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Comment by goatlover

8 hours ago

What's a "DEI bike lane"? Like woke, DEI has lost all meaning at the political level of discourse. It's just whatever the current regime dislikes.

In a nearby suburban town, the GOP Chair forced a referendum on a road project.

New York has a complete streets program where bike lanes and pedestrian friendly crossings are included in most projects. Iirc 4-5 people have died crossing this road.

The call to action was that “those people” would use the bike lanes to leave the city, connect to the Democrat bike trail and rape, murder and rob the townsfolk.

Old fearful white people are terrified of this stuff.

  • Yep. Beverly Hills and Bel Air used the same argument to rally against new subway development near UCLA.

  • I think there's a good faith possibility here that the taxpayers just don't see themselves biking to "the hood" rather than some sinister plan against black people. I mean I wouldn't vote for a bike route to the white trash trailer park, not because I hate them but because there is no reason for me to bike there whereas I might bike to a nice gentrified district for some drinks.

    I would reframe most things more in terms of "what will I gain" to see how voters to vote, and new opportunities or bridges to bike to the hood gains them basically nothing.

    • It’s actually a super popular bike route as it’s a 20 minute path to the central business district downtown. And again, 4-5 people have lost their lives in as many years.

      In this case most of the hubbub was really about a pedestrian island that would block left turns to a business the guy was friends with. The woke people were out to get them for some reason, etc.

      The racist dog whistle was very deliberate and targeted at Nextdoor. The messaging in more mainstream outlets was about lane width reductions causing a traffic nightmare. It was almost taken from Blazing Saddles.

It's just a way to keep the culture war hot. They need people on Reddit mad, the media questioning what a DEI Bike Lane is and ridiculing, etc. The actual policy they've implemented, excluding the border, has so far been an abject disaster and even their own base is unhappy. "DEI Bike Lanes" is a way to throw their voters some red meat while stirring the pot.

Making things better is Progressive, and Progressive is woke, and woke is DEI. So to fight back against DEI find the things that make peoples’ lives better (like bike lanes) and destroy them. Just tear them up, and you’ve won the culture war and saved America.

This is the official GOP policy, the best of what the GOP has to offer. Fight friends, betray allies, threaten your neighbors, drop bombs, smash bike lanes.

  • Not that there's any credence to the idea, but many residents of low-income neighborhoods in urban areas see bike lanes as a dinner bell for gentrification. Never mind that a ton of bicycle commuters in urban areas are from low-income neighborhoods themselves...