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Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

Do you, too, live in San Jose?

My favorite feature of bike lanes there is how highway access ramps straight up cross them -

- creating a flow of cars accelerating to highway speeds coming from behind and sideways from you, while you are in the perfect spot to be obscured by the car's A-frame.

Or perhaps how I had to move away a sign saying "SHARE THE ROAD" (with bicycles, presumably) from the bicycle path. Multiple times.

No, perhaps my favorite is how the Mayor decided to show off our bicycling infrastructure by taking a bicycle ride the first day of the year, and. . .

. . . was promptly hit by an SUV, which broke his bones[1].

If you don't live in San Jose, that's all you need to know about cycling in San Jose.

[1] https://abc7news.com/san-jose-mayor-hit-by-car-bicyclist/500...

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I live in San Jose, and bike a lot, and all three of my kids bike to school, too (I accompany the 2nd grader). Everything you say is true and correct. But, San Jose is still far more bike friendly than the vast majority of American cities, both in terms of driver awareness and infrastructure. An increasing number of marked bike lanes on secondary streets every year, a formal program for road diets on dangerous (for everyone) primary surface streets, sharrows on lots of residential streets, and enough North-South MUTs to facilitate many commuters.

I live in Willow Glen and used to commute to Google in Sunnyvale. About 2mi to get to the GRT, then connect to the Bay Trail in Alviso, and about a half mile of streets to get to the campus. It's not just SJ, but the existence of the Bay Trail, the GRT, the San Tomas Aquino Trail, the Stevens Creek Trail, and even the Los Gatos Creek Trail all make a big difference for cyclists around here.

Compare to European cities San Jose definitely is bad on bike infrastructure. But if you compare to neighbor cities like Santa Clara (low bar, I know), it's pretty ok. Sam Liccardo at least actually cares about cycling around the city, and made bike infrastructure improvements, like 3rd around downtown (yes it took some time after the change to educate our bright drivers how to make right turns there correctly, but it mostly works now).

And San Jose's Department of Transportation traffic signal unit at least has an email address I can use to tell them which traffic signal failed to detect bicycle and turn green, and they actually fix them.

> the Mayor decided to show off our bicycling infrastructure by taking a bicycle ride the first day of the year, and. . . . . . was promptly hit by an SUV, which broke his bones

Your description may conflate the 2017 archival video with Mayor Sam Liccardo’s 2019 New Year’s Day bike ride.

The archival footage comes from a 2017 event touting Ford biking infrastructure, but the reporting does not say that the New Year’s Day bike ride was part of a promotional event.

Are we talking about the time the car hit the mayor on his bike in 2017, or the time the car hit a different mayor in 2019, or the more recent one in 2023?

Either way, when you ram your car into a bicycle it is known as "el san jose hola" or "The San Jose Hello" around here.

Here’s the Belgian version with a good part of the population commuting by bike and the politics by taxi:

"Health minister and deputy prime minister open car doors into busy bicycle lane."

https://www.politico.eu/article/belgian-ministers-send-cycli...

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