Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road?
Like you sit in traffic for an hour each day to work. Wouldn’t you want to halve that by having more other people use bicycles instead?
If you ride in a town or city a lot, you know one big piece of the answer: jealousy.
If there are more cyclists, you’ll see them more often riding by you at red lights and lines of cars at stop signs. Drivers hate this; it reminds them that sometimes cars are slow, and they love their cars, so they get angry.
If there are more cyclists, drivers will have to be careful not to hit them, and being careful is annoying. Right now, depending where you live, the driver can say “almost no cyclists are out here, so I wasn’t expecting them, they need to be more careful”. And the drivers believe it, and their friends do, too. But more cyclists around would make those excuses look like the BS they actually are.
And related to the second point is that, if cyclists increase in number, they will demand (and get) more bike lanes and protected areas to ride and park. This will absolutely come at drivers’ expenses. Drivers know this. So even though fewer cars would decrease congestion, drivers know that they would be inconvenienced in other ways, and that would again remind them that they aren’t as important as they want to be.
Finally, in the US specifically, large SUVs and trucks are causing massive increases in dead pedestrians, children, and cyclists. The increased death rate over the last ten years is appallingly high. If cycling is normalized even more, clearly political opinion will shift, and those giant vehicles will be heavily restricted or taxed, or their insurance rates will skyrocket, or drivers will be charged more frequently with manslaughter for the death that they cause every day. People are reasonably afraid that their unreasonably large vehicles will be taken away from them.
#suckstobethem
They don’t ride bikes and they don’t see many people riding them for practical uses (work, shopping etc) so for them it’s hard to sell the idea of bike infrastructure (that they think is for mainly recreational riders) making their commute slower and not the best use of tax money.
I get how this is flawed thinking and I want more pedestirian and bike friendly areas, but that is their perspective.
Surely, this question is targeted at USA/North Americans. The average commute is beyond biking distance. The average suburb is sprawled beyond biking convenience. So, exactly to your point, people reliant upon cars largely don’t see the benefit potential of bike lanes. You can point to tight older cities like NYC or Chicago, but, surprise, the cars in the city traffic aren’t fromthe city. They drove in form the surrounding neighborhoods to their jobs.
I biked for 2 years when I happened to get a career job in the town I lived. It made sense because I could cut through a park and skip the traffic light bottleneck. The 2nd closest career job I’ve ever had was 17 miles. The furthest was 65 miles.
I’m Aussie, so unfortunately it’s targeted at Australians driving huge American pickup trucks. :(
I’m sorry we exported that ideology. I love utes. My next vehicle may very well be a tall American version of a ute to replace my compact pickup. Maybe I won’t need it by then if the home projects reduce in size. I wish more cars had trailer hitches here but, just like our daily driving “needs”, there’s this belief that only trucks can pull trailers. Even a 1.5m x 3m sofa hauler needs a F150
deleted by creator
They think of it as a zero-sum game
But it’s not.
The reason you need more lanes is because of a growing population using a fixed set of roadways. As you add protected bike lanes, more and more people opt for using a bicycle. This means fewer people on the road, negating the need for the extra roadway.
If you spend limited tax dollars on bike infrastructure, driving infrastructure will not receive necessary maintenance.
I’m not sure what you personally believe, but this is not true at all.
deleted by creator
Because they lived in world of lies. They don’t care about facts or studies, they only care about being angry at someone and the media they consume say that cyclists are the problem
In short, it’s selfish myopothy. “I don’t see how this will immediately and directly benefit me so I oppose it and, now that I have made my uninformed knee-jerk decision, I refuse to listen to opposing arguments that might cause me to admit that I was ever wrong about anything.”
You might recognize this behavior in other aspects of society. It is not isolated to transportation infrastructure.
Look at the comments from others in this thread and it will give you a good idea that this isn’t just a knee jerk reaction
That’s evidence for some people having more than a knee jerk response, it’s far from statistically saying it’s the most common rationale. Smart people are also amazing at having a knee jerk reaction and then making it sound well reasoned with clever arguments.
I agree its not just a knee jerk reaction, and I know I don’t have a good basis for how many are knee jerk vs rationalised but I do know I’ve been around plenty of people that seem to have a knee jerk reaction and plenty that demonise the culture, hell half the world is being bullied not to have windmills and some of that is blanket anything green is dumb
🤷 People often do or say things that make no sense.
There is no logical reason to be ideologically pro car
Prep the downvotes.
I live in a larger Canadian city. I used to commute via transit. Sometimes the bus driver would stop abruptly. Every time the driver needed to stop the bus hard - twice a month - it was a bicyclist driving erratically, like cutting off a transit bus or, in one case, brake-checking the bus.
I’ve almost been hit twice - same intersection, different days - by a cyclist running the red, shooting through the crosswalk I was on, and cursing me out for it.
I have an idea as to why drivers worry about more bikes on the roadways.
I’ve been abroad. I’ve seen segregated bikeways where there’s a ribbon of green space between bicyclists and cars. This works really well. What they’re doing here Does Not .
But the reverse is true, and this is why I do not envy bicyclists : they’re gonna die on these metro roadways where they are mixing bikes and cars and tractor-trailers and buses, and fast. I have no desire to be someone else’s lesson on blind spots.
Cyclists being stupid is why i want them segregated from me. And pedestrians, too.
Like. No. If we never cross paths, they can’t be idiots and bolt out of a blind corner and get turned into a red smear, and send me to jail.
When car drivers are stupid they get in a small prang and have to pay the excess on someone else’s insurance.
When cyclist are stupid, they end up in a hospital or the morgue.
Yeah. Most drivers only exposure to cyclists sharing the road is a anxious experience of very different speeds, erratic movements, no signaling, and ignoring the traffic rules (surprising the drivers).
Vehicle users should pay for the cost of transit and cycling infrastructure via a tax on gasoline. This could allow transit to be free of charge. Don’t want to pay the gas tax? Take the bus for free. Everyone wins.
Because every iteration of bike improvements has been fucked up. Isolated bike lanes that are painted where they can fit, but don’t properly connect anything. Bike lanes that are squeezed into part of a wider car lane. Designated shared bike/car lanes on 35mph roads that make cyclists a rolling obstruction to smooth traffic flow. Bike lanes squeezed between a travel lane and a parallel parking lane, causing exchange chaos, and double obstructions when city drivers double park in the bike lane. Widened shared pedestrian paths where cyclists are to pedestrians what cars are to bikes. Cyclists that think the bike lane isn’t for them. Cyclists going the wrong way. Cyclists taking their “right of way” sporadically, expecting drivers to read their minds. Bike lanes that barely overlap with my usual travel needs. Bike lanes in areas too sparse to be utilized for anything other than exercise.
I am a car lover. I am a motorcycle lover. I am a bicycle lover. I am a walking lover. I am a train lover. I am a bus lover. I use all modes of travels as they fit my needs and wants - how far, what logistics, what weather, what cargo, what fuel cost, what purpose.
I’m Australian, so maybe my experience with cyclists and cycling infrastructure is different. We usually extend our roads and have a green lane for cyclists, or even dedicated cycling ways alongside the footpath (sidewalk).
People here whinge that these protected cycle ways get built. And I’m just baffled.
Expand the bike lanes into what? I don’t have the Australian experience. The places where infrastructure is compact enough to benefit from bike lanes in the US have already been expanded to be, effectively, wall to wall car ways with sidewalks. It does become a sort of zero sum game from a surface area argument of car vs bike vs pedestrian vs building. So, from a tangible perspective, cars lose ground. It’s too much of a mental simulation to imagine how reducing car lanes becomes a benefit to those that must drive because of a reduction of traffic and potential improvement to overall flow.
Oh I see. Most of Australian cities are actually suburban and have had wider footpaths than necessary, as well as parking buffers. It’s trivially easy to just convert one side into a protected bike lane.
I still argue that in a lot of urban areas where the road has swelled to its natural limit, depending on the road, it can be good to reduce the road by one lane and add a protected bike lane. But this is situational. Not every road needs a bike lane. But there should be bike lanes every so often, so people can safely get close to their destination without bothering motorists.
It’s too much of a mental simulation to imagine how reducing car lanes becomes a benefit to those that must drive because of a reduction of traffic and potential improvement to overall flow.
Fair enough. I agree that reducing a road by a lane can improve congestion, it isn’t always the case, and isn’t a simple sell.
That very thing you said at the end is usually already too much thinking for car brains
Having been a dumb kid growing up in bumrucksville, I’ll add this too: Congnitive load.
You have to learn to cope with something new. Driving sucks, other drivers suck, you’re telling me I have to drive in a two lane which could become one lane at any moment? I have to watch for faster pedestrians? “Isn’t the sidewalk for bikes, why do they need the road??”, then not realizing sidewalks aren’t properly flat enoigh and mixing bikes with walkers on a 3ft wide space is as stupid as the rest of stroad design to mix pedestrians and cars.
Nah, sounds like too much work, bikers can drive like the rest of us, “keeps everyone safer” or whatever you wanna tell yourself without thinking further. Too much work to re-evaluate.
Real life is more complicated, a typical bike line is built over an existing road, at worst you get some painting on the road, which barely changes anything and piss off both side. At best, a lane es turned into a nice cycle lane which pisses off car-driver, especially when the rest of infrastructure doesn’t follow.
I am all in for car free city, but too many mayors skip the build parking which connect to public transport at the Town entrance. Closing lanes without offering alternatives is just a way to get your work cancelled after next election and to block any alternatives project for another decade
Simply put, it’s not as easy to build transit or pedestrian infrastructure as roads. That’s it, at least in the USA. There’s an endless money machine for road maintenance and widening and anything car related and there isn’t at all the same for anything else.
So the public transport barely exists anyway and even if you give them a park and ride they won’t use it because public transit sucks and is far less enticing even if bike lanes nuke car lanes.
To add on, the morons do this to areas that don’t even connect other bike lanes. There’s no reason to use it if it doesn’t connect to anything.
I used to ride a bike every day for 15 years, I’m currently a car driver.
The big problem is when design desisions are made without considering all users.
For example where I used to live they divided the pavment into two, one side for pedestrians one for bikes. The only thing making this divide was a line of paint. This meant that you had to dodge pedestrians who didn’t like the bikes encroaching on their area whilst also having to deal with crossing junctions.
If you stuck to the road in the same area you could get a much higher speed as you didn’t have to deal with obsticals. The big problem was now in the eyes of the car drivers you weren’t supposed to be on the road as you had your own lane on the pavement.
Similarly, in a nearby area they decided to try and take a lane away from the cars to make a cycle lane. The issue being they ignored the fact that most people needed to take a turn that crossed the lanes, the only way to do that was to leave the cycle lane and join the cars, but again you have your own lane and the car drivers don’t think you’re allowed in theirs anymore and you’ve made their traffic worse.
This kind of infrastructure led to so many negative encounters for me that I gave up riding all together.
The problem tends to be that these kinds of infrastructure changes are only done as token gestures and are rarely well thought out. When these kinds of changes are done well it can be fantastic but those occurrences are rare so everyone defaults to the defeatist stance of the changes will cause more problems than they solve.
It’s a catch 22, you need to build new infrastructure that is good and works, to stop people being against it but it can’t be built because people only know the bad examples that have been built in the past.
There’s been a bunch of bad design around me, too.
For example, they decided to eliminate a lane of traffic, shift the street parking out into the road farther, and build a “protected” bike lane between the parked cars and the sidewalk. Except there’s a bunch of driveways for parking lots, and side streets, for cars to want to turn into, and now all the cyclists were invisible to the motorists because they were separated by the row of parked crossovers. If you rode at anything more than a walking pace, slowing or stopping at every curb cut to look for cars, you’d get hit by someone that had no hope of seeing you.
I guess enough people got hit by cars, because after about a year they moved the car parking back against the curb, and the cycle lane back to the traffic side. Though the road was still less one car lane in an area where there had been a perfectly good bike lane before all the improvements. I used to ride that road a lot. I don’t anymore.
Another thing that’s popular now is painting the entire bicycle lane with green paint. Because cycling is green! But that paint is a lot more slick than pavement when wet. It’s awful to ride on.
I think it’s mostly pavlovian.
It’s not that they follow some chain of reasoning to arrive at opposition to bike infrastructure, but that the mere idea triggers anger, and the position follows the mindless emotional response
See also: pretty much everything that they consider “woke.”
