* Most US roads are not bicycle ready. They weren't designed to have mixed vehicles, they weren't built for it, and they don't do it well.
* Cyclists have been given a right to be on these roads, which can't safely handle them, by legislation.
* Having them there does impede traffic that the road WAS designed for.
* The US culture has devolved lately into a "my rights" based one.
* Both the car drivers who have historical precedent with "rights to be there" and the cyclists with the newfound legislative "right to be there" willfully fail to recognize the rights of the other.
* Both sets of drivers blame the other for the lack of adherence to safety and traffic laws. Both are correct.
This is true, but many of the roads in my hometown that people insist were "built for cars" predate the automobile, which is just to say that they can be (and have been) changed to support whatever we want them to support.
Compare to London where the streets were designed for neither automobiles nor bicycles. In London there’s a culture of acknowledgement that we all have to make do with the available space. So pedestrians spill into the street, cars occasionally have to go up onto the pavement (aka. Sidewalk) and bicycles achieving critical mass happens naturally during peak times. London is 10 times as congested as SF and yet everyone is 10 times as calm.
It’s amazing to me the success the auto lobby had in America a century ago to create a culture where the default is that everyone should be able to drive super fast and have parking available in every square inch of developed land, and anyone who uses anyone who uses any other form of transportation is an uncivilized pleb deserving of second rate accommodations at best.
Which, of course, is completely irrelevant complaint regardless of ones views on filtering. There's this notion that a driver is entitled to both their place on the road and some sort of ill-defined spot in a queue that isn't there.
Cognitive dissonance and how we respond to it is the main topic of the first episode of Sean Carroll's new podcast Mindscape. I found it very interesting.
So, inevitably, we end up in an inherently acrimonious situation: Everyone smaller than you is treated as nothing but an obstacle to be avoided, and everyone bigger than you is understood as a threat to your safety, and everyone about your same size is regarded as that asshole who just cut you off, or that asshole who needs to speed up and quit holding up traffic, etc.
We've become such misanthropists when it comes to transportation that it's even common for people to aver that they don't like using public transportation because they don't like how it brings them into regular social contact with people they don't know, and nobody thinks that attitude the least bit strange.
It's really quite odd, when you step back and look at it. Sad, too.
* Motor vehicles have been given a right to be on these roads, which can't safely handle them, by legislation.
If anything, it is the more recent (and sensible) restriction of cycle use on certain major roads that is "newfound".
The roads where I live now are a lot more orderly, but cyclists get a free pass in a lot of ways. You’ll get a ticket for passing within 5 feet of a cyclist, so you better hope they’re a fast cyclist when you get stuck behind one. I also see them run reds frequently and ride across pedestrian crossings. For a group that makes up about 1% of commuters, they manage to make a disproportionate nuisance of themselves. I’m not an anti-cycling nut, but it’s not hard to see where the frustration comes from.
There is lots of hatred on both sides. Drivers see cyclist running a red light and generalize about those criminal cyclists.
Cyclists take an idea like Critical Mass that was originally supposed to be a demonstration, a traffic-political statement, and don‘t even care about traffic policy anymore, but openly talk about how to disrupt car traffic the most so those „carholes“ get the traffic jam they deserve. It‘s just fun to them, a bit of trolling.
I don‘t see the relationship improve, unless many more „common“ people use the bike. Then they would have much more understanding for the other side when driving a car, and the bike extremists would vanish in the mass as statistical noise.
Injuring pedestrians doesn‘t give you legitimacy, either.
You simply illustrate the extremist biker that will achieve nothing but more hatred from all other participants in traffic.
That‘s why I‘m hoping for more „casual“ bikers who don‘t see the war on the street as their focal point of life.
From my perspective in Copenhagen -- one of the foremost cycling cities in the world -- I think this is happening because policies are increasingly being enacted to favor cyclists and public transit. A lot of road improvements have favored bicycle lanes, often by decreasing the number of lanes available for cars, or by making a lot of streets one-way only for cars.
Some car drivers see these as direct attacks on their chosen mode of transportation, or even their lifestyle as a whole.
I see this as a necessary evil. You cannot improve conditions for one type of transport beyond a certain point, without also making conditions worse for other types of transport. Cycling, walking and public transit go very well hand-in-hand, but personal car traffic doesn't really mesh that well with anything other than car traffic.
So for high-density living, car traffic must necessarily be down-prioritized in favor of higher-density and less polluting traffic, namely cycling and public transit, both of which work best in cities. Roads and parking lots simply take up way too much space that could be used for parks, homes, shopping streets and people instead.
Conversely, it is hard to make public transit work efficiently in rural areas, and cycling 10-15km between towns for social activities (in all kinds of weather) is not acceptable to most people. Electric bicycles mitigate this somewhat, but in most less densely populated areas, cars still make a lot of sense for most people.
I'm a city person, so I favor cycling and public transit, and I would love to see the center of Copenhagen completely closed off to personal car traffic, only allowing delivery drivers and other professionals with a legitimate need to drive through the city center. I don't condone violent activism or similar methods, nor do I condone breaking traffic laws through methods like Critical Mass and the like. The "critical mass" I want is simply for there to be so many cyclists in traffic that they cannot be ignored or marginalized.
I would also never try to ban cars in other less-densely populated places, because that's simply not realistic. At least not yet, not without some major revolution in living conditions or public transit feasibility.
At some point, we have to realize just how ridiculously wasteful personal car traffic really is, and do something major to disrupt it. I don't think self-driving cars are the answer.
I'm pretty much neutral: I'm a licensed driver, and I've cycled to work in the past, but right now I don't have a bike or a car.
I saw a discussion on a local forum recently where cyclists and motorists just refused to accept that both camps use their vehicles as transportation. Drivers acted like cyclists were just silly kids, despite some being eligible for Social Security, and cyclists acted like drivers were robber barons having their chauffeurs mow down poor people.
On a side-note: cyclist in Berlin are very annoying they park their bike in front of you at EVERY traffic light and are then exceedingly slow to get moving again.
Now that I think about it, it might just be that the attitude changes with the introduction of cycling lanes to keep cars and bikes separated
In my experience, in an urban environment, it doesn't matter how fast you get moving again, there's another traffic light right ahead
I mean, bikes accelerate much slower. So what realistically happens is that bikes weasel through cars and the right curb to the front, distribute themselves over the whole width of the lane. And when they get green they... have to go over to the right side again (single-file!) and are being overtaken (usually with little room) by all the cars.
I‘ve just read the article you linked, and the HGV aspect is a good one. But in my home town, those bike boxes aren‘t on streets with real goods traffic, but on residential streets.
I happen to live in an area with wide (car width+ shoulders) so most of the time I'm there. However, there are a handful of left turns I make that result in me being in the vehicle left-turn lane at the signal lights. When the green arrow shows I'm lights-out sprinting through the intersection so I'm not holding up vehicle traffic. Cyclists can actually accelerate much faster than vehicles over the first couple of seconds and it's only 5 seconds or less through an intersection.
Having said that, my sprint power from a dead stop is from 6 - 15 watts / kg, depending on my motivation level. If someone is coming away from a dead stop at a lower power-to-weight ratio they should probably not be in the road since they will unnecessarily hold up traffic.
How do you measure this on a bicycle? I know you can do that on a stationary rower (I was exceedingly happy when I could hold > 1 hp for 30 seconds) - do you measure on gym stationary bikes?
https://www.cyclingweekly.com/group-tests/power-meters-every...
I ride a hard-tail mountain bike I converted for commuting with some more appropriate city tires. I am no triathlete, but I know enough to shift into the right starting gear before I stop and to sit with one pedal up in a position that allows a good power stroke to get rolling again. I am often first across a large intersection when the light changes, although a few drag-racing cars may catch up (against the general trend in which drivers seem more distracted and slower to respond to light changes these days).
I see younger, healthier riders who wobble all over the intersection like a little kid learning to ride. They have their bikes in the wrong gear or have a bike with fixed gearing. They fumble around trying to get both feet on the pedals before they even have enough forward movement to balance. And, some ride bikes that seem to be configured in the worst possible way for balance and efficiency, with bad geometry, seats and handlebars in the wrong place, or absurdly heavy materials...
This is caused by traffic laws seeing everything in the road as being similar to a car, which is counter-productive, forcing slower traffic such as bikes to cross lanes for left turns.
It is much more sensible and safer for cyclists to do hook turns, instead of using the vehicle left turn lanes.
"A transverse marking consisting of a continuous line across one or more traffic lanes shall mark the line behind which drivers are required by the sign B, 2, "STOP", referred to in Article 10, paragraph 3, of this Convention, to stop. Such a marking may also be used to show the line be hind which drivers may be required to stop by a light signal"
http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/trans/conventn/Conv_road_...
If you lived in country A and were planning a holiday in country B, then yes I'd spend a bit of time googling their laws. But on a 2 week "coast to coast" road trip travelling through a dozen countries? I probably wouldn't bother.
However, if I knew nothing about the UK "bike box" and was driving as a guest, something tells me it would be blindingly obvious what it was for. No? I mean, it's a symbol a bike surrounded by thick white lines. https://goo.gl/maps/zz1TvLM6fcv
One change I'd really love to see implemented is moving the traffic light pole to the near corner (as opposed to the far corner or suspended in the middle). This encourages drivers not to creep into the intersections because they wouldn't be able to see the light.
As a German, I say: you hang around with the "wrong" cyclists and motorists to perceive the strong polarization. I know people of the more militant kind from both sides.
Let me tell you: these cyclists typically know the exact subtle details of the road traffic regulations (Straßenverkehrsordnung) much better than most motorists (who had to do an exam about this topic to get their driving license). This is also very necessary, since lots of motorists feel so much entitled and do not actually know the laws. In this case only knowing the law exactly helps and if discussions are futile (they often are), the only thing that you can do is to file a criminal charge against the motorist.
To give my private opinion (after having heard lots of arguments from both sides): The fact that there exist obligatory driving licences is a lot at fault for all these escalations. Their mere existence leads to a lot of the entitlement of the motorists ("I had to take the driving exam and learn a lot about traffic laws before, while the cyclists did not. So the motorists feel 'more entitled to know what is right and wrong in traffic'").