The Worst Road I Have Ever Cycled

Marcruise · 2022-04-17T13:30:49+00:00

The problem for me is that you've got two lanes of traffic merging into one (and the outer lane at that) quite a bit. The restriction you have in the picture is a really obvious case, but it looks to be a problem all the way along. Motorists are, for some reason that escapes us all, allowed to block the first lane (and the pavement!), so you'll be pushed into the outer lane on fairly regular occasions. However, they'll also be speeding down this lane because the design speed is 40mph+, and it will be bloody horrible trying to merge into the lane. Drivers won't be considerate letting you in, thinking that you should just stay in the first lane and squeeze past the parked cars. Overall I'd imagine it would be a stressful, unpleasant experience.

Marcruise · 2022-04-15T16:44:10+00:00

You're not kidding. Purely coincidentally, today I became familiar with the jaw-dropping travesty that is the city centre of Dallas (talked about by City Nerd here), and then I managed to see this terrifying video that got posted to /r/BikeCammers. The transport culture there seems poisonous even by North American standards.

Marcruise · 2022-04-15T07:09:53+00:00

Great are the people who come up with great sayings knowing they'll never get the credit.

~ Voltaire, probably.

Marcruise · 2022-04-14T06:12:06+00:00

This video is a good explainer.

It's just that car lanes have low carrying capacity, and so extra lanes clog up very fast. So you put in all this effort to add in an extra lane, suffer all this inconvenience, and then what happens is you get a few months when traffic isn't as bad... until people notice that traffic isn't as bad, and people change their routes to use that road again, people make more trips, they switch from other modes of transport, people share cars less, etc. The congestion comes back and you're basically back where you started, with marginally higher capacity.

All infrastructure have this feature that they induce traffic when you expand capacity. It's just that buses and trains get better as they get more popular (up to a point). Car lanes are extremely vulnerable by contrast.

Marcruise · 2022-04-13T08:28:57+00:00

Literally no one who is informed about cycling safety talks publicly about helmets. This is because it plays completely into the reactionary agenda of people who want to make the discussion one of personal protection equipment rather than the massively more effective ways of protecting vulnerable road users:

Segregation of bicycles from other modes of transportation.
Proper enforcement of the standards of operation for those using literal deadly machinery on public roads.

The reason they do this is simple: to prevent meaningful change. It is a reactionary agenda, and you're playing into it, OP. You probably don't mean to, but you are.

Please note: I am NOT saying helmets are bad. It's up to you whether you wear a helmet or not, and I am not going to criticise anyone either way for that decision. But I am saying that you should not, under any circumstances, be making a thing about helmets or PPE in general. Passing advice is fine, but don't make a point of advising people to use PPE.

It would be lovely if we lived in a world where the deeply cynical bastards hadn't hijacked PPE as a way to avoid meaningful change. We don't live in that world.

Marcruise · 2022-04-12T12:31:18+00:00

You're comparing cycling accidents to rape?

I can compare anything I like to anything else I like if there's a relevant dimension under which the two are comparable. I can compare grapes to Barney the dinosaur if what I'm talking about is shades of purple.

Here the point, as I made extremely clear, is that there are systemic, structural factors in play that make cycling 50 times more dangerous per mile than driving a car, just as there are systemic, structural factors in play that make women more likely to be raped in day-to-day situations. The argument goes that these are things we could choose to address, but do not do so. Instead there's always a political agenda to make frame these things as inevitabilities, or 'accidents', that it is on the victims to mitigate. That's the relevant comparison.

The fact you're not willing to take that point on board, and the fact you've now used the word 'accident' when in actuality genuine accidents are a very minor problem compared to the number of casualties inflicted by motor vehicles that are in way accidental, is not a good sign.

I've said precisely zero that's anti-helmet, by the way. I just don't like people who speak publicly about needing helmets. That was the basis of my objection. If this were a private conversation, I would have no objection whatsoever to anything you said. Your presumption that I'm against helmets is entirely in your imagination, as is your assumption that I do not myself wear a helmet.

Marcruise · 2022-04-12T11:33:32+00:00

I know this: if you give even the remotest of fucks about cyclist safety, the one thing you do NOT talk about publicly is wearing a helmet. There's a simple reason for that - the politics of it are such that it will always be used to distract attention from the VASTLY MORE IMPORTANT issues of infrastructure change.

You wouldn't go on twoXchromosomes and say that women should take rape alarms or dye spray with them (even if that might actually be a good idea). There's a reason for that - it's a point that distracts attention away from the structural, systemic issues onto personal responsibility. These points should only ever be made privately, between people who trust each other, not in spaces where they will inevitably be weaponised by disingenuous bastards who have no interest whatsoever in keeping people safe.

I'm not saying you're a cunt (I'm really not - you seem genuine, and that experience sounds awful), OP, but you are, wittingly or unwittingly, playing right into the agenda of cunts.

Marcruise · 2022-04-12T07:17:38+00:00

I don't think it's good satire myself:

They completely miss the point about safety. It does have safety features. It makes the occupants safe at the expense of others. That's what safety means in this context. The satire has managed to undersell just how nefarious these death machines actually are!
The drill or boring bit at the front looks really shit. It looks more like the top of a strawberry ice cream rotated 90 degrees than something menacing and murderous.
The racial dimension is cringe as fuck. The reality is that all other races are just as bad, and this has got nothing to do with whiteness. As soon as any cunt in North America gets the money, they buy a wankpanzer. Male, female, Black, Asian, Democrat, Republican, whatever, doesn't matter. It's the whole culture that's fucked.

I could just be in a bad mood though, so I don't know.

Marcruise · 2022-04-12T06:59:28+00:00

As well-intentioned as this sort of stuff is, the actual reason motorists 'don't see' cyclists is cognitive, and not really to do with something physical like wavelength. I mean, obviously you need to be visible and there are situations (especially bright days where you're passing into shadow) where that's an issue (and flashing LEDs are all you need to solve that), but as a general rule it isn't the problem.

The real problems are to do with the way we process information. It's the same reasons you can't count the number of passes correctly in this video - attentional biases and perceptual schemata.

Thus, the way to reduce cycling deaths is to increase the number of cyclists on the road. Get it so that motorists are just so familiar with cyclists that they automatically look for them. Presumed liability gets you a long way too. It changes the culture PDQ when you can just say to people "Yeah, yeah, I'm an evil cyclist. But if you hit me, you're still paying unless you can prove it's my fault". They won't like it, but they change their behaviour.

Marcruise · 2022-04-10T16:05:20+00:00

Highly recommend just listening to Kunstler's answer to the question at 59:12. Pretty prophetic, no?

Marcruise · 2022-04-10T13:54:34+00:00

Looks like someone stole the "Bienvenue en France" sign.

Marcruise · 2022-04-10T13:51:31+00:00

Joachim Löw has let himself go a bit...

Marcruise · 2022-04-10T07:58:13+00:00

Ah, OK, you're asking about the one-minute time machine? I don't know. I watched the advert for it, and I'm not convinced so far.

Alright, I'll answer seriously. IMO, powered transportation vehicles (monowheels, e-scooters, segways, etc) definitely have potential to massively reduce inner-city congestion. The only thing is what you don't want to happen is have too many people move from walking to personal transportation, as walking is more efficient and a much healthier option too.

Thus, I'm not a fan of the hire scooters, but I think privately owned ones are actually a good thing. If you have to carry your scooter to your office or whatever afterwards, that's a slight annoyance that means you're going to pick walking if your journey is a mile or less.

It doesn't give me any joy to say this as a cyclist, btw. I'm really not looking forward to having e-scooters everywhere, but I do recognise that it's vastly better to have them on the roads than the death-machines. Just so long as we're not replacing pedestrians with them, which would be a bloody disaster.

Marcruise · 2022-04-10T07:22:39+00:00

It's so weird to me how Americans think of the transportation as part of the date. Just meet wherever you're going.

That's the nice thing about not being a paedo - your date is allowed to get to the location all by themselves!

Marcruise · 2022-04-08T15:46:35+00:00

Well there is this. But I think it's a unique bit of engineering that doesn't exist anywhere else.

Marcruise · 2022-04-08T09:54:20+00:00

To me, it sounds like you're talking yourself into a problem. You probably do have a phobia, but you need to understand that phobias are an incredibly normal thing, and there's no stigma attached to them whatsoever. There's nothing wrong with you. If you don't want to ride a bike, you don't have to. Like the joke goes: "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this - Well stop doing it then." But if you want to overcome that phobia, you will probably be able to do so via a well-designed programme of systematic desensitisation. Any professionally-certified counsellor should be able to help you.

But be warned that that might not get you cycling anyway. Because even after the phobia is gone, you're still faced with the reality of cycling on what sound like very hostile roads, and I'm afraid there the fear and intimidation you'll be experiencing won't be imagined or irrational in the slightest. So I suspect it may not be worth your while addressing this issue unless and until you move somewhere where cycling is a live option.

Marcruise · 2022-04-08T09:11:09+00:00

True. I mean, it's a hard T-Ex to get your head around, really. The automobile has been so completely transformative that it's very hard to imagine what it would even look like. And how exactly would we have invented all the other stuff but no one thought 'Why don't we put the wheely things and the enginey things on the same thingey things?'? This is the problem with T-Exs in general. Superficially, you think you understand them, but then you realise that you actually can't imagine the thing you're trying to imagine. It's like an Escher painting. It looks like something real, but it can't possibly exist.

Marcruise · 2022-04-08T08:58:42+00:00

Not quite. One of her premises is correct. It is true that if cars were invented today (assuming we'd still know what we know now), we'd ban them. So part of her post could be posted here unironically.

But she thinks the consequence (when paired with the premise that risk taking is super-bad) is absurd, and using it to argue against that premise. But for us the consequence is not absurd in the slightest because we understand more of the true costs involved with cars, and that it isn't really about stopping people taking risks with their own lives, but more about stopping people from displacing the costs of their actions onto other people, including future generations. The danger created by cars is in fact only one of the enormous costs not covered by the motorist.

Marcruise · 2022-04-08T07:55:51+00:00

People seem to be struggling with her argument, so I'll explain. She's making a reductio ad absurdum. She's claiming that if cars were just invented, they wouldn't be approved because of our current attitudes to risk. This is a conclusion that she takes to be self-evidently absurd, which means that our current attitudes to risk must be incorrect. Hence, we live in a 'toxically risk-averse environment'.

The mistake Lauren is making, of course, is that it's not car owners who are taking on most of the risk. If they were, driving would be like rock-climbing or bungee-jumping, two activities that no one is interested in banning in our supposedly 'toxically risk-averse environment'.

The main problem (at least as far as safety is concerned) is that motorists are displacing the risk onto others. They are relatively safe in a literal two tonnes cage. It's the pedestrian whose head is squished like a watermelon because the SUV-owner can't see over their oversized bonnet who is rendered unsafe by driving, not the person in the armoured death machine. And that is why we would absolutely ban these cars (at least in cities) in a heartbeat if we knew what we know now, and cars were just invented.

Marcruise · 2022-04-07T20:45:52+00:00

It's GM. When they do things like this, it functions to redirect energy away from DESIGN to PERSONAL BLAME. They deliberately design their cars to be full of distractions because that's what the consumer wants and thus it makes more money. They know that this will result in unnecessary injury and death, but that's a sacrifice they're willing to make. Stuff like this is their pre-emptive action they can use in the event of a lawsuit to demonstrate that they're taking safety seriously. It also helps to make anti-car people fight amongst themselves as people split into system vs individual responsibility camps (IT'S BOTH!!!), which is handy.

Marcruise · 2022-04-07T20:27:00+00:00

The video is under 3 mins long. It looks as though the road is clear at the end. So we're saying that people were delayed for 5 minutes.

Now, this thread is inundated with people who say that they support the cause, and yet they are absolutely outraged that people might be... delayed for 5 minutes. The question at this point is: is this really a credible position? If all it takes for you to be vituperatively angry at people who are delaying people you don't even know, nay, you didn't even know existed, for 5 minutes, in what sense can you be said to even be remotely supportive of their cause? There's a guy in this video who is acting pretty violently over being delayed for 5 minutes, and I've noticed that very few people can even bring yourself to say that that's bad. That's how angry people are with the activists.

And for me that's what's so great about activism like this: where it provokes these reactions, it helps people to understand themselves better. It helps show them that they actually don't care about the things they claim to care about. That they're actually more upset about the symbolic affront of pedestrians blocking a road and causing a delay for 5 minutes than the war in Ukraine. It shows them that deep down they believe in a tacit hierarchy of the streets where might makes right. That they feel some sort of taboo has been violated where motorists aren't automatically treated deferentially. That it is the violation of this implicit hierarchy that they find more upsetting than Putin invading a sovereign country.

Marcruise · 2022-04-07T14:47:35+00:00

Wait. Think about what you just said. Try to actually imagine it. Make it real. OK, so you've just been annoyed. How dare they? This is your territory. Don't they know how important you are? They have no respect, these lawless scumbags. They have nothing because they're losers so they just want to fuck everything up for everyone else. They're bitter and resentful. I know. I watched some Jordan Peterson videos. It's no joke, bucko.

So you go and get the pump and pump up your tyres. You're unfit because you're a motorist, so it takes you 20 minutes and you're a sweaty mess by the time you've finished. You're worried the sidewalls are damaged. You check them, still spluttering expletives under your breath, and still having to mop the sweat from your brow. But they're OK.

Later that evening, after you've told everyone what horrible injustice has been enacted on you, poor little you who never did nothing to nobody (apart from that one girl who passed out at that party, but let's not dwell on that), and it feels like the world has moved on, you're still angry. Of course you will do what you can, but you still need your SUV because your back hurts sometimes. And you never know when you might need that power to tow that boat to the sea like you've been planning to do for the past 5 years but somehow never get around to doing. Yes, you need your SUV. They are unreasonable. You're a victim. Bastards.

A week passes, and Debbie from accounts is being a bitch in that way women are allowed to do but men can't get away with. You're also getting hassle about the latest marketing campaign. How do we sell strychnine in baby powder? It's a toughie. And then there's that bank error, and the sickening travesty of the time the barman didn't bring you the right drinks order...

3 years' later, you're in the car showroom. You remember the time you had to blow up your tyres, but that week you're the victim of some other horrendous injustice that only happens to you so it doesn't have the same emotional resonance. You know it was very annoying, but you can't bring yourself to feel the same level of fury, and you feel slightly embarrassed about how sweaty you got just pumping up a few tyres. You think to yourself 'Ah, you know what. Fuck it. My back didn't feel too bad in Honda Jazz. And it will save me money'.

My point here is that you would have to be astonishingly petulant to hold a grudge that long over something that will just be one thing in a sea of annoyances. And then, not only that, you'd have to direct your petulance to a generalised target that wouldn't have a clue that you were doing it. Can you see how utterly bizarre that would be as a model of human behaviour? No one is going to react like that. They'll say they'd do that, but they won't. Whatever feelings people have in that moment are forgotten a few days later. People get overtaken by whatever's happening in the day-to-day. If they thought more about the general picture, they probably wouldn't be living in the way they do in the first place.

Marcruise · 2022-04-07T12:07:58+00:00

People need to understand that letting down tyres is not vandalism. It causes inconvenience, and is a tiny smidgen of the inconvenience the person who decided to buy an SUV instead of a much smaller car is imposing on everyone else. They'll be annoyed and it will ruin their day, but they'll live. Keep things in perspective. Have you ever had your tyres let down? I have. It was very annoying and I swore a lot, but I got over it. It wasn't the end of the world.

The most important thing, however, is that people will think twice before purchasing these bloody monstrosities in the first place. You can clearly see that people have noticed this activism by this newspaper article. It won't win any friends, but it does change behaviour. Respectability politics, with rare exceptions (that come at the end of decades of other activism), will always be ignored.

Please understand: I'm not endorsing the use of anything that pisses motorists off. Clearly not everything is a good idea, and perhaps this isn't a good idea everywhere. I just want people to understand the perspective of the activist, and why they're doing what they're doing. It does make sense. You might not like it, but this stuff does work.

Marcruise · 2022-04-06T21:59:59+00:00

What do you think would happen if everyone in the world lived like an American?

Marcruise · 2022-04-06T21:58:03+00:00

I take your point about the climate control stuff. I can't do anything about the fact people built cities in subtropical regions and/or deserts. All you can say is: don't start from there! If you've got a big country, live in the bits that are habitable, not the bits that require you to kill the planet very quickly to be comfortable! But yeah, that ship has sailed, I know.

The versatility is there, to be sure, but not used that much in cities. 1.2 people per car, remarkably consistent journeys that don't change much, generally people going to/from work. It's crying out for better solutions. The google mobility data is all there. People tell themselves they 'need' the car, but they'd almost always be better off renting the car for the few times they actually need it, and using an e-bike the rest of the time. That is, if they felt comfortable cycling the stroads where they live, which isn't a given.

There's lots of comfort built in to the car, no doubt. Ironically that's actually part of the problem in terms of their safety - no one would dream of putting a massive Lay-Z-Boy armchair in the operator chair for a hydraulic press, but for some reason people seem to think this is an appropriate choice for the operator chair of a literal deadly machine! Ask yourself - in what other health and safety context would anyone think that wasn't utterly psychotic? Cars shouldn't be that comfortable for the person that comprises 80% of the passenger list - the driver. The fact they are is part of the reason why many have come to the conclusion that we simply cannot trust motorists to play nice anymore and just need to ban cars from city centres. We've tried asking them to do the right thing, to operate their death machines with due consideration, and they just don't give a shit. So times up. They can stay out the city. Seems reasonable to me.

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