To be fair, trucks are regarded as egomobiles in the municipal areas of California if they’re all shiny and are obviously not used for heavy work.
In the 1990s and aughts, bicyclists had a bad reputation in San Francisco for messengers being inconsiderate and for bikers being a voting bloc. I don’t know if they are since mass gentrification.
Out in the redder suburbs, all the vehicles are trucks and the women are blond unless they’re behind the Jamba counter. And those shiny trucks frequently have truck-nuts. In those towns, they joke about running bikers off road, and might actually do it if they’re drunk enough.
Fun fact. The average age of Lemmy users is higher than Reddit.
There is still many kids here, but Lemmy is much less “accessible” than Reddit meaning it’s less attractive to younger folks.
It’s a bit of a small culture shock when you compare how Lemmy users who have a job and family talk about their lifes versus Reddit users who obviously still go to school.
Did you honestly think I was being serious? I can’t see how you could think I was bring “laughably naïve” without being “laughably naïve” yourself. No offence intended.
There are dozens of studies with similar scopes and results. It’s obvious: Car drivers do not care about cyclists and many would prefer them gone.
Just look at some driver’s attitude about climate protests - here’s a sample from comments online:
There are humans who won’t be missed. Especially not terrorists [people blockading streets]. Therefore: Full throttle.
Simply let a semi roll over them. Those pests must be gone… preferably backwards, it’s easier to clean the underride guard.
Why “kill”? It’s self defence.
Those aren’t “humans”, they’re criminals making everyone very very angry. Kill them all, there’s too many people on the planet anyway it would help the climate too.
Don’t like what you see? Fucking move on. Don’t be fragile and try to drama bomb a community that you don’t give a single fuck about. Just move on, or talk to someone you trust if you find you have difficulty doing that on your own.
So yesterday I’m cycling and I come to a spot where the bike lane disappears for a quarter-mile segment, so I slot in at pace behind a shuttle bus (the kind that gives a lovely draft, so I won’t be slowing traffic down) to get me to the next point where there’s a bike lane.
Well, dude in the truck following that bus didn’t want me there, so not only does he get on his horn, he did the Seattle-classic maneuver of accelerating into the merge-space to prevent me merging, and when I came in anyways, tailgated aggressively to the point where he was an arm’s span off my wheel, while I was a bike-length behind that bus. We’re not going slow at this point, I’m pacing in the draft of the shuttle bus at traffic’s speed (something close to 30mph is my guess). For what it’s worth, I’m comfortable drafting like that (I race bikes, it’s common practice, it can be safely done) but being tailgated by a hostile driver in this situation was terrifying.
Now I can understand not liking it when someone merges in front of you (but in my defense, my lane was just ending and it will resume in ~400M and in his defense, maybe he doesn’t know that), but I somehow don’t think vehicular assault is an appropriate response. I can get him thinking it was rude for me to get into traffic in his way, but in the end jumping in the draft of that bus was the least-disruptive way for me to be on that road.
So pretty soon the shuttle reaches its destination and turns off to the right, and by that point we’ve reached the spot where the bike lane begins. I overtook on the left as it turned off and was in the bike lane on the right before man-baby in the truck was able to come through. In the end he wasn’t slowed down in any way, traffic wasn’t disrupted at all, and maybe he thought I was rude, but fuck that guy.
Yeah the reason people shit on bicycles is we inconveniently insist on existing in spaces where accommodating our use is often an afterthought. I don’t like the spots where the bike lane isn’t either, but getting anywhere involves stitching up segments of bike lane with segments of that shit and when I traverse those things I go to the effort to get up to the speed limit to do it- and 99% of drivers are really good about sharing and giving space, it’s that other 1% that consistently seem to think driving like an asshole will teach us a lesson or something.
I found Caleb maybe a month back, and while I am not in the situations he is assisting people with, holy shit is this stuff needed. The USA has no financial literacy education, and poverty is a multigenerational vicious cycle for many various reasons.
Sadly, in many locations (especially Texas where he is based out of) a car is a necessity because of the lack of public transit. A car can quite literally be the difference in being stuck in a depressed town you grew up in or moving up in life. It shouldn’t be this way, but it currently is.
When Oslo and Helsinki achieved the same thing, it didn’t start with people asking for visible crossings or bicycle lanes. It started with people voting in a government that promised to get rid of pedestrian deaths. The actual plans and design followed.
People might dismiss and argue for or against specific solutions, but I think we can all agree that pedestrian deaths are bad, so it shouldn’t be difficult to get started, regardless of who is running the government.
The problem I’ve experienced in the US is that the local governments will voice support for this goal, claim they are pursuing it, but then just not implement really easy and basic solutions because of their fear of backlash.
Just to add a supplemental anecdote to humanius’ great explanation of the two, an example of transit oriented development turning into 15 minute cities is many large Chinese cities, where the metro map has rapidly expanded each year and each new metro stop will very quickly develop restaurants, department stores, parks, municipal sevices and residential areas all within a 15 minute walk.
It’s pretty amazing to get off a metro stop anywhere in Beijing and walk around a completely serviced town or neighborhood with a distinct personality.
The “15-minute” city is a term used to describe a type of neighbourhood (or preferably whole city) where, for everyone, all their day-to-day needs can be met with stores that are at most a 15 minute walk or bike ride away.
Transit-oriented development refers to planning the land around transit stations (trains stations, tram stations, etc) to be designed as much as possible with destinations in mind. That means housing, offices and shops, instead of large parking lots for commuters.
The two concepts refer to different things, but they are not incompatible with each other. In fact, they complement each other.
I would say neither is better than the other, and they are best used together.
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. It doesn’t have bike lanes but you can set a fully pedestrianised city, as emergency vehicles can use footpaths if needed. It also has trains, trams, buses and trolleybuses. Also helicopters, which are cool but impractical most of the time. The public transport line management is pretty in depth too, you can have pick up only spots, spots specific for workers or students, drop off only, or a bunch of other parameters. It’s really good.
It also has resource management, but the difficulty settings are really granular so you can adjust it to however you like.
My city recently did 15mph for neighborhood residential roads and 20mph for the wider through roads connecting to them. I feel much safer now when walking and biking in the neighborhood. The roads here were never intended for cars to be parked up and down both sides.
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