Mostly summarizes a lot of points I’ve heard in other videos, but I’m also a frequent follower of the topic. Makes me wonder if we can make that light truck exemption a ballot issue.
Cars don’t serve us, they serve our employers. It used to be that employers built things like streetcars and other public transit so that employees could get to work and back. You don’t need a car to have a completely full, fulfilling life. You need a car to maintain your employable status. If you’re not working, you don’t fucking need a car. Take a cab for the two or three trips a week that are necessary.
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.
The meme is shitting on both owners of pickup trucks and bicycle owners and basically saying that there both hostile elitist community’s and if the comment section of this sub is anything to go by I would say the meme is correct
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.
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