9 Things Drivers Need to Stop Telling in the Bikes vs. Cars Debate
9 Things Drivers Need to Stop Telling in the Bikes vs. Cars Debate
There are certain things assured to set off an internet firestorm. Talk about climate switch, mention Monsanto, or bring up the treatment of women in movie games. And you can, especially in latest years, piss off a entire bunch of people simply by writing about bikes and cars. Nothing seems to bring out the angry caps lock and individual attacks quicker than transportation issues.
A latest report displaying more cyclists are dying on US streets prompted a remarkable number of stories about cyclist safety . And in the comments section of each, people rehashed the same tired arguments over and over.
So, before the next big wave of internet arguing, I propose we retire a few overused and underwhelming opinions in the bikes vs. cars debate. Tho’ I drive and bike, my allegiances skew toward cyclists (feel free to scroll straight the comments and yell at me). But beyond my individual judgments lie a superb many studies and data displaying most of the pro-motorist arguments just don’t hold up. I know it’s hard to be wrong, especially on the internet, but here are a few sentences I hope we see less of in the future.
1. Cyclists always break the law
Let’s get this one out of the way very first, because it’s the one you hear most often: “I can’t respect cyclists because they overlook stop signs” or “Cyclists don’t seem to understand the rules of the road.” And yeah, when I’m on my bike, I sometimes arch traffic laws and see other cyclists doing the same.
The question is, how often does this happen? And how angelic are drivers? The data is a little hard to come by: Nobody, as far as I can tell, has placed a camera on the shoulders of drivers and cyclists and measured how well they go after the rules of traffic. But there is some information. One British probe found that six out of ten cyclists admit to running crimson lights . Last year, Fresh York magazine sent an intern out to see how cyclists treated traffic lights at three intersections. She found only 14, 22, and 36.6 percent of riders stopped at crimson lights, respectively .
How about cars? Well, an internet questionnaire found two-thirds of drivers admit to violating the law at some point. The Society of Automotive Engineers concluded that US drivers use their turn signals just half the time when switching lanes, and only a quarter of the time when turning improperly, which could be responsible for as many as two million accidents annually. And that 14-to-36 percent compliance rate for bikers? It’s a little offset by the fact that Fresh York City drivers collectively run 1.23 million crimson lights per day .
The truth is that we’re just not that superb at not cracking the law. Cyclists neglect to go after some rules, mostly rolling tho’ stop signs and going through crimson lights if there’s no cross traffic. Drivers tend to leave behind the following things are illegal (at least in California): Speeding, tailgating, not signaling, not stopping before a right turn, getting behind the wheel while inebriated, texting or using a cell phone without the hands-free option, dual parking, throwing trash (including cigarette butts) out the window, failing to stop for pedestrians in a crosswalk, making a U-turn when there’s a ‘No U-turn’ sign, honking your horn just because you’re angry, and yes, running crimson lights and rolling through stop signs.
I’m not telling two wrongs make a right. That drivers break the law doesn’t make it okay for cyclists to do so. I'm attempting to point out that traffic laws are some of the least significant and most commonly disregarded rules on our books. Drivers break them every day, casually, and usually without much thought. But the way some people talk about rule-breaking cyclists, you’d think our traffic laws were equivalent to the Bill of Rights, Geneva Conventions, and Magna Carta spinned up into one.
My conclusion is, chill out. Most people see cars cracking laws every day without telling “I don’t respect drivers” or “Drivers truly need to learn the rules of the road.” Sitting on a bike seat doesn’t somehow turn you into a monster anymore than getting behind the wheel does . Cyclists don’t break the rules because they’re bad people, they do it because they’re people.
Two. Roads are designed for cars
So I looked into it and, as it turns out, roads have been around for many thousands of years. And for much of that time, they've carried a broad multitude of things: feet, carts, horses, wagons, streetcars, buses, bikes, and automobiles. It’s only in the last six or seven decades that we’ve determined cars should get priority.
The roads don’t control us, we control them. We can design them to carry whatever types of traffic we feel are useful, and provide for safe and convenient passage of those different modes. But after World War II, many coerces in the US—suburban planning, interstate highway development, the movement of the middle-class out of cities—conspired to create a motorist-dominated streetscape. These days, most state departments of transportation evaluate roads using one metric, called Level of Service .
LOS doesn’t tell engineers how safe a street is for pedestrians, or how convenient it is for buses. It measures only one thing: How many cars you can stir through an intersection in a given period. Any delay in auto traffic is a bad thing, to be rectified by shrinking sidewalks, enhancing lane widths, and removing crosswalks and on-street parking. The problem is that making driving lighter also encourages more driving, a phenomenon known as induced request , which causes traffic engineers to pursue ever-diminishing comes back in attempting to improve LOS. These days, many cities and states are reevaluating their reliance on LOS, with California set to ditch it entirely .
But for so many years, we’ve auto-oriented our roads and put every single other mode of travel at a disadvantage. More troublingly, we’ve auto-oriented our minds, making it hard to imagine that things could ever be any different.
Three. Cyclists are dangerous
The CDC notes that tho’ only one percent of trips are made by bike in the US, cyclists face a higher risk of crash-related injuries than drivers. Around seven hundred people on bikes are killed a year on the road, and cyclists from time to time hit and injure or kill pedestrians . Therefore, some might say, bikers are reckless, with an utter disregard for their own safety and the safety of others.
Look, cyclists have a responsibility to stay safe and look out for others. But drivers are operating much more powerful, much stronger vehicles at high speeds. And if there’s anything Spiderman’s Uncle Ben trained me, it’s that excellent power comes with excellent responsibility.
The US ranks behind many developed countries in traffic safety, with automobiles killing almost 34,000 people a year . That’s equivalent to a Boeing seven hundred forty seven crashing and killing everyone on board every single week, year after year. If planes were crashing once per week, would you consider it safe to fly? While we call these things accidents, the truth is our roads are far deadlier than they need to be. One of the things we can do to avoid so much carnage is redesign streets to slow down the automobiles.
A two thousand thirteen investigate from the AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety found that a person struck by a car at twenty five miles per hour has a ten percent risk of dying. At forty mph that risk increases to fifty percent. In places with high numbers of pedestrians and cyclists, speed thresholds can be diminished in the name of safety, something that Fresh York City has recently done . I understand we can’t engineer away all collisions, and some people will still die on our roads, but that’s not truly a good excuse for not attempting to reducing their harm.
Four. There’s not enough room for bike lanes without causing gridlock
Driving in the US is relatively cheap and convenient. Gas taxes are low, the roads have been designed with speeding in mind, and highways connect far-flung places. It’s not indeed surprising that many people fear switching this system. After all, it seems to most that removing a traffic lane will reduce the capacity of the road and clog things up for drivers.
But traffic engineering is actually a little counter-intuitive. It turns out you can take away auto traffic lanes and not have a significant slowdown for drivers. When protected bike lanes are implemented well, they have been found to improve everyone’s safety , generate more revenue for shops along the street , and, yep, even speed up car traffic . With good design, cycling infrastructure fits lightly into city roads and intersections .
This actually make more sense when you realize that a bike lane isn’t necessarily reducing capacity, it’s permitting people to switch to another mode of transport. Cities have a finite size. Bikes and public transit are more space-efficient ways of moving large groups of people. We can attempt to keep squeezing cars in, requiring more lanes and more parking, or maybe realize that such a system will never totally work and take a different tack.
Five. Cyclists just want everyone to stop driving
You often hear that some people want to “coerce people out of their cars.” If that’s the case, then why are almost all Americans still driving to work ? Every time most people step out of their house to go somewhere, they’re more or less required to get into a puny motorized box and drive. We’ve auto-oriented our thinking so much that hardly anybody even questions this fact anymore.
Cars are good. They’re convenient, they shrink distances, they get people to exactly where they want to go. But they’re also noisy, polluting, and deadly. What I think most cycling advocates would tell you is that driving a car shouldn’t be the default option for every outing. By some estimates, something like forty to seventy percent of car trips are under two miles , a distance that could lightly be covered by biking or frequent transit.
There’s a bike lane by my house that all of a sudden completes for no reason, ripping off me in a lane packed with fast-moving cars. How would drivers feel if their lane came to a stop and deposited them on a railroad track? If we had fully separated and protected bike lanes in a well-connected grid—as in high-cycling countries like Denmark and the Netherlands —more people would feel convenient using them and perhaps even a few would be “coerced” out of their cars.
6. Drivers pay for roads so they should get priority
I’m sorry, but your gas taxes don’t cover the cost of roads and highways. Since the interstate system was implemented in 1947, US spending on highways has exceeded the amount collected from fuel and vehicle fees by more than $600 billion. Where has the rest of that money come from? Mostly bonds, property taxes, and the general fund . So even if you don’t drive, you’re paying for highways, a type of infrastructure that only cars can use. Roads in your city are generally financed through local, property, and sales taxes.
Designing our cities around cars, as we’ve done for the last few decades, requires large seas of parking and long highways to get people around. Auto-oriented design can decrease density to the point where the tax revenue generated by homes and business no longer covers the cost of maintaining roads and other infrastructure. Such a system, where municipalities don’t have the necessary funds to maintain what they’ve built, has been referred to as a Ponzi Scheme and represents a massive expenditure of money from all of us in favor of drivers.
7. Cycling is a fad
Sure, cycling in many major US cities has tripled since 1990, and even enlargened significantly in smaller and mid-size cities . But how do we know it will last? What happens if we redesign our streets only to find that all the bikers disappeared?
I suppose there’s that risk. Maybe tomorrow, many cyclists will wake up and realize that they’ve been duped, and that all they ever indeed desired was a car. But there’s a good amount of data to suggest that won’t be the case. In the very first place, rates of driving in the US seem to have peaked . While earlier generations have been mostly mono-modal, seventy percent of millennials (those folks born inbetween one thousand nine hundred eighty and 2000) say they use numerous forms of transportation to get around, including walking, biking, driving, and public transit. As a member of this generation, I can tell you anecdotally that most of my friends have a bike and use it all the time. Even those with kids still rail, often with the little ones strapped into a seat on the front. I hope that when I have children, they will inherit a world with less auto pollution and more protected bike lanes.
8. There’s a war on cars
Ah yes, the War on Cars . Taking away parking catches sight of, substituting automotive lanes with bike or transit-only lanes, and slowing drivers down. The tireless effort from wicked anti-car groups who love to caress their mitts together, cackle, and think up fresh ways to piss off motorists. Or at least, that’s how some people seem to view it.
How do I know the War on Cars is not truly a thing? Because I’ve been outside my house, and seen that there are still cars everywhere. It’s a lot like the phantom War on Christmas that has yet to stop the month-long wreath, candy cane, Santa Claus, and Christmas tune-fest that takes over this country every December.
Our roads are already powerfully tilted in favor of cars . Yet drivers seem to hate the idea of being slightly inconvenienced so that other modes of transport might be safer and more appealing. Pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit users have been exceptionally inconvenienced for decades, all so automobiles could get where they’re going a bit quicker. Redesigning streets is not a “war” against cars. It’s just acknowledgment that they don’t have to be the only thing on the road.
9. People absolutely need cars to get around
If we take away cars, how will people go to the store? Or carry large equipment around? Or take their grandmother to her doctor’s appointment?
Well, very likely some of those things will be done by bike. Using cargo bikes and trailers, people rail around with their children , haul groceries , and even stir their furniture . In general, drivers aren’t ferrying a couch and an elderly family member on every tour they take (tho’ I haven’t actually checked this).
What it comes down to is that there are many different devices for many different jobs. In many places, like low-density cities and suburban areas, I understand that cars will very likely proceed to be utterly useful and likely the superior mode of transportation. But in more crowded cities, it makes more sense to budge beyond one single mode of transportation and give people more options and more freedom.
Now, feel free to get into the comments and debate how our cities should react to the needs of everyone who uses public roads. But please, think cautiously before using any of the above arguments. If you can do better, we'd love to hear it.
9 Things Drivers Need to Stop Telling in the Bikes vs
9 Things Drivers Need to Stop Telling in the Bikes vs. Cars Debate
9 Things Drivers Need to Stop Telling in the Bikes vs. Cars Debate
There are certain things assured to set off an internet firestorm. Talk about climate switch, mention Monsanto, or bring up the treatment of women in movie games. And you can, especially in latest years, piss off a entire bunch of people simply by writing about bikes and cars. Nothing seems to bring out the angry caps lock and private attacks swifter than transportation issues.
A latest report showcasing more cyclists are dying on US streets prompted a remarkable number of stories about cyclist safety . And in the comments section of each, people rehashed the same tired arguments over and over.
So, before the next big wave of internet arguing, I propose we retire a few overused and underwhelming opinions in the bikes vs. cars debate. Tho’ I drive and bike, my allegiances skew toward cyclists (feel free to scroll straight the comments and yell at me). But beyond my individual judgments lie a excellent many studies and data displaying most of the pro-motorist arguments just don’t hold up. I know it’s hard to be wrong, especially on the internet, but here are a few sentences I hope we see less of in the future.
1. Cyclists always break the law
Let’s get this one out of the way very first, because it’s the one you hear most often: “I can’t respect cyclists because they overlook stop signs” or “Cyclists don’t seem to understand the rules of the road.” And yeah, when I’m on my bike, I sometimes arch traffic laws and see other cyclists doing the same.
The question is, how often does this happen? And how angelic are drivers? The data is a little hard to come by: Nobody, as far as I can tell, has placed a camera on the shoulders of drivers and cyclists and measured how well they go after the rules of traffic. But there is some information. One British investigate found that six out of ten cyclists admit to running crimson lights . Last year, Fresh York magazine sent an intern out to see how cyclists treated traffic lights at three intersections. She found only 14, 22, and 36.6 percent of riders stopped at crimson lights, respectively .
How about cars? Well, an internet questionnaire found two-thirds of drivers admit to violating the law at some point. The Society of Automotive Engineers concluded that US drivers use their turn signals just half the time when switching lanes, and only a quarter of the time when turning improperly, which could be responsible for as many as two million accidents annually. And that 14-to-36 percent compliance rate for bikers? It’s a little offset by the fact that Fresh York City drivers collectively run 1.23 million crimson lights per day .
The truth is that we’re just not that good at not cracking the law. Cyclists neglect to go after some rules, mostly rolling however stop signs and going through crimson lights if there’s no cross traffic. Drivers tend to leave behind the following things are illegal (at least in California): Speeding, tailgating, not signaling, not stopping before a right turn, getting behind the wheel while buzzed, texting or using a cell phone without the hands-free option, dual parking, throwing trash (including cigarette butts) out the window, failing to stop for pedestrians in a crosswalk, making a U-turn when there’s a ‘No U-turn’ sign, honking your horn just because you’re angry, and yes, running crimson lights and rolling through stop signs.
I’m not telling two wrongs make a right. That drivers break the law doesn’t make it okay for cyclists to do so. I'm attempting to point out that traffic laws are some of the least significant and most commonly disregarded rules on our books. Drivers break them every day, casually, and usually without much thought. But the way some people talk about rule-breaking cyclists, you’d think our traffic laws were equivalent to the Bill of Rights, Geneva Conventions, and Magna Carta spinned up into one.
My conclusion is, chill out. Most people see cars cracking laws every day without telling “I don’t respect drivers” or “Drivers indeed need to learn the rules of the road.” Sitting on a bike seat doesn’t somehow turn you into a monster anymore than getting behind the wheel does . Cyclists don’t break the rules because they’re bad people, they do it because they’re people.
Two. Roads are designed for cars
So I looked into it and, as it turns out, roads have been around for many thousands of years. And for much of that time, they've carried a broad diversity of things: feet, carts, horses, wagons, streetcars, buses, bikes, and automobiles. It’s only in the last six or seven decades that we’ve determined cars should get priority.
The roads don’t control us, we control them. We can design them to carry whatever types of traffic we feel are useful, and provide for safe and convenient passage of those different modes. But after World War II, many compels in the US—suburban planning, interstate highway development, the movement of the middle-class out of cities—conspired to create a motorist-dominated streetscape. These days, most state departments of transportation evaluate roads using one metric, called Level of Service .
LOS doesn’t tell engineers how safe a street is for pedestrians, or how convenient it is for buses. It measures only one thing: How many cars you can budge through an intersection in a given period. Any delay in auto traffic is a bad thing, to be rectified by shrinking sidewalks, enhancing lane widths, and removing crosswalks and on-street parking. The problem is that making driving lighter also encourages more driving, a phenomenon known as induced request , which causes traffic engineers to pursue ever-diminishing comebacks in attempting to improve LOS. These days, many cities and states are reevaluating their reliance on LOS, with California set to ditch it entirely .
But for so many years, we’ve auto-oriented our roads and put every single other mode of travel at a disadvantage. More troublingly, we’ve auto-oriented our minds, making it hard to imagine that things could ever be any different.
Trio. Cyclists are dangerous
The CDC notes that however only one percent of trips are made by bike in the US, cyclists face a higher risk of crash-related injuries than drivers. Around seven hundred people on bikes are killed a year on the road, and cyclists sometimes hit and injure or kill pedestrians . Therefore, some might say, bikers are reckless, with an utter disregard for their own safety and the safety of others.
Look, cyclists have a responsibility to stay safe and look out for others. But drivers are operating much more powerful, much stronger vehicles at high speeds. And if there’s anything Spiderman’s Uncle Ben instructed me, it’s that excellent power comes with fine responsibility.
The US ranks behind many developed countries in traffic safety, with automobiles killing almost 34,000 people a year . That’s equivalent to a Boeing seven hundred forty seven crashing and killing everyone on board every single week, year after year. If planes were crashing once per week, would you consider it safe to fly? While we call these things accidents, the truth is our roads are far deadlier than they need to be. One of the things we can do to avoid so much carnage is redesign streets to slow down the automobiles.
A two thousand thirteen examine from the AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety found that a person struck by a car at twenty five miles per hour has a ten percent risk of dying. At forty mph that risk increases to fifty percent. In places with high numbers of pedestrians and cyclists, speed thresholds can be diminished in the name of safety, something that Fresh York City has recently done . I understand we can’t engineer away all collisions, and some people will still die on our roads, but that’s not indeed a good excuse for not attempting to reducing their harm.
Four. There’s not enough room for bike lanes without causing gridlock
Driving in the US is relatively cheap and convenient. Gas taxes are low, the roads have been designed with speeding in mind, and highways connect far-flung places. It’s not truly surprising that many people fear switching this system. After all, it seems to most that removing a traffic lane will reduce the capacity of the road and clog things up for drivers.
But traffic engineering is actually a little counter-intuitive. It turns out you can take away auto traffic lanes and not have a significant slowdown for drivers. When protected bike lanes are implemented well, they have been found to improve everyone’s safety , generate more revenue for shops along the street , and, yep, even speed up car traffic . With good design, cycling infrastructure fits lightly into city roads and intersections .
This actually make more sense when you realize that a bike lane isn’t necessarily reducing capacity, it’s permitting people to switch to another mode of transport. Cities have a finite size. Bikes and public transit are more space-efficient ways of moving large groups of people. We can attempt to keep squeezing cars in, requiring more lanes and more parking, or maybe realize that such a system will never fully work and take a different tack.
Five. Cyclists just want everyone to stop driving
You often hear that some people want to “coerce people out of their cars.” If that’s the case, then why are almost all Americans still driving to work ? Every time most people step out of their house to go somewhere, they’re more or less required to get into a puny motorized box and drive. We’ve auto-oriented our thinking so much that hardly anybody even questions this fact anymore.
Cars are superb. They’re convenient, they shrink distances, they get people to exactly where they want to go. But they’re also noisy, polluting, and deadly. What I think most cycling advocates would tell you is that driving a car shouldn’t be the default option for every outing. By some estimates, something like forty to seventy percent of car trips are under two miles , a distance that could lightly be covered by biking or frequent transit.
There’s a bike lane by my house that abruptly completes for no reason, ripping off me in a lane packed with fast-moving cars. How would drivers feel if their lane came to a stop and deposited them on a railroad track? If we had fully separated and protected bike lanes in a well-connected grid—as in high-cycling countries like Denmark and the Netherlands —more people would feel convenient using them and perhaps even a few would be “coerced” out of their cars.
6. Drivers pay for roads so they should get priority
I’m sorry, but your gas taxes don’t cover the cost of roads and highways. Since the interstate system was implemented in 1947, US spending on highways has exceeded the amount collected from fuel and vehicle fees by more than $600 billion. Where has the rest of that money come from? Mostly bonds, property taxes, and the general fund . So even if you don’t drive, you’re paying for highways, a type of infrastructure that only cars can use. Roads in your city are generally financed through local, property, and sales taxes.
Designing our cities around cars, as we’ve done for the last few decades, requires large seas of parking and long highways to get people around. Auto-oriented design can decrease density to the point where the tax revenue generated by homes and business no longer covers the cost of maintaining roads and other infrastructure. Such a system, where municipalities don’t have the necessary funds to maintain what they’ve built, has been referred to as a Ponzi Scheme and represents a massive expenditure of money from all of us in favor of drivers.
7. Cycling is a fad
Sure, cycling in many major US cities has tripled since 1990, and even enlargened significantly in smaller and mid-size cities . But how do we know it will last? What happens if we redesign our streets only to find that all the bikers disappeared?
I suppose there’s that risk. Maybe tomorrow, many cyclists will wake up and realize that they’ve been duped, and that all they ever truly desired was a car. But there’s a good amount of data to suggest that won’t be the case. In the very first place, rates of driving in the US seem to have peaked . While earlier generations have been mostly mono-modal, seventy percent of millennials (those folks born inbetween one thousand nine hundred eighty and 2000) say they use numerous forms of transportation to get around, including walking, biking, driving, and public transit. As a member of this generation, I can tell you anecdotally that most of my friends have a bike and use it all the time. Even those with kids still rail, often with the little ones strapped into a seat on the front. I hope that when I have children, they will inherit a world with less auto pollution and more protected bike lanes.
8. There’s a war on cars
Ah yes, the War on Cars . Taking away parking catches sight of, substituting automotive lanes with bike or transit-only lanes, and slowing drivers down. The tireless effort from wicked anti-car groups who love to paw their forearms together, cackle, and think up fresh ways to piss off motorists. Or at least, that’s how some people seem to view it.
How do I know the War on Cars is not indeed a thing? Because I’ve been outside my house, and seen that there are still cars everywhere. It’s a lot like the phantom War on Christmas that has yet to stop the month-long wreath, candy cane, Santa Claus, and Christmas tune-fest that takes over this country every December.
Our roads are already powerfully tilted in favor of cars . Yet drivers seem to hate the idea of being slightly inconvenienced so that other modes of transport might be safer and more appealing. Pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit users have been amazingly inconvenienced for decades, all so automobiles could get where they’re going a bit swifter. Redesigning streets is not a “war” against cars. It’s just acknowledgment that they don’t have to be the only thing on the road.
9. People absolutely need cars to get around
If we take away cars, how will people go to the store? Or carry large equipment around? Or take their grandmother to her doctor’s appointment?
Well, very likely some of those things will be done by bike. Using cargo bikes and trailers, people rail around with their children , haul groceries , and even stir their furniture . In general, drivers aren’t ferrying a couch and an elderly family member on every excursion they take (however I haven’t actually checked this).
What it comes down to is that there are many different devices for many different jobs. In many places, like low-density cities and suburban areas, I understand that cars will most likely proceed to be enormously useful and likely the superior mode of transportation. But in more crowded cities, it makes more sense to budge beyond one single mode of transportation and give people more options and more freedom.
Now, feel free to get into the comments and debate how our cities should react to the needs of everyone who uses public roads. But please, think cautiously before using any of the above arguments. If you can do better, we'd love to hear it.