- cross-posted to:
- bicycling@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- bicycling@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.
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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?
Only because its funny. Yes.
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.
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!
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.
Vehicular cyclists are the fucking worst. I find that they fall into two groups:
- “The John Forrester”, generally oldhat nerds festooned with side mirrors and blinking lights and fluoro vests who are basically at the point of cosplaying as a car.
- “The Dentist”, young and middle-aged guys with money for whom cycling is purely a sport and nothing else, who annually dump $20K into prebuilt bikes and clothing like it’s nothing.
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.
