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This is my primary motto as a cyclist. Taking over footpaths, taking the full lane, using industrial parking lots, driving in the wrong direction on a residential street, rather than the right way on the main road.....what have you. If it is illegal, go sue me. My life matters more. I love grade separated bike lanes as much as the next guy. When the system enables it, I am every bit a law abiding (non) citizen. But drawing some ink to separate me and massive cars is not enough. In such a case, I'm going to do what I must to survive.
Half-assed efforts towards bike lanes are more dangerous than not having them. It creates a false sense of security. The scariest are right turns where the bike lane abruptly ends and turns into a lane for cars. I also dislike fake bollards, which are merely cosmetic. If you're going to erect a pole, I want it to be solid metal. This is my experience in SF. Lots of bike lanes, but too exposed to multi-lane traffic. Narrow single lane 25 mph streets are my favorite. Don't need a bike lane. I'll do my normal 12-15 mph and the cars can follow behind. Traffic calming measures work better than bike lanes or helmets.
More than lack of bikes, this is North America's biggest problem.
Bikers, public transit & pedestrians all suffer equally, as US & Canada coddle car drivers beyond every reasonable limit. Drunk driving is still the best way to kill someone in the US. No punishment. Blind old people get licenses. 17% of the US has substance abuse issues, and all of them are driving 24x7. The US has no way for drunk people to get home other than spend $50 taking an uber back. So instead, people roll the dice.
Speed limits are 65 mph, but family cars can accelerate to in 4 seconds. Why? You can cross 200 mph in family cars. Why ? It's the only country in the world where motor vehicle deaths are going up, even as cars get overwhelmingly safer. Why ? Pedestrian death numbers look like a genocide is going on. WTF ?
The government tries to hide the 2 types of deaths they're most ashamed of (drug abuse and car crashes) into 1 category : "Unintentional injuries". A category that covers more deaths than almost all the other categories COMBINED.
The US spends $400b/yr on heart disease & cancer treatment, just to increase the lifespan of geriatrics by a few years. But, the majority of accidental deaths (I consider drug related deaths to be self inflicted) among the not-old (under age 50) are caused by cars. By far, cars steal the most years of anyone's lives in the US. More than cancer or heart disease, combined.
Now, you could eliminate 50% of those deaths, by just doing a half-as-good job as Europe. Yeah, that's how much safer Europe is than the US.
How much would you need to spend ? Let's start with a sensible number. How about as much as we spend on the next 2 diseases : heart disease and cancer : about $200b/yr. Sounds like a large number. But, you could literally stop treating heart disease and spend all that money on reducing car related deaths.....and more Americans would be alive at the end of the year.
But, before we even spend a single dollar on road safety, can we start with the low hanging fruit ? Things we can get for free. I have 3 suggestions:
Qualifier - My suggestions will make some pure blooded Americans angry, but none of these are in violation of the constitution, so there is that.
Why can you drive faster than the speed limit ? You have google auto / car play. They know the speed limit. So does the car. Why allow the person to go faster ? Sure, there might be an emergency that warrants it. But if you don't wear your seatbelt, a loud alarm goes off. Let's start there. If you go above the speed limit, then a massive alarm start blaring. Yeah, if your wife is in labor or gangs are chasing you, you can go faster. Surely, the blaring alarm is the least of your worries in this situation.
Same for the upper limit. The national speed limit is 75 mph. Why allow a car to go faster than 90 mph, ever ?
Gaze tracking is trivial to implement. Why do we allow distracted driving at all ? A simple gaze tracker than tell when a person has zoned out, is using their phone or almost asleep.
I leave the best for last. Drunk drivers are the biggest nuisance, but they have zero repercussions. Why not take away their driving license for a very long time (~5 years) unless they install expensive tracking. "They are poor and can't afford this. They wouldn't be able to work without a car.".....well, that's better than them killing a person. Let's start with getting their cars installed with a permanent dashcam and breathalyzer. Car doesn't start unless you breathe into it and register sober. A simple dashcam is good enough to make it hard to game.
That's it. With these 3 changes, American roads would already be a lot safer. Not just for cyclists, but also pedestrians, other cars and the drunk drivers themselves.
I am fully black (orange?) pilled on the matter. Decent public transit, bike infrastructure & pedestrian safety should be table stakes for a functioning urban society. If the government can't make progress on these amenities, then it is a sign of an unserious society.
To me, that's the US traffic agencies right now.
Zoning out a little bit, the rethinking of urban infrastructure is going to be unifying issue for this generation. NIMBYism and cars will be the 2 sacred goats that the youth will try to slay.
Personally, I welcome it. I hate car brained urban Americans and I hate NIMBYs.
Yes, I mean it as a blanket statement with no qualification.
Deaths per million scaling. Mostly in the single digits, spiking to the mid-10s for nighttime biking enthusiasts. I don't want to be callous, but the rhetoric is not matching the death rates here.
What I'm learning here is that Americans can ride bikes during the day with a collective 0.00000005% chance of dying (not clearly shown in the image but presumably per year). I'll take that deal. Yes please.
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I don't know what life is like in San Francisco, but in my entire life I've never seen someone dare such a thing. I'd deadass be on my horn every single second until you got the hell out of the way, and you'd likely find yourself run over or beaten in the street within the month. Everyone would agree that it was unfortunate but that you sort of asked for it by being an asshole.
If I'm picturing the streets he's describing correctly they're the kind of one way parking on both sides narrow ass streets that a car would struggle to keep up with a cyclist on because going faster than 10 puts you at serious risk of clipping a mirror.
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SF is nicer, but yes, I only attempt this in places where I'm surrounded by softer liberals. Well, I wouldn't live in places with aggressive bastards in the first place......so I self-select.
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You take on a risk and want to restrict others to deal with it?
Sounds like fascism, to me.
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The US also has a high drunk driving limit- .08%. Europe generally has .05%.
That being said, drunk driving is or had recently been slowly improving. What’s getting worse is high driving- marijuana. To a certain extent, worrying overmuch on drunk driving is barking up the wrong tree.
I think the DUI thing is one of many crimes that people would be down for way much punishment for if put to a direct vote. I believe that if you put it to a national vote that the third or fourth time someone got pulled over and blew drunk they were just shot like a dog in the street it would pass with a majority or come very close to passing. I could be totally wrong about that but its just an impression I got people just seem to hate drunk drivers universally regardless of politics.
The problem with hate campaigns against DUI is they always take more than is offered. For instance, in Canada, they took advantage of one such moral panic to make drinking AFTER driving illegal.
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~75M people are planning to vote for one for Vice President.
(To be fair, that doesn't prove they don't hate him; not a lot of great options these days.)
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Yeah, I'd put them all together as 'impaired' driving. It sucks that it isn't easy to instantly detect how high someone is.
Still think an eye tracker will help with catching pot smokers.
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Passing, for one.
If you A) don't tailgate or cut someone off, and B) don't speed, then you can't pass anyone going >=70% of the speed limit in many designated passing zones, even assuming instant acceleration and good luck with oncoming traffic.
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And that sort of thing is why a lot of motorists hate bicyclists. They're trying to get somewhere, and they're blocked by someone doing half the speed limit in a place where they can't be passed.
There is no national speed limit any more. As for speeding, the purpose of a car is to get from point A, to point B, quickly and in comfort. It is a national disgrace that we don't have routine travel speeds north of 100mph, though I admit there are many on the New Jersey Turnpike who are attempting to rectify that.
25 mph is a residential side street. You are getting blocked by signals and stop signs more than you're by a cyclist. I see car drivers zoom past past me everyday, only to have to stop by the immediate next stop sign or signal 1 block after.
On any arterial or multi-lane street, you and I both would rather have the bike be in its own lane.
Is it? Has it ever succeeded? Can you give me 1 reason why the 'just 1 more lane bro' (fixed link) meme is not valid criticism of car infrastructure ?
You're saying that a country with the highest per-capita road deaths in the developed world ? You think people are responsible enough for that ?
"Why build infrastructure if people have a great desire to use it?" That's a popular anti-road-NIMBY argument. But it seems almost perfectly backwards to me.
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Assuming you're talking about the unquenchable thirst for more lanes, that doesn't seem like a criticism at all. It's a ringing endorsement of car infrastructure: people cannot get enough convenient mobility.
The most miserable cities to get around are also the ones with the most car infrastructure (LA, Houston, Atlanta).
This isn't rocket science. Transit is a win-win for car lovers and transit lovers alike.
Cities have finite amount of people. These people have to get to places. Cars occupy the most space per person and transit is more compact. If those people use bikes, buses, trains and footpaths, then they occupy less space. So yes, when car lanes are converted to transit/bike corridors, traffic still goes down. No one benefits from transit as much as those who 'need' to use cars. We have the numbers to prove it. The bike-pilled Dutch happen to have a great driving experience.
Now, transit & biking in most American cities sucks balls. If that's your experience with it, I can understand why it feels horrible.
But, isn't it even a little bit curious that North America is the place where this car-only idea has any uptake ? Everyone else agrees that transit and bikes are good.
I agree there are many places where driving is a miserable experience (often enough, at least).
Yet people still choose to drive.
Congestion is a highly visible issue, but that's because it's the problem that's left over after cars solved all the important ones.
Cycling, walking, and transit all have advantages, but cars blow them away for the vast majority of people's normal use-cases. Cars:
And that's just the big, widely-applicable ones. I haven't mentioned comfort, the ability to socialize, or benefits for people with disabilities. I also didn't include the benefits they offer families with kids, which is a massive blindspot for a lot of Marohn-pilled types. You can see it when someone says things like "cars only save you 20 minutes on your commute" ... as a parent, there are days when 20 extra minutes would quadruple my free time.
I'm in favor of transit in principle: a first-rate transit system gets close enough to cars on those points that its other benefits net out. But no one has figured out how to bootstrap a first-rate transit system in a US city from scratch in the twenty-first century.
Edit: fussy formatting. Also, I regret that I did not at least mention pollution, another problem left over after cars solve the others, even though it wasn't at issue in context.
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https://usa.streetsblog.org/2012/04/20/cities-with-the-most-highway-miles-a-whos-who-of-decay
Los Angeles actually is in the list of cities with the LEAST number of lane miles per capita, not the most.
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Transit is no good for drivers because it wastes good gas tax money subsidizing 3 people on a 70 person bus. Very few lines actually get people off the roads because most potential lines don't have many potential customers. I make a trip to our in-laws very often. There is no direct line. Its a 3 transfer trip. And even two of those 3 legs rarely have more than 10 people on a bus or traincar.
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Atlanta?
Atlanta is easily one of the most walkable major cities in North America.
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Can you point to a single country in which cars are not the strong revealed preference? Everywhere in the world people drive when they can afford it.
Japan & Western Europe would be the obvious answers.
From the cities I've visited, it applies to - Paris, Geneva, Barcelona, Madrid & Zurich.
Manhattan, Brooklyn & Boston (before MBTA crumbled) do pretty well too.
Just like America, as soon as you get outside large metros, everyone in Japan owns a car. And even in Tokyo, once you get to the "outer" wards (e.g. Adachi, Suginami, Setagaya, Katsushika, Nerima, etc) many people own cars. I live in a medium side city in a rural prefecture, and every functioning adult I know owns and regularly drives a car. The city does have bus lines, but the few times I've taken them there are only tourists or the very elderly aboard.
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LOL, I once took a little rest by the circle around the Arc de Triumph, watching the car accidents. People in Paris love their cars.
As for Manhattan, no, mere millionaires do indeed use public transportation. But in Manhattan, they're not rich.
There are a lot of people in Manhattan who could afford to replace their transit usage with Ubers who don’t do so.
If your argument is that having a chauffeur is preferable to taking the subway, I’m not sure what the point is. Revealed preference is that many people prefer to take public transport (particularly trains and also long haul rail in countries that have fast trains) rather than drive even when (a) they own a car, (b) gas costs are cheaper than public transportation and (c) the road infrastructure for the trip exists.
You can drive from London to Paris or Munich to Amsterdam easily on clean and well-maintained roads. Yet the revealed preference of the public is, in many cases, public transport. US cities only break this system because of zoning rules that forced or strongly encouraged the construction of huge amounts of above-ground parking space that was economically perverse.
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We just had an entire subthread about how the Japanese restrict car ownership to the wealthy while the plebs use public transit
I didn't see the thread, but car ownership in Japan doesn't save time by getting you to a place quickly. It saves time by allowing the wealthy attend to their chores in the 'back seat' of a car. Because the wealthy don't drive their own cars. They have drivers.
If you don't have to drive, walk to parking, find your own parking or maintain the car......then yes, car ownership is cheap.
You prove my point. There isn't a revealed preference for cars. There is a revealed preference for being chauffeured. It is a revealed preference for having a Butler.
No, the vast majority of people in Japan drive themselves, it's just that being able to do so marks them as upper middle class. Because they can only make the poor use public transit by restricting them from having cars
The Tokyo subway shuts down at 11:30 and doesn't reopen until morning. Nobody crowing about how Japan is a public transit success asks the night janitors if they care about walking home.
Nitpick, but plenty of lower middle class and what we Americans would consider "white trash" people drive in Japan as well outside of Tokyo. There's even a stereotype that if you have fake blonde hair, heavy make-up, and buy your clothes at Don Quixote, you probably drive a Toyota Voxy. My wife wouldn't let me buy one because it's a lower middle class marker.
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I'll keep the conversation to urban areas, with dense urban cores. So.....Tokyo. I don't care much about towns or rural places.
In Tokyo, the majority does not drive cars.
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Obviously not, since OP said the cars could follow behind. The residential side streets in my area are wider and in fact have higher speed limits than that.
Yes, and yes. For instance recently I made it from Northern New Jersey to the Ithaca, NY area, a distance of over 220 miles, in less than 4 hours, in air conditioned comfort.
I think you mean this, not the nice hat. I think they're going to need several more lanes.
I don't think anyone here is against cars for long distance travel.
I am not against car ownership. Mostly just use of cars for urban transport. I have done that drive too; Niagara falls to NYC.
yeah............sigh. You know that's what they thought when they had 20 lanes right ?
Cars are good for a lot more than "long distance travel". They're good for everything longer than a short walk, and if you need to carry anything they're good for shorter things. Even in areas with heavy traffic they're usually faster than mass transit, unless there's a direct single-seat mass transit route between the two.
There's no inherent limit. It's like razor blades, you can always add one more.
Many people oppose car culture on aesthetic grounds. Endless stretches of ugly black asphalt violate the natural landscape to a much greater degree than a stone path or railroad tracks. Cars are ugly and the US’ increasingly lower IQ population can’t be trusted to drive them without hurting other people. I don’t see why there need to be any other arguments against cars (although there are many). They look ugly, highways look ugly, drivers can’t be trusted to drive them, and I don’t care if people have to suffer a little more to live in a more aesthetically pleasing society. This shit is fucking ugly, that fat Walmart fans might no longer get to the drive-thru Wendy’s to stuff their piggy faces as fast doesn’t concern me.
“Cars are more efficient”. So what? Drinking Soylent is more efficient than cooking real food. Doing intensive cardio by yourself is more efficient than playing sports. Talking to your family on FaceTime is more efficient than going to visit them. Wearing the same vest and sweat pants every day is more efficient than putting effort into one’s appearance. Car opponents dislike the aesthetics of cars and car infrastructure above else. It is ugly and it is ugly everywhere in the world.
I see lots of people downvoted you, but I'm right there with you. At least in spirit, although I'd to see a longer effort-post acknowledging the pros and cons of this. I hate how so much of our American society is engineered towards convenience, and people treat aeshetics as if it doesn't matter at all. I think that's part of the reason so many tourists fly to Europe or Japan, is just so they can bask in the aesthetics of walking around a low-car city that looks nice.
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Why do you think either cars or highways are ugly, as opposed to railroad tracks and trains? Why is a parking lot uglier than a railway station? Do you want to cram a low-IQ population into mass transit?
Highways are more chaotic than train tracks - they have to make 100 000s of units play nice together instead of maybe 100 trains. No road rage on train drivers that I've heard of, either. Trains are uniform, a parking lot is a mishmash of (rather boring, can't even be called a rainbow) colors.
I was under the impression that mass transit is absolute shit in USA and that's why you have to "cram" people in it. Also, where exactly would you rather the "low IQ population" go? I sure wouldn't like to share the road with their cars if they're as bad as you're putting it...
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It's less ugly in most places; my understanding is that "stroads" are much more common in the US and Canada than they are elsewhere. The big roads in Australia are largely freeways (i.e. no normal intersections, increasing safe speeds), and they're either hoisted into the sky or sunk into trenches (for noise reduction, I believe), which means you're rarely looking at huge stretches of asphalt (they also have massive green areas around and in the middle of them for safety).
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These aesthetes should find an ivory tower to live in, high above the plebians in the cars. We'll try not to let you know how the food gets there.
The commercial area at Breezewood, PA is ugly, sure. So is the Port of Los Angeles. So is the Bingham Canyon Mine. Or any number of undistinguished sewage treatment facilities. These are the things that make the world work, regardless of whether aesthetes think they're pretty or not.
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Obligatory reminder that the reality of that photograph is significantly less objectionable
It’s still very, very ugly, especially if you gaze both ways on the highway and then look around.
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Telephoto lenses are a propagandist's best friend. https://petapixel.com/2020/05/02/controversial-photo-of-crowds-on-ca-beach-was-shot-with-a-telephoto-lens/
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