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Comment by yodelshady | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, bicycles probably did lead to more marriage breakups. Certainly in the UK they're considered a key part of emancipation. No longer, as a woman, is your dating pool limited entirely to the boys in your village. And if the boy you did marry turns out to be an angry drunk - well. Bicycles aren't fast, but they're faster than walking. And they're cheap.

And the latter, if we're honest, is the real reason for bicycle hate. The banker or tech bro on a carbon frame is both conspicuously consuming more than you and actually spending less than you. Much less. And, in a city, going faster. Hell, the homeless guy with three steel tubes lashed together might be too. That should be a right wing dream - a private investment, low regulation, small business friendly, with rewards going to the individuals who work harder.

But sometimes, we're just not nice people, and we don't like having our egos punctured.

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I don't think the cost is the biggest driver of tension unless you listen to professional drivers. People don’t blame bus riders for not "paying the road tax" (a UK trope, that tax was abolished). It would explain why things got worst recently, but people don’t hate electric cars the same way for instance.

The most common angle of attack is territorial: "get off _my_ road". Cyclists shouldn’t belong there, because of the shape of the vehicle, and how it goes at different speeds (faster in traffic, slower on the free road). The hostility is shared with Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTN), car-free side roads converted into cul-de-sacs. Those remind cars that they are not welcome. “Invisible” bicycles match the repeated trope that cyclists run red lights (in practice, they cross with pedestrian lights at three-phase lights, when it’s safe): the behaviour on the road is different, and forces car drivers to get out of their automated reflexes, and do things they should, but never do: check their mirrors, look back in the blind side, check before opening their door. Forcing drivers outside of the mental comfort of habit-driving is what is causing so much pain and anguish.

It’s also why drivers in countries where cyclists are common don’t have the same issue: they are used to bikes and drive habitually with cyclists in mind.

That matches the biggest issue cyclists point at drivers: using their mobile phones. You can’t drive and use a phone unless you are in a fully reflex-based flow. If those reflexes don’t expect a bike passing you, it yanks you out of your flow, which is physically painful. That explains the explosive and murderous reactions from drivers.

In fact, in the Netherlands, they just gave up on motorists and created a complete parallel infrastructure for cyclists (in addition to that for pedestrians).

That's seemingly the only way to keep people safe from injury.

> The most common angle of attack is territorial: "get off _my_ road".

Yeah, but why do you think it's your road when in a car, especially when the same attitude exists in places without the tax, or with drivers cars that are exempt, or hell, if you've just not bothered paying it? My bet is it's nothing to do with ~£100 of tax, and everything to do with not wanting to admit you were misled by advertisers into thinking spending tens of thousands of your hard-earned cash on something you thought would give you effortless, fast, convenient transport.

A better argument that it’s not really how much it costs, but some territorial sense that anything paved with macadam is there’s is how violent conversations about parking gets:

* if someone “steals” a spot in a parking lot that you felt you wanted,

* if someone parks on the public road in front of one’s house,

* or worse, more recently when people started taking over streets for other use than car storage.

If this was seen as a commercial transaction ("as a driver, I paid the £100, therefore it is mine, and people who haven’t paid shouldn't be allowed in") then for-pay parking spots wouldn’t be seen as such an unfair tax, even when they aren't that expensive. The outrage comes from seeing those as the birthright of any car driver. Taxing that right is inherently wrong, even for a few dollars an hour (which is several orders of magnitude cheaper than the value and externality of any urban parking lot).

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