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Comment by fatneckbeard | Hacker News Reader

yeah ive been riding bicycles 30 years. what we want is separate bike roads, bike crosses, bike parking, like the Netherlands, we do not want some giant police movement to regulate truck sizes.

this is like the definition of why liberals cannot win elections. the first instinct is never to solve problems, it is to find some 'wrongdoer' and punish them.

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Except that pedestrians face the same or greater risks than bicyclists from vehicles from higher front ends.

The biggest challenge is that pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers tend to live, work, and shop in the same locations. Even with separate facilities (sidewalks, cycle tracks), there will be conflicts (intersections and driveways). Lack of visibility and a disparity of mass and velocity are always going to be hazardous at these conflict points.

I’ve been an avid cyclist most of my adult life. I’m all for separated bike infrastructure, and it would certainly save lives. But it doesn’t address the actual problem: the enlarging of vehicles and reduction of line of sight for drivers is a danger to everyone.

I’m also an even more avid pedestrian. I routinely encounter drivers who struggle to see me over their hood, or even the increasingly high floor for windows in auto designs almost across the board. I’m above average height for US men, but I’ve even had to navigate around trucks with hoods so tall it would be nearly if not totally impossible for a driver to see me at all, much less see my pup.

I’m not exaggerating, I walked across an intersection just the other day where I had to stand on my toes to see if a driver was even at the wheel in a huge truck stopped at a stop sign, while simultaneously forcibly shuffling my pup ahead of me so the potential driver wouldn’t see me clear the intersection and assume that’s all there is to it. All the while, I was imagining what would happen if there was a driver at the wheel and we couldn’t make all of the necessary communications for a safe crossing. This truck wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, the intersection wasn’t either. The experience is even more common for navigating around vehicles in reverse.

I’m not going to make any policy suggestions, and I don’t care about how this affects elections or relative success of any political perspective. I will just say that balancing public safety without requiring automobile accommodations for it is inherently untenable.

I'm torn on this, really. I think separate bike infra is great, when you have the space and funding for it, and we should push for this whenever we can. But it's not always feasible.

And beyond that, larger vehicles pollute more. Even larger EVs require larger batteries and more materials to construct. Sure, you can say that people who want them already pay a higher price in fuel (even if that fuel is electricity), but that doesn't seem to have been enough to disincentivize the proliferation of SUVs.

To be clear, “we” the cyclists want cars to be prohibitively expensive in cities. Presumably we the cyclists aren’t so homogenous.

there really does have to be something done about truck sizes though, they're objectively a hazard to pedestrians because the driver can see less. they're a nuisance in cities because they exceed the standard size of parking spaces, they cause more wear on the roads, and increase congestion.

Thank you for this comment. I (as a large SUV driver) would be happy to have my tax dollars diverted to separate bike routes, with sane traffic signals, that let drivers and cyclists safely move around. There's way to much ideology involved, and not enough pragmatism.

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