a six metre wide lane to themselves (even the cycle lane there is three metres wide)
That's potentially another objection, I guess--"they're going to run us over either way, why bother inconveniencing us with unprotected bike lanes as well?"--but I guess that feels to me like perfectionism.
Sorry but I will not take infrastructure advice from someone with the last name "carr".... /s
Pro-life + anti-gun control = pro-birth.
Or in other words: He's pro after-birth abortions.
Birth them all; let school shooters sort them out
"Solve school shootings by birthing backup-children."
Relevant OGLAF (NSFW)
No, thats too messy. Cars cull the weak outside, where cleanup is easier.
who the fuck said anything about novelty?
Even better is the pro life /pro death penalty.
I can at least see the logic in that one. No child is born deserving to die, but some adults have absolutely earned it.
Couldn't you say that no child deserves to be born?
I disagree, but I’ve definitely heard this argument before. NYC bike lanes are almost never respected. Cyclists need to be just as aware in a bike lane as they are splitting lanes.
That's because most of them are unprotected and drivers are assholes. Paint doesn't mean shit to them
Yep the concept is called "vehicular cycling". Proponents argue that cyclists fare the best when they act like and are treated as any other vehicle in traffic. It's bullshit of course, cyclists are safer in dedicated infrastructure and we should try to transform urban areas to be less car-centric and more walkable in general.
Oh The Urbanity! youtube channel made a video about this in particular: https://youtu.be/XpnZy7RrO3I
I'm all for separated bike lanes etc. They're nicer and safer than riding on the road. however when that doesn't exist the safest way to ride is to behave like a car, so holding the leave etc. Otherwise people try to squeeze past you or your less visible and it gets really dangerous
Places that implement bike lanes in a decent way have physical dividers between the car and bike lanes, not just paint.
If we add a novelty bike lane, what's next? Novelty unicycle lane? Novelty camel lane? There is no end to silly positions on things that nobody is asking for but I can pretend they do. You people need some common sense.
At least in Canada, people were literally cycling before automobiles came to our streets. Streetcars/trams were originally just falled "cars" before the automobile industry appropriated it.
This is funny to me because the one time I was in NYC, the streets were empty but the sidewalks were congested as fuck.
Dave must be an "avid cyclist" you see at public meetings.
Dave isn’t very bright
That's obvious. He pays to use Twitter.
Weird. I had a convo with one who said that protected bike lanes in crowded streets are dangerous as ambulances cannot get through the tight traffic.
And parallel to that was a fully car-restricted street. As an ambulance driver I would take that, as it is likely free.
So I think car-free roads are better, but it feels wrong being restricted to smaller roads when using the bike, especially if shops etc are all on bigger roads.
Ironic that the replier's last name is (assumedly) carr
Im pro bike, but we should round up all the cyclists
Damm cyclists... they ruined cycling!
Bike lanes are fine as long as we don't get rid of roads in the process. Living 10 miles from a city, terrible public transport and chronic pain means I'm not about to use my bike for actual errands. Before we say "just fix public transport" there is a balance of how much it will cost vs how much it is worth and no, I don't think it will be worth fixing
I am anti-bike lane. Honestly at least 50% of it is from the shitty bike posts. Probably more. Some of it is from the massive unused bike lane they built in my neighborhood. It cut though yards and 50ish trees and permanently fucked traffic. But half of it is the sorry-ass bike memes.
If traffic is so fucked, you should just ride your bike instead. Sounds like you'd have a nice traffic-free bike lane all to yourself.
Yeah! Great! If the bike path led to anything. You have inspired me to show up for town hall meetings to try and remove the bike path. Good job!
Has the concept of "extending the bike lane so it leads to something" crossed your mind, or have you been huffing too much gasoline for that kind of radical thinking?
Well, at least you're not in denial about it. Good for you!
With opinions like that, I expect there are very many things you don't realize. That isn't one of them, but I respect the attempt. Good lad.
Do you not see that this is exactly the point? What good is a new bike path if it doesn't lead anywhere? I'm not sure how you see this as a problem of too many bike paths and not too few bike paths Genuinely asking if you can see the merit of this point — as I 100% agree with your premise, and 100% disagree with your conclusion.
"I don't like some pictures online so cyclists should have to ride in the street."
lol
It probably isn't unused. You probably just think it's unused because a bike lane has a lot more capacity than a car lane, so they appear a lot less full for the same amount of traffic.
https://transportist.org/2016/03/30/on-why-bike-lanes-might-appear-underutilized/
The thing is that bike lanes need to be built intelligently. As a bike commuter I want to have bike lanes that don't force me to ride close to parked cars because that is dangerous for the cyclist and people getting in and out of the cars. I want to be able to conserve momentum and not have to stop everywhere, because building up speed costs effort. In my country if there is a bike lane its use is compulsary, but some lanes are so unsafe or so built to kill your speed that I often do avoid them wholly or partially.
I admit to being somewhat of a vehicular cyclist but I support easier safe options for those who are not.