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Comment by Tommyixi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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