There’s plenty of examples where car and bike can coexist. Look at Denmark or the Netherlands.
I’ve seen a few other factors that might contribute to increased pedestrian/cyclist deaths on our roads:
-
e-Bikes. e-Bikes are mostly a goddamn mistake. The ones that don’t make the bike go any faster than you yourself can pedal it, just make pushing the pedals easier? Those are fine. Anything else should be classified as a moped, and I don’t know why they aren’t. People are riding them at 20+ miles per hour on sidewalks and getting backed into out of blind driveways that weren’t designed with traffic that speed on the sidewalk. Plus you’ve just got more people on 2-wheelers mixing with car traffic, which is a game they lost at the character select screen.
-
Half-assed attempts by DMVs to add bike lanes and walking paths. All the squawking about walkable cities this and fuck cars that you bots have been bitching about has been heard. In my area, where new housing developments or shopping centers are going in, the DOT now requires bike lanes and sidewalks in such places. They connect to nowhere because the main roads aren’t all being modified to add such features, not until they need major modifications themselves. So you’ll see bikes and pedestrians on highways they didn’t used to appear on.
Another problem I’ve seen is the mixing of bike lanes and turn lanes. Our roads have long been built such that any lane that is allowed to turn right does not have lanes that can go straight to their right. So if you have the right of way to turn right, by green circle or green right arrow signal, it is logically safe for the driver to proceed. Until they added bike lanes to the extreme outside next to the curb. We didn’t add signals for these bike lanes, they’re supposed to follow the same signals as cars. So. You’re sitting at a red light with your right turn signal on. It turns solid green. You go. The cyclist overtaking you in the bike lane also saw the light turn green, he tries to go straight, he is crushed to death under your right rear tire. This didn’t used to be a problem, it is now.
- Walkers and bikers be out here going full retard. My neighborhood is a grid system full of stop signs. There are two North-South streets a couple blocks apart where all the stop signs are crossing, so these are main thoroughfares through town. Cars go the posted speed limit of 35 along there. Between these two streets is another that has stop signs on most blocks. Cars don’t tend to travel down that road because they constantly have to stop. Guess where everyone decides to walk and bike? EVERYWHERE EXCEPT THE ROAD WITH NO CAR TRAFFIC. People go out of their way to play in traffic. I guess you can’t earn a living by getting a job anymore, so you’ve got to get your pelvis crushed to have your day in court.
Akasazh@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The United States isn’t Denmark or the Netherlands; we have been building bike unfriendly roads for a century, and it’s not going to be trivially undone by painting a white line on the side.
Akasazh@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
They didn’t come out of nowhere in those countries. They were once as car centric as everywhere else.
‘if you build it, it will come’
MBech@feddit.dk 3 weeks ago
They were once as car centric as everywhere else.
Not quite sure about that. Denmark famously had a bicycle regiment during WW2. We’ve never been anywhere near as car centric as places like the US, for various reasons including, but probably not limited to:
- Our cities and towns are really close. I can cycle for 30 minutes and get through 3-4 towns around my rural parts.
- We have had excellent public transportation for a very long time.
- Old ass cities are really bad for big roads, so instead you get a bunch of crammed roads that are awful to navigate, resulting in more people prefering their bike, since it’s about as fast anyway.
- We have a very high (compared to the USA) tax on cars, gas and everything relating to it. This started in the 70’s when oil got scarce. To try to make people conserve oil, we started to tax the shit out of it, and kept doing it. As a result, driving a large vehicles is super expensive, and if you CAN live without one, you’re much better off riding a bicycle.
This is not to say that the person you responded to isn’t completely wrong about everything, it’s just not going to help acting like we’ve ever been as crazy about our cars as they have always been. It could also be a decent roadmap for how to get rid of the huge deathtraps, and get people more excited about bicycles.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Right, so you don’t stop at a white line, you lower speed limits+add speed bumps, or protect your bikelanes.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Or you do what I’ve seen some cities do and you close certain roads to car traffic entirely, and then send the bikes down there. Further increase the efficiency of both modes of traffic while eliminating collisions. Create walkable and bikeable sections of town that cars can travel between.
Teepo@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
If people aren’t driving cars down a road because stopping at so many stop signs is unpleasant, why do you expect cyclists to bike down that road, when they actually have to physical work (not just pushing a pedal) getting up to speed again? Stop signs suck for bikes more than for cars. If cars avoid a route because of stop signs, of course bikes will avoid it!
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
In my area, there are very few cyclists who actually bike to get anywhere. They do it for exercise and/or to be allowed to wear their little padded shorts in public. So get the exercise from peddling away from a stop sign. The reason to choose that route instead of the others? To not get hit by cars.
And what exactly is the pedestrian excuse? Why do people insist on walking on the sidewalkless busy roads when in between them there’s a sidewalkless non-busy road?
lonefighter@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I think e-bikes are such a problem in the US because we have such a car-sentric culture and the majority of people who are riding them seem to be people who lost their drivers licenses due to poor life decisions (AKA, dangerous driving or DUI) or are too young to get a drivers license in the first place. They take the same dangerous, stupid mentality and transfer it into their riding of the e-bikes. I drive an ambulance and every single day I see a suicidal idiot blitzing through traffic at top speed on an e-bike, running red lights and stop signs without even slowing down or looking, going the wrong way up one way roads in the middle of the lane, driving at 3am down the middle of the road with no lights (almost always going the wrong way and running stop signs), ignoring the blocked off bike lanes on the roads that do have them, or just generally being an absolute menace and an idiot. We have so many bikers getting seriously hurt or killed because of their antisocial behavior. I’ve almost hit a couple in my ambulance because they’re constantly pulling out right in front of me or simply trying to bike right into the side of my rig as I’m driving down the road doing the speed limit, forcing me to either swerve or possibly end their entire existence. They just assume that car drivers will get out of their way, which is a dumb assumption when most of the drivers are just as dumb and are fucking around on their phones. Suicidal fucking idiots with zero survival instincts. I have zero problems whatsoever with the ones who are responsible and follow traffic laws, but they seem to be in the low minority around here.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There’s something about the damn things that makes people think they can do vehicular parkour.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Terminal car brain
Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
For real, they think the only solution to cars endangering pedestrians and bikes is to ban both bikes and pedestrians… As God intended eagle screeches and flies overhead
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yeah go die in traffic with all the other zealots.
Having a quasi-religious hatred of automobiles only causes people to demand things like bike lanes right the fuck now, paint the lines on the asphalt, NOW. They don’t put in traffic lights with dedicated bike lane lights that would stop car traffic to let bike lane traffic safely cross, they don’t close some roads to automobile traffic, they paint the lines on the road. And then cyclists think that white line on the pavement somehow keeps them safe when they cross paths with a sedan, when the presence of those lines fundamentally breaks the safety algorithm the roads are built on in the first place.
e-bikes should be outright illegal. We should be imprisoning containership crews for landing with them on board.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
So is the problem that there’s too much support for non-car infrastructure, or that there’s so little they get away with half-assing it, and not slowing the cars down enough that the road is safe?
As far as mopeds in traffic, the problem is obviously the cars running them over, wtf?
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
It is my assertion that bike lanes, as implemented, are a rock chewing stupid idea.
For about a century now, we’ve had two kinds of travel lane: Sidewalks, and traffic lanes. Sidewalks are for WALKING, traffic lanes are for all vehicles of every description. Every vehicle is supposed to behave the same way following the same rules, regardless of performance. A bicycle, moped, motorcycle, car, truck, all of them are supposed to follow the same rules.
When there are traffic lanes only, no sidewalks, we have rules for how traffic flows. For example, right-turn only lanes at an intersection are right-most, followed by turn-or-straight lanes, then straight only lanes, then straight or left lanes, then left only lanes. Having a lane that goes straight to the right of a right-turning lane is a recipe for collisions.
We do that all the time with sidewalks. Pedestrians are expected to exercise a lot of caution when entering crosswalks to avoid conflict with vehicle traffic. Pedestrians are expected to treat EVERY intersection as if it has a stop sign for them, or they are expected to obey crosswalks with signal devices that are interlocked with traffic lights.
Bike lanes as I have seen them implemented are a lot like sidewalks; slower traffic is placed to the right of traffic lanes…except they do not expect to treat every intersection as a stop sign, and they interpret green lights for straight through as for them, even in conflict with right turning traffic.
So we have a travel lane positioned similarly to how sidewalks are positioned relative to roads, but without the rules that make sidewalks safe. It doesn’t help that, where they do implement lights or whatnot, they increasingly do so in non-standard ways that generations of drivers have not been trained on. There are new kinds of lights at crosswalks, new and weird nomenclature at intersections rather than "No Right On Red 🔴 " signs that have been around for years. It’s not implemented well, and it’s getting people killed.
As for e-bikes: They’re basically not regulated, there’s supposedly a classification system for them, which people ignore. There’s no enforcement, and they do whatever the hell they want, including riding at travel lane speeds on sidewalks, which causes collisions because no other traffic, vehicle or pedestrian, is expecting 20+mph traffic on the sidewalk. They either need to be regulated like mopeds, or they need to go away. “But the motor is electric not gas” fucks with people’s brains. Somehow people aren’t riding Honda Metropolitans or Yamaha Zumas on the sidewalks at 20 or 30mph but that’s happening with e-bikes.