In the U.S. we're struggling to get them to understand that bike lanes and sidewalks can't just randomly end mid-block and still be useful. While the idea seems ostensibly solid, and cars very much need containment, we still have much more basic needs before we can start optimizing car infrastructure.
No, we can start improving car infrastructure right away because, on the types of roads that have guardrails, cars are like 98% of the traffic or more. And the rare roads that have both guardrails and sidewalks should probably have the sidewalks on the far side of the guardrails, at which point improved guardrails also protect pedestrians.
Purely from a safety standpoint, outright prohibiting bicycle traffic on motorized roads would be a massive improvement at the expense of inconveniencing a small minority of people (while improving the convenience for everyone else). I'm kind of surprised more states haven't done it yet. Failing that, it's probably better to also use guardrails to physically separate the bike lanes from the motor lanes, which is yet another use-case for improved guardrails.
> Purely from a safety standpoint, outright prohibiting bicycle traffic on motorized roads would be a massive improvement at the expense of inconveniencing a small minority of people (while improving the convenience for everyone else).
To me this sounds like the equivalent of permanently shutting down a public park because it's infested with disease carrying rats rather than trying to get rid of the rats.
No, I'm comparing America's car culture to a rat infestation; something that causes serious problems and is a problem in its own right. This has nothing to do with the moral standing of individuals drivers...
Which is a ludicrous, fringe viewpoint that verges on trolling when you go out of your way to bring it up in a discussion about safety barriers for motorways.
Slaveholders were a minority of the population who managed to structure all of society to suit their wishes to the detriment of everyone else. As you might have gathered, I’m opposed to this sort of thing.
As you might have gathered, I’m opposed to this sort of thing.
In that case perhaps we could compare the number of drivers in the United States with the global population and then talk about the environment? The US is a major contributor to global climate change and the US is exceptionally bad compared to other developed nations in GHG contributions arising directly from motor vehicle use. I'm not interested in contrived arguments about slavery but if you want to take a principled stand against a small minority forcing their preferences and the adverse consequences of those preferences on a much larger majority then unfortunately you are on the wrong side of this issue.
Purely from a safety standpoint, outright prohibiting bicycle traffic on motorized roads would be a massive improvement at the expense of inconveniencing a small minority of people (while improving the convenience for everyone else). I'm kind of surprised more states haven't done it yet.
But then you have the self-perpetuating problem of stigmatising cycling and promoting car use. Given the numerous advantages of promoting cycling for journeys where it's a reasonable alternative it seems quite understandable that governments wouldn't want to universally ban on-road cycling.
It’s not a problem IMO. Bicycles aren’t very useful vehicles compared to cars, which is why a very small share of the US population uses them on the roads in the first place. Unfortunately that tiny minority of people are very outspoken about attempting to socially and physically engineer the world to cater to their preferences.
> Bicycles aren’t very useful vehicles compared to cars
I find this point of view amusing because it is so contradictory to my personal experience. In my case, I started commuting by bike after years of being tired to spend an unpredictable amount of time stuck on traffic, looking through the window at cyclists merrily passing by. Since becoming one of these cyclists, I feel a bit of pity every time that I see people stuck in their useless cars.
I concede that cars can be more useful than bicycles in some circumstances. There are also people like you who legitimately seem to love using cars, and there's nothing wrong with that. But at least in my country:
- there are more bikes than cars
- there are more people who can drive bikes than cars
- every year, more bikes are sold than cars
- most car trips are less than 10km
- most of those cars only carry a single person
- most people would prefer to take the bike than the car if they could
Why do most people still use cars, then? Because there is no safe infrastructure for cycling, and that is the main problem. Improving cycling infrastructure would be a net benefit for everybody, especially for car lovers who would then find their streets liberated of other drivers who just hate being there.
Another problem with cars is that they are ridiculously space-inefficient. Especially when they carry a single person, which is most of the time. A street with 20 people in 20 cars is crowded in dense traffic. The same 20 people cycling or walking are almost invisible, low density occupation of the same space.
> Because there is no safe infrastructure for cycling, and that is the main problem.
Which, as I pointed out, could be addressed with more effective barriers between motor vehicle and bicycle lanes. But I think you’re very much overestimating the willingness of Americans to ride bicycles to get around in a Florida or Texas summer, or a Minnesota winter, or up the hills of Seattle or San Francisco, as well as the degree to which Americans are willing to tolerate constantly stinking of sweat.
Which, as I pointed out, could be addressed with more effective barriers between motor vehicle and bicycle lanes.
Unfortunately it isn't as simple as that. Statistically most serious accidents involving cyclists happen at junctions or other localised hazards. For obvious reasons complete physical separation of car and cycle lanes usually isn't possible in those places.
I mean, sure, yesterday I made a trip that was less than 10km.
It took around fifteen minutes. I'm a pretty quick cyclist and it would have taken over half an hour.
It was also 6 degrees C outside and raining.
I don't consider cycling particularly unsafe even on the road.
But, aside from it being pretty good exercise, it's objectively inferior for me to do it, unless the car infrastructure is unavailable or deliberately crippled.
It's not about crippling car infrastructure. There will always be good reasons to use large/flexible/powerful vehicles for a lot of journeys.
It is about not promoting car infrastructure to the detriment and ultimately exclusion of alternatives that have the potential to be widely beneficial to society (including, ironically, to those who still drive motor vehicles in our hypothetical alternative reality).
You can provide well for different modes of transportation at the same time. Several European cities have had great success in doing so and they are much nicer places for it.
> Bicycles aren’t very useful vehicles compared to cars, which is why a very small share of the US population uses them on the roads in the first place.
It's because the infrastructure for biking is almost non-existent. Thanks to people who keep saying "just ban bycicles because cars!".
The infrastructure is almost non-existent because the vast majority of Americans don’t use bicycles to travel, not the other way around. There is not any sort of untapped well of demand in the American population to use bicycles to get around, outside of a very small and vocal activist minority who mostly already ride their bicycles in motor traffic already.
The Netherlands is an extremely dense, flat, temperate country, which is ideal for bicycles. The United States is none of those things. Bicycles predate automobiles by decades, but in the US they never even displaced horses or horse-drawn vehicles because even those are more practical than bicycles here.
> The infrastructure is almost non-existent because the vast majority of Americans don’t use bicycles to travel, not the other way around.
No. Please read about Netherlands again.
> The Netherlands is an extremely dense, flat, temperate country, which is ideal for bicycles. The United States is none of those things.
Ah yes. All of United States is mountainous land where each person leaves 100 miles from another person.
However, even in places where United States is more like the Netherlands there's almost non-existent bicycle infrastructure (or even pedestrian infrastructure for that matter).
> Bicycles predate automobiles by decades, but in the US
Ah yes. The uniqueness of the United States where bicycles were introduced decades before the car. Unlike any other country where... bicycles were introduced decades before the car.
If you actually made the effort to read the link (and watch the video), you'll see that it's not a unique thing only seen in the US. Let me quote:
"But the way Dutch streets and roads are built today is largely the result of deliberate political decisions in the 1970s to turn away from the car centric policies of the prosperous post war era." The Dutch had the same thing: everything was being converted to roads used exclusievly by motorists, and "the Dutch don't use bicycles for travel". And yet, here we are in 2022.
> > Bicycles predate automobiles by decades, but in the US
> Ah yes. The uniqueness of the United States where bicycles were introduced decades before the car. Unlike any other country where... bicycles were introduced decades before the car.
You’re quoting me out of context and mocking me for your own misunderstanding of what I said. What I said was, “Bicycles predate automobiles by decades, but in the US they never even displaced horses or horse-drawn vehicles”.
In the English language, we use words known as “conjunctions” to combine two related thoughts into the same sentence. The first thought was, “bicycles predate automobiles by decades”, which is a general statement that was not specific to the US. The second thought was, “bicycles never even displaced horses in the US”. These two statements are joined by the conjunction “but”. Adding the qualifier phrase “in the US” after the conjunction “but” is done to indicate that the qualifier phrase does not apply to the first thought.
> The Dutch had the same thing: everything was being converted to roads used exclusievly by motorists
They didn’t quite have the same thing, which is the point I made earlier. From Wikipedia:
> Cycling became popular in the Netherlands a little later than it did in the United States and Britain, which experienced their bike booms in the 1880s, but by the 1890s the Dutch were already building dedicated paths for cyclists.[8] By 1911, the Dutch owned more bicycles per capita than any other country in Europe.
> The ownership and use of bicycles continued to increase and in 1940 there were around four million bicycles in a population of eight million. Half of these bicycles disappeared during the German occupation, but after the war the use of bicycles quickly returned to normal and continued at a high level until 1960 (annual distance covered by bicycle for each inhabitant: 1500 km). Then, much like it had in other developed nations, the privately owned motor car became more affordable and therefore more commonly in use and bicycles as a result less popular. That is: ownership still remained high, but use fell to around 800 km annually.[9] Even so, the number of Dutch people cycling was very high compared to other European nations.
This did not happen in the US, where private car ownership caught on much earlier, but also where bicycles were never as popular to begin with as they had been in the Netherlands.
You really need to work on your reading comprehension, or at least put in more of an effort. My central point here isn’t that the US is unique. If anything, it’s the Netherlands that’s unique. But at the very least, they are two very different countries.
One thing the US and Netherlands have in common is that they are both democracies. The Dutch pivoted back to bicycle infrastructure because there was public demand for it. This is not true in the US.
Bicycles aren’t very useful vehicles compared to cars
That depends on your criteria. For journeys where they are a viable option bikes are usually much cheaper, healthier, less dangerous, more efficient and cleaner than cars. Of course that doesn't include all journeys that people need to make but it does include many of them.
which is why a very small share of the US population uses them on the roads in the first place.
Somehow I doubt their lack of utility is the reason that almost nobody in the US rides bikes on the road.
They didn’t always. That infrastructure was built and subsidized so they were used.
> Purely from a safety standpoint, outright prohibiting bicycle traffic on motorized roads would be a massive improvement at the expense of inconveniencing a small minority of people
Purely from safety standpoint, making less motorized roads would be a massive improvement and people would conform to new modes of travel just like when cars and interstates were introduced.
There are plenty of other countries on that page with similar laws.
> In Zimbabwe, jaywalking is illegal, as per the traffic laws gazetted in 2013 by the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure Development.
> In recent years, jaywalking has become more strictly controlled in China as car traffic increased. Police have tested facial recognition to identify jaywalkers.
Italy:
> Pedestrians are allowed to cross a street without any recognised crossing point only if there are no zebra crossings within a range of 100 m
My point was more that "things that americans do", "things that everyone does", and "things we should be doing" is a venn diagram with a very small center when it comes to car use.
When I used the word “we”, I was talking about the US. I don’t believe in a global “we”. You live in a country where pedestrians are allowed to walk out onto the same street where cars go, and I live in a country where they aren’t. And apparently, we are both happy with how our respective countries do things. And that’s fine; I’m happy that you’re happy with your country’s laws and customs and I wouldn’t want to impose my country’s laws and customs on anyone else.
