Every bike on the road is one less car causing traffic. It's crazy to want infrastructure for JUST cyclists when the road is a perfectly good way to travel.
North America spent the past four decades telling people it's safe to ride a bike in car traffic. Several European cities spent that time building continuous networks of dedicated, physically protected cycle tracks. All you need to do is compare how the modal splits have changed over that time to know which approach was more successful.
Me I drive the car some days and the bike other days. I wish for bike lanes equally much when I'm in the car and when I'm on my bike. (I'm a biker so I'm allowed to say this: Yes you are allowed to ride you bike in the main street around here but it shows a real lack of understanding when you have a row of cars queing up behind you, and a choice between a sidewalk, another route and several less crowded streets to choose from and still choose to use the main road.)
I didn't say everyone will start cycling, I said more people will start cycling. Please stop attacking a straw man.
The biggest possible problem is that as the auto driver you become responsible for any bike rider you come into contact with because they are unprotected regardless of the circumstances of the contact. I didn't ask them to get on the road with me, but I'll sure as hell be held responsible for their decision if something happens.
More importantly, as a tax payer, I've helped fund literally dozens of miles of really nice dedicated paved and marked bike only trails, complete with parking and overpasses, tunnels and signals at busy intersections. There is literally no excuse for them to play "Tour de France" on the same road I'm trying to get to work on.
If there were only cyclists on the road, the worst accident would be a few broken bones. You chose to bring a potentially lethal device onto the roads, of course it's your responsibility. If I juggle chainsaws in a crowded plaza, I don't get to blame the guy who bumped into me for flinging chainsaws into people.
> More importantly, as a tax payer, I've helped fund literally dozens of miles of really nice dedicated paved and marked bike only trails, complete with parking and overpasses, tunnels and signals at busy intersections. There is literally no excuse for them to play "Tour de France" on the same road I'm trying to get to work on.
Try it. You might be surprised that these bike lanes have dead ends or obstacles or just astonishingly crappy terrain.
And don't give me the "taxpayer" line, an astronomical amount of cash is spent on roadways and expressways over and above any gas taxes or fees. Complaining about the small amount spent on bikes just makes you seem extremely petty.
So much this. We have some fantastic bike trails in my area, but one of the primary arteries just suddenly ends about two miles from the downtown core. The official, city-endorsed route the rest of the way runs on normal surface streets.
Coincidentally, the closest I've come to being involved in a serious accident on my bike was through that section when some jackass behind me decided I shouldn't be on the road and tried to force me into a gutter. The kicker being I had just pushed off from a red light and was actually moving faster than the car in the left lane beside me at that point.
Sometimes bikes don't have any choice but to be on the road, and sometimes they're even told to by the local government.
That's a terrible analogy. The correct one is if I choose to juggle chainsaws in the chainsaw juggling room. And some people think it would be a good idea to come in there with me and start doing cartwheels. Then when one of them gets hit with a saw complains about all the chain saw jugglers.
All the chainsaw jugglers have accepted the risk of their activities and are even doing it in a purpose built room just for them. While the cart wheelers just want to coopt and use somebody else's space without accepting the dangers of it and despite it being purpose built for somebody else.
You repeat this mistake despite being shown an example US law that explicitly states that roads are not just for motorised vehicles.
1) You don't actually know what the law is. You've cherry picked laws that allow bikes to share roads without having even a breath's familiarity with the responsibilities that also come with road usage and the laws that lay out those responsibilities.
2) You equate "being legal" with "being wise". It's perfectly legal for me to go on a diet of all broken glass. But it's a stupid idea. It's perfectly legal, and even specifically enshrined in law for me to go grocery shopping with a loaded shotgun and a backpack full of dynamite, but it's also idiotic.
I think to save cyclists from themselves they should have protected, dedicated bikeways that are not meant for pedestrians or cars but bikes and transportation devices of similar speed and weight (roller skates to Segways). I think that this is a fantastic idea and should be the norm everywhere. I'm not retarded, a psychopath, or ignorant of what the law says. But I do have to share the road with cyclists who are and to save them from themselves I wholly support the above engineering and planning ideas and would even be willing to sacrifice my own income to make this a reality in the form of higher, purpose designated taxes.
If you have a problem with my attitude fine, but you're doing absolutely nothing to dissuade me from my preconceived notions that the community of cyclists I deal with every week is made up mostly of entitled assholes with a death wish.
Anybody who looks at a 40+ mph undivided two lane road with poor visibility and double yellow no passing lane markings and says "I'm going ride my bike there" is perfectly legal to do so. But they're also idiotic morons.
And when they complain that that journey wasn't safe, not because there isn't a good bike lane, but because of all the cars on that purpose built automotive surface driving exactly as they were supposed to, they can go fuck themselves. Because I'm not responsible for their stupidity.
Your entire point seems to be "I am a selfish and bad driver, so fuck everyone else".
I know when I ride I purposely try to avoid roads that have poor space for bikes. I don't feel safe and I don't want a distracted driver running me off the road. It took a couple near misses for me to learn that lesson, but I follow it and my rides are much more pleasant as a result.
Basically. But DanBC obviously wants to push some kind of agenda to the point of absurdity.
I get where you're coming from and what you're advocating, but your presentation needs a lot of work.
> I didn't ask them to get on the road with me, but I'll sure as hell be held responsible for their decision if something happens.
Even granting "sure as hell" as hyperbole, you're not even close to correct. Cyclists are held to the same traffic rules as drivers, and they are often found at fault. I do think the unprotected factor is extremely relevant, pushing me to support relaxed traffic rules for cyclists. They are, in fact, not piloting a lethal weapon (as a general rule). But the status quo is overwhelmingly in favor of treating drivers and cyclists equally, if not fairly.
> More importantly, as a tax payer, I've helped fund literally dozens of miles of really nice dedicated paved and marked bike only trails, complete with parking and overpasses, tunnels and signals at busy intersections. There is literally no excuse for them to play "Tour de France" on the same road I'm trying to get to work on.
Again, I'll grant you the hyperbole of "literally no excuse", where all I would need is a single counterexample. You've obviously never attempted to commute as a cyclist if you think you can get from your house to your work on bike-only paths. The number of counterexamples is orders of magnitude larger than the number of qualifying examples. For you to even come close to believing your statements tells me you live in an idyllic outlier of a community. Sign me up.
It's no surprise because the bike infrastructure stinks on those roads (which I'd be more than happy to support with my tax dollars to fix, and even give up a travel lane to make it happen).
It really is almost all sports bikers. It's all in the local area (I live in a very big development with almost zero office space anywhere nearby). It's hard to explain, but it really is just people tooling around in the suburbs and between developments training for bike races or triathlons.
It's a source of constant consternation and local messageboard discussion for the residents here who do have to get out of the suburb and to their jobs because all the cyclists really do impeded traffic to and from the arterial roads. What's specifically infuriating is that there's dozens of miles (maybe hundreds) of very well built and designed bike trails all over the same area, one of which even provides connectivity all the way into the major city some 30 miles away and intersects cleanly into several neighboring major employment centers (that almost all have branching connecting trail systems) along the way. I know the county next door has something like 500 miles of connected paved bike trails. But despite that, these guys will still get out on all the roads around here, endanger themselves and block traffic up for miles. I'm not sure how many there are, but it's enough to support a nice local bike store within walking distance from my house. But it's probably in the low hundreds.
Honestly, it only takes a dozen or so to fuck all the roads up every week.
The cyclists, not surprising don't give two shits and get on the local boards to make sure to let everybody know that and that their hobby is more important than everybody else.
Dedicated bike lanes tend not to exist everywhere. The initiatives for such things tend to be concentrated in city downtown areas where there are many riders. Once you are out in the boonies, there tends to be nothing. Often a piece of highway is the only realistic way to get somewhere, whether by car or bike. It's either that, or cut through a bush, corn field, or swim a body of water.
As we get away from the downtown areas, we still find bike trails, but more oriented toward recreation. They are localized into small areas and veer off useless places such as parks on the assumption that you aren't going to work, but on a picnic (if you were going to work, you would obviously drive). The trails do not form a complete system to get from A to B; even if you use them as much as possible, you have to use regular roads to get from one trail network to another. Some bike trails are also simply not built for speed; you cannot just get on these trails and pedal all out at 30 mp/h.
How many thousands of miles of streets do you have locally?
Is the decision to build roads for cars and not bikes still confusing for you?
I'm not confused. I just think it's hilarious to present "dozens of miles" as if it were a lot. I make no comment on the correctness of the quantity built.
It all connects into the regional bike trail system which includes a 50 mile paved and marked trail that gets you literally from farmland into the major city and crosses through almost every other sizable city and employment center along the way, each with connecting bike systems of their own. I don't know for my county specifically but the neighboring county has something like 500 miles of paved bike trail. I'm pretty sure my county isn't quite that extensive or well integrated but it's almost all fairly new, within the last 20 years.
It doesn't bring every town to within a friendly bike ride, but if you live and work near the 50 mile main trail, it's reasonable to bike commute to work every day.
The whole system across 3 counties and about 3 million people is something like 20 times the size of Copenhagen's to put it into perspective. It's just that my taxes mostly cover my local area and we're probably at under 100 miles of trail all told or about half what all of NYC has.
I don't know if that's a lot or not. It's not a mirror of the road system in terms of size (which I'd personally like to change), but it's no slouch either.
This is bullshit. If you hit and kill a pedestrian, you're not always at fault, even though they always have the right of way. Likewise, often drivers who kill cyclists get off scott free:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-to...
and here's an example of it happening again, from five days ago:
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/beach-633885-city-attorne...
Drivers like you are the reason cyclists have started wearing GoPros. If cyclists were so belligerent, you should mount a dash cam to start documenting their offenses.
Drivers don't subsidize cyclists, it's the other way around.
How, exactly, are you harmed by having to share the road safely with non-motor vehicles? Your stated concern over protection applies equally to motorcyclists, yet you seem to have no problem with them.
Your real concern seems to a presumption that you would get to work faster if it weren't for bicyclists. This is very unlikely in reality, and certainly no more than a couple minutes in the worst case. A belief that your right to get to work 2 minutes faster trumps other citizens' entitlement to use and enjoy public rights of way safely is somewhat sociopathic.
I can relate, though. This is what car commuting does to a lot of people. It's dog-eat-dog and me-first out there, with few norms of or need for civility. I've been there. It eats away at you progressively and makes life objectively worse. Explore your options for transit or ride-sharing or find a job you can walk, bike or take transit to. It really makes a huge difference in quality of life.
Cars are extremely dangerous to be around when in motion. Motorcyclists are also at risk, true, but they can move at car speeds and don't become a road obstacle to be avoided. I don't have any personal history of motorcyclists droning on and on about how unsafe the roads are when they're driving at some fraction of the speed limit and swerving in and out in front of speeding cars. But as the comments in just this thread indicate, cyclists seem to think the entire road system was purpose built for them and anybody not on two human powered wheels should adjust everything else they're doing just for them. No matter how you approach the topic, cyclists have convinced themselves this is true and it's every other person in the world's fault that they entered into an unsafe practice.
When my grandmother was learning to drive quite late in life (in her 50s). There were roads that she was literally unsafe driving on. Somebody recommended that maybe she should't drive on those roads. And you know what? She thought it was a good idea and didn't. She didn't blame all the people who drive above 60 mph, or the road engineers, or anybody else. She recognized that she was taking part in an unsafe practice and chose not to do it. She spent time finding alternate routes and ways to get where she wanted without dealing with those roads and as a result never had a road accident.
Runners, skateboarders, rollerskaters, motorcyclists, segway riders....in general don't act like bicyclists and don't have this specifically shitty attitude. A cyclist wants to meander along the middle of a high speed road and nearly get killed several times over, well that's the cars' fault. Cyclist runs a stopsign and nearly gets flattened? Cars' fault. Cyclist grabs my window well for a push off and damages the weatherstripping, well fuck me because he's on a bike and I should just know better than to expect a drive where my personal property doesn't get molested and damaged by cyclists.
Even suggesting that "maybe you shouldn't have been riding on that road" or "maybe you should be observing traffic signals" or "maybe you shouldn't put your hands on other people's property" is met with an almost militant rebut.
For fun find a cyclist discussion somewhere where they complain about something like this and post a mildly worded suggestion and see what kind of response you get. I absolutely guarantee it won't be "yeah, you know what, maybe we should be observing traffic laws like we're supposed to"
The East Bay Bicycle Coalition, at least, explicitly tells bikers to abide by the laws, and offers classes in (amongst other things) what those laws are. I fully agree that there are bicyclists that don't know what they're doing and ride unsafely, and I condemn that - as do a lot of other people I know who bike more regularly than I.
As kids you can kind of ride your bike wherever you want, as adults riders just sort of expand where they can ride to include roads and don't really give much thought to it. Police don't really seem to enforce the laws either, so you're kind of on your own to educate yourself or develop some method of ridership that works.
Note that the bicycle safety classes I mention above was not only free, they gave out free lights to boot!
Oh that's awesome. I would have loved to have had something like that. Do you know if they have local police come in and give safety talks as well? Cops see everything and they have all kinds of stories and advice to give.
I most states its legal for cycles (motor and non) to pass cars and pull to the head of the line at a light. Not sure why; but that's the way it is. Stopped cars + agile cyclist = no problem.
When traffic is moving after the light, the car sure as heck better leave some room for the cycle, because any error there means an ambulance.
Try staying for a minute or two behind a vehicle that has its engine running and burning fuel. In a line at a light inhaling exhaust is enough to make you dizzy—at least that's what happened to me when I tried it once. Always pulling right to the light afterwards.
It's legal in exactly one state: California. I think it's a wink and a nod for bicycles (or maybe it is legal for pedal bikes, I just don't care enough to look), but it is most definitely illegal outside of CA for motorcycles. One lane == one vehicle. I can even dig out the relevant section of the Revised Code of Washington, 'cause it sure would be sweet to lane split in WA but the RCW says "no".
A lot of lights in London have a space marked out at the front reserved for cyclists and motorcyclists so that they don't get cut up by vehicles making a turn.