231
Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes.
(www.centraloregondaily.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
231 points (92.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
9591 readers
43 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
People ride on the sidewalks for a simple reason: the roads do not feel safe enough for riding for them, because there are car drivers there behaving in a manner lethal to non-car drivers (and other drivers too fwiw).
All solutions begin with taking the lethal actor out of the equation. Anything else is needless victim blaming and can be dismissed without any more discussion.
I used to cycle on the sidewalk, but my town started enforcing cycling in the bicycle gutter instead. I did that for a while, but then I got hit and run by a car. As a 16 year old. I don't ride my bike anymore unless it's a trail or something.
You can be both a victim AND an abuser. Being a victim does not excuse your actions that put OTHER PEOPLE at risk.
I don't disagree that roads can feel unsafe. But there's an important detail about sidewalk riding: you can be traveling against the direction of traffic. This is demonstrably dangerous at any kind of lot entry or any time cars can traverse the sidewalk path, because there should not be vehicle traffic moving in a different direction.
So I'd say both parts are true. Bikers may feel unsafe and may be unsafe on congested roads (or especially roads without dedicated bike paths), but riding on sidewalks is actually demonstrably unsafe for the biker (not to mention unsafe for anyone walking on the sidewalk).
It depends on the sidewalks. They should be on a different grade, and separated from the road by some distance. Although part of the problem is that SUVs jump kerbs more easily, and this type of "car" has become dominant in recent years.
While "it depends," overall we have undeniable statistical data that a km on a sidewalk is on average more dangerous than a km on the road.
This doesn't apply to parking entrances or other areas where cars are expected to cross the sidewalk, which is the specific portion of that point.
And the bigger point in my view is pedestrians. I don't believe that pedestrians should need to deal with bikers on the sidewalk. It's called a sidewalk for a reason. Walk the bike.
I understand bikers being upset about unsafe road conditions, but lessening safety of sidewalks for pedestrians is not the answer.
All of these issues are systemic issues and a failure of infrastructure. It's fine on an individual level to say that riding on footpaths isn't ideal, but ultimately people are going to do it no matter how much you call them out for it, if they feel it's the safer option than riding on the road. So if you don't give people a safe option to ride their bikes, then they are going to have to pick between multiple unsafe options, which is not ideal when you are trying to drive an uptake in cycling. And the most important way to make cycling and walking safer, is to increase their popularity, because it means there are less cars, and cars are a much more serious threat to pedestrians.
Anyway, we are probably talking past each other a bit. I think that in the end you are talking about sensible individual choices (which is fine), but I feel that the majority of efforts and discussion need to be directed at governments if we want to make cycling so safe that even a 5 year can ride around unsupervised.