A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Fuck your existing lanes and fuck your 1.5-tonne beasts. Make some space, it won't fucking kill you.
I agree, dedicated bike lanes are crucial for safety. It's frustrating seeing how vulnerable cyclists are on the road. Speaking of frustrating, I recently got sucked into a silly online game, something about a chicken jockey clicker. It's a mindless distraction, but the real world needs solutions like these bike lanes, not just digital escapism.
Car drivers complaining about bike lanes 'reducing capacity' but still drive around with 4 empty seats are fucking morons.
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.
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.
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.
What kind of sad sack is so anti-bike that they run a whole "no bike lanes" social media account?
some fat lazy fuck who drives to their own mailbox at the end of the driveway
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 :(
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.
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.
The zero sum game conservative mentality rears its ugly head again to yap some heinous shit.
Fuck bike lanes. We need to dedicate a percent of the roads to be cycling-only roads
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.
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.
Used to commute to work on the Santa Ana River trail. Majority of early morning commuters there were working class on inexpensive bicycles. Shifted to Mountains to Sea Trail, far fewer commuters, most in riding kit with more expensive bikes. No surprise, reflects the communities the trails exist in.
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
Thanks! It's from my emotes mod, which is also included in the Noita Together multiplayer mod.
Oh neat! I've used this actually
Thanks for making mods :3
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
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.
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.
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?
We take the lane for safety, actually. There are many situations where it is much safer to take the lane.
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.
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.