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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   36372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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The deaths to pedestrians from cyclists seems like a bad statistic for either side to bring up, and a bad statistic in general.

  1. Cars are obviously more deadly on a per incident basis. I can't imagine a pedestrian surviving if I hit them regular speed in a car. I can't imagine a pedestrian dying if I hit them regular speed on a bike.
  2. Bike incidents are likely to be high, they share more spaces with pedestrians. Cars and pedestrians rarely overlap, they tend to intersect.
  3. The per mile deadliness makes bikes actually sound really deadly given how non deadly they seem. But that statistic is thrown off by high miles travelled by cars and low by bikes.

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 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.

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.

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.

I don’t care whether adult cyclists are encouraged in their hobby or lined up and shot for partaking in it.

Then why the complication of policing cyclists' deaths by negligent/reckless and/or malicious driving, as per your reply to the other commenter?

the priority groups

Have you seen examples of "complete streets," designed to better enable mixed-modal transportation?

Because murder is bad and needs to be strongly discouraged, even if I don’t much care for the victims?

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