Fuck Cars
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:
view the rest of the comments
Let me tell you how primary lane travel works out in the US. Drunks, elderly, distracted drivers, and raging truck man-children run the cyclists over. Go for it though!
Let me tell you how primary lane travel works in civilised countries: drunks and the others you mentioned end up in a canal, stranded up on a meridian, or crashed into a bollard.
That's because they do more there than just say "share the lane" and call it a day. They narrow the road to almost exactly the width of a typical car using unforgiving barriers like bollards, medians, and 5m deep canals. They restructure the roads so they aren't straight throughways, but brick-paved, winding pathways through the city.
They turn roads into obstacle courses, calming traffic, because as we all know, drivers may not be worried about killing cyclists, they're horrified by the idea of scratching their paint.
They still have drunks of course, but they're typically on bikes (since driving is so impractical), and they too often end up in a canal.
Here's a decent example from Amsterdam where they effectively have 3 classes of road:
That last category is the majority over there, and a big reason why the city is so safe and quiet... unless it's King's Day or New Years eve. Then these spaces are flooded with loud, drunk pedestrians or children shooting fireworks at random. On those days I recommend trips out of town ;-)
Narrowing and traffic calming urban roads to where cars cannot pass cyclists would be a very difficult battle in Ontario where full sized fire engines respond to every call including for paramedics, demanding wide roads. Traffic calming has been fought tooth and nail by HOAs and many of the urban roads are stroads which cannot legally be traffic calmed with a 70km+ speed limit.
Sharing traffic between cyclists and motorists has been absolutely deadly and most people will not even attempt to ride a bicycle unless they hahe dedicated infrastructure in Ontario which Ford is trying to make illegal. Even if you follow your proposed vehicular cycling, the proposed legislation makes that more difficult too.