Because if they’re riding bikes they might not be buying $70k cars. How are the poor car companies going to afford to survive now? Someone think of the shareholders.
Because oil companies and their useful idiots have propagandised them into believing that every cyclist that inconveniences their morning commute and causes them to lose 20 seconds of their drive deserves to die.
because they’re antisocial, hetero normative, fascist wannabe, assholes that despise wholesome solutions to the world’s problems. there’s only one way to deal with these sociopaths.
Riding a bike, my fellow patriots, is a clear sign of deviance and disloyalty to the core values of our great nation. The leftist elites have brainwashed these so-called “cyclists” into believing that their petty little two-wheeled devices are some sort of symbol of environmental progress. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Cycling is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt at undermining our cherished car culture. They claim they’re fighting climate change, but their real motive is to erode our freedom - the freedom to drive wherever we want without pesky road taxes or emissions regulations.
These cycle-huggers think they’ll win our hearts by peddling (pun intended) around our cities in their lycra ensembles and smug smiles. But let me tell you something: we won’t fall for their tricks. We love our SUVs, our loud exhausts, and our cheap gas - and we will protect these cornerstones of American life, come what may.
As true Americans, we must unite against this cycling menace. Our roads should belong to those who value their country enough to keep its economy thriving with their fuel consumption. It’s time to put an end to this two-wheeled insurrection and defend the freedom of movement that makes us great.
Careful someone might actually believe this instead of taking it as a joke. (Although bikes do directly threaten car culture which is why I love them so much)
Careful someone might actually believe this instead of taking it as a joke. (Although bikes do directly threaten car culture which is why I love them so much)
Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?
I do not think they are anti-cyclists. Anyone have objective proof on this claim, thanks.
Edit: For the record. I think bikers are more anti-car or anti-car infrastructure or worry about safety. Which is a valid criticism. A biker vs a 3,000lbs piece of metal is obvious. Drivers do not care about bikers outside liability or annoyance.
I think that Americans corralate freedom of movement with cars so they do not want to give that. It is about nuance. But I have never read anti-bike rethoric anywhere from reasonable people, left or right.
Only over emotional or extremist people seem to be quoted as unfairly being the voice of everyone else. And I say that as someone who bikes 50km, for fun and who also likes to drive.
I just hate the bike racing people who think public traffic is their personal sporting grounds. Meaning they don’t have to follow the rules of the road because it might mean they don’t get to break their speed record that day. Or that close down entire roads just so they can race one another.
They should find a hobby that isn’t in public traffic. Imagine if tennis closed down train tracks just so they can use the train tracks to put up their net.
I assume this is unpopular but I’ve decided not to get annoyed if I see people breaking the rules of the road. Sometimes I think “what a prick” or “he’s going to kill himself doing that” but it’s not worth anything more.
How many roadies do you encounter that they slow you down for more than a minute a day really? Way to channel your hate i guess, i know how irrationally angry it can make you to sit in a car.
Or that close down entire roads just so they can race one another
How often do you actually get caught behind a crit race? Maybe twice a year tops in some cities? Where I live marathoners fuck up traffic far worse and more often but somehow they don’t arouse the same vitriol.
Cyclists have every right to be on the road. We pay the same taxes, but this attitude is why I get menace passed and have coal rolled on me every couple of weeks. Show a video of acyclist following the law but getting hit on a bike and the comments section is people saying they deserved it. If I ride my mountain bike on trails away from cars the horse people and hikers get up in arms. I guess I should just fuck myself, eh?
I’m not at war with them… The cyclists here are at war with cross walk signals!
Two times in the last couple of years I’ve tried to turn right on red coming home at night, watching traffic on the left, turn back to the right and a cyclist is literally in front of my car as I’m about to apply the gas to turn! They would be laying across my hood without a fast reaction time.
Number one, I don’t believe they are supposed to be riding on sidewalks, and number two they completely disregard traffic signals/walk signals.
Granted this is in the U.S., specifically in Florida, and I don’t blame them for not wanting to be on the normal roads here as they will literally be run over by a jackass in a lifted F350; but I do wish they would at least abide by the pedestrian crossing signs as I really would prefer not to hit anyone!
Our state is so backwards the concept of public transit is an afterthought and very few places are remotely walkable… We have some bike trails here and there, but everything is designed for cars because living near a population center is too expensive for most and requires you to commute by car.
Yet no mention of how many times they witnessed unsafe/illegal driving behavior compared to the cyclists. Solid case we need to ban these cyclists. They are a threat to motorists, and collision with a bike could scratch their car’s paint.
Cars going over the speed limit is literally just accepted as fine by 90% of drivers but god forbid a cyclists goes through a stop sign at 20km/h looking both ways constantly to make sure it’s safe.
I see cars roll through stop signs at 30km/h weekly.
I encounter cars going twice the speed limit on one of the few designated bike routes in my city multiple times a week. I’ve almost been hit by these cars multiple times.
I’ve seen cars go through red lights at full speed 3 times in the past two years.
People are insanely reluctant to the idea that people bikes should maybe not have to follow rules that were written for vehicles that impair your vision and hearing, regularly kill and maim, and require a license and insurance.
It is true that people ride bikes on sidewalks here in an effort to stay out of the road, I see them every day and am passed by several when I walk to work. Even the ebikes are on the sidewalk. Also true that at intersections it’s dangerous as fuck, and by law they are supposed to be in the road and stopped at Red light. But if you are turning right on red, the pedestrian presumably has the right of way - you have a red light. I’ve had to slap the hood of several cars who were looking only at traffic in one direction and not the direction their car is about to move in, while I’m crossing a street on foot.
They do not have the right of way in this case, part of the issue, at least in my county, is that we have really backwards walk signals.
They show walk, then a few seconds later change to a flashing hand (don’t walk) with a count down, which makes very little sense. I don’t think the people are paying attention to them anyways.
We have those. The flashing hand and countdown, the pedestrian still has right of way - it’s just to let you know not to start crossing the intersection and how much time you have remaining to cross it. Sort of a long yellow light for walkers.
It does NOT give cars turning right on red the right of way. I don’t know where you live but if it’s the US you are misinterpreting that countdown and hand flashy sign.
I’m aware, I think they are very confusing to pedestrians. I know when I see a red flashing sign when I’m going to cross, my first thought is don’t… and I think it contributes more to people being confused and just saying screw it and crossing any time.
A walk sign with a countdown would make more sense, a red flashing hand with a count down could be interpreted as don’t walk till this is done, or you can walk for X# of seconds.
It was more a commentary of my county and how poorly it is laid out for bicycles, did you read the rest of it or stop after the first line?
I wouldn’t be caught dead on a bike here, I drive what many could consider an economy car (to me it’s a 4 door smaller sedan) and I am often asked why I drive something so small.
Even our smaller main roads here are 3 lanes each way, and nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, barring trails is designed with bicycles in mind.
Two times in the last couple of years I’ve tried to turn right on red coming home at night, watching traffic on the left, turn back to the right and a cyclist is literally in front of my car as I’m about to apply the gas to turn! They would be laying across my hood without a fast reaction time.
Maybe don’t try accelerate without looking where you’re going???
@SolNine@negativeyoda Cage is a term some people use for cars, as they act like cages, seperating the driver from everything else.
Cager is a term for a driver.
Let me further explain to you what is occurring here:
People on bicycles, without stopping, will ride from a sidewalk, across an intersection, 2 or 3 lanes per side here, fairly big roads. When you pull up to a light, you are watching for oncoming traffic in addition to any changes to the area you may turn into. A bicycle, who wasn’t there and rides into an intersection with complete disregard for traffic or crosswalk signals can be in front of your car in a literal split second. If I wasn’t looking before accelerating (I am in a manual car and have to put it into gear and all), I would simply run them over. Clearly, that isn’t the case, but I imagine with the age of people here and the size of the vehicles they drive it is not an infrequent occurrence.
I’m really surprised how many people missed the sarcasm of my first sentence and literally the rest of the post…
It greatly depends on the traffic pattern here! I also mentioned this to another reply, but our county has IMO very poorly designed traffic patterns for road crossing. It will generally turn white with a walk sign for a few seconds, and then quickly shift to a flashing red hand indicator with a count down, which means you have X number of seconds remaining to walk until the full red hand (don’t walk) shows up. Flashing red hand symbol IMO is not the best indicator for “you can still walk.”
The times I’ve had this happen are at very large intersections that have 3 lanes each way on one side and 2 lanes per side on the cross road. With lead greens, and various traffic patterns the walk signs do follow a specific pattern, but there are also opportunities for right on red without the pedestrian having right of way. This mostly occurs during the transitional periods, and during lead greens, which can be a significant amount of time in intersections of this size.
Yes of course it’s the motorists job to avoid running over pedestrians, I don’t think that was ever a question.
That’s interesting, I never considered a flashing hand as an indicator to stop. It is timed to a slow walker, so I can tell whether it’s safe to cross if I can run across.
I would argue that the signal you should pay attention to is your red light. Which also doesn’t mean you can’t go through the intersection (this is bad policy in my opinion), but it does mean that you need to look out for and yield to people driving, and walking across the intersection.
It is generally not a good idea to bike on the sidewalk on the wrong side of the road. But sometimes that is the safest option.
Our county and state in general is miserable for biking and pedestrians outside of designated trails. I only know a handful of people who are serious about road biking, and multiple have been in serious accidents due to motor vehicles.
Right on red is standard driving practice in my entire state unless otherwise posted. No one has a 180 FOV, your head has to swivel, and generally you look in multiple directions multiple times before turning.
Just like people in cars pedestrians and cyclists alike can also be negligent of the law and break right of way.
If we didn’t have right on red here, the traffic nightmare would be significantly exacerbated.
Just like people in cars pedestrians and cyclists alike can also be negligent of the law and break right of way.
Pedestrians and cyclists generally aren’t driving machines that weigh tons and routinely kill people when they’re negligent.
If we didn’t have right on red here, the traffic nightmare would be significantly exacerbated
I recommend you do some reading on the subject. The only thing that fixes traffic problems are robust public transport and increased walkability and cycling infrastructure.
Plus, as a motorist, I’d rather lose 3 minutes on my commute if it saves a few pedestrian and cyclist lives on the regular, while making the city a more pleasant and hospitable place to live in.
I more than welcome you to come to my county, the most densely populated and poorly designed for any kind of walk ability and communicate to our various cities how to improve! Some spots such as St. Pete, Dunedin and a few other downtowns are walkable, but most of the area the residential zones are far from many other businesses and services, as least much to far to walk.
That isn’t a joke when I say cities, as literally, you drive 10-15 minutes and you are in a different municipality controlled by a completely different governing body. We have a county wide public transit body, but each city has its own objectives and desires.
I am not oblivious to anything you are stating, but it is much more complex than stating obvious solutions we would all love to have. My work is a 25-30 minute drive, and the only public transit option is a bus, which takes 2 hours, not kidding!
Attempting to simply redesign a disaster that went from orange groves to wild urban sprawl necessitates funding on a variety of levels, state, county and local, and land that isn’t readily available here.
The truth? It stems from fear based mentality and personal insecurity. If you spend enough time evaluating the conservative mindset you come to realize it is grounded in fear and a disdain for oneself. They don’t want more cyclists because they think it’s an affront to them personally, as if they would need to start cycling to fit in.
Bikes don’t work well in rural or suburban communities and so if you are for it, then you are one of the “urban liberals” and so I must oppose you at all costs.
Of course there are also urban conservatives that are against cycling but we have a name for those, idiots people with a financial interest in the current car centric infrastructure
rural communities also used to have better rail infrastructure as well. With our current car prioritizing infrastructure, you are going to have a hard time convincing rural people give up the agency that a automobile gives them with regards to being able to have a career, grocery shop, get their kids to school, etc.
Hopefully remote work can fix that first problem as that will help the other issues as well.
Bikes don’t work well in rural or suburban communities
It can work to an extent in some of those places too, it’s just the infrastructure and sprawl has gotten so bad. Small towns in Europe often have quite good cycling infrastructure and public transport, for example.
But I agree with your overall point that the culture and politics of surburban/exurban/rural areas are a big part of it (along with the history that drove people from the cities to these areas in the first place).
The major problem against cycling for rural/suburban, people have a commute that makes cycling impossible. I happen to work in the same small town that I live in but I still can only bike to work during the summers when the kids are out of school and my wife is home.
Applies to shithole US only. I’ve ridden bikes and mopeds in rural places around the world and people there could’t afford cars at all. There is nothing inherently anti bicycle in rural place. Only in America do rural people make their lives impossible with their choices and access to cheap federally subsidized oil.
I’m wokerati! But no shit, we’re doing what the left wants, so of course the right is mad. It doesn’t matter if it’s for our health, cheap transit, or the environment or any other reason we aren’t guzzling oil to get somewhere and so they’re mad
The same reason they fight against vegetarians, the same reason they fight against gay men, the same reason they fight against renewable energy, all of it is toxic masculinity. The standardized male eats steaks, drives a loud truck, works at the coal plant, complains about his wife, enjoys smoking and drinking and watching sports. If you deviate from this whatsoever, conservatives are against you.
Where the infra (say it’s the road) isn’t adequately engineered to accommodate cycling and driving at the same time, it’s going to give drivers the experience that the road is a scarce resource and when resources are scarce, some folks are going to think in eliminationist terms (e.g. if those people just didn’t exist, everything would be fine) or the part of their brains that descends from people that wiped out competing clans and took their resources rules the moment and they set about violently defending ‘their’ resources.
The folks most-triggered at being made to share the road with cyclists really do some mental gymnastics to frame it in a way that they’re really the victims here and it’s cyclists, not the road engineering, that are the problem. Oh, poor me those cyclists don’t pay taxes and I subsidize their use of my roads bla bla bla and eventually that comes out in the form of vehicular assault to teach cyclists a lesson to stay off their roads. It’s bullshit all the way down of course, but that way they get to feel like the good guys while still bullying and murdering cyclists.
Also, it’s not by accident that the ‘everything is woke’ people are the first to engage in whatever moral panic that’s directing political violence at today’s boogeyman- whether it’s trans people in bathrooms, or gay people generally, or pregnant women that have ideas about bodily autonomy, their targets are always a tiny vulnerable demographic and uniting to put them in their place is an exercise in maintaining or restoring what they think order ought to look like. If they’re not putting people into the bottom rung of whatever hierarchy they think they’re defending, probably they think it’s the end of order or civilization or the like and they’ve failed in their duties to uphold order. Keeping them agitated about (and acting out about) moral panics is an effective way for lobby groups to pit people against scapegoats to keep their ire focused away from themselves or their patrons.
Your second and third paragraph neatly provide one of the best explanations I’ve seen for what people mean when we call the modern right wing fascists. They see people violating the order as they’ve decided it is and are encouraged to respond with vehicular homicide
I am so tired of the “everything I don’t like is woke” crowd. How long did it take for the “everything I don’t like is communist/socialist” crowd to be publicly ridiculed for having such juvenile worldviews?
Okay I am going to play a devil’s advocate here. So of you are not wrong. Many of these people are lashing out at charge unnecessarily, though I do think it is important to look at why. First the politicians and talking head that are driving this are just trying to make hay out of non issues for their own personal agendas. Fuck them they are toxic, but why are there so many common people so willing to buy in. Simply because they are scared of losing their way of life and ability to support themselves. I don’t mean losing the “right” to drive giant trucks, but losing what their parents and grandparents had. These people have seen it with the loss of good quality blue collar work. The work their parents and grandparents had, which one person could support a family and buy a house with. They have seen how the loss of manufacturing, steel, lumber, etc. jobs have affected others and they are scared that they are next.
They have the exact same existential dread of the future that the rest of have and or more or less the same reasons, they are just reacting in a different way. Just like how some people react to the loss of a family member with sadness and some with anger.
Hard right politicians have found that they can swing some of these people to their extreme views by capitalizing on this fear and offering a solution. Obviously isolationism and hate are not good longer term solutions, but they sadly do work well in the short term. I firmly believe many people that are just kind of going along with the hard right are only there because see no other solution being offered to their problems. Remember many Germans were not Nazis but they let the Nazis take power not because they agreed with them, but because no one offered anything else. Yes it is a lie but it is very important to remember why the lie exists. Sadly ignoring or dismissing it will not make things better.
I genuinely wish I had a solution, but I don’t maybe smarter people than me do.
First of all the “everything I don’t like is communist/socialist” were never ridiculed for their viewpoint, once Russia collapsed and China went mostly capitalist the communist rhetoric mostly dried up, but the anti socialist rhetoric remained and still remains, as does the much less talked about red-scare rhetoric, especially after a bunch of supposed “Antifa” dingbats allowed themselves to be interviewed on Fox News and admitted to being Communist/Anarchist, in the same way that the antiwork movement got derailed by that idiotic moderator going on Fox news.
Secondly the “everything I don’t like is communist/socialist” crowd is the “everything I don’t like is woke” crowd, if we had a Venn diagram about this is would be like a 90% overlap, same type of people, same types of mindsets, both with white Christian fundamentalism at it’s root, and if you dig a little deeper you’ll find that under that those roots are built right on top of Confederate ideals and white supremacy.
Add comment