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Comment by II2II | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, most of the cycling advocacy I see is pro solution yet the opposition response is largely anti problem. Those who want to ride safely typically propose infrastructure based solutions and rarely treat the automobile itself as the problem. For example: while you may see advocacy for protected lanes or traffic calming, almost no one is arguing that cars should be removed from the roads. Contrast that to the opposition response, which often seeks to have bikes removed from the roads and never supports accommodation for different modes of transportation.

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I am one of the people who is totally for the removal of cars (in cities). I don't even think this is a radical position, cars are not a neutral mode of transportation and people with cars get much more of the cake than any other person moving through a city.

Cars were somewhat utopian: everybody can move whereever they want, with a luxurious safe space around them, all while having the world shaped in auch a way it accomodates them and their car. Reality has shown, that this idea has not only serious downsides, but that it is also extremely inefficient and might even be part of the destruction of our planet. The idea that somehow we can build a sustainable world around cars, no matter how fuel efficient and what technology looks (to me) extremely naive, because it is inefficient and even if you made it better, you still won't beat bicycles in terms of efficiency and space usage.

Note: I don't argue there aren't legitimate use cases for cars. I grew up on the countryside in the alps, without a car you would be lost there (yet for some reason I managed to do everything with a bicycle/public transport till I got my driving license). Also: if your work requires you to move stuff around, cars (or trucks) can make a lot of sense. I am not arguing against that, I argue against one person sitting alone in their own 7m² and using that to commute into a city that is filled with cars.

In order to make cycling a real alternative we will have to take space, comfort and money away from cars. Take one lane away from a 4 lane road, paint it red, make it a bicycle lane. Add trains/subways/busses where people can transport their biciclyes, all that stuff.

I also have lived long enough in different european cities to know it works perfectly fine. I mean there are cities without any cars in their center (because of historical reasons) and they don't die.

> for some reason I managed to do everything with a bicycle/public transport till I got my driving license

Reasons being: no job and no kids. I lived for years in the LA megalopolis without a car. Where going to the toilet is customary done at the wheel (1). We could possibly share stories about that one multi-hour bike ride to the box store and back. All that ended quite abruptly with the first job and especially the first kid.

(1) Not really, but I hope it helps getting the the point across.

Yet even an unemployed single parent gets around just fine in Europe.

Where I live, public transport is free for young kids and parents with strollers. The buses have separate "getting on/off with stroller" buttons that signals the driver to activate the hydraulics that tilt the whole bus just to make it easier to dis/mount with a baby.

Unless you want to visit parents in other, smaller city. Then half hour drive with car, changes to two hour struggle in a crowded bus.

Or your half an hour bicycle ride changes to one hour on a crowded street. Totally depends.

I support banning cars specifically in certain neighborhoods in Manhattan. Probably not in any other borough or Jersey City but I want a ban on cars in Manhattan for exactly the same reason you are describing - building empathy toward people who need to use the subway with their babies in a stroller or backpack (not sure what the correct terminology is for this). If everyone has to use public transit, maybe we will be nicer to people who have to take their human infants to the doctor in a bus or a subway.

A lot of that has to do with the design of the city. In my neck of the woods (a moderately dense urban area in Canada) I see plenty of parents who either don't own a car or use their car as the exception rather than the rule.

Quite. this is nice, but the idea that 'I think you can actively try to become the hot new thing in part by working on being inoffensive' is naive. That approach works great for networking with peers but not against aggressive opposition.

There are a lot of people in the world who thrive on seeing other people worse off, to a greater degree than being equivalently better off themselves. In game theory terms, they're willing to experience a loss in order to inflict a loss on others. Online they present as trolls.

I have no doubt that some people want to see others worse off. Some people seem to get angry about just about anything. Yet I suspect that most people respond negatively for other reasons. A common case is they perceive it as a loss to themselves, even when there is no justification to that perception.

To choose a concrete example from pedestrian safety: curb extensions are often proposed to make crossing pedestrians more visible and to slow turning traffic. A common criticism is a loss of parking. That criticism ignores that curb extensions rarely impact parking since people are not supposed to park within a certain distance of a crosswalk.

> A common case is they perceive it as a loss to themselves, even when there is no justification to that perception.

This is symptomatic of an oppositional mindset IMO.

I personally think only about half of objections to any given proposal are sincere. Many people make arguments for strategic reasons rather than because of good faith belief. It's very noticeable on topics like climate change which yield many flame wars.

Some people make asinine dismissals that seem rooted in ignorance, and when rejected to schooled switch to ever more specific and obscure arguments, attempting to one-up the other person by displaying superior technical knowledge. They get huffy if someone asks why such an expert person would lead off with a demonstrably specious argument.

It always befuddles me when people describe me as naive, especially if I know for a fact they know my backstory.

I was sexually abused as a child. I'm a former military wife who raised two special-needs kids pretty much alone while the husband was elsewhere. I spent years homeless. Etc.

Hacker News has proven to be a poor networking opportunity for me, which I've complained about quite a lot. It's not done kind of secret. Being charming here attracts romantic interest, not career success, and that's been a dead end for years for all inquiries because of my medical situation.

I'm no longer homeless but I remain dirt poor. As is often the case, I'm currently flat broke because it's late in the month and my ability to make the front page of HN still fails to result in some kind of adequate income.

I've not remotely had a sheltered life and I've been dealing with small town politics since not long after I moved here. I've already become acquainted with some of the local pain points.

I also appear to be the highest ranked openly female member of HN and I seem to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard. Twice now in fact as I did previously under a different handle.

For that and many other reasons, I think my approach works. Though it certainly at times resembles the wry observation about democracy being "the worst thing ever -- except for all the others."

I'm describing a specific sentence as naive, not the person who wrote it. I had no awareness it was your blog, so I'm sorry my comment hurt your feelings. Nonetheless, we hold different opinions on this.

My feelings aren't hurt. Befuddled means confused or perplexed, not upset.

You sound like you have experience with cycling advocacy. If you could point me in the direction of resources, I would appreciate it.

I've identified a need locally. It doesn't require government funding. But I still have a lot to learn about bike rack best practices and I haven't ridden in a lot of years. I pretty much walk everywhere.

It's more of a case of I notice it since I ride a bike daily.

What I see in my city is mostly geared towards safety, not so much bike racks. Some of it focuses upon infrastructure that makes life safer for cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists. Some of it is directed towards people who bike, such as road safety courses and bicycle lighting.

With respect to bike racks, the emphasis seems to be on gaining business support. Places are more welcoming if they depend upon pedestrians and cyclists, are high traffic, and have limited parking. Local businesses also seem to be more bike friendly than regional, national, or multinational ones.

On that note, how businesses differentiate themselves seem to reflect how welcoming they are to clients who use bikes. Cafe's are more welcoming than coffee shops, recreation centres are more welcoming than gyms.

Also, traditional bike racks are out of favour in my neck of the woods. It's more common to see posts where two bikes can be locked up parallel to the street, or placed three feet apart when bikes are parallel to each other. Even the simplest ones are painted so they are more visually appealing, some have a more artistic flare. Traditional racks tend to be used in bike corrals. Those are typically a barricaded off on-street parking space for bike parking, with the barricades being decorated to fit into the community (e.g. paintings, flowerbeds). The basic idea seems to be that bike racks are more appealing to everyone if they aren't a tangled mess of bikes.

Thank you.

I am still researching bicycle racks, among other things. I am fortunate to be in a historica, walkable, mixed-use downtown area with "scenic" highways running through it. In other words, old-fashioned highways where bikes are permitted, not limited-access freeways where bikes are Verboten.

So we already have cyclists coming through here in spite of the lack of bike racks. I talked to a group that began in Seattle and said they were heading up around the Olympic Peninsula and down to San Francisco. So they are traveling quite the distance because of existing infrastructure and interest.

I already take photos of the area and post them online in a forum I run, which is what sparked me to think up this project. I now have a new goal of documenting bike racks and potential bike rack sites. I will develop things from there.

As someone who rides a bike for errands and fun, I’m often locking it up.

My unsolicited opinion: I love the plain and simple single upside down U.

My unsolicited rant: I’ve seen and attempted to use many variations, and anything more or less than a single upside down U is always worse.

- usage of space: “racks” that are intended to be used for lots of bikes almost never work out. An upside down u fits two bikes. Simply installing more U’s will have a better outcome than a single “multi-bike” rack because the racks almost never work as advertised - inevitably someone has a kids seat attached to their bike, or a trailer, or a taller bike or shorter bike, or whatever, and then they just end up using the two sides, or going across the whole rack, so all the middle space is wasted space anyway.

- security (eg is it the right height/width/length that I can fit my lock, and lock up all the parts of my bike, not just the wheel). With the U rack, yes, otherwise, almost never as good, and often much worse.

ergonomics - can I easily get my lock around the rack and my bike, lean my bike against it)

I’ll grant that maybe you want to sacrifice utility for a particular “look” but please do so carefully and deliberately. Good luck!!

I am absolutely soliciting opinions. Thank you very much for this.

> For example: while you may see advocacy for protected lanes or traffic calming, almost no one is arguing that cars should be removed from the roads.

But those things are anti-car. They come at the cost of travel speed or congestion as a result of fewer lanes. They're thereby something you have to fight the masses in order to get, instead of finding a Pareto-optimal solution that can thereby actually be implemented.

Or at least figure out who it is you want to fight. For example, a lot of towns have a main drag that goes through the area with all the shops. One of the best ways to make that street more accessible to pedestrians is to build a limited access highway parallel to it to carry all the vehicle traffic which is only passing through.

The shop owners are going to fight you on that. They want those cars driving past their shops. But it puts the pedestrians and the drivers on the same side, because the drivers don't want to be stuck on a road full of crosswalks and stoplights when they could be driving around it at 70 MPH.

“congestion as a result of fewer lanes”

Removing a car lane for a bicycle lane doesn’t decrease the number of lanes (may even increase it if a car lane is replaced by two bicycle lanes). If the bicycle lane gets used by former car drivers, car density may even go down, and congestion with it (but that likely will induce demand)

“The shop owners are going to fight you on that. They want those cars driving past their shops”

I don’t think they get paid for ad impressions. Shop owners want people to enter their shop and buy things, not drive past it.

> Removing a car lane for a bicycle lane doesn’t decrease the number of lanes (may even increase it if a car lane is replaced by two bicycle lanes).

It reduces the number of lanes for cars which increases congestion for drivers.

> If the bicycle lane gets used by former car drivers, car density may even go down, and congestion with it

This is wishful thinking. Everywhere you see a bus lane or a bike lane, it's underutilized. And that's true even when it's carrying all of the existing bicycle traffic that would have been there regardless.

Because the reason people don't ride bicycles isn't a lack of bike lanes. It's because they're traveling a longer distance than can covered in a reasonable amount of time on a bicycle.

> (but that likely will induce demand)

Induced demand is a farce. Congestion suppresses demand. If you relieve congestion in some way, the demand is no longer suppressed. But if we take as a given that we want to relieve congestion in some way, that's the amount of demand we have to deal with regardless of how we relieve the congestion.

> I don’t think they get paid for ad impressions. Shop owners want people to enter their shop and buy things, not drive past it.

If you're stuck at a stoplight at an intersection with a gas station, a pizzeria and a toy store and you need gas, food and a birthday gift for your nephew, you stop and buy those things. If you drive past that street on the new highway, you buy gas at a different gas station, order pizza from a different pizzeria and buy the toy on Amazon.

They're not the seller of advertising, they're the advertiser not wanting to lose the impressions they're currently getting without paying for them.

“Everywhere you see a bus lane or a bike lane, it's underutilized.”

Those can easily be underutilized and yet take more traffic than a lane filled with cars would take.

“If you're stuck at a stoplight at an intersection with a gas station, a pizzeria and a toy store and you need gas, food and a birthday gift for your nephew, you stop and buy those things.”

I don’t drive a car, but I doubt that because I don’t see how that would happen. It would take you minutes to find a spot to park your car and go shopping. The people I know purposefully decide to go into the town to do such shopping.

And who’s talking about a new highway? If car drivers become part-time cyclists, there’s no need for building new roads.

Also, it’s not a given that ease of access by car is good for shop owners. Some data points:

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2020/03/18/going-back-to-...:

“When the council proposed to take away some of the car parking spaces the local entrepreneurs stunned the council by demanding all the parking to be removed. That was novel at the time (and to be honest it still is exceptional) but could be explained because the pedestrianised area is so close to this location. The merchants simply saw that business is booming literally around the corner at locations without moving and parked cars.”

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...:

“there was also fierce opposition, especially from businessmen and shopkeepers who were convinced it would mean the end of their business if cars could no longer cross the centre. We tried to explain that we wanted to create a pleasant urban environment that eventually would attract more people to the centre and to their shops. But they were convinced they would go bankrupt if customers would not be able reach their shop by car,” says Van den Berg. “In the end, it turned out they were wrong.”

> But those things are anti-car. They come at the cost of travel speed or congestion as a result of fewer lanes. They're thereby something you have to fight the masses in order to get, instead of finding a Pareto-optimal solution that can thereby actually be implemented.

At the cost of parking, possibly. At the cost of travel speed, possibly. At the cost of congestion, unlikely.

All of the proposals for bike lanes that I have seen have typically involved the removal of parking or the narrowing of lanes. The former typically happens where there is not enough space to use parked vehicles as a barrier between lanes for motor vehicles and bicycles. The latter is typically intentional, since narrow lanes are a mechanism for traffic calming.

Neither should be classified as anti-car. Bike lanes typically run along roads that are mixed use. They aren't found on side streets since they don't address the safety issues found on side streets. (Side streets may be designated a bike route, but I have never seen a separation of traffic.) They are rarely found on roads since roads are intended to serve high speed traffic travelling long distances. There are usually better solutions for cyclists in that case. The end result is that bike lanes are usually placed along business corridors (e.g. those main drags), where traffic calming benefits all users. Parking is often less of an issue in those cases since those businesses couldn't be sustained by the limited parking available to start with.

Cyclists are not out there battling against cars. It simply doesn't make sense. Many of the places that cars go are undesirable to cyclists. Many of the places that cyclists want to go are better served when accommodations are made for multiple modes of transportation. If you choose to interpret that as anti-car, well, there isn't much I can do about that aside from pointing out that it is not the intent and rarely the outcome.

Yeah, I read this more as a how-to guide to stall progress, just pretend your opponents are doing the opposite of these steps even if they aren't.

Pretty closely fits all the arguments you see about a variety of sensible ideas that would negatively affect powerful interests.

Like cut down on meat, you probably already eat more than doctors recomend, better health, cheaper, save the planet. But if you're connected to the meat industry it pays to pretend that "Joe Biden wants to ban cheeseburgers" or whatever and argue against some fake extreme.

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