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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
The zero sum game conservative mentality rears its ugly head again to yap some heinous shit.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.