Because the cities are being actively altered in a way that transfers space and other resources from cars, to bikes.
Zero sum game, resources being reallocated, obviously the people whose resources are being taken away are going to view that as a war.
Won’t anybody think of the poor cars? But seriously, resources are better utilised by bicycles to the benefit of all. There are no losers here other than the oil companies and car manufacturers.
Oops sorry I just noticed your last sentence. Yes there are losers. They include all the people whose lifestyles involve driving.
Pretending otherwise is childish and lame.
And what exactly are those people going to lose if they get on a bike sometimes? Their diabetes?
Yes there are losers. They include all the people whose lifestyles involve driving.
However, they’d on average be healthier and happier, that’s not losing.
- There are more car-only roads than bike-only roads
- Virtually no roads are ever completely closed off from car traffic and allocated strictly towards bicycles
- More lanes = more traffic jams (induced demand)
- More bike lanes = more people on bikes = fewer people in cars = fewer jams for “your lifestyle”
- Narrower roads = Fewer cars = fewer pedestrian deaths = fewer car-crashes
- More people biking/walking, healthier lifestyle, less stress on the healthcare system.
I don’t see how this isn’t a win for car-people and bike-people.
I don’t get why people are just one or the other. I use a car, a bicycle and I walk. I experience shitty cyclists when in my car, shitty car drivers when I’m riding the bike, and as a pedestrian, usually both groups can be shitty lol
Whenever I tell people I like to walk places they always say something along the lines of “aren’t you wasting your investment in your car and insurance?”
No, I’m not. I have to pay for my insurance to get to work most days. I can still save money on gas/wear and tear by walking. This also saves carbon from the atmosphere, in theory lets me keep my car for a longer period of time, and walking is better for my physical and mental health.
It’s only a zero sum game if they view driving as an essential and immutable part of themselves, and even then, not really.
Charging adequate prices for street parking, for example, guarantees that you’ll always be able to park easily if you need to, a luxury not provided by free parking.
And then, of course, they could always just get out of their cars and immediately start benefitting from the changes.
zero sum in that there is limited amount of space… so space from something but be subtracted in order to add it to the space of something else….
it’s not a metaphor, it’s about the total being the same. it’s mathematical and squarely fits the definition of zero sum.
That accepts the framing that we’re designing for cars/bikes/peds. We’re not. We’re designing for people, whether they’re in a car, on a bike, etc.
In that sense it’s very much not zero-sum.
In my city the transportation infrastructure decisions are made by a car hate group. We have 400 miles of bike lanes and polling shows 3% of the population use. Bike infrastructure isn’t installed for bikers, rather bikers are the excuse to obstruct and restrict vehicle traffic. As long as they use the word “safety”, they get away with really dumb stuff.
I wouldn’t have nearly the problem I do if bikes USED the lanes, but I guarantee I can go out right now and not see a single bike. They are entirely vacant.
To add insult, the bike I’ve seen at a newly converted intersection with dedicated lanes, bike turn box, and no right on red sign didn’t give a rats ass about anyone or any rules, drove on the wrong side, ran a red and drive into active traffic; all the cars stopping for this moron. There is no shared responsibility and no enforcement of rules. That is my liability the biking idiot was messing with. Yes, he’d be at fault if he was hit, but the city stistics would mark that as dangerous intersection and crack down on cars harder.
So yes, I see this as a war. In my city, we coexisted before, but it wasn’t a problem until this turned this into a mine vs yours situation. The passion driving fuckcars communities to take over is matched with my passion to retain functionality. You are the invading force in this war, we are playing defence. I see paths of scorched earth like scars; barren and void of purpose for which it was designated.
There is compromise, yes and I agree some can be made, in return, I want to see utilization, coexistence, and shared respect for the rules.
I see $150 million a year wasted for a incredibly small but disproportionately vocal group of radicalized individuals to actively make things suck and in their wake, after the construction, abandoned by those for whom it was built.
Maybe at 3am, but no, my routes during the day take me on roads with other cars doing grownup stuff. Bike utilization is a drop in the bucket.
Get out there and show us you use the infrastructure built for your peace of mind.
I honestly think conservative media just tries to start as much shit as possible so they have something to talk about.
At this point they probably start out by picking some slightly complex idea that’s objectively correct and then work backwards to find a way to disagree with it.
The issue is that these changes are beneficial to society but detrimental to them personally. So they try to rationalize their stance without sounding like selfish assholes.
The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, argues that the costs of such green initiatives outweigh their benefits, suggesting that they impose unnecessary economic burdens (Heartland Institute, 2017).
Guess some people see everything in a cost-profit margin only.
Guess some people see everything in a cost-profit margin only.
Especially when it’s convenient. I’m sure they would happily look the other way if you showed them the economic burdens of having a car-centric society.
Anything the Heartland Institute publishes should never be treated as anything but toilet paper.
Man I am so tired of the endless parade of articles with the premise “How could conservatives possibly think this?? Surely if we just take the time to carefully understand their reasoning we can blah blah blah…”
Here I’ll answer the the “why” right now:
A) Most US conservatives live in suburbs and rural areas and generally hate and fear inner cities and the people who live there. They also generally hate and fear environmentalism. They also greatly resent the idea that the USA isn’t the best country on earth at literally everything. They’re also violently homophobic and have such deeply toxic ideas of masculinity that they consider it to be weak and “gay” to drive a smaller vehicle.
So when an urbanism advocate says they want people to give up their lifted truck to live in a city and ride a bicycle so the US can be more like Europe and East Asia to help the environment how in the world do you expect them to react in any other way?
B) This is a population that’s addicted to hate, fear and opposition like a drug, and conservative politicians and news orgs are the dealers. They need to periodically find something new to tantrum about. If there is no reason to hate something then a reason will be created. This was the case with LED lightbulbs, with COVID, with Romneycare, and so on and on and on. The 15 minute city conspiracy theories are not some sort of new unprecedented pattern of behavior.
I don’t have or want a lifted truck but I also don’t want to live in a city. If that means biking a hundred miles to get anywhere I’ll do it.
There should be zero delivery trucks clogging city streets. Zero.
Good luck with that. And the bike-riding population will do all their shopping far outside the city, where shops still survive? A cargo bike is nice for personal shopping, for deliviering letters or small packets, but you won’t be able to fill the shelves of a supermarket this way. And whoever thinks about using freight trams for this, sit down and actually think this idea through for a change.
Delivery trucks are fine. They don’t contribute to sprawl, are driven by professional drivers, and don’t need parking lots.
It’s personal automobiles that are the problem.
I was bout to write the exact same.
Cargo trucks cna also be limited to specific times, like 6am when most people arent in the street yet
Shall we take a guess at who the poor fella will be that has to work night shifts only because some bourgeois shoppers can’t be bothered with the fact that full shelves don’t appear through magic?
If I had a dime for every time somebody made this reply, I’d have a lot of dimes.
Nobody has ever said that. What people are saying is that the private automobile is the worst way to move masses of people in cities. They command ungodly amounts of space, make everything more expensive thereby, and aren’t even good at moving masses of people.
You want to increase the capacity of your road? You can:
- spend millions adding lanes and possibly destroying houses
- turn a lane into a dedicated bus lane
- turn a lane into a bike lane
- hell, pedestrian areas have higher people capacities than car lanes
Yes, you are right. You are talking of moving people inside cities. I am talking about a) getting in and out of the city and b) moving goods into and out of cities. None of the usual demands in this group ever even starts to address this.
What usually works better for moving people in and out of cities is park-n-ride setups where you setup a giant parking lot in the suburbs next to a metro station. People can just ditch their car outside the city and proceed using public transit. I often do this in Montreal, for example.
For goods, it’s a similar setup but with big trucks transferring cargo to smaller trucks; this is already pretty common.
Yes, of course delivery trucks need access to cities, some goods are not practical to move by cargo bike. As do emergency services and buses. Nobody disagrees with this. The problem in many cities is that streets are clogged with useless private cars. So the obvious solution is to ban private cars.
Sure, if you focus on the “zero” part of the phrase you can score a cheap point. Now focus on the “trucks” and the “clogging” part. A van can stock up a small to medium store just fine, and a walkable neighborhood doesn’t need big box stores to begin with (and small business ownership is a plus for economic conservatives too). And with fewer cars carting individuals around, delivery vans can move in and out much more efficiently without clogging up anything.
Perhaps the idea is to find ways to articulate things that don’t lead to such obvious cheap points being scorable.
“Zero trucks on our roads!” <—- stupid idea that enables the cheap point
“But zero is a stupid number to aim for” <—- cheap point
“Well obviously not zero”
Then don’t say zero! Use your words precisely, as if you had some responsibility for what’s going on. Be more like an engineer, and less like a kid, with your speech.
Many smaller businesses could be served just fine with cargo bikes. And once every inch of free space is no longer clogged up by parking cars, it’ll be easy to assign loading zones for bigger vehicles that supply supermarkets and the like. Now make those electric and everything becomes much quieter and less polluted. Then people will actually enjoy coming to the city centre again so business there can thrive.
Yeah I can only think of people envisioning small downtown stores only using small trucks/vans or the weird one underground cargo tracks (there is a startup in Texas pushing for that one).
Even then trucking tends to just make more sense from everything I’ve experienced, but what do I know
Underground cargo tracks is a nice idea, but hardly realistic. Can you imagine ripping open the whole city to build that, and the cost of such an undertaking?
If I remember right they were planning smaller deployments (think building scale, neighborhood scale) with boring tech being the solution to installation.
It’s not exactly some unsolvable logic puzzle. This is a problem not everywhere has, it’s pretty simple.
Two solutions.
First, you create a second way in. It can be anything from dedicated streets for cargo with all the loading docks to shared warehouses at the edge of the city and underground tunnels like Disney. The main idea is to dedicate most streets to people and bikes, which can have all the storefronts
Or the easy way we could do far more quickly… Instead of slicing space you slice time. Limit deliveries from 4am to 7am, maybe an afternoon slot if necessary. The idea being people get the prime time, and you work out the logistics with that constraint
For better logistics, limit the size of the trucks and do shared distribution centers as a buffer for normal shipping times.
Ideally, you do #2 while transitioning to #1. Put a slowly increasing off hour delivery tax and create an incentive. The logistics will magically come together as the tax grows
Limit deliveries from 4am to 7am
Oh boy I sure do love being woken up at 5am because the loud-ass delivery truck is restocking the grocery store.
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but I do sometimes get woken up by the garbage truck. Not often, but it’s loud as shit and comes just before 5am… IDK if it’s bad luck, but everywhere I’ve ever lived seems to have garbage trucks that came well before sunrise, and they’re about the loudest trucks before you get up to construction vehicles
Unloading a truck isn’t even on the same volume scale. Especially if we used small trucks from a distribution center outside the city. Other countries do it, and we do it already, just not in the same numbers I’m proposing
This doesn’t sound like an actual issue to me
So, why do we need a supermarket? Is there any reason a supermarket couldn’t be replaced with it’s contingent parts? A butcher, a veggie shop, a convenience food shop, a pharmacy, a bakery, and a condiments shop?
I don’t see why they have to be stapled together when separate works just fine. All of which could fairly practically be stocked individually by small light duty trucks, or even a bike with a decently sized trailer.
I also don’t see why even if you staple everything together, a cargo tram wouldn’t work. Have two, a passenger tram that works one route, and a cargo line that runs by the loading bays of local stores. They can be switched on and off the overarching infrastructure without interfering with each other.
It would be a paradigm shift for the US, but I fail to see how it would be an unworkable one.
How do you think any of those are getting goods? If you ban trucks you’ll just get cargo vans and then lots of smaller cars. Or they’ll go out of business and people will complain you can’t live in the city and move to suburbia. Again.
Is there any reason a supermarket couldn’t be replaced with it’s contingent parts?
Mainly just economics. Supermarkets tend to have cheaper prices, and it’s probably a result of consolidating the operations to share resources (loading docks, refrigeration, payroll, etc)
Supermarkets should have cheaper prices, but now that they have formed a monopoly of just a few companies they are not.
Small shops keep supermarkets competitive, without them they become monopolistic.
