Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road?
Like you sit in traffic for an hour each day to work. Wouldn’t you want to halve that by having more other people use bicycles instead?
Because every iteration of bike improvements has been fucked up. Isolated bike lanes that are painted where they can fit, but don’t properly connect anything. Bike lanes that are squeezed into part of a wider car lane. Designated shared bike/car lanes on 35mph roads that make cyclists a rolling obstruction to smooth traffic flow. Bike lanes squeezed between a travel lane and a parallel parking lane, causing exchange chaos, and double obstructions when city drivers double park in the bike lane. Widened shared pedestrian paths where cyclists are to pedestrians what cars are to bikes. Cyclists that think the bike lane isn’t for them. Cyclists going the wrong way. Cyclists taking their “right of way” sporadically, expecting drivers to read their minds. Bike lanes that barely overlap with my usual travel needs. Bike lanes in areas too sparse to be utilized for anything other than exercise.
I am a car lover. I am a motorcycle lover. I am a bicycle lover. I am a walking lover. I am a train lover. I am a bus lover. I use all modes of travels as they fit my needs and wants - how far, what logistics, what weather, what cargo, what fuel cost, what purpose.
Prep the downvotes.
I live in a larger Canadian city. I used to commute via transit. Sometimes the bus driver would stop abruptly. Every time the driver needed to stop the bus hard - twice a month - it was a bicyclist driving erratically, like cutting off a transit bus or, in one case, brake-checking the bus.
I’ve almost been hit twice - same intersection, different days - by a cyclist running the red, shooting through the crosswalk I was on, and cursing me out for it.
I have an idea as to why drivers worry about more bikes on the roadways.
I’ve been abroad. I’ve seen segregated bikeways where there’s a ribbon of green space between bicyclists and cars. This works really well. What they’re doing here Does Not .
But the reverse is true, and this is why I do not envy bicyclists : they’re gonna die on these metro roadways where they are mixing bikes and cars and tractor-trailers and buses, and fast. I have no desire to be someone else’s lesson on blind spots.
Cyclists being stupid is why i want them segregated from me. And pedestrians, too.
Like. No. If we never cross paths, they can’t be idiots and bolt out of a blind corner and get turned into a red smear, and send me to jail.
Yeah. Most drivers only exposure to cyclists sharing the road is a anxious experience of very different speeds, erratic movements, no signaling, and ignoring the traffic rules (surprising the drivers).
If you ride in a town or city a lot, you know one big piece of the answer: jealousy.
If there are more cyclists, you’ll see them more often riding by you at red lights and lines of cars at stop signs. Drivers hate this; it reminds them that sometimes cars are slow, and they love their cars, so they get angry.
If there are more cyclists, drivers will have to be careful not to hit them, and being careful is annoying. Right now, depending where you live, the driver can say “almost no cyclists are out here, so I wasn’t expecting them, they need to be more careful”. And the drivers believe it, and their friends do, too. But more cyclists around would make those excuses look like the BS they actually are.
And related to the second point is that, if cyclists increase in number, they will demand (and get) more bike lanes and protected areas to ride and park. This will absolutely come at drivers’ expenses. Drivers know this. So even though fewer cars would decrease congestion, drivers know that they would be inconvenienced in other ways, and that would again remind them that they aren’t as important as they want to be.
Finally, in the US specifically, large SUVs and trucks are causing massive increases in dead pedestrians, children, and cyclists. The increased death rate over the last ten years is appallingly high. If cycling is normalized even more, clearly political opinion will shift, and those giant vehicles will be heavily restricted or taxed, or their insurance rates will skyrocket, or drivers will be charged more frequently with manslaughter for the death that they cause every day. People are reasonably afraid that their unreasonably large vehicles will be taken away from them.
#suckstobethem
They don’t ride bikes and they don’t see many people riding them for practical uses (work, shopping etc) so for them it’s hard to sell the idea of bike infrastructure (that they think is for mainly recreational riders) making their commute slower and taking up tax money that could be used on other projects.
I get how this is flawed thinking and I want more pedestrian and bike friendly areas, but that is their perspective.
Surely, this question is targeted at USA/North Americans. The average commute is beyond biking distance. The average suburb is sprawled beyond biking convenience. So, exactly to your point, people reliant upon cars largely don’t see the benefit potential of bike lanes. You can point to tight older cities like NYC or Chicago, but, surprise, the cars in the city traffic aren’t fromthe city. They drove in form the surrounding neighborhoods to their jobs.
I biked for 2 years when I happened to get a career job in the town I lived. It made sense because I could cut through a park and skip the traffic light bottleneck. The 2nd closest career job I’ve ever had was 17 miles. The furthest was 65 miles.
That very thing you said at the end is usually already too much thinking for car brains
Imo, it should start with getting the MASSIVE cars and trucks off the roads. You wont convince us to get rid of our cars (i have many) because for a lot of us, we actually need them.
However, we DONT need Karen in an F350 that she takes to work and back by herself getting 5mpg and causing huge hazards due to massive blind spots. If only we could ban these vehicles or require better licenses that would at least help. I myself hate large cars, and only have a pickup (single cab, 40 years old, long box,) for hauling lumber or other house construction materials. All my other cars are under 3200 lbs. Even next to a new crossover they look TINY. And this further makes people who drive those monstrosities drive and act like assholes.
This will never change though. Redneck outrage would be too big a pushback and you cant change what car mfgs are doing.
If I had it my way, the only car youd be allowed to have is a miata, and a ute for work. If you have more than 2 kids you can get a wagon.
and you cant change what car mfgs are doing.
You can, though. The steady inflation in vehicle size is a direct response to CAFE regulations and revisions, which incentivize heavier vehicles. Pickups, of any size, were far less common prior to CAFE’s enaction in 1975, despite the population being more rural, agricultural, and industrial then.
Yeah but now they make what vehicles sell, and big shit sells now that the fat americans are used to it. They wont go back to small hatchback.
That’s an easy fix. Just jack up annual registration or taxes, but only for large trucks and SUVs, to $10K a year. Problem solved… Or make it a scale based on engine size, or total car width/length/height, whatever. It’s so easy to regulate… And in fact the US used to regulate large vehicles more strictly, so we already know that it can be done.
An astonishingly easy fix would be to just add a tax like a property tax based on vehicle weight. Make it scale enough to be prohibitive, but anyone who needs it will be willing to pay.
I might not be able to change what manufacturers are doing, but I do try.
I write them to let them know about their dangerous LED headlights. I write them to let them know exactly why I will not buy one of their vehicles, even used, because it has a giant touchscreen interface for core controls that is useless when the sun is shining on it.
I treat owners who are making the streets more dangerous for me like shit, and I’ll tell them why if they bother to ask. most will probably just say fuck off and not change their mind, but some might actually think about how their actions affect people.
Good for you ! I fucking hate those headlights and they should be illegal. Feel like smashing every damn Cadillac headlight in a parking lot sometimes…hmm
because, overwhelmingly, they’re dumb and selfish and ignorant, and they choose to be that way.
some aren’t. some are willing to be educated. but not most.
Vehicle users should pay for the cost of transit and cycling infrastructure via a tax on gasoline. This could allow transit to be free of charge. Don’t want to pay the gas tax? Take the bus for free. Everyone wins.
I think some of why is related to how most people in a traffic jam go “damn this traffic” not “damn, I’m making this worse”
Or “if only the city would open a new lane, it won’t be as congested”. Sometimes followed by “why dId the city shut the road, that’s just going to make traffic worse” when the council shuts the road for expansion works.
Real life is more complicated, a typical bike line is built over an existing road, at worst you get some painting on the road, which barely changes anything and piss off both side. At best, a lane es turned into a nice cycle lane which pisses off car-driver, especially when the rest of infrastructure doesn’t follow.
I am all in for car free city, but too many mayors skip the build parking which connect to public transport at the Town entrance. Closing lanes without offering alternatives is just a way to get your work cancelled after next election and to block any alternatives project for another decade
Simply put, it’s not as easy to build transit or pedestrian infrastructure as roads. That’s it, at least in the USA. There’s an endless money machine for road maintenance and widening and anything car related and there isn’t at all the same for anything else.
So the public transport barely exists anyway and even if you give them a park and ride they won’t use it because public transit sucks and is far less enticing even if bike lanes nuke car lanes.
To add on, the morons do this to areas that don’t even connect other bike lanes. There’s no reason to use it if it doesn’t connect to anything.
Cities generally have a fixed budget for infrastructure and maintenance.
This means that resources put towards bike infrastructure are taken out of car infrastructure resources, but because cities tend to have elected people setting policies on alternative infrastructure, it is rare that you get a properly implemented city plan that benefits drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.
Take my area; to use a bicycle to get groceries, I have to leave my place and go onto a single lane road with parking and pedestrian only sidewalks on both sides.
This goes around a blind corner to a busier two lane street with parking on both sides and a shared pedestrian/bike path… that is on the far side of the road with no crosswalk, that runs for 500 meters, dumping you at an unlit intersection that has a road going away from the shops that has a pedestrian only sidewalk on the opposite side of a two lane road, and a gravel shoulder used for parking on the near side.
The route you need to take is a right turn onto an unlit two lane road with no shoulder, down a steep hill.
This road has traffic calming at the far end with those white traffic sticks to prevent people from parking on the side… forcing cyclists out into the center of the road right before they need to turn right…
…onto a wonderfully engineered road with lights, plenty of driving space, parking, and a set-back shared bike and pedestrian way…
…that then loses that a km further on, directing foot and bike traffic onto what is now a narrow two lane road.
Then through another intersection, on the far side of which, there’s sidewalks, then a bike lane, then parking, then a two lane road.
On this stretch, the only like it in the city, cars open their doors into car traffic onto one side and bike traffic on the other. Many larger vehicles park into the bike lane. At intersections, the bike lane is invisible to turning vehicles.
But all that’s OK, because this road dumps cyclists onto a four lane highway with no bike lane and a sidewalk that has obstacles that make it impossible to push a stroller down it, let alone ride a bike on it.
This takes you to the shops, where as a cyclist you have to ride the length of the parking lot to get to the limited bike racks by the loading bay, and THEN walk all the way back through the parking lot to get to the shops.
And I know this isn’t uncommon. It makes bikes visibly annoying to car drivers, creates unavoidable choke points, and statistics indicate regular use of this route will eventually end in injury.
Where I live, building bike infrastructure means removing a lane of traffic, or parking, to install a bunch of curbs, poles, and large rocks, to create a bike lane that largely goes unused, while traffic is substantially worsened.
Here’s an example of a work in progress. When this was taken they hadn’t yet filled the holes they’d dug in the road with the rocks.
Having been a dumb kid growing up in bumrucksville, I’ll add this too: Congnitive load.
You have to learn to cope with something new. Driving sucks, other drivers suck, you’re telling me I have to drive in a two lane which could become one lane at any moment? I have to watch for faster pedestrians? “Isn’t the sidewalk for bikes, why do they need the road??”, then not realizing sidewalks aren’t properly flat enoigh and mixing bikes with walkers on a 3ft wide space is as stupid as the rest of stroad design to mix pedestrians and cars.
Nah, sounds like too much work, bikers can drive like the rest of us, “keeps everyone safer” or whatever you wanna tell yourself without thinking further. Too much work to re-evaluate.
🤷 People often do or say things that make no sense.
They think of it as a zero-sum game. There is either a bike lane or two car lanes. The number of cyclists is fixed and the number of drivers is fixed. If there is one less lane to drive in, there is more traffic. If you spend limited tax dollars on bike infrastructure, driving infrastructure will not receive necessary maintenance.
