Exactly! In my day job, a lot of our customers are small to medium governments, and their primary decision points are around risk exposure. We've managed to set up our government to optimize for avoiding possible downsides instead of innovating and making the status quo better.
Defaulting to caution and conservatism in local government doesn't sound entirely bad. It's too easy to bring the power and authority of government down with unintended consequences on disadvantaged people. Think abuse of eminent domain or similar.
However, I don't think this argument applies to cars, which are not people.
>It's too easy to bring the power and authority of government down with unintended consequences on disadvantaged people. Think abuse of eminent domain or similar.
True, but for the past century so much power has been centralized at the state and federal level I think the abuse potential at the local level is very low. The "actually affect change" potential of your average citizen is highest at the local level. If experimentation and competition is going to happen I think the local level is best.
Of course from time to time you get dumb crap like Sac country's working on your car ban but the number of people effected is kept minimal while everyone else gets to point and laugh and learn what not to do. It's a much bigger pain when that kind of stuff happens at the state or federal level.
This is why they need to be pushed into having lofty goals like reducing traffic/emissions, improving public health and so on. And then they should be held to those goals, forcing them to take risks and spend.
What I hear all the time with programs like this (where politicians almost have the opposite problem) is basically this type of (slightly made up) media dialog:
“won’t it be dangerous to force children to ride bikes from age one?”
“Yes, but if we are to meet the emission goals by 2025 we have no choice”.
To be clear, think it’s good that politicians are more afraid of being seen as having done too little, than they are afraid of being liable for their actions.
>What I hear all the time with programs like this (where politicians almost have the opposite problem) is basically this type of (slightly made up) media dialog: “won’t it be dangerous to force children to ride bikes from age one?”
>“Yes, but if we are to meet the emission goals by 2025 we have no choice”.
Yeah, I don't think that you will succeed in convincing any parent with this kind of argument. Getting their kid hit by a car is a way more "real" and tangible concern for parents than some abstract emission goal.
As a parent in this exact situation, my reason is not primarily climate change (although it's high up on the list); it's about fostering independence and confidence. I'm pissed off that it's families and cyclists that somehow bear the enormous responsibility for improving driver behavior and justifying road infrastructure.
We admit that our streets are by default "never safe" and then shrug and walk away.
>I'm pissed off that it's families and cyclists that somehow bear the enormous responsibility for improving driver behavior and justifying road infrastructure
It shouldn't be this way, and I agree with you that the burden should be on car drivers.
However, I don't think it will be enough of a consolation for most of the parents in a situation where their kid on a bicycle got injured or, worse, killed. Not many parents would be willing to accept the trade-off of potentially sacrificing health or life of their child in the name of a greater good. And I am saying that as someone who doesn't even have children or ever plans to have any for rather selfish reasons. I can easily imagine that people who actually have children probably have way stronger feelings on this than me.
Instead of coming up with easy radical solutions that won't ever see the light of day in places where people's ability to lead a normal life depends on having a car (which is heavy majority of places in the US outside of NYC and, to a less degree, maaaaybe a couple of other major cities), it might be more productive and efficient to work on solutions that are more difficult and less sexy, but actually have a possibility of being implemented and improve the situation. I am aware that this horse has been beaten to death and some more, but just off the top of my head:
* Physically separated bike lanes and independent bike routes that are efficient in getting people places they need to be. A somewhat successful example of the latter (that keeps expanding and improving): Atlanta Beltline. Doubly impressive, considering that Atlanta is one of the most car-centric major cities in the US with absolutely horrific public transportation and no central "core" area (it is very sprawled, similar to LA).
* Hard push for expansion of public transportation, which, most of the time, is blocked by NIMBYs and other busybodies that always use the argument of not wanting to have more "undesirables"
* More creative and complicated ways that I cannot list off the top of my head
tl;dr: complex problems require complex solutions. If you expect to solve those problems with radical "slash-it-all" solutions, then I would not hold much hope for those problems to be solved at all. It's like someone looking at an existing complicated piece of code for a complex problem, calling that code dumb and difficult to read, and then coming up with a simple solution in a few lines of code, without thinking through all the edge cases and possibilities.
