Posted on 11/30/2016 7:24:52 AM PST by snarkpup
“Perhaps the bike lobby has gotten its PR backwards.”
That’s a hell of an understatement. Regular flouting of traffic laws endangering everyone on the road and stuff like “Critical Mass” where they all get together in a big group and flout the laws together doesn’t endear bicyclists to anyone.
I don’t even drive anymore and I hate bicyclists, because they show zero consideration even to pedestrians.
Too funny!
Supposed to be 68 today in CA, bright sun, mild pacific breeze, citrus trees full, flowers out and unlimited visibility!.
Not too bad going into December.☺
One of the main features of our local approach to bike traffic engineering is to herd incompetent cyclists who do not wish to learn to ride legally and safely on the roads onto sidewalks (euphemistically referred to as "mixed-use paths"). This has made these "urban trails" the most dangerous places to walk. Bicycles are vehicles; and mixing bike traffic and pedestrians is not only unsafe and incompetent traffic engineering—it is, at least in theory, against the rules of the road.
Sure made traffic a mess though; we were coming home from a funeral in California. We remembered it was Super Bowl Sunday when got to the traffic jam trying to just get through PHX.
He's the guy who is always ready to sacrifice a neighborhood park to build a new highway entrance or exit ramp, but who thinks mitigation funding that goes back to the neighborhood to replace the lost amenity is a misuse of highway dollars. He's the guy who thinks it's great to build a new, modern bridge over the river, but doesn't want to waste money on a bikeable sidewalk on the bridge, which then becomes a chokepoint for non-motorized traffic.
We make good natured fun with the classic New Yorker cover of the view of America as seen from Manhattan. We understand what is meant by flyover country. I find that many commuters have a very similar perceptual malady. They see the world as a network of destinations: home, work, shopping, schools, with everything else as "drivethrough country," inhabited by people of no account who are primitive enough not to want a commuter highway slammed through their neighborhoods.
Buy a clue: people who actually live in a neighborhood have rights that should be valued above the convenience of people who simply want to drive through at speed. It should not be difficult to get across the street, and if we solve that problem for pedestrians, we will generally solve it for bicyclists as well. Buy another clue: people who want to live in distant suburbs because they want a quiet cul de sac life should pause to reflect that the people in closer-in neighborhoods like their trees too, and they were there first.
I live in one of those in-the-way neighborhoods that the suburban automobile supremacists have been trying to destroy for many years. We will have to agree to disagree about this. If you think your commute is too long, live closer to your work. Don't try to ruin my neighborhood to shave a few minutes off your drive time. Sometimes I think the simple solution would be to eliminate eminent domain for new highways, at least in heavily urbanized areas.
Our largest cities have long since passed the point of diminishing returns on highway construction. We are on track to double the population every 50 years, and even if Trump magically builds a wall overnight, the population will increase substantially by mid-century due to people already here. There is no way DC, or Chicago, or New York, or LA, or a dozen other cities can build enough new highways to absorb this growth with the current transportation mix. In these cities, there is no more land for more roads in the urban core. They will have to shift to higher densities and to more non-automobile commuting. If you live in a smaller city, YMMV.
Local context is everything. In DC, bicycles are prohibited on sidewalks downtown but are ok in residential neighborhoods. (Young kids biking to the park or to school belong on the sidewalks.) On quiet streets, of which we have many, most adults ride on the street, but I do not hesitate to hop on the sidewalk if traffic is heavy. The sidewalks are generally pretty empty (except on the neighborhood shopping strips). So: I try to stay off arterial and major commuter roads, although chokepoints and barriers may force occasional convergence. (This is bad transportation planning -- often the result of the old sidewalk having been sacrificed to make another traffic lane -- and is part of what I complain about.) I stay off sidewalks if they're busy. I don't ride downtown. Beyond that, I don't want to speculate about the situation on the ground in other cities. They all vary. My point is simply that a little planning to accommodate pedestrian and bike traffic goes a long way.
Or am I to presume that you never jaywalk?
“bicyclists behave like pedestrians at intersections”
Wish that were true, but in my experience only about 2-3% of them do, the rest act like they own the road and have no regard for anyone’s safety (including their own).
“Or am I to presume that you never jaywalk?”
If I do, I make sure that the roadway is clear before I do, unlike most bicyclists who barrel through without bothering to check.
I live in one of those in-the-way neighborhoods that cyclists want to destroy for an off-road bike path. The road already has a bike lane, which they fought for but hardly use. I guess they would prefer a more scenic route through people's yards.
I dropped out of the League of American Wheelmen (as it was once called) when I saw them printing editorials claiming that bike paths were so important that the Constitution should be set aside and land for them should be taken without compensation. This was around the time the League apparently got taken over by environmentalists who were more interested in the utopian anti-motoring "Smart Growth" movement than training cyclists to ride legally and safely.
As to jaywalking: I recall years ago being escorted around a small college campus by the president, who was very proud of his landscaping. We came to a central quadrangle, which was marred by informal footpaths. He was bemoaning the rudeness of students while I struggled to suppress my grin. I did suggest to him that people on foot will invariably take the shortest route from A to B unless there is a physical barrier, such as a fence or bushes. The footpaths that so disturbed him were of course between the front doors of various classroom buildings on either side of the quad. No student is ever going to walk four times the distance around the perimeter when he can cut through.
Bicyclists are the same. They are moving by muscle power. It is comfortable to maintain a coasting speed, but it is work to get up to speed, and to be constantly dismounting and remounting. If there is no traffic, people on bikes will (usually) look both ways and keep going. Obviously, if crossing against the light you do so at your own risk, but it is unrealistic to expect anything else.
“They are moving by muscle power. It is comfortable to maintain a coasting speed, but it is work to get up to speed, and to be constantly dismounting and remounting. If there is no traffic, people on bikes will (usually) look both ways and keep going. Obviously, if crossing against the light you do so at your own risk, but it is unrealistic to expect anything else.”
Oh this is some great logic. It also takes effort for drivers to press down on the brake pedal, then wait for the light to change. I guess it would be unrealistic to expect them to stop for red lights too.
Sorry, but bicyclists do not just run red lights when it is safe, or when there is no traffic. They do it any time they possibly can, with a few exceptions (usually bicyclists with small children with them will be careful, the rest are not). They are not just doing so “at their own risk”, they are risking the lives of everyone on the road, especially pedestrians, who they seem to have zero awareness of or consideration for. I literally cannot count the number of times I have almost been run over by a bicyclist, having to literally leap out of their way when they decided to blow a red light while I was crossing in the crosswalk. So I have no sympathy for them in return. If someone ran for office on a “ban bicycles” ticket I would enthusiastically vote for them.
If you want anyone to have sympathy for bicyclists, stop apologizing for their inexcusable behavior and go convince them to reform themselves. They did not get a bad reputation by accident, it is their own doing.
We can invest in traffic calming techniques and perhaps computerized monitoring and variable control of signals to improve flow. We can upgrade any number of secondary streets to take some of the pressure off the arterial roads. In many of our strip developments along the major highways, it would help if they would connect the &^%!**+ parking lots so everyone did not have to get back out on the main road to drive down to the next building. These things would help. And maybe driverless cars with perfectly seamless traffic flow will come along soon enough to buy us more time. But new major roads? Nope. Can't happen.
Smart growth can mean different things to different people. There are crazies who want to run amuck. In my view, however, we are simply going to have to accept higher density in our biggest cities. In these cases, the best way to relieve traffic will be for people to seek much shorter commutes. (The true test of a commute is not mileage; it's time.) The best way to shorten commutes and get people off the main roads in many cases will be to build walkable, bikeable mixed use neighborhoods and try to make walking and biking realistic options for many more people.
This is not an either-or question. A lot of people will still choose to drive, or need to drive. That said, I live in a neighborhood in which I would guess somewhere between a third and half my neighbors already don't drive to work. It is a very convenient way to live. But it takes a little bit of smart planning to build neighborhoods with this in mind.
Just curious: where do you live? Bicyclists around here seem to know who is going to get killed if they get into an accident with a car. I don’t see the kind of behavior you describe, except occasionally from the bike messenger types when I am driving downtown. But I live in a fairly sedate residential neighborhood with a regular street grid, which makes it easy to avoid the relatively few busy streets. And I almost never ride downtown, where I would agree with you that bicyclists need to up their game.
I often see cyclists sailing through stop signs and red lights without making even a ceremonial "rolling" stop, just because they "know it's safe." The problem with this is that it cultivates bad habits. It's like dry-firing a gun in random directions just because one "knows it's unloaded." Some day it won't be unloaded; and some day there will be unexpected cross traffic.
I live in Chicago.
It would help if the businesses didn’t try to “rape” customers just because of major event, such as a Superbowl.
Maybe then, people would spend money there. Businesses thinking they hit the big time jack their prices and then seem azamed tht peope don’t send as much. I wonder why!
Back in the 1980s, I lived in the western suburbs. As I bicycle commuter, I had to deal with two issues: 1) DuPage County motorists on the roads and 2) children riding bikes on Prairie Path (a mixed-use trail on an abandoned railroad bed, which was an alternative to some of the roads). I used the principles described in John Forester's book Effective Cycling to deal safely with the motorists. There was no known way to deal with the out-of-control kids on the "bike path", so I opted to stay on the roads. Following Forester's principles, I never had a problem.
Well, there never are many pedestrians in the suburbs, and bicyclists in the 1980s did not have the attitude that most of them seem to have nowadays. I blame the environmentalists for the latter development. They think they are “saving the planet” by biking, so they act like they are entitled to do whatever they like.
When I lived in Tucson I never saw people as rude as the cyclists. I hated (and still do even though I don’t live there ), the El Tour de Tucson.
for later
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