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"I already pay..." "I don't give a rat's ass..." "I don't care about those..." "I will fend for myself..." "I also don't care about..." "My commute is already..." "I can beat transit..." "I don't care about a new bridge..."

You've done a great job of making the article's point. You've fallen for the cognitive trap that the article is describing.

You have not considered more complex effects. How does this affect your family, friends, and co-workers? How does this affect the school and parks in your neighbourhood? How does this increase population density? How does this affect property prices? How does this affect pollution levels?

I believe that the plan will affect most of those things negatively. More traffic, more density, more pollution.

Your comment comes across to me like someone without kids complaining about school levies simply because they don't have kids. You've solved your commute problem and that is great. However, some day your commute problem may not be solved and you may need to rely on public transportation. You may even find yourself needing a road or two at some time in the future.

You are under no obligation to try to convince others to agree with your perspective but if that is your goal maybe a different line of reasoning would be better.

> However, some day your commute problem may not be solved and you may need to rely on public transportation. You may even find yourself needing a road or two at some time in the future.

At that time, I will pay the fare, or gasoline tax or whatever.

> a different line of reasoning would be better.

Like what? Vote in a way that is good for someone else, rather than yourself?

Here is an idea: everyone should vote in a completely myopic way based on what is immediately good for them today.

The big picture emerges from the total of the vote.

This is correct and how democracy works.

Democracy is not optimal; for that you want to remove voting and have centralized control.

> Here is an idea: everyone should vote in a completely myopic way based on what is immediately good for them today.

If Vancouver had a referendum to get rid of bike lanes and ban bikes from streets entirely, I doubt you would be saying the same thing. There are far more drivers than cyclists. I guess in that case all the drivers should vote to get rid of bike lanes and ban cyclists?

> If Vancouver had a referendum to get rid of bike lanes

Right, because global referenda which mainly affect a minority are examples of democracy?

Should gays be allowed to get married? Let's hold a referendum! Should some natives be given back a piece of land? Let's hold a referendum!

For the record, I currently sometimes ride where bikes are banned, namely certain sections of certain highways. So I wouldn't care. And I'm not a big supporter of bike lanes.

I'm not opposed to the idea, however, of requiring cyclists to be licensed somehow as a requirement for the use of public roads that carry motor vehicles. Don't ban; qualify.

Referendums don't directly happen for issues like that, but they do happen indirectly through the parties we vote for. Say there was a party running for city council called the "Get Rid of the Bikes Party", where that was their main platform. Would you still encourage everyone to vote for what helps themselves personally?

If everyone voted for just the things that helped them and against everything else - whether in referendums, elections, whatever - minorities would pretty much always be repressed.

> Would you still encourage everyone to vote for what helps themselves personally?

If someone thinks that a city council whose main focus is getting rid of bikes is the best for them, they should absolutely vote that way. The idea that I would have someone vote for what she thinks is good for me rather than him or herself is absurd.

> Here is an idea: everyone should vote in a completely myopic way based on what is immediately good for them today.

Are you so also cavalier with your finances? Why not spend your money in a completely myopic way based on what will bring you happiness today. Next month will take care of itself.

> Secondly, transit should support itself from the fares it collects: how about that!

I am not personally of the opinion that every service should be budget neutral or budget positive, especially if they are making investments in large-scale improvements. For most transit options, charging a self-sustaining rate would severely limit service at worst, or make it impossible to expand at best. Further, with transit specifically, everyone benefits taking cars off the roads, so to me a use-tax as the only funding mechanism is not appropriate.

Beyond that, your position reads to me like "I'm fine, so it's all fine."

> I'm fine, so it's all fine

I absolutely do not hold such an illogical position. Rather, I'm fine and don't care about the rest.

> Further, with transit specifically, everyone benefits taking cars off the roads,

I'm an example of taking a car off the road, without transit. Since you believe that people should pay some levy for the sake cars being taken off roads, it follows that a tax should be collected and some of it transferred to my personal bank account.

Fine, you care only about yourself. Understood.

You're able to bike on the roads, it seems. What bike tax are you paying for those roads? And you're right, you as a biker don't benefit at all from reduced auto traffic. Not one bit. No, you're an entirely independent entity in an otherwise highly interconnected traffic and transit network, it seems. The environmental pollution, sound pollution, increased pedestrian/biker/driver safety, and reduced infrastructure damage are benefits for everyone else.

But in fairness, in isolation I would support a tax credit for individuals who drive less than X miles per year.

> Fine, you care only about yourself. Understood.

Yes, and my vote represents myself. The fact that other people have other needs is represented by the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of other votes.

The idea that Peter should vote for what is good for Paul rather than Peter is absurd.

> What bike tax are you paying for those roads?

None, currently! Bring it on. Calculate the wear caused by cyclists and send me my share of the maintenance bill.

> And you're right, you as a biker don't benefit at all from reduced auto traffic. Not one bit.

No, I don't. Less traffic means cars going faster. The safest is no cars at all, or cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic slugging along in 15 km/h bursts.

This proposal promises reduced commute times to drivers. There is supposed to be a new bridge and more roads and so on. Of course that will get more people into cars. The commute times will then eventually drop to the original values, just with more cars. More noise, more pollution.

Vancouver has never been about this. That is why we do not have a nasty network of raised highways routed through the city, like other cities in the world. You can't get from one side of Vancouver to the other without crossing a crapload of intersections. That's the character of this town.

Douglas Copeland writes about this at length in the introduction to the book _Vancouver Stories_.

I do not care about myself only, but also about preserving the character of this town. I do not support the "Los Angelization" of Vancouver.

Do you pay a fee to use the roads you bike on? Probably not. Then why should transit users pay all costs directly, but bike (and, of course, car) users get subsidies? OK, putting the subsidy on your electric bill is pretty weird, but the general idea of subsidizing mass transit makes it no different from just about every other form of transportation.

Even from the point of pure self-interest, transit benefits you: each additional person who takes it is one less car on the road trying to run you down and put you in the hospital for the crime of riding a bike.

Road fee for cyclists? Bring it on. Calculate how much wear and tear I cause to the pavement and send me a repair bill.

Don't forget your share of the initial capital costs and wear due to weathering, both of which are substantial.

Weathering is caused by cars, especially heavy trucks. They crack the pavement, which then invites damage from freeze-thaw cycles. If nothing but bikes use a road, it will be good for the next seventy-five years.

Anyway, I'm completely in favor.

I think cyclists should be licensed in order to be allowed to use roads, and the fees could be collected through the licensing system. The police should be able to impound bikes that are driven on roads by unlicensed riders, or bikes that are not road-worthy, such as no lights at night or nonworking brakes.

Do you also think that if you don't have kids in school, your taxes shouldn't pay for public education?

No, because having kids in school is not comparable to refusing to get out of your car or bus.

If I don't have kids in school, I have not found an alternative way to achieve the same thing as someone who does have kids in school (an alternative that is cheaper, more efficient and easier on the environment).

If we don't have kids, humanity vanishes. If we have kids, but they don't go to school, everything will go to hell in a hound basket within the span of a generation.

Not everyone lives close enough to work to be able to reasonably bike there. If I biked to work it would be 30km in heavy traffic every day, rain or snow or shine. The usual response to this is to tell me to live closer to work. I would love to do that, but every km I move closer to work is a km we move further from my husband's work. If I wasn't driving or taking the bus, he would be, definitely.

In today's reality, most couples are expected/required to have both partners work, and we've yet to figure out how to solve that 2-body problem on a wide scale. More telecommuting would help, but many companies are still strongly resistant to it even when it's possible. The society that you live in needs the people living >10km from work to be able to get to work and I guarantee that if this wasn't possible anymore, you would feel the hit. If people could only get jobs at places within biking distance, unemployment would skyrocket, as would the number of unfillable job openings. The cascading effect of that would be huge. Have fun with that.

> I don't give a rat's ass about transit. I bike to work!

Surely biking to work is easier if there are fewer cars on the road?

No, it isn't. Biking to work is best when there are no cars on the road at all, or when they are bumper to bumper, moving in small 15 km/h bursts (in which situation I can treat them as de facto standing objects).

Also, small narrow streets where cars have to go slow are better than big wide lanes.

Part of this proposal is about improving the road infrastructure which is about, doh, more cars, moving faster. Faster commute times are promised to drivers and transit riders alike.

Also, transit buses present a particular threat to me: they always pull over to the right, cutting me off so that I have to swerve left around them into traffic. Almost daily, some bus driver races ahead of me and then cuts me off, even though I'm faster on average, and if he just gave me a few seconds, I would be out of there and he'd never see me again. If I vote Yes, I'm saying I want more of these jerks out there trying to kill me.