Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

As a total aside, I started to notice that folks most vehement about cars/parking being bad have a pattern: white male, no family/kids, bicycle in the profile picture. Usually they are young and in Twitter, funny to see the pattern hold for this older professor (no evidence of family in bio/Wikipedia)

Seems like a correlation between this demographic and being a sort of male Karen that's really bothered about how other people get around.

Obviously urban planning is an important thing with tradeoffs to consider, I am just talking about the most vehement car haters.

View on HN

Only when I started biking did I realize how much space a bike took vs how much space a car took, how much resources and money was spent for bikes and how much for cars, how much negative externalities bikes cause vs how much cars cause. Many people I know tried to commute by bike but stopped because of how dangerous biking is (due to modern city planning). People like me who are young, single and male are more willing to take risks. So people like me continue to bike and continue to be annoyed by how much resources are given to cars vs bikes. If you want to see a diverse group of bikes, look at the Netherlands. There or is much safer to bike, so you will see more diversity. You'll see bikers who are old and young, male and female (not too many Indians, Chinese, Native Americans, or middle easterns, but that's more for geopolitical reasons).

> Netherlands. There or is much safer to bike, so you will see more diversity

Okay, there's more diversity. But you immediately say this:

> not too many Indians, Chinese, Native Americans, or middle easterns, but that's more for geopolitical reasons

So which is it?

-----

By the way, there's plenty of people from all over the world in the Netherlands :)

Including me!

> white male, no family/kids, bicycle in the profile picture. Usually they are young

My wife with 2 kids that has no twitter account also hates cars. You just don't hear from her because you don't go to the same places she does. The same probably goes for everyone else outside the demographic you're describing.

I'm in my 40's and have two children. And I don't care how you get around, I just want to be able to bike places with my kids and not die. Cars (drivers, really) are the leading killers of children in the US, and I don't think being upset about that makes me a "Karen".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com