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.
Suggest moats, then. Only requires a backhoe.
That might actually work in some cases, since a lot of CA cities are criss-crossed with little irrigation canals. Most of what I'm pushing for, though, is putting our streets on a road diet by converting over wide or extra lanes into hardened bike lanes.
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 zero sum game conservative mentality rears its ugly head again to yap some heinous shit.
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.
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.
Just reminds me how I miss the Mountains to Sea Trail. I didn't think about the Santa Ana one though, glad there's at least an option.
Cars don't belong in cities
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
They feel entitled to other people's lives.
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