Comment by MisterMower
14 hours ago
No, it would be like a city building a dog park and then having parents bring their kids to the park and demanding that dog owners keep their dogs on leashes while in the park.
By your logic, this is fine because the kids aren’t pooping in the park which degrades it less.
Never mind that the park was created for dog owners, and their enjoyment of it is impaired by these new restrictions placed on them by people who shouldn’t even be there.
Your analogy is the bad one here.
To be like that, almost everyone would need to own a dog, and everyone including the non-dog-owners would have things delivered by dog, the dog park would have to actively block access to most places, and the fees for the dog owners pay for the dog park would have to be insufficient for the dog park and the park instead subsidised by general taxation even from the people who only get stuff delivered by dog… which would be quite fair and reasonable because almost all the damage to the dog park that the maintenance fees would need to cover, would be due to specifically the delivery dogs.
The actual point of the dog park fees in this scenario would be to reduce the usage of the dog park, due to everyone riding their dogs everywhere. Which is a heck of a mental image.
Roads aren't for pleasure, they're economic infrastructure that some people happen to enjoy.
I'm sorry you aren't able to see the parallels. Let me explain them for you:
Dog owners are the motorists. Dedicated infrastructure was built specifically for them to use.
Parents with kids are the cyclists. They want to restrict how that infrastructure is used so that they can enjoy it in the way that is most convenient for them, at the expense of the dog owners.
Initially, dog owners used the park freely without any interference from parents with kids. But at some point, parents with kids felt they were entitled to use the dog park in ways it was never intended to be used, and changed regulations to restrict dog owners enjoyment of the park.
I intentionally left out any discussion of how these things are paid for to highlight the unfairness of this situation. It doesn't matter how it's paid for, since the infrastructure already exists for a specific purpose and is being used for that purpose.
To include the finance side of things in this analogy, it would be like funding the dog park with a special sales tax on dog food, which increases the unfairness of the whole situation when it's taken over by the parents with kids, who paid nothing to maintain or build it.
In case you don't understand how analogies work, they highlight critical similarities between two situations that are otherwise dissimilar to help understand the underlying concept. They aren't parallel in all respects, nor can they be.
If your best argument against my analogy is to introduce irrelevant dissimilarities to distract from the obvious point of the analogy, I'll take that as an endorsement it was effective.
I think we're ignoring the wider context of this thread, which would be the context of TFA, which is New York City specifically. The roads in NYC predate the existence of the automobile. NYC had a bicycle boom in the late 1800s.
https://www.nytimes.com/1869/03/08/archives/velocipedes-thei... | https://archive.is/UDhZf
Bike cops in NYC in the late 1800s were likely more common than cars.
https://flatironnomad.nyc/history/brief-history-of-bicycling... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250713044710/https://flatironn...
> In 1896, then New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt launched the first-ever group of bicycle-riding officers. This team evolved into a 100-member organization with its own station stated Evan Friss, co-curator of the Museum of the City of New York’s 2019 exhibit Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History[0].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250319112028/https://www.mcny....
By the time this film was created in 1911, cars existed, but they had to share the road with pedestrians, cable cars, and horse carriages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx5sUa_2SD8
> This documentary travelogue of New York City in 1911 was made by a team of cameramen with the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern, who were sent around the world to make pictures of well-known places.
> Opening and closing with shots of the Statue of Liberty, the film also includes New York Harbor; Battery Park and the John Ericsson statue; the elevated railways at Bowery and Worth Streets; Broadway sights like Grace Church and Mark Cross; the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue; and Madison Avenue. Produced only three years before the outbreak of World War I, the everyday life of the city recorded here—street traffic, people going about their business—has a casual, almost pastoral quality that differs from the modernist perspective of later city-symphony films like Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s "Manhatta" (1921). Take note of the surprising and remarkably timeless expression of boredom exhibited by a young girl filmed as she was chauffeured along Broadway in the front seat of a convertible limousine.
Jaywalking wasn't even really a concept until ~1915. It's legal again in NYC as of last year. Jaywalking laws against pedestrians and other non-drivers could be viewed as a taking from or enclosure of the commons; in this case, roads as public thoroughfares for one and all. In this light, the behavior of drivers towards cyclists is a continuation of their hostility towards horse carriage users and pedestrians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking
https://www.cnn.com/travel/jaywalking-legalized-new-york-cit... | https://archive.is/Y2MCk
Folks have been cycling in NYC long before cars were common. Before that, folks were using the roads for all manner of pursuits. Roads are tools for living, and they're for everyone who needs them if a better option more suited for your mode of transportation isn't available.
It’s more like the cities have chosen to turn _every public space_ into a dog park that you have no ability to escape. For the pleasure of living in this inefficient landscape, you are charged in the form of taxes to maintain it. Dog owners remain convinced that because they pay sales tax on kibbles, that they have a right to this space. After all, it’s just how places naturally are!