Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?

> Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.

No the reasons are likely wholly political.

It's clear from the photo that doing the bike ramp better would require more space. It would require moving that street sign. It could require allocating less space to cars and more to sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists. These are financial decisions and political decisions. Spending money on cyclists is a political lightning rod that special interest groups will fight at all costs to maintain the automobile oriented status quo. Spending money is aggressively fought at all costs in an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible.

Engineers and policy people are not lazy they are constrained by aggressive political special interest groups.

> These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving.

hint hint.

It's almost as if the decisions are being made for car drivers and not pedestrians. This is a political choice driven by special interest groups that seek to preserve 1950s era thinking automobile dominated status quo.

The author assumes that everything sucks because everyone is lazy and stupid but the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded.

I have a friend who sees what he thinks is a problem and starts off with "I don't know why they just didn't...", as if he could come up with a better solution in 2 minutes of thinking than experts in the field. The reality is that he just doesn't know all the competing interests and problems. The article feels the same way.

Knowing that there is a reason just boils down to the same thing.

You can overcome the forced working against you if you care enough, but nobody does.

I see this fallacy a lot in the US. I think it's because of our individualism. Attention and hard-work can't overcome everything, we aren't all-powerful beings.

You're more likely to burn out butting your head against the incentives working against you. If you're lucky, you may get a few successes before you burn out.

If you care enough and have the resources available. It's rare for someone to care only about one specific thing like a bicycle ramp to put in the resources to make a difference, though.

(i.e. my experience is that people do, on the whole, care. But they generally care about different things, and especially have different priorities in terms of how they allocate their resources, especially time. This blog is a rant about people caring about things that the author cares about, a lot of which are reasonable, but are not the be-all end-all of priorities)

That's partly true, but "competing interests and problems" have a tendency to accumulate in much the same way as technical debt.

Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.

It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.

(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)

I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.

Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.

To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.

It's not necessarily that complicated. My mom likes to complain that the person who designed her new stove never cooked in their life. I think the simpler explanation is that the person who designed that ramp arrangement didn't cycle very much and just wasn't empathetic to riders flying down the hill. In other words, they didn't care.

No, there are very specific regulations around infrastructure design, including what sorts of curves are safe in bike lanes at which speeds.

The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.

Anyway, the influence of the auto lobby on urban infrastructure is really well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dependency

> the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded

This may be the case for many things, but I would add that a lot of things suck because of conflicting incentives. Whether it's laziness or even because they are actually getting paid MORE to do the sucky thing.

As an example, where I live a running joke is about the number of road cones whenever work is being done. They don't need THAT many road cones, but they put them there... why? I have no evidence, but I suspect someone is getting paid to add extra road cones - OR potentially another incentive is at play.

The biggest one that gets me is traffic lights within roundabouts... how anyone thinks that is a good idea.... arghh #sigh :(

> Person with headphones blocking the sidewalk.

Any normal sidewalk would be wide enough that a single person could not conceivably block it, and wearing headphones while walking, especially noise canceling ones, is popular because US cities are largely unpleasant, deafeningly loud places full of fast-moving cars.

Umm, in 99% of the US, cyclists and pedestrians are definitely the special interest group, and the vast majority of voters and especially taxpayers want to see the transportation infrastructure optimized for cars.

Well damn I guess I’m living in the 1% /s

Minority groups are not the same thing as special interest groups. Special interest groups usually have undue money, resources, or power given their size.

Many cyclist are also drivers.

Yeah, they shouldn't. Cars are a terrible mode of urban transit. They should all get bikes and bus passes, and then everyone would get everywhere quickly and cheaply and without deadly collisions.

Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.

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