Because everything is a culture war.
What’s your favourite colour? Whatever your answer to that question is, it will determine the side you’re on for a culture war next week.
To add to that, it’s all to distract everyone too. If I’m busy hating on your shitty choice of color, then I’m not thinking about how my true least favorite color is wealth hording.
I honestly think conservative media just tries to start as much shit as possible so they have something to talk about.
At this point they probably start out by picking some slightly complex idea that’s objectively correct and then work backwards to find a way to disagree with it.
If they can distract you, they can take more from you.
Apologies as this is off topic, but does anyone have suggestions for how to minimize the extremely intrusive advertising that kind of ruins reading articles like these? 2/3rds of my mobile screen is covered with ads. If it matters I’m on iOS and use Chrome for my default mobile browser. I’m aware of the privacy implications of those choices.
Firefox with uBlock Origin or Rethink DNS on Android cab block ads, the best you can do on iOS is DNS adblocking with something like Adguard
Because the cities are being actively altered in a way that transfers space and other resources from cars, to bikes.
Zero sum game, resources being reallocated, obviously the people whose resources are being taken away are going to view that as a war.
Won’t anybody think of the poor cars? But seriously, resources are better utilised by bicycles to the benefit of all. There are no losers here other than the oil companies and car manufacturers.
Oops sorry I just noticed your last sentence. Yes there are losers. They include all the people whose lifestyles involve driving.
Pretending otherwise is childish and lame.
- There are more car-only roads than bike-only roads
- Virtually no roads are ever completely closed off from car traffic and allocated strictly towards bicycles
- More lanes = more traffic jams (induced demand)
- More bike lanes = more people on bikes = fewer people in cars = fewer jams for “your lifestyle”
- Narrower roads = Fewer cars = fewer pedestrian deaths = fewer car-crashes
- More people biking/walking, healthier lifestyle, less stress on the healthcare system.
I don’t see how this isn’t a win for car-people and bike-people.
And what exactly are those people going to lose if they get on a bike sometimes? Their diabetes?
I’m going to lose my lifetime, literally, by biking a total of 80+ km to work and back. And public transportation takes 2+ hrs one way.
No, lose it making money to maintain and feed the car ( how many working hours a year that is?) and sitting in a car for an hour in one direction. Correct time of commuting is time spent in traffic + time spent to earn the money for fuel. If you bikemute, you can actually consider a part of that time as free gym.
You have no idea how ableist you’re being right now.
Even ignoring the jab at diabetics, what about other disabled people? Not everyone can just get on a bike.
It’s always so funny when car brains suddenly discover their heart for disabled people when they desperately reach for arguments against non car centric traffic planning. If you’re genuinely concerned about disabled people and those who can’t drive for other reasons (poverty springs to mind) you should advocate for transport options besides cars.
It’s always so funny when car brains suddenly discover their heart for disabled people
This is viciously insulting. What the hell are you talking about “suddenly discover their heart”. What do you know about my heart?
You really think the only people to disagree with you are ice cold monsters? That’s a crazy way to see this scenario: you versus the cold blooded shade demons who don’t like being forced to change their lives.
I am a disabled person and I vote for transportation levies and taxes every time they come up, but nice trying to pretend that I’m a car brain just because I happen to need one.
Once again, ableism. Don’t assume everybody is not disabled just because you don’t see them in a wheelchair.
You’re a car brain because you jump from “we should build more bike lanes” to “they want to ban cars”. Nobody is saying that.
I suppose it’s generally easier for the disabled to drive, yeah?
I don’t get why people are just one or the other. I use a car, a bicycle and I walk. I experience shitty cyclists when in my car, shitty car drivers when I’m riding the bike, and as a pedestrian, usually both groups can be shitty lol
It’s only a zero sum game if they view driving as an essential and immutable part of themselves, and even then, not really.
Charging adequate prices for street parking, for example, guarantees that you’ll always be able to park easily if you need to, a luxury not provided by free parking.
And then, of course, they could always just get out of their cars and immediately start benefitting from the changes.
zero sum in that there is limited amount of space… so space from something but be subtracted in order to add it to the space of something else….
it’s not a metaphor, it’s about the total being the same. it’s mathematical and squarely fits the definition of zero sum.That accepts the framing that we’re designing for cars/bikes/peds. We’re not. We’re designing for people, whether they’re in a car, on a bike, etc.
In that sense it’s very much not zero-sum.
In my city the transportation infrastructure decisions are made by a car hate group. We have 400 miles of bike lanes and polling shows 3% of the population use. Bike infrastructure isn’t installed for bikers, rather bikers are the excuse to obstruct and restrict vehicle traffic. As long as they use the word “safety”, they get away with really dumb stuff.
I wouldn’t have nearly the problem I do if bikes USED the lanes, but I guarantee I can go out right now and not see a single bike. They are entirely vacant.
To add insult, the bike I’ve seen at a newly converted intersection with dedicated lanes, bike turn box, and no right on red sign didn’t give a rats ass about anyone or any rules, drove on the wrong side, ran a red and drive into active traffic; all the cars stopping for this moron. There is no shared responsibility and no enforcement of rules. That is my liability the biking idiot was messing with. Yes, he’d be at fault if he was hit, but the city stistics would mark that as dangerous intersection and crack down on cars harder.
So yes, I see this as a war. In my city, we coexisted before, but it wasn’t a problem until this turned this into a mine vs yours situation. The passion driving fuckcars communities to take over is matched with my passion to retain functionality. You are the invading force in this war, we are playing defence. I see paths of scorched earth like scars; barren and void of purpose for which it was designated.
There is compromise, yes and I agree some can be made, in return, I want to see utilization, coexistence, and shared respect for the rules.
I see $150 million a year wasted for a incredibly small but disproportionately vocal group of radicalized individuals to actively make things suck and in their wake, after the construction, abandoned by those for whom it was built.
Which city would that be?
Do you see vacant car lanes too? Cause there are plenty of it!
Maybe at 3am, but no, my routes during the day take me on roads with other cars doing grownup stuff. Bike utilization is a drop in the bucket.
Get out there and show us you use the infrastructure built for your peace of mind.
Now it is a drop in the bucket, but with a good bike road (which is secure from cars and actually go somewhere, like workplaces, schools, groceries) people can finally take a bike or a scooter instead of their car.
If you want personnal example, I go out and make grown up stuff everyday on my bike, like going to work, groceries and taking kids to the school, cause I know how to mix in traffic (and most of people in cars here are respectful).
With a secured bike road my kids could go by themselves, and my wife could go by herself to groceries, now she is too afraid of cars, fortunately city is spending millions to build that so in few years it will be allright.
And I see plenty of roads empty during the day which is used only twice a day during workdays by a couple of resident (if they work), and you still pay for it without thinking about it.
Sorry I couldn’t reply right away, I hit a grocery store and hardware store for work tomorrow.
It was 6.5 miles, took 20 minutes, had bike lanes continuously with half being protected to a grocery store like you want. And no, the supplies I need don’t fit on a bike.
Not a single bike on this warm night perfect for a ride. Anywhere.
All I hear is bikers want want want. Well my city has it, and has for almost a decade.
Complaining is easy, it’s time to use the infrastructure bikers confiscated (yes, bike lanes here are at the expense of what were vehicle lanes) and get out there. Show us there is utilization that follows all this vocal demand.
Man I am so tired of the endless parade of articles with the premise “How could conservatives possibly think this?? Surely if we just take the time to carefully understand their reasoning we can blah blah blah…”
Here I’ll answer the the “why” right now:
A) Most US conservatives live in suburbs and rural areas and generally hate and fear inner cities and the people who live there. They also generally hate and fear environmentalism. They also greatly resent the idea that the USA isn’t the best country on earth at literally everything. They’re also violently homophobic and have such deeply toxic ideas of masculinity that they consider it to be weak and “gay” to drive a smaller vehicle.So when an urbanism advocate says they want people to give up their lifted truck to live in a city and ride a bicycle so the US can be more like Europe and East Asia to help the environment how in the world do you expect them to react in any other way?
B) This is a population that’s addicted to hate, fear and opposition like a drug, and conservative politicians and news orgs are the dealers. They need to periodically find something new to tantrum about. If there is no reason to hate something then a reason will be created. This was the case with LED lightbulbs, with COVID, with Romneycare, and so on and on and on. The 15 minute city conspiracy theories are not some sort of new unprecedented pattern of behavior.
A large part of this is about control. E-bikes are affordable, easy to use, and make it easy and cheaper for anyone, even poor people, to get around. The upper classes do not want the lower classes free on any level.
Sorry this is just bullshit.
I don’t think the upper classes spend any time thinking about us at all, certainly not thinking about how to prevent us being “free”.
Ask yourself this: if these e-bikes were extremely expensive and so expensive that only the rich could use them, would rich people complain?
The upper classes do not always explicitly think about things, like “oh, a Democrat is in power, seems like a great time to price gouge” or “hmm, all the other top leaders are firing people and price gouging since there’s a liberal in power, I should do it too” but these things do happen. Doing things to treat lower classes harshly isn’t always specifically talked about and planned, it’s just something those at the top do because they know others will as well and they also don’t believe the lower classes will recognize it and fight back politically, especially when the more religious party always favors the rich and religion helps increase class complacency.
I’m not against people making money or being successful, but there is a certain level of exploitation that goes on and it’s not always explicit and it’s not always planned out in clear language and it still happens
This is just nonsensical.
Of course no one would complain about e-bikes if no one was using e-bikes.
You’re unable to demonstrate a causal link between upper classes hating e-bikes and upper classes wanting to prevent the poors being free because there just isn’t one.
Honestly, I dislike being poor and I dislike wealthy people but making up ridiculous accusations like “they don’t want us to be free” is just plain silly.
Most wealthy people get their wealth from the labor of poor people. If poor people have easy lives, and need to work less hard for fun and to enjoy life, then they are less likely to work hard and wealthy people are less likely to stay wealthy.
I can’t demonstrate a causal link because it would be impossible to design a study really showing that.
To demonstrate anything, I’d have to get a group of wealthy people and determine which of them don’t want poor being free (and just asking them wouldn’t reveal that).
Then I’d have to determine which of the wealthy people hate e-bikes by asking them.
Then I would have to see if there was a correlation.
If you use Democrat versus Republican as a proxy for the first inquiry, it would be an easier but less approximate estimation.
In order try to show causation (and it would be a iffy showing), you would have to take wealthy people and measure their views of e-bikes, wait a week, divide them in three, and show them films of poor people. One film would show poor people disliking ebikes and being unhappy. One film would show poor people feeling free after using ebikes and having nicer lives. One would be a film of a a film that showed something as neutral as possible, like a show about how to do math problems. That wouldn’t actually be neutral, so if a budget allowed there would be a fourth group with no tv show at all. Then measure their views of e-bikes again and see if they changed.
I can’t prove any of this, but the wealthy people shown groups of poor people happy using e-bikes would probably have more negative views of e-bikes after on average because this is a control issue. E-bikes are cool and great for the planet and rich people who don’t like them only have 1 rational reason: wanting to maintain their lifestyle and concern that the lower classes finding more fun may reduce that. (And alcohol is fun and promoted because lower classes who use it a lot are more likely to have less intelligent children who will lack social mobility and can be exploited more easily.)
So yes, I don’t have a budget or inclination to prove this, but it’s not an impossible thing to prove nor is it irrational.
I don’t have the budget nor inclination to prove that the sky is purple, I’m just going to keep saying it because it makes me feel better about myself.
So you’re saying that my position is clearly evidently wrong, just like purple is not the color of the sky and therefore that’s clearly wrong.
I get it, but the easy lifestyles of the rich come from the suffering of the poor. The poor doing well is always a threat to that lifestyle and it’s naive to think the wealthy don’t often have a deep-seated gut reaction to anything that could threaten that. Even if you think it’s a stretch, it certainly isn’t as evidently wrong as a purple sky.
This just isn’t how wealthy people think though, even if it’s correct.
They think they became wealthy through hard work and good decisions. They think of themselves as benevolent and generous. They think they’re using their wealth to improve the lives if the have-nots.
There should be zero delivery trucks clogging city streets. Zero.
Good luck with that. And the bike-riding population will do all their shopping far outside the city, where shops still survive? A cargo bike is nice for personal shopping, for deliviering letters or small packets, but you won’t be able to fill the shelves of a supermarket this way. And whoever thinks about using freight trams for this, sit down and actually think this idea through for a change.
Many smaller businesses could be served just fine with cargo bikes. And once every inch of free space is no longer clogged up by parking cars, it’ll be easy to assign loading zones for bigger vehicles that supply supermarkets and the like. Now make those electric and everything becomes much quieter and less polluted. Then people will actually enjoy coming to the city centre again so business there can thrive.
Sure, if you focus on the “zero” part of the phrase you can score a cheap point. Now focus on the “trucks” and the “clogging” part. A van can stock up a small to medium store just fine, and a walkable neighborhood doesn’t need big box stores to begin with (and small business ownership is a plus for economic conservatives too). And with fewer cars carting individuals around, delivery vans can move in and out much more efficiently without clogging up anything.
It’s not exactly some unsolvable logic puzzle. This is a problem not everywhere has, it’s pretty simple.
Two solutions.
First, you create a second way in. It can be anything from dedicated streets for cargo with all the loading docks to shared warehouses at the edge of the city and underground tunnels like Disney. The main idea is to dedicate most streets to people and bikes, which can have all the storefronts
Or the easy way we could do far more quickly… Instead of slicing space you slice time. Limit deliveries from 4am to 7am, maybe an afternoon slot if necessary. The idea being people get the prime time, and you work out the logistics with that constraint
For better logistics, limit the size of the trucks and do shared distribution centers as a buffer for normal shipping times.
Ideally, you do #2 while transitioning to #1. Put a slowly increasing off hour delivery tax and create an incentive. The logistics will magically come together as the tax grows
Limit deliveries from 4am to 7am
Oh boy I sure do love being woken up at 5am because the loud-ass delivery truck is restocking the grocery store.
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but I do sometimes get woken up by the garbage truck. Not often, but it’s loud as shit and comes just before 5am… IDK if it’s bad luck, but everywhere I’ve ever lived seems to have garbage trucks that came well before sunrise, and they’re about the loudest trucks before you get up to construction vehicles
Unloading a truck isn’t even on the same volume scale. Especially if we used small trucks from a distribution center outside the city. Other countries do it, and we do it already, just not in the same numbers I’m proposing
This doesn’t sound like an actual issue to me
So, why do we need a supermarket? Is there any reason a supermarket couldn’t be replaced with it’s contingent parts? A butcher, a veggie shop, a convenience food shop, a pharmacy, a bakery, and a condiments shop?
I don’t see why they have to be stapled together when separate works just fine. All of which could fairly practically be stocked individually by small light duty trucks, or even a bike with a decently sized trailer.
I also don’t see why even if you staple everything together, a cargo tram wouldn’t work. Have two, a passenger tram that works one route, and a cargo line that runs by the loading bays of local stores. They can be switched on and off the overarching infrastructure without interfering with each other.
It would be a paradigm shift for the US, but I fail to see how it would be an unworkable one.
How do you think any of those are getting goods? If you ban trucks you’ll just get cargo vans and then lots of smaller cars. Or they’ll go out of business and people will complain you can’t live in the city and move to suburbia. Again.
Ooh, how was that called again, proxy-arguments? They were answered 10 years ago already.
Is there any reason a supermarket couldn’t be replaced with it’s contingent parts?
Mainly just economics. Supermarkets tend to have cheaper prices, and it’s probably a result of consolidating the operations to share resources (loading docks, refrigeration, payroll, etc)
Supermarkets should have cheaper prices, but now that they have formed a monopoly of just a few companies they are not.
Small shops keep supermarkets competitive, without them they become monopolistic.
That’s not what I see here in Seattle. Yes, the supermarkets are monopolistic, but they are still significantly less expensive than going to a butcher, a baker, etc.
It’s mostly an issue in rural and suburban areas. The grocery store closest to me feels like it’s price gouging (Safeway) , and I try and go to other grocery stores for bigger trips like Wegmans or H-Mart.
Meat is especially bad, like $10/lb for ground chicken bad. Meanwhile at H-Mart it’s $3/lb.
If I had a dime for every time somebody made this reply, I’d have a lot of dimes.
Nobody has ever said that. What people are saying is that the private automobile is the worst way to move masses of people in cities. They command ungodly amounts of space, make everything more expensive thereby, and aren’t even good at moving masses of people.
You want to increase the capacity of your road? You can:
- spend millions adding lanes and possibly destroying houses
- turn a lane into a dedicated bus lane
- turn a lane into a bike lane
- hell, pedestrian areas have higher people capacities than car lanes
Yes, you are right. You are talking of moving people inside cities. I am talking about a) getting in and out of the city and b) moving goods into and out of cities. None of the usual demands in this group ever even starts to address this.
Yes, of course delivery trucks need access to cities, some goods are not practical to move by cargo bike. As do emergency services and buses. Nobody disagrees with this. The problem in many cities is that streets are clogged with useless private cars. So the obvious solution is to ban private cars.
Just because you have no need for a car, private cars are not necessarily useless.
Private cars in general are not useless, but private cars in the center of cities should be useless if the city is designed well. The space-transportation trade off does not make sense.
Because the powers that be created both r/fuckcars and pushed anti 15 min city bullshit. They now play both sides using research done by former wall street quants now working for major think tanks
You went a tad too conspiratorial there.
Unpopular opinion: because cyclists are entitled assholes 😘
Bicycles on their own don’t turn people into assholes, the same way toaster ovens or flip-flops don’t do it, so we have to assume there is some percentage of the population that are assholes no matter what they drive. So before letting them loose in the city, would you rather equip an asshole with a multi-tonne metal murderbox or with a bicycle? The more assholes on bikes the fewer assholes with the means to murder people.
Counterpoint: r/idiotsincars (or !idiotsincars@lemmy.world)
Also there’s a whole dictionary term created for car drivers called “road rage”.
So going by statistics, car drivers are entitled assholes.
Yeah I’m the entitled asshole with my bike because I wanna go from A to B
Not the person who takes up 8 times as much space as me to transport the same or more often less cargo than me, poisons the air I breathe, pollutes my drinking water, endangers my life because they’re busy reading texts or think their time is more valuable than everyone elses, uses my tax dollars to fund massive roads I’m not even allowed to use and, best of all, honks at me to get out of the way on the narrow streets I live on as if I’m the uninvited guest.
But one dude in spandex made you swerve a little some 2 years ago so go off queen
What do they do that makes you consider them entitled?
They want all the protections of the road laws but want to follow none of them
Oh no, they want protection, how entitled can you be! Everybody in traffic breks traffic laws, you too.
I’m a cyclist who follows all road laws, am I entitled?
You answered your own question
Cyclists need validation too, apparently
We want the opposite of “protection laws” in roads. We want separate paths so we never have to share a road with cars. Just give up one of your fucking lanes and you won’t ever see a bike in yours again, I swear.
come to the Netherlands. we welcome all cyclists.
Amsterdam reduced vehicle traffic to 30 kph for most of the city
Forcing bikes into conflict with cars is of course going to create problems. When I first started riding being on a sidewalk was fine. If that wasn’t available there was usually a sufficiently wide breakdown lane. Only fools and couriers rode in busy urban environments. But with the big push for bikes both municipally and on the basis of personal preference they had to get bikes out of conflict wirh pedestrians on sidewalks, but in built-up urban environments where there isn’t any room to put in proper bike lanes. It’s just a recipe for inflamed tempers. Even on roads that are more suburban, a couple of 18mph bikes blocking a 45 mph road is stupid even if they have a right to be there. But we need more bikes.
No, riding on the sidewalk was never “fine”. I know it FEELS more safe, but cyclists are struck more often and killed more often per km of sidewalk than road. And I am never okay with pushing risk off on other people because I’m afraid to accept it myself; even if riding on the sidewalk were safer for me, it is less safe for everyone else, so I don’t fucking do it.
Dude(ette), I’m over 50. It was “fine” in the sense that it was what we all did and there were rarely any rules against it. I don’t know where you’re getting that I said it was acceptable in the modern context, in fact I stated pretty much the opposite. You’re making controversy where there really isn’t any.
I am 47 and this has been the case my entire life. We have data.
The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, argues that the costs of such green initiatives outweigh their benefits, suggesting that they impose unnecessary economic burdens (Heartland Institute, 2017).
Guess some people see everything in a cost-profit margin only.
Guess some people see everything in a cost-profit margin only.
Especially when it’s convenient. I’m sure they would happily look the other way if you showed them the economic burdens of having a car-centric society.
Because cyclists are narcissistic people who think the vast minority of people who live in cycling distance of their work and everything else and never get enough from the store or anywhere else that is problematic to carry back home (seriously, do these people ever actually get anything of substance?) think they need entire city blocks completely dedicated to them while giving a big middle finger to people who just want to get to where they’re going directly because they CAN ferry any decent amount of goods back and forth.
Not to mention their massive ableism that ignores people who cannot easily walk or ride for any decent distance and denies them direct access to places. Cities already do this to a point where there’s no actual free parking anywhere for people, even parking dedicated for them which, in the suburbs, every single parking lot has spots right next to the building for them so it’s as easy as possible to access. Most cities rely on garbage paid parking decks and lots far away from most things people need to get to, and even if they have spots for those people, they’re still not as accessible as the vast majority of places in suburbs.
Cyclists are basically like vegans and religious people: ignorant, hateful, and annoying. It’s not “turning” into a culture war: it is a culture war, with rich, fortunate elitists on one side and the rest of us on the other.
Yes the “rich, fortunate elitist” trying to commute on a $200 bike instead of a $60,000+ SUV that spews noxious gases.
Poe’s Law, thou art a bastard.
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