I use a wheelchair and I want more bike lanes

August 31, 2023 1:21 PM

It seems like nearly every week I am having arguments about how bike infrastructure is ableist. It’s not.
posted by aniola (53 comments total)

Liked this! Thanks.
posted by Well I never at 1:34 PM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thank you for posting this and thank you to the author for writing it.
posted by tofu_crouton at 1:51 PM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is a well-appointed cycleway just a few metres from our house. Only yesterday as I rode to a dentist appointment I exchanged a friendly wave with a guy in a mobility scooter coming the other way. I regularly see old folks on mobility scooters using them, and one time, memorably, a young woman in an electric wheelchair giving her friend a ride to school.... to me, we need to stop thinking about BIKE infrastructure and call it what it is, which is a mid-speed zone for wheeled folks.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:01 PM on August 31, 2023 [30 favorites]

we need to stop thinking about BIKE infrastructure and call it what it is, which is a mid-speed zone for wheeled folks.

Totes down with this.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:03 PM on August 31, 2023 [10 favorites]

People ride electric scooters, e-bikes and one-wheelers all over Toronto, and as a rider of what I now call "acoustic bikes", I used to get annoyed by their crowding up "my" bike lanes. But once I realized that they're effectively accessibility tools for a badly-designed city, I realized that the real problem is that the bike lanes weren't three or four times as wide, that I should act in solidarity with my battery-powered-mobility comrades of all stripes, and of course as always fuck cars.
posted by mhoye at 2:15 PM on August 31, 2023 [36 favorites]

I'm so glad to live 100 meters away from a mid-speed zone for wheeled folks. Our cycle path infrastructure includes a "velo underround."

In an earlier powerchair that went 8.5mph, I could get downtown faster by the path than by bus. I'm grateful that most folks passing me by sing out 'on your left'!
posted by Jesse the K at 2:29 PM on August 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

I am a low vision non-driver who bikes. Of course also lots of folks who don’t exactly bike but benefit from better bike and pedestrian infra exist. Always any attempt to make spaces in the US better bring out hordes of opposition because “what about accessibility”. It is deeply frustrating and glad to see this story getting some interest.
posted by R343L at 2:29 PM on August 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wish to god in this country we could ever make space for 'these things are complicated and there are nuances'. I don't disagree with anything said in the article, but at the same time, I dread the next argument over bikes vs cars because I can already foresee people not reading the article and trotting this out and despite the author in the article correctly noting that indeed, yes, many disabled people are in fact car-dependent, but that accessible bike infrastructure can be created that keeps that in mind, arguing that bike-first or bike-only infrastructure is totally accessible which is not in fact what is being said.
posted by corb at 2:50 PM on August 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

I very often use bike lanes when I'm in my wheelchair, because they are SO much more accessible.

Pavements in the UK are often not at all wheelchair-friendly - high curbs, no curb cuts, tree roots, extreme cambers, rough surfaces - not to mention when there is a bike lane, the pavement alongside often has those cattle-grid paving slabs at frequent intervals, presumably to discourage cyclists from going off-piste, but they also discourage the hell out of me; they really hurt. Bike lanes tend to be smooth, level and have curb cuts. Much much safer and more pleasant.

I used to second-guess myself about it a bit, but cyclists never seem to mind. I'm embracing the 'mid-speed zone for wheeled folks' concept.
posted by BlueNorther at 3:09 PM on August 31, 2023 [8 favorites]

When I hear complaints about pedestrian- or bike-friendly infrastructure (and yes, while I'm on record here about how badly bikes behave vis a vis pedestrians, we do need the latter, along with maybe shock collars to make bikers stop running red lights across crosswalks or something) as supposedly being "ableist," my first cut is that it's the tremendously tedious thing some liberals do where they can't admit they personally find a policy or action inconvenient or unappealing, so they go hunting for a marginalized identity group they can make up speculative scenarios about the policy or action harming.

I know this isn't universally the case and it is certainly possible to be pedestrian- or bike-friendly in a way that makes things inaccessible, but...unless I know the person is themselves disabled, that's my first cut.
posted by praemunire at 3:39 PM on August 31, 2023 [7 favorites]

I very often use bike lanes when I'm in my wheelchair, because they are SO much more accessible.

Just promise me you don't take your Rascal zipping down the center of 8th Avenue in midtown Manhattan the way I once saw one guy doing.
posted by praemunire at 3:41 PM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

> don't take your Rascal zipping down the center of 8th Avenue in midtown Manhattan the way I once saw one guy doing.

Alternatively: absolutely do drive your Rascal down the middle of the road. Become ungovernable!
posted by riotnrrd at 6:21 PM on August 31, 2023 [8 favorites]

I also keep seeing more and more of what looks like ebike tech derived power assists for wheelchairs and I'm digging it.

So instead of some bulky industrial motor and lead acid gel battery on a 300 pound power chair frame it's a much smaller battery and motor clipped to a lighter unpowered chair and it seems to behave a lot more nimble the same way a bicycle with power assist is more nimble than a scooter or motorcycle. And the user has the option to get some exercise if they want it, too.
posted by loquacious at 6:40 PM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

I use a powerwheelchair.

Most of the footpaths in my area have concrete slabs that have lifted or sunk or broken - going over them physically HURTS, and flares up my hip pain and back pain for days.

The only pain-free surfaces in my area are

a) dedicated cycle paths (beautifully smooth poured concrete, painless)

b) the bitumen road for the cars.

So I am always happy to see new poured-concrete cycle paths.

Also, sometimes when the pain is very bad, I have gone onto the cycle path on the road (painted lines on a smooth bitumen road) because it was the only way I could cope.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:52 PM on August 31, 2023 [9 favorites]

Pavements in the UK are often not at all wheelchair-friendly

I visited my mum in the UK recently, who is an electric wheelchair user, and was kind of shocked by how bad pavement accessibility is now. It was never great, but now people park their f-ing cars on the pavement, it’s terrible. I was wheeling a double wide stroller around a fair bit, and regularly had to reroute around vehicles or pavement repairs or areas with no cut ins to get up onto the pavement in the first place. Genuinely terrible.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 9:06 PM on August 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

It constantly pisses me off that parking on the pavement isn't even illegal in the UK, except in London. There is literally a line in the highway code (rule 244, IIRC) saying "don't park on pavements in London" like the rest of the country doesn't matter. Even as an able-bodied pedestrian not trying to wrangle a pushchair or anything, I find it hard to navigate sometimes. I'm this close to making it policy to key any car I have to awkwardly squeeze past, maybe just by starting to wear my keyring on my belt.
posted by Dysk at 11:40 PM on August 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

fun fact, the Berlin bike lane pictured in the article has been dismantled with great prejudice after a suburban backlash gave the right-wing CDU enough votes for the conservative wing of the social democrats to push out their left and green partners from the governing coalition. so, uh, that’s uplifting
posted by daveliepmann at 12:55 AM on September 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I now carry a few of these and these when I'm out. Kind of tempted to make my own, slightly sterner ones, but these are a good start. She makes hard-to-remove luggage tags to put on luggage left in wheelchair spaces too.
posted by BlueNorther at 4:05 AM on September 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you'd like to see examples of all the cool accessible bike varieties available in the Netherlands, here's a good website.

Corb, one thing to keep in mind is that environments with human-friendly rather than car-friendly infrastructure are fundamentally different from what you get in the US. With everyone who doesn't want to be in a car no longer forced to be in a car, roads meant for cars have far less traffic and multi-lane monstrosities are rare and are only for going long distances (rather than being what you are required to take to go to the grocery store). Not Just Bikes has a video on how nicer it is to drive in the Netherlands.

But yeah, my grandmother had narcolepsy and so couldn't get a driver's license. She was forced to rely on other people for every single trip to the grocery store, to church, to work, etc. And she was a single mother raising three kids. She could have taken transit, if it was available, but there was none. She could have ridden a bike -- she had one that she never rode because the roads weren't safe enough and nothing useful was within biking distance, anyway.

And myself. I have pretty severe ADHD. I happily don't have or need a driver's license anymore since I've moved from the US to NL, and I never felt safe driving. Here they will bar you from driving if your ADHD is bad enough (and my therapist asked me to confirm I wasn't driving, so I assume I'm in that class). And honestly -- you don't want people like me on the road next to you! But in the US, we force people to drive to meet the basic needs of daily life, so we are on the road next to you.

With car-dependent infrastructure things are so spread out and dangerous that there is only one choice -- the car. Human-, bike-, and transit-friendly infrastructure gives you the freedom of many choices.
posted by antinomia at 4:05 AM on September 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

I’d be a lot more ok with bike lanes if bikers thought the law applied to them. My disability makes a bike crashing into me potentially more dangerous than for most people. Cars in NYC understand to stop at red lights for pedestrians. Bikers don’t. I’m glad people with mobility scooters can go faster, but as someone who has used a mobility scooter (my mobility issues are intermittent), I’d rather be safe crossing the street (with or without a cane) than be able to go faster on a scooter. To be clear, as far as I can tell, people on mobility scooters don’t almost run people down like assholes when pedestrians have the right of way, so they’re not the problem, but if you want to grow broad support for bike lines, able-bodied cyclists have to show they understand they’re doing something that can endanger other people instead of assuming they’re the heroes of the environment (again, I’m on foot here) to whom the rules don’t apply.
posted by vim876 at 4:25 AM on September 1, 2023

That's also a thing that tends to be different in cycling cultures with infrastructure set up for it - cyclists being a major component of traffic, you get fewer assholes that think they have license to do whatever because obviously they are the ones at risk from cars. You don't see many people on commuter or granny bikes displaying that kind of behaviour in Europe, in my experience. (Bicycle traffic being not a near non-existent afterthought, it tends to actually be policed as well).


I now carry a few of these and these when I'm out.

Problem with where I am is that the pavements are barely wide enough for a wheelchair to begin with, and the roads barely wide enough for large vehicles when empty. The only viable solution here is for people to just not park on this road, at a minimum not on both sides of it. As it is, there is little to no access for pedestrians, and it would be a shitshow if an ambulance ever needed to get access. A fire engine couldn't even begin to try.

It's almost like these Georgian and Edwardian streets weren't made to accommodate parking, and it isn't viable for every household to have 1.5 cars on average.
posted by Dysk at 5:31 AM on September 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I’d be a lot more ok with bike lanes if bikers thought the law applied to them.

You have a legitimate grievance but this is backwards. People getting around by any modality will obey the rules when the infrastructure makes obeying the rules safe and comfortable. Remember any of those many cases where someone dies crossing a stroad because the bus stop is across from their house and the nearest crosswalk is a half-mile away? Withholding support for bike infra is like opposing putting a crosswalk at the bus stop because people keep jaywalking. You *especially* should want more bike infra, so they get out of your space.

Cars in NYC understand to stop at red lights for pedestrians.

Ah yes, the famously rule-abiding drivers of NYC.

The NYC DOT's Bicycle-Pedestrian and Motor Vehicle-Pedestrian Crashes is pretty clear on who is killing whom. This gives me three policy-relevant conclusions: 1. reckless bicycle riders are a problem, but likely a minority one among people cycling; 2. car drivers are factually 100x the problem of reckless cyclists, and 3. cycling/walking conflicts would probably be fewer and less harmful if we weren't fighting over the scraps of space left over after cars take the lion's share.
posted by daveliepmann at 5:45 AM on September 1, 2023 [10 favorites]

Oh, BlueNorther's don't-block-the-pedway fliers remind me of a particular disability-ignoring occurrence I keep seeing which absolutely enrages me: there's a typical 5-foot sidewalk along a road, and set up on it in an orderly line between 5 and 15 of those rental scooters perpendicular to the sidewalk. Those things are at least 3 feet long and I, a fully mobile person with no need for assistive aids, have to skirt by the damn things just to walk past. How the hell is someone in an 24" walker or a 30" wheelchair going to get by?

Also, I swear to god they've made those fucking things heavier in the last few years just to make it harder to push them out of your way.
posted by jackbishop at 6:08 AM on September 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

one thing to keep in mind is that environments with human-friendly rather than car-friendly infrastructure are fundamentally different from what you get in the US

It's almost like these Georgian and Edwardian streets weren't made to accommodate parking, and it isn't viable for every household to have 1.5 cars on average.

So I think these two comments together really helped crystallize what I see as part of the fundamental problem with kind of solving this deeply difficult issue - and it is deeply difficult if you care about humans, and yes, I definitely get what you're saying praemunire about that particular discursive tendency - if it helps, I am a disabled woman with chronic pain who also has fluctuations in that pain which has helped me understand some of what I will call the perception difficulties here. I think there are two big issues.

So, first, in the US, I think we can all grant that infrastructure in the majority of cities is definitely primarily set up for cars, and especially with the rise of the two-working-parent household, the expectation is that multiple members in a household will have multiple cars, producing the 1.5 car average. And I think we can all grant that it would be ideal if this were not the case - if at the very least, we had scenarios where those numbers came down.

But I think the difficulty is that it is really difficult to fundamentally redesign existing infrastructure without using eminent domain in extremely aggressive ways that will have people relatively justifiably rioting. You can't just say, "Hey, it would be really nifty if my city had a subterranean train system with stations every half mile, it doesn't, but now I'm going to just drill and make it so, sorry about your houses." Nor can you say, "It would be way easier if this city had been designed with bike lanes on arterial streets, sorry, we're going to widen the arterial streets, again, sorry about your houses/businesses, we're widening this baby." The only way you can place bike lanes on those streets (which generally don't have parking, so this isn't a parking issue) as far as I am aware is by narrowing the existing streets.

And I think that most of the people who are trying to solve this problem are fundamentally good, kind people. And they look at that problem, and they want to solve it, and I think looking at that problem in the US means realizing that people are going to suffer no matter what is (politically feasibly) done. (It is important to note that the author of this article is not in the US). And kind people don't want people to suffer, and kind liberals don't want people who are already marginalized to suffer, so they try to do some mental gymnastics to explain why really people won't suffer, or the people who will suffer are very small, or they deserve it, or they aren't really marginalized. And those ways of thinking are tempting, but they're fundamentally wrong, and they're also deeply unkind to fellow humans who will suffer, and don't deserve it, and are marginalized. And because it is unfair to blame people for the choices that were made over half a century ago, before they were even born.

I am uncomfortable even typing these words because of the shame so frequently attached to them, but the extent to which my disability keeps me from biking or walking in the US is also heavily dependent on my weight at the time, because extra weight placed painful pressure on places that didn't have the structure to support it. Weight is also a problem more in the US for a number of reasons than it is in other countries, and it exacerbates disabilities. Recently, a new medication has caused me to lose about 1/3 of my previous weight, and I am more able to walk short distances, and try to do so when I can. Prior to that, people would tell me I should walk more to lose weight, not understanding that to do so caused me excruciating pain, would knock me out for the entire day, and would also not cause weight loss. I mention this not for kicks, but more because I think that often in these conversations it is not understood first, how often weight plays into the amount to which people can benefit from cycling or walking, because people often make casual assumptions about how far most people can or should walk, and second, how incredibly upsetting these casual assumptions can be. I think people understand that people are heavier in the US but don't understand that it's not a simple matter of just expecting everyone to start biking to fix it.

Creating a human-friendly infrastructure also would require fundamental economic changes. I recognize that bikes that support my disability exist: I would love to ride them. They're expensive, and not financed nearly as easily as car loans. Nor can I lift them over my head to those convenient bike racks so gloriously on display in that video. I would also love to be able to afford to live within walking or biking distance to work; I don't think I ever will be able to because of the wages paid in the US, which also fall far behind wages paid in the EU. I would love to be able to have healthy meals delivered to my door at reasonable prices so that I could maintain a lower-pain weight at times when I am unwell and unable to cook or leave the house. It would also let me be less car-dependent. But I don't foresee any of these things happening.

I don't think this means the problem is insurmountable, but I do think it means it's not a quick-fix problem. And I wish people wanted to work on any of these problems with me, but I don't see a lot of it. I see people kind of ignoring these problems to try to get to their goal, which doesn't exactly make me feel great about the overall movement. I recognize it's a part of a broader loss of trust and cohesion within the US, but it's still a problem.
posted by corb at 6:45 AM on September 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I didn’t say New York drivers obey every rule; I only said that, in my experience, they are more likely to stop at a red light when there’s an obvious pedestrian. And if you’re going to use city-wide death statistics to “prove” your point: a) There’s a lot of NYC without bike lanes. Let’s compare it by rider-miles per year if doing it citywide, and b) let’s include crashes that don’t kill people. A bike crash that might only give a normal person a broken arm and some bruises could dislocate several of my limbs, tearing tissue along the way.

I take the point of the person above who said that as bicycling truly became integrated as transit, the mindset would change. I just don’t respect that disabled people who don’t bike, like me, will just have to shoulder the risk until then because the general population doesn’t think it’s a real problem.

I don’t think bike lanes are ableist; in fact, I vote for more of them, even though I think they endanger me, because we have to fight climate change. But I think a lot of hard-core promoters of bike lanes are ableist. And the ones who are, as illustrated by this comment thread, aren’t interested in rethinking the perspective where people using bikes are always the good guys. It’s easier to assume that people like me simply love cars than that the issue is complicated.
posted by vim876 at 7:10 AM on September 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

The only way you can place bike lanes on those streets (which generally don't have parking, so this isn't a parking issue) as far as I am aware is by narrowing the existing streets.

Yeah, probably. That would create some congestion in the short term, but would make it increasingly attractive to bike, for those who can
In the medium term, it might reduce traffic, making parking more available for people still driving, and alleviating the increased congestion somewhat.

I think it's also worth noting that the US isn't a monolith either. A lot of what you're describing as stuff that would be excellent to have but doesn't exist, describes NYC at least as well as a typical bike and transit-friendly city in Europe. And there are a lot of cities here that, due to their age and narrow roads, would require straight up removing cars from roads altogether to enable cycling infrastructure. From what I understand, typical lane width in the US is over double what it is in the UK for example so there ought to be scope to narrow roads without actually reducing capacity, but reducing the width of each lane rather than by reducing the number of lanes, while still maintaining wider lanes than are typical in a lot of places.
posted by Dysk at 7:27 AM on September 1, 2023

For a while I wasn’t biking and was only traveling via transit, walking and crucially using a literal blindness cane. Depending on light level I needed it to reliably detect the surfaces I was walking on. I could easily not notice a shitty hole in the street crossing at an intersection and then fall and boom car hits me. One day heading home it was still pretty light and I was crossing a street downtown at one of the highest pedestrian volume areas in town. It was a walk signal but a person driving a car decided to turn right across the crosswalk within inches of me. With a blindness cane extended. They didn’t hit me and I noticed them. At that time of day the cane was to stop me from tripping not noticing cars. But the point is the person driving did not care. They figured they could make it and not hit me — or didn’t even notice. The reality of the zero sum car focused design of US cities is that every class of road user acts like a shitheel sometimes and often feels justified. The solution is less space for cars and better designs for non-car users. But the only way to do that cost effectively or in any reasonable time frame is to reduce space for cars. And that upsets nearly everyone. So instead a lot of the debate is about who is most misbehaved (or what policy change is “ablist”). I’m kind of done. We need more space for all and the only space available in most places is currently allocated to cars.
posted by R343L at 7:28 AM on September 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

(Okay, I got some bad numbers and was too groggy to sanity check them, US traffic lanes are not twice the width of the ones on the UK, but they are often a foot or two wider. That's still potentially four feet of width on a road with one lane in each direction, without significantly reducing road capacity.)
posted by Dysk at 7:41 AM on September 1, 2023

Problem with where I am is that the pavements are barely wide enough for a wheelchair to begin with, and the roads barely wide enough for large vehicles when empty. The only viable solution here is for people to just not park on this road, at a minimum not on both sides of it.

Yeah. The actual street I live on now is wide for a UK residential street, and there are some parking restrictions, so it's broadly okay for me. But a lot of the streets surrounding me are just...not available to me. They’re narrow, people park on the pavements on both sides because there is nowhere else for the cars to go, so I just...can't use them. And, you know, I know for a fact that some of the people parking on the pavements are disabled people who need to drive because the streets aren't accessible to them, so...
The (very pretty, mostly Georgian) street where my parents live has a long stretch where the pavement is not just too narrow for a wheelchair but too narrow to get down on crutches or even if you're just not super steady on your feet, or at all fat. It's about sixteen inches wide, wall on one side, steep curb on the other. Luckily there is a bus stop I can get to, but what that means is that it's physically impossible for me, and presumably most disabled people, to get into town or to the train station from my parents' house without using some kind of vehicle.
These aren't all problems that can be solved by people just being more considerate or making better choices.
posted by BlueNorther at 7:57 AM on September 1, 2023

Become ungovernable!

The dead are ungovernable, it's true.
posted by praemunire at 8:10 AM on September 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

The only way you can place bike lanes on those streets (which generally don't have parking, so this isn't a parking issue) as far as I am aware is by narrowing the existing streets.

Here in Louisville, KY, there's a fairly standard "road-diet" plan for medium-traffic arteries: take a road which used to be 2 lanes in each direction, each lane with the standard width of 12 feet (so, 4*12=48 feet in total), and redivide that into a 6+12+12+12+6-foot configuration: 6 foot bike lane and single car travel lane in each direction, and a left-turn lane in the middle.

The funny thing is that there are a number of situations where this configuration, despite reducing total car-travel width, actually prevents car-travel congestion. I bike, so I see a lot of situations from a bicyclists'-eye view, and I have overtaken (on the right) a car turning left. At these points I and the left-turning car are creating congestion which would not exist on a dieted road; I'd be in the bike lane, they'd be in the turn lane, and the travel lane would be clear.

The only real problem I see with the road-diet plan is that it does not interface wonderfully with buses; they have to stop at the curb, that means blocking the bike lane and half of the travel lane if there's not a dedicated bus cutout, which there usually isn't. The bus issue also means that placing any serious bollards between the bike lane and car lanes is a nonstarter on a lot of roads.
posted by jackbishop at 8:19 AM on September 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is there a specific recent case where a US city/state/etc. actually used (or even tried to use) eminent domain to demolish people’s homes so that they could build transit or bike lanes? The advocates for transit, bikes, and safe/complete streets that I know of focus on reallocating public space away from cars and car storage — which there is plenty of in most US cities. Most contemporary subway projects use tunnel boring in built up areas (or more rarely, cut and cover in public roadways).

These projects already meet with lots of fierce, loud opposition, even when they involve something as minor as applying paint to a bus-only lane, so I am finding it kind of hard to believe that there are a lot of real-world advocates (as opposed to blowhards puffing their chests, who are always over-represented in internet discourse) who are willing to advocate for something that radioactive in today’s political environment.
posted by en forme de poire at 10:27 AM on September 1, 2023

But a lot of the streets surrounding me are just...not available to me. They’re narrow, people park on the pavements on both sides because there is nowhere else for the cars to go, so I just...can't use them.

It's the same in my town. A couple of streets are intractable, but most cases could be solved by turning a lane in each direction setup into a single one-way lane, which would allow pavements to be widened.
posted by Dysk at 10:51 AM on September 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

The state of Texas is using eminent domain to destroy homes in Austin to expand I-35 (against the wishes of most of Austin). Meanwhile, the city of Austin is expanding a roadway to make room for better public transit and is not removing any homes, but is removing some businesses that people are sentimentally attached to.

So yes, using eminent domain to change roads in the US is doable, you just need the right combo of will and power.
posted by tofu_crouton at 10:51 AM on September 1, 2023

I didn’t say New York drivers obey every rule; I only said that, in my experience, they are more likely to stop at a red light when there’s an obvious pedestrian. And if you’re going to use city-wide death statistics to “prove” your point: a) There’s a lot of NYC without bike lanes. Let’s compare it by rider-miles per year if doing it citywide, and b) let’s include crashes that don’t kill people. A bike crash that might only give a normal person a broken arm and some bruises could dislocate several of my limbs, tearing tissue along the way.

I'm curious where we disagree, underneath the statistics. Is it that you think bicycles are in some general way the greater menace to people walking, compared to cars? Because to me, the frequency of hard-to-read stories like this one and my analysis of, well, just about any metric make it clear that cars are the problem by far. I don't for instance believe that cyclists are behind a hidden majority of sub-fatal ped crashes.

Or are these general stats about crashes and rider-miles — I often prefer metrics by trip — a red herring, because you're trying to tell me not about general danger or intersection safety or crosswalks but specifically that people cycling run a lot of red lights? Because yes, I agree, and they drive me nuts too. My solution is that a city should rely less on red lights to make it safe and pleasant for you to cross the street. Curb extensions, ped islands, fewer lanes, and (paradoxically) fewer stop signs and red lights are the path to a culture with fewer cyclists menacing you. And more cyclists, since that would diminish the sick subculture of reckless sport riding so prevalent in American cycling tradition.

I do want to throw water on the "European cyclists are so polite" idea above. Berlin cyclists run red lights, but mostly it's middle-aged women riding sedately on an omafiets, not assholes weaving through traffic at high speed on a fixie. The Dutch are worse:

by the time World War II rolled around in the Netherlands, Dutch cyclists, especially in Amsterdam, had developed something of a reputation for being rule breakers. They were known for just blowing through stop signs, riding slowly down the middle of the road, and annoying cars–stuff like that. They were sort of like a 1940s version of Critical Mass–kind of anarchic in their style. And apparently when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, they were pretty taken aback by this behavior.

[transcript] [spotify] I think this difference is important, in that this style of rule-breaking is far less dangerous and intimidating.

The only way you can place bike lanes on those streets (which generally don't have parking, so this isn't a parking issue) as far as I am aware is by narrowing the existing streets.

The street doesn't get narrower. The part exclusively for the use of the most space-wasteful, energy-wasteful, polluting, noisy, murderous mode of transportation gets narrower. The street stays the same width. Or, better yet, the street is "closed", that is, opened to people not using cars. Or people driving can still use it, but you put modal filters diagonally at a fewer intersections and at the end of a few streets so people riding can go where they please but people in cars have to take the long way around. (That way, people who actually need to drive a car on that street can do so, and people who are just driving there because it's easy now have a reason to take the main road or a bike.) These are the actual techniques being used and proposed.
posted by daveliepmann at 11:07 AM on September 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

I do want to throw water on the "European cyclists are so polite" idea above. Berlin cyclists run red lights, but mostly it's middle-aged women riding sedately on an omafiets, not assholes weaving through traffic at high speed on a fixie. The Dutch are worse:

Europe is also not a monolith. In Denmark for example, 11% of drivers occasionally ignore red lights, while the figure for cyclists is 8%. If there's a vehicle speeding toward a crossing in Denmark when it's green for you to walk, you're more likely to have an issue if it's a car, even ignoring the ways in which a bike slashing through your crossing is potentially less disasterous than a car doing the same.
posted by Dysk at 11:28 AM on September 1, 2023

I have pretty severe ADHD. I happily don't have or need a driver's license anymore since I've moved from the US to NL, and I never felt safe driving. Here they will bar you from driving if your ADHD is bad enough

Huh, this may explain a lot about why I hate driving and why it freaks me out, because I have raging untreated ADHD for my whole life and have fanatically avoided becoming a driver or car owner.

I know a huge part of it is a very earnest and sincere dislike for American car culture and dominance but I know another part of it is I don't trust myself driving, and part of the reason why is a huge amount of anxiety about it. Like it totally drives me bonkers to be a passenger in a car with a distracted driver and I'm on edge the whole time being a (mostly silent) back seat driver ready to grab the wheel and just way too hyper-vigilant the whole time and it's exhausting.

I know another small part of it is I turn into an instant hoonigan when I do drive. Get me on a go cart track, offroading or a racing sim video game or something and suddenly I'm The Stig and I will totally pwn you at Forza or even Mario Kart, and I race dirty and have absolutely no qualms about nerfing you into the rails or pushing you out of a turn from an inside sneak pass right in the apex and other totally unsporting track behavior.

But driving in actual traffic? That's a whole different thing.

I have no idea why riding a bike is so different for me. I think a huge part of it is how much more connected to the environment I am compared to driving, and how much lower risk it is. On a bicycle it's a lot easier to just go slow and let my ADHD run wild and it's fine.

And I'm a very courteous and careful cyclist. While I do love being a total hoonigan and menace to myself on my bike when the coast is clear and I'm not risking injuring innocent bystanders and pedestrians, but as soon as I'm in mixed traffic I dial those tendencies way back and have never even come close to colliding with anyone.

I already feel bad enough when I slow down to relative walking speeds and I startle someone walking around day dreaming or listening to headphones on a MUP or whatever. Hi, I'm sorry, yes, my bike is really quiet because I hate a noisy bicycle.
posted by loquacious at 11:47 AM on September 1, 2023

So yes, using eminent domain to change roads in the US is doable

I specified “for transit and/or bikes,” though — and I think this is a very important difference because these projects are typically held to a completely different standard in terms of community review, etc. than projects that involve expanding car or plane infrastructure.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:58 AM on September 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

The city is using eminent domain to expand a road for transit. There are many complaints, but complaints don't equal power.
posted by tofu_crouton at 2:04 PM on September 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

A common thing that happens with supposed transit oriented projects is that instead of just taking away likely copious existing car-dedicated space for the transit project, the DOT insists it would DESTROY car throughput. So we have to widen the road which costs money, pisses people off, etc. Of course the goal is almost always officially to change trips to not-cars and all studies on adding space to do these projects shows it will expand car trips and MAYBE transit. But can’t ever slow cars down so here we are.
posted by R343L at 4:02 PM on September 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I always thought of my wheelchair as an honorary bicycle.
posted by Soliloquy at 4:16 PM on September 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

An unmentioned point, caregivers being able to cycle improves the lives of the elderly and some disabled, because ultimately care recipients pay for caregivers' transport expenses, if not directly then indirectly via politics, bureaucracy, restrictions, etc.

As for bike bells, I love these bike cow bells because once you slide away the magnetic strap then the bell rings as you move. At least in Switzerland everybody looks around when they hear a cow bell approaching.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:29 AM on September 2, 2023

> I'm this close to making it policy to key any car I have to awkwardly squeeze past

Also lentils provide an intermediate option
posted by jeffburdges at 4:41 AM on September 2, 2023

The city is using eminent domain to expand a road for transit.

Again though, the original contention and the comment I was responding to was about destroying people’s homes for transit and bikes. If you’re talking about the light rail project in Austin, unless I am misinterpreting or not finding the right information (which is totally possible!) it sounds like they chose this alignment specifically to avoid displacing anyone from their home.

To return to my original point, I still think it is really misleading to bring up eminent domain (especially that which displaces people from their homes) in the context of bike lanes, as if it is a major obstacle to making our streets safer and enabling other types of transit besides private cars. Just to make it clear what I’m talking about, the original comment said that “it is really difficult to fundamentally redesign existing infrastructure without using eminent domain in extremely aggressive ways that will have people relatively justifiably rioting.” This is just not the case! First of all, as I mentioned, the government’s use of eminent domain for car infrastructure like highway widening is actually much more commonplace and aggressive. Second and more importantly, bike lane and busway projects, in particular, primarily involve reallocating or redesigning existing public car and parking space. NACTO has a guide showing lots of examples of how this can be done in different environments without widening streets. Removing and narrowing car travel lanes can in fact often be desirable in its own right, because a lot of American roads are overbuilt and removing excess capacity improves safety. Narrowing roads often does not even increase congestion or divert traffic to other roads, because a lot of the safety gains are achieved simply by reducing unsafe driving (and this is without even getting into any gains from moving some car traffic to other modes). One of the big reasons this can be accomplished without demolishing entire communities, as was once shamefully done to construct urban freeways, is because bikes and transit allow much more efficient uses of space than cars. Roadway capacity is not the main issue — in fact, we’ve already overbuilt road capacity in most of the USA — the issue is how we’re using that capacity to allow people to get to their destinations safely.
posted by en forme de poire at 7:55 AM on September 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

I live in New Zealand, which is where the original article originates. Generally cycle infrastructure is built by narrowing car lanes and/or the grass berms at the side of the road. Acquiring new land is very rare. Usually the fuss comes from loss of on-street car-parking, but in the best case, what we do is put the new cycle route on the far side of the carparks, so the parked cars protect it, and no new space is used, it's just swapped around.

And cycle routes often aren't on the main arterial route for cars but one block over. You can't always do this but where you can it's often better anyway because it means that the bikes etc aren't negotiating the same busy intersections with car traffic.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:48 PM on September 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

They do that in Portland and while it is better in the sense of "they're less likely to kill me" it does also mean I was always on residential roads and never biked past anything commercial.
posted by aniola at 4:30 PM on September 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

cycle routes often aren't on the main arterial route for cars but one block over.

These wre great because you aren't huffing exhaust the entire ride.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:32 PM on September 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

> I have no idea why riding a bike is so different for me. I think a huge part of it is how much more connected to the environment I am compared to driving, and how much lower risk it is.

As a fellow ADHD cyclist/non-driver I would agree that sense of immersion in the environment is a big part of it. The other factor, I think, is the sheer fact of the physicality of cycling pays a big role. Its a form of exercise so oxygen is circulating etc, and its one you drive with your body. The one time I rode a e-bike it felt really disconcerting because the sensation of being pulled rather than pushing and the whole time it felt like opening a space for momentary distraction to cause a loss of control. I can't imaging car driving as anything other than this, writ even larger.
posted by tallus at 1:59 AM on September 4, 2023

As a fellow ADHD cyclist/non-driver I would agree that sense of immersion in the environment is a big part of it. The other factor, I think, is the sheer fact of the physicality of cycling pays a big role.

Something interesting I remember reading is that drivers with ADHD drove more safely when they used a manual transmission, as opposed to an automatic. It’s a pretty small, older study on adolescent males, but at least a couple of data points in favor of the idea that a more physical connection to driving could help inhibit attentional lapses. And of course there’s also evidence that aerobic exercise itself seems to enhance prefrontal cortex function.
posted by en forme de poire at 8:39 AM on September 7, 2023

I'd vote that "honorary bicycle" is fair, certainly for path usage, Soliloquy.

A lone wheelchair does not inconvenience cyclists, not anymore than another cyclist does, because wheelchairs move just as predictably as bicycles. Also mountain bikes have handle bars just as wide as wheelchairs.

As a comparison, a small child pedestrian becomes problematic on cycle paths, because small children act erratically. And untrained dogs wind up even worse.

I'd suggest cycle paths should officially be cycles and wheelchairs, and even single file pedestrians towards the edge, but no dogs except trained service animals.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:01 PM on September 11, 2023

There's a shared street in my neighborhood that has a car lane, a sidewalk, and a two-way bike lane protected by pucks. People regularly use the bike lane for wheelchairs, walking dogs, playing with their children, jogging, etc. It's not a problem for all those and my bike to share a path because the cars are so few and slow. I can swerve into a car lane if needed to avoid children. I don't have any cars that I need to zoom past at a stop sign to get ahead of for safety. All those modes of transportation are perfectly safe together without cars in the mix to change the safety calculus. With cars, everyone has to proceed with rational fear for their lives, so not acting like an a-hole takes a back seat
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:24 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Children and dogs have a right to the space, too. More space should be nibbled away from the car lanes, not the dogs.
posted by aniola at 5:31 PM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Children and dogs have a right to the space, too.

They have a right to a space, but not necessarily this space. Sometimes it makes sense for slow wheeled transport to share a space for play, jogging, dogs, whatever — much of the time it does not, especially if there's a sidewalk.
posted by daveliepmann at 1:10 AM on September 12, 2023