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Comment by saikit | Hacker News Reader

The locals in the US are militant against anything that reduces street parking in their neighborhoods.

See 14th street bus lanes in NYC. https://www.amny.com/transit/14th-street-busway-lawsuit-1.33...

This, pretty much. Motorists can be extraordinarily vocal without realizing how extraordinarily entitled they are to be able to operate their motor vehicles in urban environments where accommodating those motorists has an extraordinarily detrimental effect on the community in terms of space, traffic, pollution, congestion, etc.

Not really a slight against motorists, I am one and never had this realization until I spent some time trying to use other modes of transportation. People are accustomed to being able to drive everywhere and that just isn't sustainable.

In America, Motorist == Community. It's bikers who are deviations from normal. We've built our cities for cars, now these bikers demand 'inclusion' on infrastructure they broadly don't pay for while flagrantly violating laws (ever seen a bicyclist come to a complete stop at a stop sign? Me neither).

There's something almost cute about hauling out an argument this tired on a site for people who like to consider themselves on the cutting edge.

That's a beautiful example of the entitlement in question. Cyclists pay taxes (did you think that gas taxes are high enough to pay for roads?), cause orders of magnitude less damage and wear to the road surfaces than automobiles, and don't use anywhere near the amount of valuable land as free storage for their vehicles when not in use.

(The law violation works both ways too. Ever seen a motorist obey the speed limit? Me neither.)

> (The law violation works both ways too. Ever seen a motorist obey the speed limit? Me neither.)

Drive next to a police car.

> did you think that gas taxes are high enough to pay for roads?

They would be if the gas tax revenue weren't diverted towards politican's pet causes.

> cause orders of magnitude less damage and wear to the road surfaces than automobiles

Same is true for most things that are lighter than cars. Scooters and motorcycle cause less damage than cars.

> Drive next to a police car.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but here the police regularly drive 20 kph above the speed limit.

Yours and parent comment both have a wrong assumption: cyclists don't own cars and therefore pay no taxes that car owners do.

Some of them own cars, but prefer to be on a bike.

Would you be open to

  a. having bicyclists licensed, 
  b. their bicycles registered & inspected by an 
     agency,
  c. license plates issued & 
  d. the respective parties be insured to cover
     potential damages to themselves and others 
     on the road, when accidents happen?

Does not that reasonably follow from what you're implying & if you want the same rights as any other DMV registered vehicle?

How does a cyclist not get to do any of those?

For example, did you know that impaired riding of a bicycle is just as prosecutable as "driving under the influence" of a motor vehicle?

I would personally be open to all of those, but I feel like it's something that would be good 10% of the time, and pretty problematic 90% of the time.

I can see an argument made for licensing cyclist who want to ride on non-residential roads. These sort of cyclists though are unlikely to injure anyone but themselves, so there's not a lot to be ganied from it.

The idea of requiring a 5-year-old to get licensed so they can ride around in front of their appartment building/house seems a little bizzare.

Vehicle licensing depends on the kind of vehicle and how easy it is to accidentally kill or maim people with it in it's normal operation. This is very easy with the DMV registered vehicles, it's not that easy with a bike.

I'd obviously be very willing to do all of these -- I've already done them as a driver. I've been licensed and driving for 25 years with no accidents or tickets. I'm a member of AAA too, for what that's worth. (Though I'll note that I'd expect my biking insurance to be so close to zero as to not matter as the odds that I'll injure anyone on my bike are vanishingly small compared to the odds that I'll severely injure or kill someone when I'm driving.)

In my opinion cyclists should be licensed, but that's not currently the law. But neither is it the law that killing someone in a wreck is automatically 2nd degree murder, which in any other situation it would be.

Those licensing laws don't exist because the government wants to make driving on the natural roads that sprung fully formed from the earth less fun in cars. They exist because roads are built on public land that could potentially be used for other purposes, and because driving is inherently dangerous to other people and requires special training. And while I would actually prefer that there were more regulation here, I don't see how it is implied from cyclists paying taxes any more than it would tax-paying pedestrians requiring a license to cross a street. Aside from being another direct example of driver entitlement, that is.

It's... downright bizarre that you think anyone wouldn't know that impaired riding of a bicycle is prosecutable. I honestly can't figure out what you're even trying to say there. If it's some sort of sideways implication that anyone riding a bicycle is ignorant of the law, I'd point to the far larger number of arrests for DUI of drivers as a counter.

I humbly suggest that you dig deep and examine whether your opinion has more to do with the anger and frustration you experience while driving than objective fact, or any measureable harm you receive.

I don't own a car. I just call it like I see it, I don't think cars are great but bicycles seriously randomize the road, it's beyond stupid that 4000 lb cars driven by people who don't even operate the vehicle that well 'share' the road with 10-30 lb bicycles.

> it's beyond stupid that 4000 lb cars driven by people who don't even operate the vehicle that well 'share' the road with 10-30 lb bicycles.

I agree, but how do you get from there to "bicyclists are the problem"? Neither type of driver conduct their vehicle very well (only humans, after all) but one is infinitely more fatal than the other.

> it's beyond stupid that 4000 lb cars driven by people who don't even operate the vehicle

I think we can just stop the sentence right there, before we even discuss other users of the road.

Er, heh, I should actually have stopped the sentence after "that well", oops.

Revised quote:

> it's beyond stupid that 4000 lb cars [are] driven by people who don't even operate the vehicle that well

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. People want more buses so they can commute and travel by bus but they don't have the bus routes they need to reach their place of work or the locations they wish to travel to. Which means they can't give up their car until a robust enough transportation option is available. Which can't be implemented until streets and parking are redesigned to accommodate the new transportation option. I'm watching it play out in a smaller scale where I live (Madison, WI) right now. As density increases and there aren't robust transportation options for people to use on their daily commute; parking becomes a hot-button issue.

Depends on where you are. Outside of the denser places like NYC, SF, and LA, street parking is often undesired and seen as something like a sign of blight (only the poorest neighborhoods don't have space for off-street parking).

Bike lanes remain horribly under-provisioned even there, but it's not really a street-parking thing. It's just a car-first thing. A two to four lane road with no street parking but still no bike lane is not meaningfully more friendly than one with street parking.

It's funny, because in St. Louis, MO (often considered a heavily-blighted city by outsiders) the presence of densely-occupied street parking is usually seen as a sign of wealth. Blighted areas instead have what appear to be extra-wide roads, because they are two-lane roads with space for parking -- but nobody's parking there.

Both blighted and wealthy areas are full of city lots drawn before automobiles, so nobody has much room for parking without sacrificing part of their back yard. Some wealthy people do build parking pads and garages to do this, but the alleys are so narrow that navigating something like a Cadillac SUV into a back-of-lot garage is... problematic.

Ah, good point. I guess neighborhood age is the bigger indicator than density (though they're often loosely correlated). Newer cities and burbs have driveways and garages as first-class citizens, and wealthy areas have space to spare (vs having to convert your garage to another room, etc).

Odd since there is plenty of space underground to store a lot of cars. Wanting street parking in NYC is like wanting to live in a house not an apartment.

I don't see any evidence of that in the article you posted, other than the opinion of one of the plan's supporters.

You can read all about the group that's against the plan. https://www.14thstreetcoalition.org/

I still don't see anything about parking. Which makes sense, because there already isn't any on 14th St. They are whining about the vehicle travel ban.

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