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The Economist has published an article (paywalled, sorry) on the state of cyclists in New York, which dropped the day I was leaving the city. It was the first time I had visited as an adult. I came away with some respect for it (loved the food, service, and how fast everyone walked). The point of the story is supposedly that cyclists are now being treated unfairly:
I’m a cycling nut, so the issue is close to my heart. In a T2 city, I feel like our role is that of a scapegoat. People fantasize about killing cyclists pretty regularly, and none of them understand the challenges and tradeoffs we have to deal with. At this point, I've just thrown up my hands in despair at this ever being better, so I just get on the road as little as possible.
The people on two wheels in NYC are a different breed. Each of the longtime residents I asked - 100% - are now more scared of cyclists than cars. My 3 day trip felt the same to me. Every car was attentive and respectful of me as a pedestrian. The cyclists were fast, heavy, and disregarded almost every crosswalk signal or red light, despite having their own lanes. What’s the quantitative danger?
Notice the sleight of hand here. What’s included are E-Bikes, scooters, and mopeds - each of these truly motorized vehicles. The number of people killed by analog cyclists nationwide has been, for many years, single digits. This is important. E-bikes allow users to achieve speeds and momentum totally beyond their skill, and are often part of poorly maintained machines that are part of sharing programs. My mind is blown that even 8 people have been killed - that's an enormous number even in a place as dense as NYC. It probably means a huge number of serious injuries as collateral damage.
Put simply, the fixie riders racing through the city are psychotic but not dangerous to pedestrians.
As you’d expect, the lede is buried, along with the Culture War. The cyclists zipping through the city on E-bikes are exclusively yapping in a foreign language on speakerphone, with DoorDash bags on the back of their cycles. Nothing should get in the way of private taxis for burritos.
To recap how insane this is:
It’s so similar to LA, albeit with fewer vehicle fires and bricks on heads. The fix just cannot be the obvious and correct one. Instead, it’s to hop on Reddit to “map police hotspots” or refuse to stop as a way to LARP civil disobedience.
The deaths to pedestrians from cyclists seems like a bad statistic for either side to bring up, and a bad statistic in general.
I think the risk to pedestrians seems minimal and bikes should just fully share the sidewalk with pedestrians. Bikes hitting people is most likely to ruin both people's day, but cars hitting bikes is most likely to ruin someone's life.
Every cyclist I've ever suggested this to hates it, and I think it's just because they don't like going as slow as you sometimes need to go on a sidewalk to be safe. But it is often what they are asking drivers to do: go slowly for the cyclists safety on the road. Which is when it turns into a whole political question. No one likes going slower than they can, so who has to suffer the indignity drivers or cyclists?
The answer seems obvious in my head, but I know I identify with drivers more (despite riding a bike around the neighborhood pretty often)
I think this is a terrible idea. On roads, we have traffic rules which enable everyone to go at reasonable speed while still maintaining safety. On sidewalks, pedestrians are not required to follow any traffic rules. This means that a safe-ish speed to pass a pedestrian will always be quite low.
I agree that bike-pedestrian collisions are unlikely to kill anyone directly, but that does not mean that they are not bad. For an elderly, a broken bone requiring hospitalization can easily mean the beginning of the end, costing them multiple QALYs.
Then there are unintentional consequences. If you force bikes to the sidewalk, effectively halving the speed of responsible bikers, that will cause more people to drive cars instead. As someone who occasionally drove a car in a medium-sized European city, I don't particularly like having bikes ahead of me, they generally are slower than cars and their vulnerability means that I have to take more care for overtaking them than I would for another car. But most of the time I lost in traffic was actually lost to traffic jams which were caused by cars.
Driving cars is fairly regulated, while riding bikes is not. This means that there are a lot of reckless bikers out there. Ignoring traffic rules around cars is limited by a process called natural selection -- if you keep running red lights without checking the traffic, that is a problem which will solve itself. On the sidewalk, the cost of reckless biking would primarily fall on others.
If we had a way to consistently enforce a sidewalk speed limit, I would support giving bikers the option to use the sidewalk at speeds up to 10km/h. There are certainly times when I would gladly have made use of that option.
If I were dictator I would make a law that bikes can go anywhere, but never have right of way. If a cyclist is in an accident it will always be their fault- hit an old lady and go to jail, get hit by a car and die.
Why?
To put the onus on bicyclists, obviously.
I saw you already replied to someone else's obvious objection, but are you trying to discourage bicycling? Would leaving the laws the same, but having the DOT create "Travel (Method) Advisories" for each mode of travel be an acceptable alternative?
(I hate anti-car bulverism as much as I hate bad traffic engineering, but there's non-zero overlap between the recommendations for precautions to take, if you insist on ignoring recommendations against traveling to Somalia, and possible recommendations for cyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians.)
I don’t care whether adult cyclists are encouraged in their hobby or lined up and shot for partaking in it. I have strong sympathy for young teens, but those mostly know that ludacris’s traffic mix is aimed at them- I make you move, bitch, get out the way. Likewise I sympathize with the poor who can’t afford cars, but, again, they understand their station in life.
I care about the sidewalks being usable for pedestrians and the road being usable for cars. Hippies should get a haircut and fitness fanatics should avail themselves of exercise bikes and the like if either of them are going to cause problems for the priority groups.
Tbh this is just as bad a take imo as the fanatics wanting to get rid of cars in the countryside said bc they "just need better public infrastructure". Yes, cars are superior for rural regions and public infrastucture is just not feasible there, but for well-designed suburbia and especially for smaller cities, bikes are also just better in many circumstances. It has nothing to with hobbies, hippies or fitness fanatics (though regular exercise is one of the benefits of bikes!). They need so much less space, they're cheaper, more flexible, less dangerous for pedestrians, etc.
Reducing cars in the suburbs to pedestrian speed and giving them the blame for any accident is great, it means even smaller kids can run, play, and bike through the suburbs without me needing to worry much, It means I can walk and bike there without having to be attentive all the time, and as long as it is properly designed even if I need to drive through it's just a minute or so of slow driving.
In cities car culture is also awful, the smell got better but everything is just so clogged and noisy. Worse, the danger means that even if you want to bike, it makes you choose the car bc a single idiot can cost your life. When I was living in London, almost everyone biked for a while, and those who stopped always had an incident with a crazy car driver. I myself also had several such situations. The counter here is usually crazy cyclist, but crazy cyclists are merely annoying, even a collision will usually not even seriously hurt you (though I get very pissed when small kids are involved, but even there I can literally just jump in front & stop the bike if needed); Crazy drivers can kill you with frightening ease, and there is absolutely nothing you can do. There's a lot to dislike in the EU, but well-targeted car bans are great.
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Then why the complication of policing cyclists' deaths by negligent/reckless and/or malicious driving, as per your reply to the other commenter?
Have you seen examples of "complete streets," designed to better enable mixed-modal transportation?
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