Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road?
Like you sit in traffic for an hour each day to work. Wouldn’t you want to halve that by having more other people use bicycles instead?
🤷 People often do or say things that make no sense.
because, overwhelmingly, they’re dumb and selfish and ignorant, and they choose to be that way.
some aren’t. some are willing to be educated. but not most.
There is no logical reason to be ideologically pro car
I think some of why is related to how most people in a traffic jam go “damn this traffic” not “damn, I’m making this worse”
Cities generally have a fixed budget for infrastructure and maintenance.
This means that resources put towards bike infrastructure are taken out of car infrastructure resources, but because cities tend to have elected people setting policies on alternative infrastructure, it is rare that you get a properly implemented city plan that benefits drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.
Take my area; to use a bicycle to get groceries, I have to leave my place and go onto a single lane road with parking and pedestrian only sidewalks on both sides.
This goes around a blind corner to a busier two lane street with parking on both sides and a shared pedestrian/bike path… that is on the far side of the road with no crosswalk, that runs for 500 meters, dumping you at an unlit intersection that has a road going away from the shops that has a pedestrian only sidewalk on the opposite side of a two lane road, and a gravel shoulder used for parking on the near side.
The route you need to take is a right turn onto an unlit two lane road with no shoulder, down a steep hill.
This road has traffic calming at the far end with those white traffic sticks to prevent people from parking on the side… forcing cyclists out into the center of the road right before they need to turn right…
…onto a wonderfully engineered road with lights, plenty of driving space, parking, and a set-back shared bike and pedestrian way…
…that then loses that a km further on, directing foot and bike traffic onto what is now a narrow two lane road.
Then through another intersection, on the far side of which, there’s sidewalks, then a bike lane, then parking, then a two lane road.
On this stretch, the only like it in the city, cars open their doors into car traffic onto one side and bike traffic on the other. Many larger vehicles park into the bike lane. At intersections, the bike lane is invisible to turning vehicles.
But all that’s OK, because this road dumps cyclists onto a four lane highway with no bike lane and a sidewalk that has obstacles that make it impossible to push a stroller down it, let alone ride a bike on it.
This takes you to the shops, where as a cyclist you have to ride the length of the parking lot to get to the limited bike racks by the loading bay, and THEN walk all the way back through the parking lot to get to the shops.
And I know this isn’t uncommon. It makes bikes visibly annoying to car drivers, creates unavoidable choke points, and statistics indicate regular use of this route will eventually end in injury.
Imo, it should start with getting the MASSIVE cars and trucks off the roads. You wont convince us to get rid of our cars (i have many) because for a lot of us, we actually need them.
However, we DONT need Karen in an F350 that she takes to work and back by herself getting 5mpg and causing huge hazards due to massive blind spots. If only we could ban these vehicles or require better licenses that would at least help. I myself hate large cars, and only have a pickup (single cab, 40 years old, long box,) for hauling lumber or other house construction materials. All my other cars are under 3200 lbs. Even next to a new crossover they look TINY. And this further makes people who drive those monstrosities drive and act like assholes.
This will never change though. Redneck outrage would be too big a pushback and you cant change what car mfgs are doing.
If I had it my way, the only car youd be allowed to have is a miata, and a ute for work. If you have more than 2 kids you can get a wagon.
I might not be able to change what manufacturers are doing, but I do try.
I write them to let them know about their dangerous LED headlights. I write them to let them know exactly why I will not buy one of their vehicles, even used, because it has a giant touchscreen interface for core controls that is useless when the sun is shining on it.
I treat owners who are making the streets more dangerous for me like shit, and I’ll tell them why if they bother to ask. most will probably just say fuck off and not change their mind, but some might actually think about how their actions affect people.
and you cant change what car mfgs are doing.
You can, though. The steady inflation in vehicle size is a direct response to CAFE regulations and revisions, which incentivize heavier vehicles. Pickups, of any size, were far less common prior to CAFE’s enaction in 1975, despite the population being more rural, agricultural, and industrial then.
They don’t ride bikes and they don’t see many people riding them for practical uses (work, shopping etc) so for them it’s hard to sell the idea of bike infrastructure (that they think is for mainly recreational riders) making their commute slower and taking up tax money that could be used on other projects.
I get how this is flawed thinking and I want more pedestrian and bike friendly areas, but that is their perspective.
Real life is more complicated, a typical bike line is built over an existing road, at worst you get some painting on the road, which barely changes anything and piss off both side. At best, a lane es turned into a nice cycle lane which pisses off car-driver, especially when the rest of infrastructure doesn’t follow.
I am all in for car free city, but too many mayors skip the build parking which connect to public transport at the Town entrance. Closing lanes without offering alternatives is just a way to get your work cancelled after next election and to block any alternatives project for another decade
Where I live, building bike infrastructure means removing a lane of traffic, or parking, to install a bunch of curbs, poles, and large rocks, to create a bike lane that largely goes unused, while traffic is substantially worsened.
Here’s an example of a work in progress. When this was taken they hadn’t yet filled the holes they’d dug in the road with the rocks.
Many good answers have been given already. One more is that many people understand it would be better for the environment and their own health if they biked instead of driving a car. Yet getting a car was one of the symbols of having the means for a good life. If you are able to let go of your car, it shows that you have held pointless things as important parts of your identity. You don’t want to have been a moron, do you?
So, you suppress the idea that you could be doing something else than what you are doing. And other people bicycling is kind of in-your-face. They show that you could have an alternative, and that causes a feeling of guilt in you. And that feeling of guilt is uncomfortable, and the people riding their bicycles are what have triggered that feeling. In other words: They have ruined your day by making you feel guilt. A completely self-created guilt, but an annoying feeling all the same. And then you hate everything that is connected to those people that keep ruining your days by the virtue of visibly existing.
This is not necessarily the reason for all of the people opposing bike infrastructure, but it is one of the important reasons for many.
They think of it as a zero-sum game. There is either a bike lane or two car lanes. The number of cyclists is fixed and the number of drivers is fixed. If there is one less lane to drive in, there is more traffic. If you spend limited tax dollars on bike infrastructure, driving infrastructure will not receive necessary maintenance.
In short, it’s selfish myopothy. “I don’t see how this will immediately and directly benefit me so I oppose it and, now that I have made my uninformed knee-jerk decision, I refuse to listen to opposing arguments that might cause me to admit that I was ever wrong about anything.”
You might recognize this behavior in other aspects of society. It is not isolated to transportation infrastructure.
Look at the comments from others in this thread and it will give you a good idea that this isn’t just a knee jerk reaction
That’s evidence for some people having more than a knee jerk response, it’s far from statistically saying it’s the most common rationale. Smart people are also amazing at having a knee jerk reaction and then making it sound well reasoned with clever arguments.
I agree its not just a knee jerk reaction, and I know I don’t have a good basis for how many are knee jerk vs rationalised but I do know I’ve been around plenty of people that seem to have a knee jerk reaction and plenty that demonise the culture, hell half the world is being bullied not to have windmills and some of that is blanket anything green is dumb
I used to ride a bike every day for 15 years, I’m currently a car driver.
The big problem is when design desisions are made without considering all users.
For example where I used to live they divided the pavment into two, one side for pedestrians one for bikes. The only thing making this divide was a line of paint. This meant that you had to dodge pedestrians who didn’t like the bikes encroaching on their area whilst also having to deal with crossing junctions.
If you stuck to the road in the same area you could get a much higher speed as you didn’t have to deal with obsticals. The big problem was now in the eyes of the car drivers you weren’t supposed to be on the road as you had your own lane on the pavement.
Similarly, in a nearby area they decided to try and take a lane away from the cars to make a cycle lane. The issue being they ignored the fact that most people needed to take a turn that crossed the lanes, the only way to do that was to leave the cycle lane and join the cars, but again you have your own lane and the car drivers don’t think you’re allowed in theirs anymore and you’ve made their traffic worse.
This kind of infrastructure led to so many negative encounters for me that I gave up riding all together.
The problem tends to be that these kinds of infrastructure changes are only done as token gestures and are rarely well thought out. When these kinds of changes are done well it can be fantastic but those occurrences are rare so everyone defaults to the defeatist stance of the changes will cause more problems than they solve.
It’s a catch 22, you need to build new infrastructure that is good and works, to stop people being against it but it can’t be built because people only know the bad examples that have been built in the past.
There’s been a bunch of bad design around me, too.
For example, they decided to eliminate a lane of traffic, shift the street parking out into the road farther, and build a “protected” bike lane between the parked cars and the sidewalk. Except there’s a bunch of driveways for parking lots, and side streets, for cars to want to turn into, and now all the cyclists were invisible to the motorists because they were separated by the row of parked crossovers. If you rode at anything more than a walking pace, slowing or stopping at every curb cut to look for cars, you’d get hit by someone that had no hope of seeing you.
I guess enough people got hit by cars, because after about a year they moved the car parking back against the curb, and the cycle lane back to the traffic side. Though the road was still less one car lane in an area where there had been a perfectly good bike lane before all the improvements. I used to ride that road a lot. I don’t anymore.
Another thing that’s popular now is painting the entire bicycle lane with green paint. Because cycling is green! But that paint is a lot more slick than pavement when wet. It’s awful to ride on.
I would say I am more a car person than a bike person.
I’m not against bicycle infrastructure, but I am against bad bike infrastructure.
I use to live in Cambridge in the UK and bike lanes were often an after thought meaning adapting the existing area to accommodate everyone regardless of if space was available. Unfortunately, it usually seemed that it was done for the lowest price so the local council could tick a box to say that it was done even if it was not fit for purpose.
The most common examples are where there is still parking or bus stops on the side of the street which blocks the bike lanes and forces cyclists onto the road again.
Another is the inconsistency of bike lanes being on the footpath or on the road. The cheep option seems to be to take which ever is widest (the path or road) and squeeze in a bike path. If the road and path were actually resized, and resurfaced properly, there would often be enough space for everyone.
Because conservatives ultimately do not believe in anything beyond helping the in ground and hurting the out group. That is it. Everything else is just window dressing.
