>We are only on the first steps of the urban revolution. It seems as if nothing has changed with the increased usage of said bikes but an uptick in associated accidents. But that was also the case when the car was introduced to the city. People demanded that every car be led by a man walking in front of it with a warning flag in hand. The car frightened both horses and pedestrians and claimed road rights. The public was furious, safety advocates wrote impassioned articles and demanded that cars be prevented from entering the city… sound familiar?
Good insight. Many people in my city decry bicycles and scooters (motorised or not) as a danger to pedestrians, but deaths and serious injury are almost always the result of a pedestrian being hit by a car. People complain that dockless rental scooters and bicycles block the sidewalk, but I have never experienced being blocked by one. On the other hand, I frequently have to navigate around cars parked on the sidewalk, blocking it completely. There is a cultural blindness to the problems caused by cars.
One of my biggest fears while cycling in the city is uber. Drivers frequently pull to the curb aggressively without signal, often blocking bike lanes. Unlike a taxi there are few markings to alert cyclists that the car will show this behavior. At best you might spot an airport rideshare pass in the back window, but these are often placed in the corner of the drivers side, making them hard to see from the edge of the road.
Literally every day on my bike ride to 4th and king Caltrain, as I pull up to the intersection, a Lyft or Uber waiting at the stoplight will pop a right side door on me as a completely unaware passenger tries to hop out.
I feel bad for the driver cause it's not like they can make the passenger wait for the red light so they can pull up to the actual drop off point, so I usually skid to a stop right next to the door shouting my head off in a "panic" to give everyone a good morning wake up call.
One of the selling points of Uber in their marketing, at least in chicago, was that Uber drivers would drive like “regular” people and not like cabbies; because cabbies in Chicago drive like crazy people. In a very short period of time Uber drivers all drive exactly like cabbies, which is obnoxious since there’s more of them.
I live in Chi too and frequently lyft. They need to make it easier to report bad driving. That would solve the problem. I submit tickets when the driver drives like a madman but it’s not clear what to do about it inside the app.
> I live in Chi too and frequently lyft. They need to make it easier to report bad driving. That would solve the problem.
It needs to be possible for non-customers to report bad driving. Uber and Lyft passengers are not incentivized to report bad behavior by their drivers because that behavior often benefits them (stop wherever the passenger likes, shave a few minutes off by veering through traffic, block or drive in bus lanes because it's more convenient or faster).
That's my biggest complaint about these taxi (they're not "sharing" shit) services: there's no enforcement structure against them and no way for people who aren't customers to push back on terrible actors. Uber and Lyft have disclaimed all responsibility because "drivers are not our employees" and they use the myth of "sharing" to get around laws around many things, but especially around receiving complaints.
Given that Uber/Lyft track every inch of the car's journey, it seems entirely feasible for them to automatically catch some types of bad driving (exceeding speed limits, illegal U-turns, frequent hard braking, etc). But currently they're not incentivized to.
Well then obviously for some reason "crazy" driving is selected for. The exhaustive options are:
1) profits are optimized by driving slightly faster and slightly more recklessly.
2) with hours and hours of experience you can drive better than an average person. Our simple non-professional minds simply don't comprehend their driving style and interpret their decisions as crazy.
NY's regulations help a lot in this regard. While Uber's don't have vehicle specific markings, they do have specially marked license plates that I can use to predict their behavior.
There are at least two kinds of cyclists and they move at different speeds.
One is the urban cyclist that uses the bicycle to go buying stuff at shops or take kids at school. It's short range and slow. They're usually scared by the idea of sharing the road with cars. They use cycle lanes and I often see them on sidewalks.
Then there are cyclists who pedal longer distances for fun and when they use bicycles in cities they are easily twice as fast as the others. Cycle lanes are often too slow (up and down sidewalks, tight turns, bumps.)
I belong to the second variety and I definitely prefer to pedal in a car's road than in a bike lane designed for slow bicycles. Urban designers should try to come up with different designs that suit both kinds of users.
I notice this about cyclists. Basically, I change between the types depending on how tired I am. I still feel like the majority of people will always be in the first category but unfortunately, the second category are more of the "enthusiasts" who actually engage with cycling organizations whilst the first category don't really seem to.
For the first category the bicycle is a convenient mean of transportation but it's nothing special. It's like computers are nothing special to most people except to professionals and enthusiasts.
However cycling organizations can leverage all those people to campaign for more bike lanes and the like. They vote...
In German you would be described as a Kampfradler, literally a warrior cyclist. Please slow down, for the safety of others and yourself. Just like a car driving 2x the speed of everyone else is dangerous, so is a bicycle.
The slow cyclists ride at 10/12 km/h. The fast ones at 20/25. It's still much slower than cars. Obviously it would be too fast for bike lanes, that's why I stay in the road.
Indeed, I've read similar comments about cycling in Amsterdam. Folks who live there say that they have one bike for the city, and another bike (with helmet) for weekend recreational rides in the countryside.
I think that’s just because there are more car drivers around. It’s super funny: whenever I’m in the car myself I get annoyed by bikers. When I’m on a bike I don’t understand how dumb some car drivers are. I think it’s just the vehicle you’re in/on which shapes your perspective. Quite telling for other situations too btw
I've thought along the same lines when I go to a busy parking lot. When you're driving, the pedestrians walking everywhere, right in front of you, etc, are very annoying. As soon as you get out of your car and become the pedestrian, you expect the cars to remember that you have right-of-way. Ha!
Look up most police precincts and you'll see this sort of behavior. It's not limited to police, of course; the city government engages in widespread abuse of sidewalks as storage space for vehicles.
And it's not limited to the government, either; I know a number of restaurants that have valet parking where the valets will at best double or triple park cars--including in the bike lane--and at worst park on the sidewalk. All this a few blocks from the police precinct. Sadly, Google's street view cameras came by at the wrong time of day.
This understates the impact of cars on sidewalks, however, as historically many New York streets and avenues had wider sidewalks before we introduced street parking.
In Germany, almost every time a road in the city is rebuilt, more space is allocated to bike lanes and sidewalk, and space is taken away from parking and road for that. This is an example of forward-looking planning. However, it isn't such a nice sight if you are a car owner.
> People complain that dockless rental scooters and bicycles block the sidewalk...
Seen it quite a few times, on my bike I just kick them out of the way. The last one I was walking over to the corner store for some morning coffee and it was parked right in the middle of the sidewalk but left unlocked so I "moved" it over to the store with it telling me it was calling the police the whole way.
I actually haven't been seeing very many of them lately around the valley, I guess they figured out nobody wants to ride around on a bike during hot Arizona summers and moved them to more lucrative markets. Well, plus all the "adopted" ones I still see running around town.
Good insight. Many people in my city decry bicycles and scooters (motorised or not) as a danger to pedestrians, but deaths and serious injury are almost always the result of a pedestrian being hit by a car. People complain that dockless rental scooters and bicycles block the sidewalk, but I have never experienced being blocked by one. On the other hand, I frequently have to navigate around cars parked on the sidewalk, blocking it completely. There is a cultural blindness to the problems caused by cars.