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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

I think your prediction will turn out to be as closer or closer than any other. Certainly more on the money than the breathless “won’t be a problem in a few years when self-driving...”

But as I read your probably-on-the-money prediction, I was thinking “here we go again, dumping money for the two-ton wheelchairs while alternative transportation goes begging again.” Where’s my fucking barrier-protected bike lane? Or any bike lane at all?

Frankly, if that’s how it goes, I wonder if it happens at all. “Separate lanes for wealthy tech workers” is how that’s going to go. You know why we can’t even get bike lanes? Because people bitch and moan because they don’t personally use it. Expand that to an empty lane of moving traffic while the plebs sit in traffic.

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> Frankly, if that’s how it goes, I wonder if it happens at all. “Separate lanes for wealthy tech workers” is how that’s going to go. You know why we can’t even get bike lanes? Because people bitch and moan because they don’t personally use it. Expand that to an empty lane of moving traffic while the plebs sit in traffic.

It’s bad policy to spend scarce resources (in this case road space) on something few people use. Just 0.6% of people bike to work at leas once a week. Bike lanes are a phenomenon completely out of proportion to how many people use them.[1]

Self driving cars will be that way at first, of course. But the big difference is that self driving technology has the possibility of becoming mainstream. Biking, by contrast, will never become mainstream. The average American commutes 16 miles one way. That’s an hour of biking each way (in weather that, in most of the country, is too hot or too cold most of the year).

[1] It doesn’t help that bike lane resources tend to be focused in areas where they disproportionately benefit educated white men: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/biggest-obsta...

It’s bad policy to spend scarce resources (in this case road space) on something few people use.

You mean like self-driving cars? How about we spend "scarce resources" on things people actually do use right now, like bicycles, scooters, electric skateboards, whatever.

You're also arguing, "let's not spend anything on infrastructure for $ACTIVITY, then when no one does $ACTIVITY, we can say, 'yeah, but nobody does that'."

Like he said, because less than 1% of American commuters bike, and the average commute is over 16 miles.

We're already doing that in my neck of the woods with toll express lanes on the insterstates. The moneyed skip the traffic at the expense of widened roads which would help all. These express lanes will logically be the first to allow automation, but at least in that case the affluent will be paying to prove the technology which will eventually benefit everyone.

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