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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   35229 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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Disclaimer: I don't hate cyclists and have not had many negative experiences with cyclists while driving.

I always find it difficult to find sympaths for cyclists in America. My thinking goes like this.

  1. America is built for cars. Homes and jobs are far apart. Friends and employers expect you to travel distance only reasonably covered with a car.
  2. Thus, cars are a necessary part of life for most Americans. You need a car to get a job to feed your kids. You must buy and drive a car even if you don't really want to.
  3. Biking to work or to the grocery is not feasible for most people for many reasons. Your employer won't think it's cute that you show up sweaty, or drenched in rain, or 30 minutes late due to snow. Your wife won't be amused when you have to bike 30 minutes to Walmart every day to fill your backpack with food for the kids. How do you get to the hospital when someone is sick or injured? How do you take your family anywhere, especially when the kids are small?
  4. Thus, cycling is best thought of as either an elective hobby for those with money and time to burn, or a last resort for truly destitute and/or criminal. The former can afford a car if they want, they just choose not to. The latter have bigger problems than just not having reliable transportation and prioritizing bikes over cars won't fix those.
  5. Thus, I really don't care about cyclists' complaints. I mentally put cyclists in the same bucket as skateboarders, rollerbladers, and Segway riders. If you can do your hobby on public roads safely and without endangering yourself or or car drivers, then fine. If there's any inconvenience or risk to drivers, the just ban everything except cars and call it a day.

tl;dr I need to get to work on time or pick up food for dinner, I'm not interested in being delayed or inconvenienced to accommodate some bum or some stranger's vanity hobby.

An argument I'm somewhat sympathetic to is that if we don't accommodate cyclists, we'll be stuck in our current automobile-centric hellscape forever. That is probably true. However, my preferences go like this:

  1. Cities designed for bikes & public transit, cars rarely needed
  2. Cities designed for cars
  3. Cities designed for cars where cycling is awkwardly retrofitted into existing car infra with significant gaps where there are no provisions for bikes at all

In the U.S., number 3 seems by far the most common, and it sucks for everyone. The car/bike war is one of those problems that IMO can only really be solved by a strong executive power not beholden NIMBYs and lobbyists. Until one materializes, I'm supporting option 2 all the way.

American cities are also much warmer than most of Europe. I think there might be a mismatch there, because the Sunbelt is too hot much of the year for cycling to be enjoyable. It's much easier to dress for cold than for Phoenix summers.

Are there any tropical or subtropical cities with respected bike infrastructure? Maybe Shanghai back when China was bike-dominant?

I worked in Shanghai for a few months. Their scooter infrastructure is amazing. A wide lane for scooters separated from the car lanes by a concrete barrier. It goes: sidewalk, scooter lane, concrete barrier, car lanes, concrete barrier, scooter lane, sidewalk.

This would be perfect biking infrastructure, but they seem to be all in on small electric scooters rather than bikes.

Well yes, everyone who has the option of motorizing seems to pick that option except for a minority of hobbyists.

tl;dr I need to get to work on time or pick up food for dinner, I'm not interested in being delayed or inconvenienced to accommodate some bum or some stranger's vanity hobby.

I can count on one hand the number of minutes per month I'm delayed by a cyclist. On the other hand, every time the Penguins or Pirates play a weekday home game I'm treated to at least ten minutes of extra sitting in traffic so a bunch of suburbanites can treat themselves to a night of overpriced disappointment. And I'm just trying to get home or the grocery store; I'm sure there are other people out there who have jobs at the hospital to get to, or something even more important than my convenience. So if people's recreation getting in the way of convenience is the standard to set, then cyclists on public roads should be way down at the bottom of the list of things we need to get rid of.

I can count on one hand the number of minutes per month I'm delayed by a cyclist. On the other hand, every time the Penguins or Pirates play a weekday home game I'm treated to at least ten minutes of extra sitting in traffic so a bunch of suburbanites can treat themselves to a night of overpriced disappointment.

You need to figure out the amount of delay per cyclist and per driver, not the total amount of delay. The total amount is skewed by the much larger number of cars.

I would bet that if all those people went to the ball game on bicycles, your delays would not get any shorter.

I guarantee you they would disappear entirely if that were the case, since cyclists don't ride on the freeway.

I am more than in favor of banning pro sports as well

In the context of NYC though, these points are largely invalid. It's dense, walkable, transitable, employers don't expect cars, grocery stores are close enough to walk to, let alone bike. If you must drive (which is entirely reasonable for some use cases) it's a pain because of the traffic (as it's so dense even a small portion of drivers cause congestion). Less than half of NYC even owns a car, something like ~20% in Manhattan.

For a significant number of trips, cycling can not just be an alternative quirky choice (like rollerblading), but the ideal mode - direct to your destination, cheap, faster than transit or a car (due to bypassing transfers or traffic), no need to find parking, and with some cargo or kid capacity if you have the right bike.

Safety is one of the big blockers though, which is why cycling advocates want more infrastructure.

And yes, this does trade off against drivability, but NYC is definitely not Pareto optimal in this regard - there's room to improve design for cyclists without significantly showing down drivers.

I agree 3 sucks, but it doesn't have to be as awkward as your making it out to be. Filling in the gaps doesn't make it impossible for cars to function.

I will concede that very dense places are different.

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