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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

As much as I hate Cambridge I'm having a hard time finding fault with this. Bike lanes fit their needs really well.

I lived in Boston/Cambridge about eight years ago and found it to be the most bicyclist-unfriendly city I had ever lived in (there are certainly worse, I just haven’t had that misfortune). I’ve been honked at by obnoxious drivers before, but only in Boston would drivers routinely slow down to call me a “f----ing f-gg--t” for being on the road.

NYC drivers might be jerks, but I never got the impression that they were actively malevolent.

Brian McGrory, editor of the Boston Globe, penned this great little op-ed, “Make Boston Bicycle-Free” back in 2011. I wonder how he feels about this win for the f-gg--ts in his city. http://archive.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/...

It's gotten far better. As a grad student who races for MIT and trains on the roads around Boston's suburbs, I've found most drivers to be surprisingly patient with us cyclists. There's the fair fraction of drivers who turn without signaling, but the only anger I've gotten from drivers is when I've run a red light (deserved it). The suburbs to the west are packed with road cyclists, and good weather weekends mean the roads are full of cyclists. The protected bike lanes have helped road commuters, and prevent angry interactions. The stereotype of Boston drivers being extraordinarily unfriendly to cyclists is outdated by now.

I'll second this. I commute to downtown via the southwest corridor bike path, and most of the drivers are pretty patient and give me enough space once I get on to the roads. The worst parts of the commute are usually the torn up roads by mass Ave.

Good to hear. I dropped by Boston last summer and was mildly shocked by how friendly everyone seemed, was wondering if I was just interacting with tourists or if they introduced prozac to the water supply.

Are there scooter companies in Cambridge? I've been hoping they would spur some major cities to invest in bike lanes but I'm not sure if that's the case here.

Either way, solid win all around.

> Are there scooter companies in Cambridge?

Not currently, very briefly scooters appeared before they were shooed out

There aren't scooter companies here in NYC but there's plenty of people that own them and ride around on them. It seems easier to deal with than bikes, since you can just take them inside with you at your destination. I use my own bike for my commute but then Citibike for any other trip, as I don't want to worry about my bike being parked outside. You wouldn't have that problem with a scooter.

The entire state of MA is highly unwelcoming to anything with two wheels and a motor that is less than a motorcycle (and even then it kinda sucks for them too). You say "scooter" or "moped" and suburban soccer moms and uptight politicians get images of New Dehli in their heads and that's too low class for MA so any organized attempt at doing that gets blocked by the power of arbitrary enforcement.

As another commenters mentioned they were there briefly before the .gov told them to get lost. The other thing about MA is that it's highly totalitarian. The government is mostly benign and the single party nature of the state means it doesn't cause too much discontent but trying to pull an Uber and provide a service that has popular support before the regulators can kick you out doesn't really work in MA because the people have little choice in the manner, the .gov can just say "this isn't good for you" and that's the end of it.

Eastern MA is like this, but Western MA is surprisingly bike-friendly. The Amherst/Northampton/Easthampton area is wonderful for biking.

Yes! I stay in Amherst and it is lovely for biking.

MA already had laws statewide mandating bike lanes on new construction and renovation. This has led to the situation near my house where a highway intersection (Route 1 and 495) was rebuilt and a bike lane added for about 1000 feet on a road that has a 55mph speed limit. There is no bike lane on the rest of Route 1, just around the intersection where the construction happened. Now we have a bike lane that will never be used confusing the drivers trying to figure out where they should be when taking the entrance ramp onto the highway. This is a suburb around 40 miles outside of the city.

I’m all in favor of bike lanes but these types of blanket mandates aren’t the solution because it eliminates the community’s ability to use common sense and apply the law logically. So you wouldn’t be encouraging biking across a ramp with no signals and cars going from 55 mph to 65 mph for example.

This is what you get when the state government is basically the standard oil octopus with its tentacles into everything and the majority of state decisions are made by people who don't acknowledge anything outside of I95. They could have just passed local laws but doing it state level lets them pat themselves on the back more so of course they do it to the detriment of everyone else.

>eliminates the community’s ability to use common sense

The higher entity telling the lower entity they can't be trusted to think for themselves is a really common theme in MA politics if you're looking for it. I'm not sure how we got here but it sucks.

Well, it seems to me that constructing bike lanes piece-meal as roads are re-built is the most cost-effective way to do it, even if it results in a super fragmented bike lane network at first.

As far as bike lanes across freeway entrance ramps goes, great, if it's done right. The bike lane should be painted solid green or red where it crosses the ramp, with a "Yield to " sign. The rebuilt interchanges in my city are like this, and the coloured lane is a visual obstruction that forces drivers to take notice of any cyclists on it. I've both cycled on and driven across these lanes, and they work well, far better than the alternative.

Also, bike lanes on 55 mph roads is fine if there are no alternative roads for cyclists to use. Often, this just means paving a wide shoulder and putting regular "" signs as reminders to drivers. Even if only a few people a day ride it.

Edit: it looks like the commenting platform strips out the "U+1F6B2 BICYCLE" character, used twice above.

Single party nature of the state? The governor is Republican

And has been for most of the last three or four decades.

Look at the 2016 election county map. MA is really thoroughly blue. Having a (relatively) politically homogeneous state minimizes the amount of people who find the actions of a powerful state government to be distasteful.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_In_Name_Only

Curious, why do you hate Cambridge so much? I find it a reasonably great place, but I'm just a graduate student here.

Here is my list:

* Its ridiculously ugly. * The layout seems designed to amplify the wind and somehow manages to do it in all directions. * Building restrictions that prevent affordable housing from being built. * They're happy to hike prices on parking to reduce cars, but the Red Line is unreliable which forces people to use cars. * Central * They managed to make bike lanes that are more dangerous than roads * Northbound Longfellow Bridge * Try turning on to Technology Square from Broadway * Mass Ave in general

All that plus the ivory tower politics the people of the wealthy parts of the Boston ares push at the state (I have no problem with them sinking their own ship) is why I don't like it. The greater Boston area in general thinks the world revolves around it and they're a) wrong and b) entitled jerks for thinking that in the first place.

[edit: just wanted to say these are my initial opinionated responses to your points. Not stating these as facts necessarily]

* Eh. Running around the Charles in the fall is glorious. Mt Auburn cemetery is awesome. There's a crazy diversity of architecture from Mass Hall in Harvard Yard to the Stata Center.

* It's a windy city. The average wind speed of the Boston area is higher than Chicago.

* Affordable housing is a serious issue in a lot of cities, especially ones with a rapidly growing population of high-salary tech jobs.

* As much as people hate the Red line, it's old, and it works. Yes it's delayed often, but at rush hour it's packed with people who don't want to use cars.

* Central is central. There's tons of ok restaurants, and it's lively enough for me. As 'downtowns' go, it's not intolerably dirty or worse, dead. As public art goes, it's not Lisbon, but it's quite fun.

* They're clearly trying to improve the bike lanes. It's gotten a lot better over the 6 years I've been here.

* More specific road issues: yes, it's in a state of change, and there are a bunch of old streets. I'll always have complaints about cities. Considering it started as the oldest grid-planned town in the US, it's not all that bad.

These do not seem like very legitimate complaints.

1. The city is generally considered nice looking. What about it do you find ugly. It has a very nice 19th century feel to it.

2. Idk about the wind. The city is windy, but so is all of Boston. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with city planning.

3. It is a step in the right direction. The busses and red line (despite the admittedly bad reliability) are more frequent and numerous than most cities in the US.

4. I have biked in Boston, NY and Cambridge. Cambridge was the safest of the bunch. It is rated as one of the best biking cities in the US. NY was easy, because everyone was going slow, but was full of the not nice type of surprises. Boston in the other hand is a proper death trap.

The housing restrictions are a pain. I will give you that.

Also, if those are your main complaints about a city. Then I would have guessed that you love it, not hate it.

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