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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

It is pretty frustrating to be forced to go 10 MPH on a 30 MPH road. The roads also aren't designed for traffic to go 20 MPH slower than it ought to be, traffic starts to build up, causing more delays and frustration. I think we should be more accommodating of bikers, but asking them to share the road and be treated the same as cars is not the answer.

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I mean, if we're talking about Boston then the roads weren't originally designed for cars either: they were created for horse drawn carriages. http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/dcr/pe/historic-parkways/4d72bd...

They have been engineered to accommodate cars, so now they're undergoing a renovation for bikes.

> so now they're undergoing a renovation for bikes.

Good! Renovate them to accommodate bikes. That's great, do more of that. But "sharing the road" is a terrible solution, which leads to the honks and dangerous situations the OP described. Neither the biker nor the drivers in the OP's post are in the wrong. It's just a really terrible situation that really should not happen.

> Neither the biker nor the driver in the OP's post are in the wrong

In the OP's situation, the drivers that exhibit aggressive and dangerous behavior are clearly in the wrong. You could argue that their frustration is understandable, but their behavior is certainly wrong.

So is the guy who steals an unlocked bike. What are you going to do? You're going to not create that situation in the first place. You're going to use a bike lock. "Share the road" is a dumb solution, as evidenced by the OP. It simply does not work. Find another solution.

To be clear: you think that someone stealing an unlocked bike is not "in the wrong"?

I agree I phrased that poorly. My point is humans are predictable. If you leave an unlocked bike, it will get stolen. Yes, it's the thief's fault and the thief is wrong, but you could have done something to avoid it, too.

Sounds like you're really stretching here.

Share the road works fine as a solution without dramatically overhauling current infrastructure. Just don't be a mean driver.

So do you have a solution in mind, or are you asking for one? If the latter, then it's simple: narrower lanes. If you make the lanes 9ft wide in each direction, I promise that you will never again be delayed by the speed of bikers, though the bikers may find themselves upset about motor vehicle speeds being too low.

Sharing the road is dangerous with dangerous, aggressive drivers. Tailgating and bumping bikers is the fault of the driver, not an unavoidable consequence of sharing the road.

So why does it happen, and how do you propose to solve this? Complain on the Internet? Shake your first at those damn angry drivers? Something something driver's education? I mean, this is a real problem. "Share the road" doesn't work, and complaining on the Internet isn't going to suddenly fix it.

What doesn't work about it? The only thing that doesn't seem to be working is that some people feel entitled to go as fast as they can get away with all the time.

It works fine if people adjust their expectations. Cyclists in the way rarely cause real stretches of backed up traffic. Your average speed might go down slightly, big whoop.

It seems like fining and, if necessary, revoking the drivers licenses of dangerously aggressive drivers might be a simple way of solving the problem, no? Sharing public goods is be the norm in other areas of society; why not on the road?

You can't legislate away a cultural problem. See the drug wars, anti discrimination laws, and others. If we're going to be so cheap that we can't add bicycle infrastructure then we need to at least fund a public awareness campaign and possibly start teaching our kids about it.

>You can't legislate away a cultural problem.

[Lots of places beg to differ](https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/dutch-kids-have-different-r...).

You can't bully people into being good, but there are lots of nudges like education and more thoughtful design that can move culture to work better.

You are right. I guess I should have said "you can't punish away a cultural problem." Using legislation to change the culture itself can certainly work if done right.

Although your examples are valid, there are many counter-examples: see increasingly-stringent enforcement of anti drunken-driving laws since the 1970s. Although drunken driving does still occur, it's vastly more uncommon than it was before we began legitimately enforcing the laws we have.

Honking and running your car in to someone because you're mad at them for legally using the road is hardly in the right

Wait, you mean drivers deliberately hitting a biker with their car are not in the wrong?

Heheh, I feel like I'm making my point poorly :) The driver is in a 3000 pound vehicle capable of accelerating from 5 MPH to 60 MPH in a couple of seconds. The biker is an unprotected human capable of traveling 10, maybe 20 MPH as an absolute maximum. My point is that these two objects cannot share traffic on a US street that is designed for cars traveling 30 MPH for more than a brief period of time.

If they do share that traffic lane, bad things will happen. Humans will make bad decisions, because humans are dumb and fallible. My point is that situation should not occur in the first place. It's engineered to fail, and sure enough, it does.

Better to leave the car out of it then. After all, Boston's narrow winding streets aren't designed to accomodate them.

The only people that will make bad decisions are the aggressive angry drivers, which should be removed from the road ways for the benefit of all innocent people.

Well, that's obviously not true. I've seen bicyclists.

Maybe speed limits should be reduced to 25 MPH within cities (a la NYC).

20mph is a nice magic number for speed limits. That's the maximum speed where a collision with a pedestrian is highly unlikely to be fatal.

In Boston city traffic, bikes move faster than cars. The city speed limit is 25 mph, and most narrow roads with sharrows the typical traffic speed is much lower.

Source: Bikes daily in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville on a bike share bike. Passes cars the entire way.

We need to figure out a harmonious scenario, sharing the road is absolutely the answer right now because the road is all we have to work with at the moment.

In a perfect for me world the CBD would have zero cars and everyone would be on bikes, foot or mobility devices after they parked on the CBD fringe carparks or caught public transport in.

That will never happen.

So the next best step for me is dedicated bike lanes separated with enough room for everyone.

More likely, but not everywhere is getting this right or has enough space.

So what we have to work with until something better arives is what we have now. Cyclists don't want this any more than you do but this is what we have and we would just appreciate some understanding. I try to get out of the way as soon as it is safe and I make sure I am at least trying to keep pace. I have never had cars behind me for more than 30 seconds and I honestly don't think that's much to ask for my safety and ability to get to work. If I were in a car you would be stuck behind me the whole way and then I would take your parking spot.

I actually take the bus most places, I only drive once or twice a week, to the grocery store or so. I have no real skin in this game. In my experience, and in the OP's experience, "share the road" is a dumb, dangerous solution that leaves everyone unhappy. Bikers should refuse to put up with it. Demand real lanes.

The vast majority of advocacy groups do demand real lanes.

The thing, I want to commute to work today. Do I just stay home and yell at politicians until a lane is built? Or do I legally use the existing roadways?

I'm sorry, I don't have an answer for you. I'm just frustrated that all of these threads end up tilting at the "damn drivers!!!!" windmill instead of blaming the actual problem, which is trying to combine car and bike traffic, which cannot be done on most US roads as currently designed.

If we could magically re-do all of the existing infrastructure overnight, then that would be a good solution. But since it's impossible to re-build all roads to have dedicated bike lanes, cyclists will have to use the road at some point.

And once there is the precedent that cyclists ride only in dedicated bike lanes, then you've limited the area that cyclists can ride to dense, affluent areas that have the demand and money for dedicated bike lanes.

I think "frustrating" is the key word here. My subjective impression is that in the US drivers hate slowing down for bikes more than they hate slowing down for something else, like a car parking or a garbage truck. I think the perception that bikes are dangerous and slow down traffic exceeds the reality. It's about culture, the feeling that bikes don't belong in the road and shouldn't be accommodated in any way.

I'd have more sympathy for your position if auto drivers didn't seem to think they owned the road, margins, turn lanes and basically anything else that isn't a building.

Shared space doesn't mean "shared with other auto drivers only."

Okay, so why doesn't it work? You can complain about drivers all you like, but fundamentally car traffic and bike traffic are incompatible. You can't expect a driver traveling at 30 MPH on a 30 MPH road to suddenly and calmly accept that they are now traveling 10 MPH because of the guy in front of them. Swap the biker for a driver going 20 MPH under the speed limit and you're looking at a road rage situation. Sharing the road is a terrible solution. It doesn't work.

Must be so difficult for them sitting down in a temperature controlled environment with audio entertainment burning massive amounts of non-renewable energy while taking up much more than their own width in space in an already cramped urban environment. I'm really feeling for the driver here. It's definitely the cyclist causing all the congestion in the first place.

I most certainly can expect that of them. Driving is a privilege, not a right. If they can't follow the rules of the road then they should not be driving. That's like saying you can't expect a car driving 30MPH to have to stop because their a person in the crosswalk in front of them, pedestrians crossing streets is a situation engineered to fail.

If we view them as incompatible then the solution is rather obvious but to the disadvantage of the car traffic. The current cooperation between bike traffic and car traffic is to allow bike traffic without disrupting existing car traffic.

For roads where there is street parking you simply dedicate that for bike lanes and force car owners to use the more expensive parking houses. This influence the commercial flow a bit unless the space between parking houses is minimal in commercial districts.

In proportion to bike ownership you also need to remake roads which are too narrow and make them dedicated bike lanes. The proportionality clause here is really important to balance the interest of both groups if we want to view roads as incompatible to be used by both.

You're insinuating that since the road cannot be shared then bikes should not be allowed on them. It does work when people are respectful of others and aren't always in such a rush all the time.

Yes, that is the unfortunate truth. Humans are stupid, rushed, and fallible. Expecting them to override 50+ years of cars owning the roads because you put up a street sign is misguided. If it cannot be done safely, it should not be done. If we want more biking, we need to make it safe. "Sharing the road" is stupid and unsafe, like the OP says. We need a different solution.

Strange that is was like that for ages in the Netherlands. On minor residential roads the speed limit is now usually 30 km/h (around 20 MPH), but is was 50 km/h for a long time (30 MPH). Often a car has to wait to overtake a bike.

Of course if cyclists can rely on cars to pass them carefully, they can move all the way to the side to let the car pass. But that doesn't work with aggressive car drivers.

If the road/street is wide enough then there should be separated bike paths. If the road is narrow then the speed limit should probably be lower anyway.

And you know what else is a ridiculous demand on drivers: stop signs! When they demand I drop from 40mph to zero, you can't be surprised that I don't just lie down and take it. Sure, I legally "shouldn't" have stolen all the stop signs on my commute, but if that's wrong, then screw being right. What am I stopping for anyway? Nothing in my way deserves to survive the morning.

Add dedicated bike lanes and reduce car lanes. Now cars can sit in traffic more and go 10mph all of the time. Problem solved.

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