Post

Those folks need a sense of proportion

fundamental problem with motorists & cyclists & (admitting w/ sorrow & regret) pedestrians is, they're all a bunch of Homo sapiens from the Greek for Homo: relentless sapiens: jerk

I recently got a Class 2 e-bike and was getting disapproving looks/comments on a trail where these are permitted, despite my speed being 15 mph or so. As a test, I tried the same route with pedaling vs throttle. Same speed. Pedaling: zero disapproval. ….

if good transport infrastructure was a reward for good behavior then how the fuck did all these folks driving like shit i see every week in various ways earn these flat wide roads?

A cyclist killed my goat! Or did I dream it…

to be clear: there is a direct line linking both deaths

I appreciate this post as someone who doesn't ride a bike on the street, basically ever, & may get irritated by other drivers of any vehicle (including bikes!) However, dedicated bike lanes 100% keep me as a driver safer, b/c I don't want to hit anyone! I hope they keep those on bikes safer as well.

Especially when many of the rules, are written to cope with the deficiencies of motor vehicles. Eg Compulsory Stop often there due to vehicle speed, mass, and driver visibility limitations not a factor for cyclists

I hate that paths in our area have been given zero road visibility, if i cant see im slowing down to stop if needed, then some impatient hoser always has to speed around and inevitably nearly bodies someone. Have an iota of thought for others, please

I don’t know what it is about bike lanes that causes the crazy. I live in Santa Monica, CA. The subreddit bike threads are a thing of nightmare. “If you don’t agree with me, you are an evil moron who hates everything good.” In <3 posts. Always.

As a walker, I appreciate good bike lanes, it keeps them off the sidewalks. We should really get rid of cars lanes.

Most in fact do. Which may or may not make it worse.

In all seriousness: as a dedicated but schlubby bicycle commuter I had to retrain myself when after mostly not driving for a decade I started again, because I was too used to straining for every bit of acceleration and once I was behind the wheel of a car accelerating was misleadingly effortless.

Here, have a study which says that bicyclists are faster at a common driving skill than only-drivers: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28732320/

A drunk blind bicyclist juggling chainsaws while breathing fire going the wrong way on a one way street during rush hour is less dangerous than an above average SUV driver to other road uses.

I have encountered exactly 1 badly behaved cyclist in my life worth remembering. They blew through a red light at high speed, putting themselves at risk. I remember several drivers within the last couple years who did the same, nearly killing me and others.

I was an exceedingly well behaved cyclist every day for a decade, and when I started I had two knees, but a badly behaved driver fixed that for me, with an efficiency the very worst-behaved cyclist would struggle to match.

As @notjustbikes.com often says -- bike lanes are an example of *car-centric* infrastructure. If cyclists weren't so desperately in need of being protected from vehicles and their drivers, bike lanes would be unnecessary

All of that is what makes cars mostly-safe (if still the most dangerous form of transport) and makes the remaining danger feel costed-in, in the sense of being mitigated, managed and anticipated.

I think it may be because you can actually see the person on a bike and thus assign more agency.

lol this is what I get for not reading back far enough 😅

You see this in the insane way sentences are given for traffic crimes. Someone can run over and kill someone and then it’s like “6 months suspended sentence and banned from driving for three years.”

You may already be aware of it, but @ianwalker.bsky.social looks at this in his work on motornormitivity

Not in nyc mate

It's worse than that- there are a lot of tasks involved in driving that due to the way that attention and perception in the brain works make drivers perceive cyclists as surprising and dangerous even just for doing normal cyclist things. Motorcycles trigger a lot of the same reactions.

I will say, there's bike infrastructure that prevents trouble, and bike infrastructure that causes it. Here in Malmö, we have bike lanes that do not have any physical boundary to sidewalks, occasionally just crossing over the sidewalk or similar. The result is predictable.

Those responses feel like they are coming from the "cops can kill people if they might have done crimes" crowd. Booooo to that!

Why are we trying to make CITIES safer? Cities are the worst. Haven't you heard of Sodom and Gomorrah? (am i doing this right?)

THIS ⬆️🚩⬆️🚩⬆️🚩🚩🚩

Isn't saying you hate cyclists on the road a sign you should be for bike lanes that are safely separate from where you drive and park your car? Otherwise, be serious and just say you think bicycles are an infernal contraption the ATF shoud treat like a moonshine still.

Consequently i always take the lane, because I don't think cycle respectability politics is gonna break that cycle (eyy) :p

BUT ONE TIME I SAW A CYCLIST WEARING SPANDEX AND IT MADE ME IRRATIONALLY ANGRY

i know it’s far from the point of your post but now i ascribe to the belief that bike lanes should be ubiquitous and roads for cars should be a reward for good car behavior. it’s perfect because under this system there will never be a need to build roads for cars

Ngl if we used that argument against car users, by their own logic no car infrastructure should ever be built given how many people die/are injured by their hand. Alas, one can only hope that cities wisen up to building more bike/pedestrian infrastructure.

a) I was joking. And b) no they weren’t - they were built for horses!

There's a guy in my parents' neighborhood who thinks cyclists have the right of way at 4 way stops. Everyone has nearly hit him. I haven't even noticed him after they put in traffic calming measures and a roundabout. It's not hard to share the road if the infrastructure is there!

"Pretty much nobody who complains about bike rider behavior is against better infrastructure!" It's so handy when the post starts off with a delusional lie.

Well in SF at least, it’s pretty much a wall of posts arguing against better infrastructure and citing cyclist behavior as justification.

bsky.app/profile/jscr...

no one is talking about bike lanes as needed so that bikes can go faster -- they're needed because they VASTLY REDUCE DEATH

i think a lot of the "misbehavior" is a reaction to the kind of harms cyclists are exposed to by primarily cars and trucks and some truly baffling decisions by road planners (near my home there is a section where cyclists are supposed to weave in and out of traffic every 50 or so m, but only 1 way)

It’s such wild confirmation bias because everyone has 100 times more negative experiences with other motorists than they do cyclists. But for some reason those experiences are “normal” and quickly forgotten, but folk will bring up the one time a bike cut them off for years.

exactly! at minimum curbing separating the bike lanes from car lanes

It’s so frustrating because I feel like these conversations end up putting people at odds that don’t need to be, I really do think there are ways to satisfy what everybody needs with a little bit of compromise and consideration! I appreciate you not being that person 💕

Are you saying cyclists shouldn't be rewarded for good behavior?

Brava!!

around here it's "entitled cyclists took away our parking for their precious lanes and they're not even using them!" (cycleways are inappropriate for those cyclists who want to travel at car speed and they're not legally required to use the cycleways anyway.)

well, its actually really fun, so at least theres that

Convenient how everybody complaining about cyclists still don't want the bike lane that fixes it.

And an actual useful one, not where the curb is painted with a bike symbol.

That would take their ability to blatantly attempt to murder cyclists though. A thing anyone who has ridden a bike on roads for any length of time can attest to. I've had on multiple occasions been in positions where I can only describe what the motorist was doing as gleefully attempting to kill me.

Some people absolutely have a mental model that it's far worse for "the wrong person" to get something good, than for everybody to be worse off. It's nuts. But they really see good things as immoral if somebody they don't like will use or benefit from the good thing.

Came here to say this.

hopefully the bike lanes can continue through junctions, instead of giving up with "I dunno, sidewalk's there, I guess. sort it out yourself"

Signaling that drivers will obey without any enforcement? There is no such thing.

A thing that makes cycling extra scary is that people who think this is a good point are just out there regularly piloting 3500 lb of metal.

True, we should ban cars.

Human nature (or at least our culture) is to learn from and emphasize negative interactions and develop a perception that those negative interactions are common. Figure out how to deal with that bigger problem and so much of our society would work more smoothly.

My personal observation is that good bike infrastructure IMPROVES cyclist behavior. That hints at what may be causing the “bad” cyclist behavior. Rules designed to govern driver behavior don’t always make cyclists safer.

As a driver (I have some coordination problems that make me a bit wary to try with cycling at the moment): where are cyclists and pedestrians supposed to be? Most of the time in my UK town it feels like the problem is there are no dedicated cycle paths.

There is something about cars that short circuits people’s brains, especially back in the US. I’ll chat with family, friends and acquaintances and it’s like they can’t even process that you can build cities that provide more than 1 transit option and that the other options are more convenient.

It's even better if you have all of these working together with Tokyo, Japan levels of transit.

I will not listen to anything about the Netherlands and their bike culture, because they refuse to wear helmets. They refuse to wear helmets, they make all the standard, stupid-ass excuses for not wearing them, and therefore THEY ARE STUPID. We can argue in favor of bikes without them.

The same folks who rage against cyclists and bike infrastructure tend to deny the very idea of induced demand. Meanwhile good bike infrastructure demonstrates that induced demand applies even to cycling. Build it and they will bike.

but also by reducing wait times at intersections by getting pedestrian traffic out of the way sooner.

I guess I just don't understand why anyone would be against separated bike lanes as a concept?

I'm always impressed how normalized deranged, sometimes murderous, hatred of cyclists is.

Bike lanes, Pedestrian lanes, and Trams. All clearly separated and well maintained

Having biked in Copenhagen and some of the least bike-friendly parts of Germany, my observation is that the number of mad cyclists seems a constant fraction of road users anywhere. When you have good bike infrastructure, these madmen won't go away, but their behaviour will drown in the average.

I have all sorts of bad things to say about cyclists but that pales in comparison to the bad things I have to say about cars and is also wholly irrelevant to the need to build out proper cycling infrastructure. It’s an easy position to have!

The way some people actively want to ruin everything that's meant to make everyone's lives better.

Resistance to painted-line bike lanes may (even subconsciously) a recognition from car drivers that they're not enough. Painted-on bike lanes still cause cars and bikes to mix unpredictably. Bikes need separate roads or at least a strong, physical divider.

(I would personally like to see car roads pushed out of city centers entirely, with public transport and bikes/scooter/walking handling last-mile transit, but I know it's a pipe dream)

drop speed limits everywehre

People are dull.

Right. Closing bike lanes because one bike runs a light or rides the wrong way is like closing a street to cars because one driver runs a red like or fails to yield on a right turn.

Much of the psycho cyclist narrative really stems from the fat they are fighting for their lives out there on the road. The lack of empathy for cyclists is insane. Yeah there are bad eggs, but like the post says bad egg cyclists don’t obliterate pedestrians with 2 tons of steel

Car drivers break the rules 30 times on the way to the grocery store.

It's awesome how bike lanes are the tiniest and pettiest example of why everything sucks now. "The people who are right are kindof annoying, so let's just let everything rot and collapse. That'll show 'em"

We can do lane splitting, and lane filtering here now. People bitch about bikes moving to the front of a light. I've had cars try and bully me out of there was slowly pulling forward once I'm at the front. Ignorant people bitch ignorantly and will never do anything else.

Well... I guess in theory you could just re-allocate the same space to nothing (like buffer space) and get most of the safety results without inducing more cycling.

And good thing there are no badly behaved drivers!!

Imagine conflating hitting a person with a car vs with a bike. They aren't even in the same galaxy!

Imagine if roads were only built as a reward for good driver behavior...

Bike Lanes are insufficient. Every cyclist should also be allowed to kill one driver each month. However! I am willing to be argued into one a day.

Like I said. Just repaving 4 lanes with a wide grassy median. Grind down old road curb to curb, new asphalt, paint new lines, add some signs. Now a road with 2 cars lanes and 1 bike lane on each side. No changes for cars except slightly narrower lanes, nice space for bikes.

There were 1166 cyclists in Ameroca killed by cars in 2023. The sneering indifference towards the lives of cyclists by dipshit drivers is at least partly to blame. share.google/EmVvLVINM4JU...

What's weird about this discussion is that "every way cyclists have wronged me" would be *immediately* solved if they just had bike lanes to ride in instead.

Pft. Cyclists don't behave any worse than drivers. Bad behavior is not limited to one kind of vehicle.

What makes me insane is that, at least in LA, bike lanes are predominantly installed in the “extra” space left over by a road diet. The point of the redesign is to slow cars, but drivers assume that it’s for bike lanes, which often have only moderate ridership, because they’re not where bikers ride.

My town is putting in sidewalks and some of my neighbors were against it because they were "concerned about the trees." It wasn't about the trees. They didn't want "those people" walking safely near their house. This feels similar. They don't want more cyclists, but that's not OK to say out loud.

🔥🔥🔥

That’s stupid. The main ‘victims’ of bad behaving cyclists are well behaving cyclists. The existence of assholes (motorized or not) should not matter when we are talking about infrastructure.