This post is inspired by me seeing an ambulance in the bike lane by the apartment building opposite of mine.
By this point, I’m sure we’ve all had just about enough of anti-urbanists and NIMBYs claiming in bad faith that bike lanes and bus lanes will be obstructive for emergency vehicles, and as such cannot be built.
You’re probably well aware that exactly the opposite is the case - cars are the principal obstruction for emergency vehicles, and emergency vehicles can actually make very efficient use of bike and bus lanes to shorten response times.
I propose that we flip the argument on its head by rebranding bike and bus lanes as Emergency Vehicle-lanes, which just so happen to afford permission to buses and bikes when not in active use by emergency vehicles (which is of course already the case, everyone is required to yield any space to emergency vehicles, at least where I live).
This way, we kill this particular argument against bike and bus lanes in its crib, and expose the opposition as being actually against emergency vehicle mobility, in favour of having more lanes to drive their cars on.
Let me know what you think!
To clarify, when I say “mobility device” in this context, I’m referring to an electric scooter like this:
And yeah, that was a photo taken from the dash cam on my bike… seeing old or disabled people having to navigate around cars just angers me.
I have no problem with someone like that using the bike lane:
That would be nice, except the areas around here often don’t have clear sidewalks (i.e. cars parked on them, snow not cleared, poor surface quality, , too narrow, etc.).
I went for a walk yesterday, and I can say with 100% certainty that someone in with a mobility device would not be able to use the sidewalk to get to the local grocery store because of snow and snow banks leading into intersections, despite the roads being 100% clear.
The mobility scooters I see during the summer are large and go faster than walking speed, so I’m sure the user simply finds it better/safer to be using the bike lane. Hell, we have a lot of joggers who use our bike lanes rather than the sidewalks, and I don’t blame them - sidewalks are a hazard when you’ve got cars around. And that’s assuming you’ve got a sidewalk to begin with!
We need bigger bike lanes, regardless of the speed of the users. Some places (i.e Montreal and Paris) have areas where the “bike lane” is as wide as a standard car lane, and it allows ANY non-car user to travel on it without conflicts. It’s glorious!
Some sidewalks in my area are so narrow that you can’t walk past another pedestrian unless one of you goes on the grass. I can’t imagine someone using a wheelchair, mobility device, or stroller on those same sidewalks.
And that assumes only ONE of the people are in a wheelchair or mobility device… if you have one going in each direction, it’s a stalemate.
When you’ve got cars parked onto those same sidewalks, even partially, it’s a nightmare.
It’s a good point that we all live in different places with different variations of issues
It’s rare here to see cars in the sidewalk but there was this one house that consistently did it for a while
Part of the problem is that too many people have large trucks for personal use… these trucks were never designed to be parked in a residential area. So, they take up the sidewalk AND often back onto the bike lane… double-whammy!
This is the type of nonsense our cyclists have to deal with on a marked bike route:
FYI: not long ago a cyclist was hit and critically injured just down the street from where this photo was taken. These bike lanes aren’t safe when you have cars blocking them.