Do you feel safe biking on a road with a painted line “protecting” you from drivers?

Did you go with this? It’s a really cool use-case.

Having dedicated bike infrastructure means that people using bikes and pedestrians are not forced to compete for a tiny strip of sidewalk while most of the roadway is dedicated to cars. Bikes need to yield to pedestrians, so aside from it being illegal to ride on the sidewalk as an adult, it is much slower. There are also many roads that do not have sidewalks.

Proper bike infrastructure is protected by concrete bollards or curbs

How has your experience been so far?

Locking due to too many people raging and inciting violence against people riding bikes.

I fucking hate cyclists in the road

Well that’s too bad because the road is for everyone. Keep your road rage in check and be more constructive next time.

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That is heartbreaking.

Who is saying it’s OK to walk blind in front of a car? Nobody is claiming you shouldn’t be wary around vehicles because we all know how dangerous they can be. The point is that telling pedestrians to be careful is often a substitute for a complete lack of action on safe infrastructure.

You’d be shocked at how little traffic violence is treated as manslaughter. In Ontario, Canada, a lady only got a temporary driving suspension for driving through a group of girl guides at 120km/h in a school zone, killing one and injuring several others. The driver even denied responsibility in court.

The public dialog is still that pedestrians and cyclists need to be careful around cars with victim blaming when people are hit. When school starts, the kids better be careful. Where are all the signs and messaging around how drivers need to be careful? I constantly see drivers speeding and rolling stop signs in school zones but it’s completely normalized and shrugged off.

Simple self preservation should lead you to the same conclusion. When it comes to safety, the squishiest one lose

Also, this is a dangerously devoid of any sense of responsibility. It sounds like what someone would say after blowing a red light and running someone over.

The stationary crane comparison doesn’t carry over to dangerous machines in the context of transport.

The only proven way to make cycling and walking safe is by separating motor traffic from other modes of transport, by way of cycleways along main roads, and filtering minor roads to restrict through-motor-traffic.

When you have no such safe infrastructure and the entire dialog is “be careful around those dangerous cars”, then there is clearly a problem.

The poster is alluding to other approaches to road safety. You can prevent fatal interactions through infrastructure and city design. Failing to do so and pinning it on everybody outside of a vehicle is absurd.

Of course, we all need to be mindful of dafety, no matter what form of transport. But our roads are designed and the dialog is set up so that all responsibility is focused on pedestrians and cyclists who aren’t the ones in control of a potentially deadly machine.

the real problem isn’t the vehicle, it’s its speed and compared to the traffic around it.

I distinguished that speed of a vehicle itself is an issue and not primarily, as you stated, how its speed relates to traffic around it. A car that’s going with the flow of traffic at 80km/h is still fatal to be hit by when you’re walking or biking.

The real problem is speed, doesn’t matter how much mass or energy a vehicle can have if it’s not moving.

This shows a fundamental lack of understanding; a stationary vehicle has no kinetic energy. When you get hit by a car, the energy you are hit with (kinetic energy) depends on the mass and speed of the vehicle.

My dad got hit by a kid in a bicycle causing a wound that never really healed.

I’m sorry to hear that, it sounds like I really difficult experience. I fail to see how a child making a mistake while riding a bike is relevant to your claim that “the real problem isn’t the vehicle, it’s its speed and compared to the traffic around it.” and how “cars have to slow down because of bicycles” is the cause of danger. Orders of magnitude more people and children die being hit by cars than any other form of transportation and the answer is not blaming people on bikes for collisions since they “made” cars change their speed relative to traffic around them.

People die from doing activities with risk, the answer is not to lock yourself in a room and live afraid

No such claim was made.

That you dismiss the utility of cars is more of a commentary of the bubble and environment you’ve had the opportunity to enjoy

Nobody is denying the utility of vehicles. Our infrastructure are designed with cars having absolute top priority, making short trips by bike and walking dangerous. Most trips in cities are short and doable by bike or walking, but when the infrastructure is poor and people perceive it to be an unacceptable risk, they take a car. How many times have you seen people riding on sidewalks because they don’t feel that the line of painted bike lane protects them from a driver on their phone who could kill them? Or someone on a mobility scooter in a bike lane because the uneven, discontinuous sidewalk that lowers for cars at each crossing presents more danger of them falling over? I bike, I walk, and I drive; everything I’ve mentioned is the product of not living in a bubble, otherwise I wouldn’t see the problems.

I’m starting to see ad hominem and straw man arguments, so I’m not going to put the energy into continuing this conversation. Enjoy the rest of your day. :)

Certainly! And that’s the problem. We’ve been spending billions to expand highways and add new highways through cities, while chronically under-funding public transit and designing roads that are unsafe to cyclists and pedestrians. As cities continue to grow, adding highway lanes counterintuitively increases traffic due to induced and latent demand, when the most people will be moved by public transit, walking and bicycling. The only cure to traffic is viable alternatives to driving.

Cars take the most amount of space to transport the least amount of people. There are extremely densely populated cities all over the world that routinely move people in from hundreds of kilometres away every day for work. A single Japanese Shinkansen train can move 15,640,000 people per day and operate up to 500km/h. But even busses would suffice as the infographic below shows.

Cars take the most amount of space to transport the least amount of people. There are extremely densely populated cities all over the world that routinely move people in from hundreds of kilometres away every day for work. A single Japanese Shinkansen train can move 15,640,000 people per day and operate up to 500km/h. But even busses would suffice as the infographic below shows.

Never a bad idea! Typically, bicycle lights and maybe some reflective tape strips on your bike provide plenty of visibility too. :)

Don’t be so condescending.

Sharrows are worse than no bike lanes since they provide the illusion of safety while offering absolutely no protection.