How Cities Made a Huge Mistake in Promoting Cycling | Hacker News Reader

How Cities Made a Huge Mistake in Promoting Cycling

business.financialpost.com

17 pointsmeri_dian8 comments

The wikipedia article on the foundation he represents and founded is pretty enlightening. For a half sentence -

EPRF argues that "the science behind competing theories of global warming is not yet settled"[2], stating that "global cooling" is on the rise[3], that climate change is surrounded by "clouds of conspiracy"[4], and that climate science is "corrupt" and the "greatest scientific fraud of the century"[5]. EPRF also argues that fossil fuels, especially gasoline, shale oil, natural gas, and coal, are clean and environmentally beneficial choices,[6][7][8]

No citations, just thinly-veiled attacks, and the source seems to be somebody with quite an interesting angle on several topics:

- Why the ‘e’ in e-car actually stands for evil

- Singing the praises of coal — the virtuous stone that liberated humanity

- How Tesla’s Elon Musk became the master of fake business

A solid skip of a read.

Lawrence Solomon is a known anti-cyclist. This article is garbage clickbait, and a waste of time.

Don't do this.

It's useful to know the background of the authors of these stories, and an opinionated summary is helpful --- though more persuasive if written persuasively, rather than as a coded declaration.

It is not useful to reduce articles we simply disagree strongly with to "clickbait". Clickbait is something specific, going beyond even articles written in bad faith (which, if this article is from a "known anti-cyclist", it is not). Clickbait articles are free of substantive content, lacking even easily rebutted arguments.

There's not a single study referenced in at least the first half of the article, when I stopped reading.

The closest thing that came to evidence was a "many Londoners believe bikes increase congestion!" (From memory, not the actual quote, but it gets the gist.)

This article makes no sense. Larger bike lanes cause more pollution because cars have to fit into smaller roads, thus causing jams? The entire point of a larger bike lane is that you'll take the bike instead of the car!

The premise of this article is an unspoken "given that nobody prefers bicycles over cars", which is laughably untrue, making the article almost deliberately misleading.

I don't understand the whole "cyclists not paying their fair share" argument. I imagine it's the whole congestion fee thing, but most first-world governments spend huge amount of public money to build and maintain roadways primarily for cars and trucks. And while everyone receives a measure of utility from trucks (delivering goods etc), the same cannot be said for cars.

It’s cyclists’ fault that cars ruin cities, because the road space for cars is slightly reduced to make cycling less dangerous?

Also, cycling is not more dangerous than driving to begin with, even with the toxic car culture in most developed countries.

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