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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Also plenty of room for a competent cyclist to pass inside the cones -- not to speak ill of the dead, but a lot of the cycling discourse seems to vaccilate between "Bikes are Vehicles; I'm taking the lane if I damn well please" and "Bikes are Fragile -- motorists need to yield to them as though they were pedestrians".

If you are driving your car up to some roadwork and need to merge into the adjacent lane, it's 100% on you to make sure nobody crashes into you -- including drunks and people watching tiktok. If you ride a bike on a city street (which I used to do a lot) you have even more incentive to get good navigating this -- but the moralistic aspect seems to encourage dodging the blame when you fuck it up.

a lot of the cycling discourse seems to vaccilate between "Bikes are Vehicles; I'm taking the lane if I damn well please" and "Bikes are Fragile -- motorists need to yield to them as though they were pedestrians".

But... both of those are true. There's more than one type of vehicle, you can't just force classify everything as "a car" or "not a car." Race cars, tanks, motorcycles, garbage trucks, school busses, scooters, skateboards, and bikes are all "vehicles" but they handle vastly differently and therefore have different rules. A bike is naturally faster than a perrson walking but slower and more vulnerable than a car, that's just how it is, it's pointless to get mad at them for not following some imaginary speed binary of "you must go either 3 MPH or 30, nothing in between."

Also plenty of room for a competent cyclist to pass inside the cones -- not to speak ill of the dead, but a lot of the cycling discourse seems to vaccilate between "Bikes are Vehicles; I'm taking the lane if I damn well please" and "Bikes are Fragile -- motorists need to yield to them as though they were pedestrians".

Yeah, those are the activists I can't stand. I wouldn't pass inside those cones, looks kinda tight with the dumpster overhanging. But obstacles like that are just regular city trouble for all vehicles, happens all the time.

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