What's a "DEI bike lane"? Like woke, DEI has lost all meaning at the political level of discourse. It's just whatever the current regime dislikes.
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.