US DOT deleting bike lane references
npr.org
npr.org
Jumping straight into the middle of the article you might believe you stumbled onto The Onion.
The driver, identified as 31-year-old Charles Medina, then sped past the couple from behind. Rapp’s boyfriend responded to the maneuver by raising his hands and yelling, at which point Medina slammed his brakes, skidded to a stop and accelerated in reverse. Medina ultimately hit Rapp so forcefully that his “rear windshield was shattered completely”. He also allegedly left skidmarks from having “rapidly accelerated backwards” as well as apparently “steering towards something while backing up”. Emergency responders found Rapp unresponsive and lying face down in the roadway. She was pronounced dead after being taken to a hospital.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/22/boxer-hannah...
I couldn't find out if he ever got convicted or sentenced to anything.
But any cyclist, including myself, can tell you that there are people out there with murder in their hearts who want you to die just for the crime of delaying them by a few seconds.
Often it's not an actual delay, but just a perception of a delay as the driver then arrives at the next queue a few seconds later which makes no difference to their total journey time.
Well the rate were this world is going with Climate Change, in 50 to 100 years the only method of transportation will be walking. That is after what could be called "the migration wars".
Getting out of fossil fuels should have started 30+ years ago. But people would rather have their children, grandchildren suffer far more then we would have if we took Climate Change seriously.
For example, a few years ago they replaced the bridge over a river just outside of town, adding a bike/pedestrian bridge on the side. This connects a county campground to town without requiring riding on the narrow bridge shoulder. Angry people oppose it because they think it's a waste.
Biking, too!
So I guess it's a common sense solution if you don't understand the first thing about roadway design?
As long as the government is captured by Capital, however, it's hard to make the case for them to "vote harder".
In the self labeling as “Christian”, sense not so much.
There's an election every year (including special and midterms). The fight is annual and it's completely unfair to believe it's a quadrennial event and lead others to believe the same. Participate in your local elections. It's where all of this starts. The national is mostly noise that bubbles up and out.
The government we deserve.
Nobody bother thinking coherent thoughts, insults and spurious non sequiturs are policy now.
He's just trying to get under everyone's skin and it's working.
Look at those crowds of bikers... ICE protesters... no king protesters...
He's a showman and he loves it.
Stop giving him airtime.
So what if federal funding doesn't recognize bike lanes or whatever this is about?
Vote in competent city Councillors that will get bike lanes prioritized in your city if that's what you care about.
Milwaukee WI has had several (awarded!) street reconstruction grants killed by this admin because they included bike lanes. They weren't bike lane _projects_, they are to primarily to rebuild crumbling unsafe streets, but they included bike lanes so the Fed's rescinded the grants and now most of the projects are dead. There's no local money to do it without the grants.
The real fix for this is to fix the stupid system we have, but for now it's what we're stuck with and this has a real impact you can't overcome locally.
And to elaborate on the stupidity, blue states send more taxes to the federal government, which then doles them back out to subsidize the low cost of living in red states.
So you end up with people in dense urban areas sending tax dollars to Washington, then begging to get the taxes their own citizens paid back, in support of building the infrastructure projects they want locally.
Using the universal analytical tool cui bono (more powerful than an LLM) and their own explicit words, there's a consistent, non-crazy strategy: Support the fossil fuel industry in every way possible (which appeals to some people; I'm not writing a critique; you should understand this.):
* Destroy or acquire national competitors: Venezuala, Iran,
even Nigeria
* Buy off domestic competitors: using tax dollars to bribe
renewable energy developments to stop
* A million other policy and political actions, major and
and minor; even opposing bike lanes.
(If you doubt it, see if my hypothesis predicts future events.)
Unfortunately there's a healthy subset of the Democratic party which is also against road infrastructure improvements like bike lanes and traffic calming. Car brain is an affliction which does not discriminate.
Only one of them is totally nuts
Here's a good quote from Susan B Anthony (famous Suffragette):
"Let me tell you what I think of the bicycle. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can't get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood."
The funniest thing is that tactical use of bike lanes, neighborhood greenways, etc, actually serves to funnel cyclists into specific protected routes such that the majority of other roads have fewer cyclists utilizing them. From my home in Seattle, I can ride several miles to work on roads that were already low traffic volume, but which are faster because cyclists get priority, and cars get diverted away. Before this existed, I just used the main roads that cars did, because it was faster.
Like, if you hate bicycles, you should love bicycle infrastructure. It's better for everyone.
Many drivers either believe there are no cyclists; or that the number of cyclists should be reduced to zero, and they should drive instead, like normal people.
Also, everything is zero-sum, so any money spent on bike infrastructure is less money spent to widen the freeways or subsidize parking.
It's often an act of power, like a mob. It's the corruption of power made viceral.
> I've given up hope on transportation in the USA. It certainly won't be fixed within my lifetime.
Exactly the response your enemies planned. Act aggressive enough and the other side will give in. You're their best friend when you do it and every time you post it.
Just because there is not unanimous support for good policies, doesn’t mean they can’t be implemented.
Also a big win for local policy making, which used to be a preference of the right.
I, for one, cycle and still oppose bike lanes - they don't make cycling much safer (a car can easily jump a curb and most of these don't even have a curb, just some paint and plastic bollards in the best case) but impede traffic for everyone. If you want to increase cycling adoption you will piss off much fewer people and be 1000% more efficient by reigning in bike theft instead of building these lanes.
When I cycle, I take the full lane even if there is a "bike lane". If I am holding up traffic, I'll slow down and retire to the bike lane until that wave of car passes, no need to agitate anyone.
This has been a solved problem in Europe, but in the states, cars got wider, but the streets didn't.
I do dislike Tour de France militant wanna be tribes, they act really obnoxious in traffic in my part of the world. When it's a single rider, mostly all is cool, but when there is a pack of a dozen or more, they transform into something else.
Glad we agree on this, the reasons you imagined could be true or false, the main point is that drivers are going to be affected by the bike lanes significantly more than by cyclists.
> Bike theft is not why people don't cycle
It is in my experience. E.g. I don't bike to work because the office building requires bikes to be stored in the shared storage room and I don't want it to be stolen. There is a bike trail between my home and office so no 35 mph cars you are so afraid of.
I think drivers are catered to in almost every single scenario in the United States to the point that giving cyclists any space, any infrastructure, or anything that is not also usable by cars is almost unthinkable. With that in mind, yes, drivers will be inconvenienced. Oh well. They're convenienced at almost every turn in almost every decision about transportation, let's give bikes a chance too.
You have a bike trail? Lucky! I live in central NJ, while bike trails do exist in the western part of the state, where people live here, they basically don't exist and you have to just ride in the street. Almost no offices even have a storage room, so you'd be chaining your bike to a sign, most likely, or storing it behind the building somewhere. You have it better than we do here...clearly, there's a lot more work to be done.
>I think drivers are catered to in almost every single scenario in the United States to the point that giving cyclists any space, any infrastructure, or anything that is not also usable by cars is almost unthinkable.
Yet it's reality in many cities in the US - tons of bike lanes, unusable by cars. You can bring up bike lanes on google maps, show me a city without those.
>Almost no offices even have a storage room, so you'd be chaining your bike to a sign, most likely, or storing it behind the building somewhere.
And yet, the bikes don't get stolen? Not even parts like wheels, saddles, lights etc? Lucky!
People don't bike here because they can't. I don't live in a city, I live in one of the many dense suburbs (which are denser than many cities in the US) of NJ, where there's lots of roads, and almost no bike lanes. Where biking does happen, they bike in the street, with no shoulder, and hope not to get hit by cars.
The bikes aren't stolen because there are no bikes, because you'd have to have a deathwish to try biking in the road with cars in the same lane as them.
It's the densest state in the union, and the only places you can bike are Newark, Hudson County, New Brunswick, Trenton, Atlantic City, Camden, the barrier islands, and the boardwalks. The other 99% of the state, you're putting your life on the line.
It's about safety. Would you feel safe biking in those lanes? Would you feel more or less safe biking where there are none?
PS. Your response got killed for some reason (very bizarre in an old thread and so quickly) but to answer your question - it depends on the road. There are roads I don't feel safe driving (I live in Austin, where the city decided that the traffic enforcement is racist or something so there is none, as the result there is mayhem on the roads) but I do bike on some streets with 35 mph and no bike lanes without feeling I put my life on the line.
I don't feel safe when I ride like that, I've been almost hit multiple times from people going into a turn lane or making a right on red because they didn't even bother looking (or just didn't care and got within like a foot of me to get into the turn lane). Most of the time, it's fine, but what would be a minor accident in a car is going to leave you pretty injured on a bike.
To paint the picture, imagine it's rush hour, and there's cars backed up everywhere because that's just how it always is at rush hour. You're, let's say, 7 cars from the intersection, and a cyclist passes. You see them for a grand total of maybe 5 seconds before they're too far ahead of you to see, then they turn right at the intersection, and they're gone.
Here's[1] a study from Rutgers about this, it seems to conclude that bike lanes do impede traffic, but the reason is that when a bike lane is present, drivers don't speed and actually come to a stop when making a right on red, and in general, the drivers in these areas don't speed when there's a cyclist there. Speeding does alleviate traffic, but I don't really think the safety benefits are worth it.
[1] https://bloustein.rutgers.edu/rutgers-bike-lanes-reduce-traf...
Even getting hit by a subcompact car can kill someone if they just step out in front of it not giving it enough time to stop.
New York has a complete streets program where bike lanes and pedestrian friendly crossings are included in most projects. Iirc 4-5 people have died crossing this road.
The call to action was that “those people” would use the bike lanes to leave the city, connect to the Democrat bike trail and rape, murder and rob the townsfolk.
Old fearful white people are terrified of this stuff.
I would reframe most things more in terms of "what will I gain" to see how voters to vote, and new opportunities or bridges to bike to the hood gains them basically nothing.
In this case most of the hubbub was really about a pedestrian island that would block left turns to a business the guy was friends with. The woke people were out to get them for some reason, etc.
The racist dog whistle was very deliberate and targeted at Nextdoor. The messaging in more mainstream outlets was about lane width reductions causing a traffic nightmare. It was almost taken from Blazing Saddles.
This is the official GOP policy, the best of what the GOP has to offer. Fight friends, betray allies, threaten your neighbors, drop bombs, smash bike lanes.
For renters, it means they're going to try to increase rents.
For everyone, it presents a pressure on favourite local businesses-- higher costs, and an influx of well-bankrolled outside competitors.
Furthermore, the absolute last thing most of these communities need is an influx of people who have fewer big problems in their jurisdiction because those people always go right to work turning the screws of government on the poors and existing residents.
I'm not saying vote against change at every turn, but given the choice between heavy industry and rich people I'm taking the heavy industry every damn time.
I'll take your flagrant strawman. You're telling me that black communities weren't doing probably the best they've ever done during that exact same period?
A conspiracy theorist would say the white man invented welfare to keep them down. I would say they weren't thinking that far ahead. I mean hell, wealthy (enough, and mostly white but that's beside the point) folk had their own communities to run and what did they do? They cooked up zoning and look how that turned out. And then they kicked all the heavy industry out of the country because I guess we're supposed to all get rich off financial products and real estate speculation. You can hair split and lay these problems at the feet of various groups. Liberal white women, hippies, moralizing christian types, money grubbing businessmen and investors, people with little hats and big noses, etc, etc. Perhaps some of the assessments of blame are mostly true. But they, and other aspects of naive pattern machining (insert 13/50 joke here) wholly miss the the broader trend. And t
The political whims and their nearly universal ignorance of 2nd and beyond order consequences that arise out of the "comfortable middle class and above" have been a disaster for western society.
Idle hands are the devils workshop and oh boy has he been productive over the past couple generations.
Wanna discuss unions next? I have a spicy take on those too.
I'd say that's a you problem but it's actually an "everyone who has to share society with you" problem.
How to Kill a City is a good one.
And both Trump and Xi-Jiping are delivering just that, thanks God.
But one thing that’s interesting with the administration’s approach to so many things is the removal of tools to get information. In the article (which works in brave which suppresses the pop up) they talk about this tool to collect information on how a crash occurred. I get wanting to change priorities. As a bicyclist I can understand if road space is optimized for other uses due to the predominant form of use.
But I think one of the reasons the US is so prosperous is that we have here a reliable and high-quality data collection machine. The less you know about yourselves the worse you can achieve your objectives.
Massive tragedy that data collection fell to ideology. Though the ideology is very funny. It sounds like an angry redditor!
“This is a common sense approach despite the Left's belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda”