“You know what else I saw on my half-hour commute to the Slate offices? At least 30 cars idling in the bike lane for unspecified reasons—hazard lights on—forcing me to maintain forward momentum by jackknifing into the busy thoroughfare.”
cyclists a minority and abusing minorities is low hanging fruit for the legal industrial complex
meanwhile you can commit murder with your car and get away scot-free. because drivers don’t want anyone to go to jail for driving.
I was just telling this to a family member the other day. Drivers can get away with literal murder because nobody wants to set a legal precedent that drivers are responsible for their actions. Having drivers be above the law is good for the automotive industry.
Don’t blame the lack of police enforcement alone for people blocking cycling lanes. It’d be nice to see these people ticketed, but that is NOT the fundamental problem.
It shouldn’t be possible for cars to block cycle lanes. They should be physically separated by at MINIMUM a curb. A car should not generally be able to enter the space.
Road engineering affects behavior. The idea that we can engineer to cause bad behavior and then rely on the police to fix the bad behavior is dumb.I can and will blame both. I can also, and will also, blame motorists who do it.
Yeah, no one LIKEs mixing bikes and cars on roads, but little is given towards making them separate. There are 4 things on a street being balanced though, pedestrians, bikes, greenery, buses, and cars. The first 3 IMHO should be the priority for a street (the area people travel short distances between close destinations). Roads on the other hand should be limited to buses, cars, and greenery OR a bike highway limited to bikes and greenery.
Like you said, though, using police as the primary method to enforce these separations is a failure of design. It would be like if Lemmy required you edit the webpages code to comment instead of having comment boxes, and having some dedicated to just going around and checking the code to make sure you were only putting in good formatted text and hoping they could punish people enough to do encourage it.
You would either shut down the site from excessive enforcement or shut it down from unusable design.
@fruitywelsh @admiralteal
I’m thinking that planting trees randomly in the road is the best answer?!
Slow cars down and force drivers to concentrate 🤔😉There is actually something to this. Even if you don’t decrease the size of the road, adding things to the sides of roads makes them feel less spacious, encouraging people to slow down.
@fruitywelsh
I actually noticed myself the other week driving down a busy crowded road with trams, really slowing down and concentrating.
We could also follow India and allow cows to roam our streets freely 😉
Whether or not you are being sarcastic, look into traffic calming. Chicanes are an effective way to make roads safer and perform better.
deleted by creator
Ironically, the real reason why NYCDOT repeatedly refuses to install physical separation in bike lanes, like curbs and bollards, is for emergency vehicles access. They do not say it publicly but they treat bike lanes as “traffic relief valves”, ostensibly for ambulances, but in practice mostly for police cars to zip up and down. The only bollards they have ever installed was on the Hudson River Greenway, and that was only after a literal terrorist drove a van all the way down it. Every single other “protected” bike lane ever built has been made wide and unobstructed enough to fit a truck through.
Fucking cops. IF they were ticketing the damn cars as well as bikes, well I guess fair play. This selective shit going after people who are actually helping improve the traffic issue is so crappy on several levels. Police departments really need to have some type of community board oversight.
Fuck the cities, too. They’ve kept these laws knowing that cycling infrastructure is insufficient and that the laws are poorly enforced. If the city can’t provide safe infrastructure for cyclists, they shouldn’t be outlawing reasonable actions to stay safe (by all means, ticket anyone cycling aggressively on the side walk, but not just for being there).
They “need” numbers to justify work, to justify budgets. Poorer people are easier targets so they get more numbers against poorer people and therefor target poorer people. Trying to ticket a rich guy in a Lambo is just asking for months of trial work and a lawyer.
That needs to be fixed. Either by address the way police get their budgets/selected, and/or making the courts more fair (progressive fine schemes also help make the bigger whale cases “worth it” for example).
ACAB as usual.
1312
The mistake is not contesting it in court. The judge would probably dismiss the charges just to not spend any more time discussing it. They waive off all kinds of traffic fines made by cops on power trips.
another cyclist thinking that the rules don’t apply to them, he had it coming
/c/LostLemming
