San Francisco is home to the world’s most aggressive bicycle activists. It’s also home to one of the world’s most aggressive anti-bike activists. Dishwasher and blogger Rob Anderson has succeeded in convincing a judge to put a temporary halt to construction of any new bicycle lanes in the city, on environmental grounds (the lanes allegedly have “not received the level of environmental review required by the California Environmental Quality Act”).
Anderson’s premise is that bicycles are inherently dangerous and will therefore never become a realistic mass transit option. Apparently it’s never occurred to him that bikes are inherently dangerous primarily because of the extreme proliferation of cars?
Only thing worse than an irrational person is a mean irrational person. With power.
That’s absurd. Corinna bikes to work (from our place in Brighton to Harvard) every day, but her “close calls” are all careless drivers…
I wish this city (and all cities, for that matter) were more bicycle/ped friendly.
Only in California would this whacko have found a judge who would listen.
-Jim
There is a lot of opposition to Bike Lanes here in Melbourne because they take up one lane which could be used for Cars.
This Premise fails to take into consideration that once you have two lanes of Car Traffic, there is no increase in efficiency by adding another lane, except in the case of stupid drivers who drive slow in the fast lane.
In order to curb this behaviour, lanes should be restricted at intersections. The left lane is for turning left, the right lane is for turning right, and the middle lane is for straight ahead. Directly after the intersection, an overtaking lane exists so intelligent drivers can overtake the slow morons. The overtaking lane terminates before the next Traffic-light Intersection.
This structure forces drivers to be more aware of other road users, allows the third lane to be converted to a Bicycle Lane and Inhibits Hoons from having Drags at Traffic Lights, since there is only one lane.
I’ve been hit by cars at least four times (mostly in Flagstaff, AZ… where I did my undergrrrrad.). In each case it was a car driver neglecting to think that there would even be a bike in the road (2 times it was the “oh, I forgot to turn right” maneuver without a blinker, once it was someone backing up when I was behind them and another time some ding dong just drifted over into me and slowly knocked me into the curb).
Joe – Sounds all too familiar. Add drivers on cell phones into the mix and it’s steel+flesh soup out there.