Comment by mzmzmzm
7 months ago
At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
7 months ago
At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
In the 70s there were massive protests in the Netherlands called "Stop the Child Murder". Note that these protests were based on conservatism. People were used to safe streets where children could cycle independently to school, go to sports clubs and hang out with their friends around the city. Then cars came and started killing their children.
At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.
Of course people did not accept that the automobile would destroy their traditional lifestyle and massive protests took place around the country.
I can certainly attest that cycling around the Netherlands was a joy during the late 70s and 80s. I lived in West Germany on and off, mostly in the north and close to the border. A lot of German roads had very decent cycle lanes too.
It was a bit of a shock cycling in the UK but to be fair all roads were a lot less busy back then. I also don't recall the hostility to cyclists back then that exists now.
A bunch of Dutch hydo-engineers probably (there were rather a lot of skilled folk over there) assisted Somerset back around C17+ to drain and reclaim some pretty large tracts of land in the "Levels". Perhaps we need some cycle lane building assistance.
I think the bigger scandal in NYC isn't the removal (it was a single lane removed as part of a 15+ year back-and-forth beef), but the fact that the city isn't even close to meeting its legal obligations around constructing new lanes[1].
(That's not to say that the removal isn't shameful and nakedly for hizzoner's political gain; I just think it's not the "big" thing.)
[1]: https://projects.transalt.org/bikelanes
This is a great reason to have snap elections instead of scheduled elections. Mayor Adams will scorch the earth to get the votes of a handful of extremists in his quixotic reelection attempt, and will harm lots of people in doing so.
How does snap elections solve this problem? You'd have less information if it happened in the next week, especially about less well known candidates. You are suggesting that elections coming in a few months leads to tricking people?
It creates conditions for more direct accountability. There's a pretty standard pattern of getting elected, doing the more extreme things, and then giving the voters time to cool off before the election happens.
2 replies →
Bike lanes are kinda scary in nyc though, because bikers usually refuse to stop for red lights, creating a hazard for pedestrians.
I once saw a biker yell at a pedestrian to get out of the way, even though she was the one who was going through a red light.
More than once I've seen a biker almost plow into someone trying to cross the street.
When I see someone violating cycling traffic code, nine times out of ten it's an electric skateboard, rental city bike or a food delivery guy on an electric moped (legally bicycles when limited to 25 km/h).
And those spandex-wearing road cyclists and commuters that motorists like to bitch about so much? The best law-abiding folks I've seen.
Helsinki didn't achieve this with bike lanes.
From the article:
> Cycling and walking infrastructure has been expanded in recent years, helping to separate vulnerable road users from motor traffic.
> Helsinki’s current traffic safety strategy runs from 2022 to 2026 and includes special measures to protect pedestrians, children, and cyclists.
With no numbers offered. Lots of cities "expanded" cycling infrastructure but can't boast that level of safety. By far the strongest distinguising factor is the speed limit. That is a mere policy that doesnt cost taxpayers billions, it works, and therefore is politically viable.
"Special measures" is not just code for bike lanes either.
Freedom, f* yeah
[flagged]
I might say that of unprotected bike lanes, but how are well protected lanes a detriment?
As a driver and biker alike I’d much prefer there to be a thick barrier between the cyclist and traffic. It reduces the chances of drivers bumping into or hitting cyclists and ensures that the cyclists cannot unexpectedly swerve into traffic.
As someone living in Copenhagen, I respectfully disagree.
Ah yeah. It's no wonder people keep mentioning Copenhagen without telling its dirty little secret. It stayed liveable _despite_ the scourge of urbanism because a third of its population was forcibly (via economic forces) displaced during 1970-s, and it _still_ has not reached the 1969 peak: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope...
So it was able to avoid the effects of the density-misery spiral. But it'll get to experience them soon. The transit will become more crowded, traffic more jammed, the crime will go up, and the housing costs (of course) will skyrocket.
> Bike lanes make lives actively worse for everyone.
Except for ... cyclists?
And pedestrians that then don't get cyclists on the pavements. And drivers getting less congestion. Someone seriously claiming cycle lanes is bad for a city knows little about urban planning.
1 reply →
> actively worse for everyone
Can you elaborate?
Second-order effects. Bikes are nothing but misery generators. They are the absolute WORST commute mode, so people (on average) choose literally anything else when they have that option. We have plenty of proof for that. There are cities with great bike _and_ car infrastructure, and the percentage of bike commutes is about the same as everywhere else.
So the only thing that bike lanes do is sabotage cars and other ground transit.
As a double whammy, bikes are inconvenient (or illegal) to take onto the most rapid and ground transit. And bikeshares are not reliable enough for daily commutes.
All these factors motivate people to move closer to the downtowns, because it becomes inconvenient to live afar. This in turn increases the price of real estate near downtowns, resulting in real estate developers building denser housing. This in turn results in higher rents, smaller units, more crime, etc.
Yes, I have researched this, and I have numbers to back up my words.
5 replies →
[flagged]
Stats doesn't agree with you. At least in the EU this is the matrix of vehicle types and deaths: https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download...
I wouldn’t think of rare American cyclists being comparable to more common European cyclists. Especially if we are talking about a bike messenger in NYC vs a commuter in Amsterdam.
I had similar experiences with cars.
Cyclists switch between pedestrian and car rules at will. I see them blow stop signs and lights constantly.
I’d argue that neither set of rules is made for them, so it’s not surprising that they take the most convenient of the two. Plus, it’s not out of the question to have laws in which red lights act like stop signs and stop signs act like yield signs specifically for cyclists[1]. It’s also likely less dangerous if that’s the case[2].
[1]: https://www.bicyclecolorado.org/colorado-safety-stop-becomes...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/may/21/women-cyclists-mo...
What I've noticed is that everybody skirts rules for convenience, but the offenses are different because the conditions are different.
Cars break the speed limit, look at their phones (easy to see from a cyclist's vantage point) and roll through stop signs, because those things are possible and convenient. Very few drivers are fully in control of their cars in fast, congested traffic, which is why "rear enders" seem to happen frequently.
Bikes roll through stop signs and invent their own shortcuts because those are convenient, but exceeding the speed limit is impossible for most of us.
In their defense, neither set of rules offers them much in the way of safety and protection.
> At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
BTW, what do you think about the 5-10 extra lifetimes that people in NYC collectively waste _every_ _day_ in commute compared to smaller cities?
A well-designed car-oriented city will have commutes of around 20 minutes, compared to 35-minute average commutes in NYC. So that's 30 minutes that NYC residents waste every day on average. That's one lifetime for about 1.2 million people commuting every day.
You've sort of given it away with the "smaller cities" thing. People who live in NYC don't want to live in a smaller American-style city with suburban sprawl.
(You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC. That number, already terrible, would be far worse without the city's mass transit -- you simply cannot support the kind of density NYC endeavors for with car-oriented development.)
I mean, I don't hide my despair at large cities. They're destroying the fabric of the Western civilization by acting as black holes for population.
> You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC.
Here's the thing. A well-designed human-oriented city like Houston has FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
The fix for cities like NYC is to stop building them and start de-densifying them.
10 replies →
> well-designed car-oriented city
Might be true, but at this point it's an utopian level of fantasy. We spent more than a century with cars in old cities, new cities, smaller ones bigger ones.
The only proven results we've had is reducing cars solveany problems at once.
The only proven result is the prosperity in the US, that started to ebb once the economic forces started concentrating people into the larger cities.