As someone forced to ride my bike right next to thundering trucks and cars on the roads every day, I can't begin to enumerate how many close calls I've had because there are no bike lanes here.
Fuck your existing lanes and fuck your 1.5-tonne beasts. Make some space, it won't fucking kill you.
Car drivers complaining about bike lanes 'reducing capacity' but still drive around with 4 empty seats are fucking morons.
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?"
why not design it with sturdier posts that withstand cars?
We can't really control what the city engineers or council do, it's an advisory commission, and something more robust would well exceed the budget that the city has allocated for the project I'm talking about. We're trying to get a win where we can right now, but we've added an agenda item to recommend a minimum standard for bike lanes so that they'll all be built with some kind of hardening.
Yeah, I bet concrete bollards don't need frequent replacements
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?
Say it with me:
Cars do not belong in the city, sensible transit system and infrastructure does
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.
The zero sum game conservative mentality rears its ugly head again to yap some heinous shit.
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. 🇺🇸
some fat lazy fuck who drives to their own mailbox at the end of the driveway
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.
Fuck cars! And fuck groups that propagate the narrative that cars are good
Anyone who runs a group like that is intentionally being contrarian just for the trolling. Some people get off on intentionally being regressive.
That, or they are intentionally spreading oil lobby propaganda, or they're a gullible tool that feel for the oil lobby propaganda.
there are "cities" of 5,000 people and others with more than 100,000 the same principles don't apply to both the large exceptions and the normal small cities. Cars work great at moving a few dozen people many miles and terribly at moving hundreds a few miles.
IIUC, in Ontario cyclists are legally allowed to take up a whole lane on most roads.
Legally allowed doesn’t mean a whole lot when it’s 100kg vs 2000kg.
I don’t mean that it’s not a fair point, but is it worth a life?
In most coastal US cities, if bike-specific facilities are unavailable or blocked then it's legal to take a full motor lane. At your own peril of course, most drivers and many cops are indifferent to this information. Vehicular cycling is sadly not the answer to getting everyone out on a bike.
And these statistics (I would appreciate OOP's sources if they're available) would be good ammunition in the lawsuit filed against the Ontario government for their bill that is spuriously trying to remove bike lanes in Toronto.
Cars don't belong in cities
What if it's snowing, raining, or very hot; there are infirmed and/or disabled people; and those who have stuff to carry?
Weather is a cop-out, not an issue, plenty of hot, cold, snowy, rainy places with plenty of bikes. For the infirm and disabled there's e-bikes and other light vehicles, and for people with stuff to carry there's cargo bikes, delivery, or, hear me out, rental cars.
And for everyone there should be public transit. Kind of a shame so much urbanist focus is on bikes, though understandable as bike lanes are quite a bit cheaper than building public transit from scratch.
assuming this is a genuine question and not just astroturfing: anyone who has to ask this question needs to have a big long look at their mental acuity, because if you actually can't figure out any other solution to these issues than "drive a car" then you must be struggling in day to day life.
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?
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
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.
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.
mixing cars and bikes works, but only under specific circumstances: you need to make sure the cars drive slowly, there's little car traffic in the first place, and ideally drivers should be used to cyclists and cyclists themselves, so they actually view them as humans and avoid making them feel like shit.
Fuck bike lanes. We need to dedicate a percent of the roads to be cycling-only roads
You can still have a road next to the bike lane, it just needs to have a barrier in between.
In the Netherlands you'll see roads with three lanes of equal size in each direction with dividers in between. One for bikes, one for buses, one for cars.
In North America you will make drivers absolutely furious if you take some of their driving lanes away and make them exclusively for bikes or public transport. But they will eventually realise that such a system makes driving far more pleasant because there are so much fewer cars on the road when most journies are done via bike or public transport that you don't need the extra lanes.
Nah. I prefer to free half the roads entirely from cars. I'm sure most city dwellers would agree.
i had to stop biking in my area because it's too dangerous :(
I'm relegated to only riding on designated bike trails because of the hazard. This really means only riding for leisure/exercise, rather than actual transportation.
I love cycling and would be more than happy to help the environment and improve my physical health by cycling to various places within range (including my job), but it's simply too dangerous. One driver looking down at their phone or fucking with their car's touchscreen infotainment could end me in the blink of an eye.
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.
Yeah, I'm just scratching my head because all the roads in my rural town are one lane in each direction, with heavy industrial farming traffic. There's not even shoulders, its just the road, a ditch, and a field.
I'd take better public transit over bike lanes.
Why not both?
The problem with transit for rural areas is that you're covering such a small number of people over such a large area that it costs more to run the service than it could possibly ever hope to earn as a service. So it would always be operating at a loss. That's unacceptable under capitalism.
For any major city or Metro area, yes, public transit should be given the highest priority, and it should primarily be run using renewable energy sources. Not only would renewable energy generally be less costly for daily operations, but it would reduce the climate impact of the service.
The problem with bike lanes in most North American areas is that it's an afterthought. So your only viable option is to pull from whatever is there to build the bike lanes, usually causing the bike lanes to run in-line with vehicular traffic, and that's usually not ideal for anyone. Even with good boundaries between bikes and other road users, there's always the chance that a 2 tonne truck barrels through whatever boundary is there and flattens someone using the bike lane. That's not really a risk if you planned for cycling infrastructure as part of the original design of a city, where you can fully separate road users and cyclists.
I recognize that roads are still needed, for deliveries and commercial purposes, but almost everyone else can take transit or ride a bike.
In rural areas, not so much.
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.
Okay
I mean I'd love to believe this but there's no source
Found one and updated it!
They feel entitled to other people's lives.
I don't ride my bike to work because the only pathways that lead there are filled with cars.
In my city there's always at least 2-3 cyclists a year killed by drivers who intentionally hit them. And the police have only ever found one of the perps.
What in the fuck
Now I'm wondering what they said
As a car-brain it would be really nice if I knew bikes weren’t going to be in my lane. Then I know I could go faster.
Honestly, this is the argument to make. Almost every human is selfish when it comes to a strangers convenience or theirs. Make the argument that it'll be more convenient to drive with bikes out of the way, and that sidewalks will be safer (almost everyone walks every once in a while). I've convinced people this way, but never with explaining the safety, let alone city livability or environmental reasons.
Which makes the downvote brigade even sadder. If more car brains like me understood that getting slow-ass bikes and mass transit out of car lanes meant cars were easier to drive they wouldn’t oppose them so much.
So many mass transit and bike path projects try to put it in the same place as cars which just makes things worse for everyone.
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.
https://bikeleague.org/about/equity-and-history/
TIL
your Noita profile picture fucking slaps
Thanks! It's from my emotes mod, which is also included in the Noita Together multiplayer mod.
Wait, we have profile pictures?