Are they? I’ve seen plenty of well-liked memes of banning cars as well as guns. There are popular posts about banning cars entirely from various developments. Or outright hate and venting when another ghost bike gets installed.

IMHO, the urbanist movement is more focused on infrastructure than fuck cars. Fuck cars is more encompassing than just urbanism and civil engineering.

Not every member of the fuck cars community is about car infrastructure, even though I personally fall into the infrastructure camp.

Say you have the viewpoint that guns should be tightly controlled due to the number of people killed by them. Cars kill approximately the same number of people in the US every year (depending on if you count suicides and if intent is important). If guns are bad for deadly external behaviors, then so are cars. Just like how there are gun ranges or race tracks for responsible ownership, there can be gun related murder and car related murder. Ban guns and ban cars.

Case in point is this very article. It appears to be a hate related crime committed with a car. Germany tightly controls gun ownership, so why would we dismiss tight control of car ownership? Should we allow this person to drive again if he’s convicted? Why do we allow DUI drivers, who have killed others before, to continue to drive again? What do devices like ignition interlocks say about us?

Amazing, right? They’re a shop oriented towards trike builders. Not only do they have by-the-foot orders for a trike’s crazy long chainline, but they offer a la cart parts on their kits! Not just for repairability but also for whatever custom project you’d like to lego together. I’ve had nothing but good experiences with them. :)

Is there something I’m missing, or do cyclists have to stop only because motorists would take a tantrum if they weren’t required to?

Motorists would make a tantrum regardless, and they don’t stop too! Rolling through is very common; indeed expected in many areas. After all, how is a town supposed to enforce all of their intersections? For example, San Francisco has 18,525 intersections and 2,140 officers. Assigning 10 intersections per officer and to ignore all other police needs would be insanity. They’re trying their best but it’s an uphill battle.

If a cyclist can ride right through this, why can’t I on my 125 motorcycle?

Perhaps it should be allowed! Cars already treat stop signs as yields (“California Roll” is the car corollary to the “Idaho Stop”). Why would you stop if the car behind you isn’t planning to? (I’d love to see motorbike studies on this; please link me to some if you know any.)

Studies have shown that cyclists treating stop signs as yield signs leads to fewer accidents, both with cars and pedestrians.

Yielding also decreases time spent in the intersection. You have a motor underneath you. Cyclists don’t. Clearing the intersection quickly prevents cross-traffic from splatting you. That’s why slowing down, checking for traffic, but not stopping is so important for momentum vehicles.

The NHTSA (the US road safety org for my Canadian friends) has a good two-pager overview. It’s a good place to start if you’re still curious about the reasoning behind the Idaho stop.

Fairings on trikes aren’t new, yet they’re not as bad as discussed here. Yes, you’re still exposed to the outside. But no, you’re not getting drenched in the thing. There’s quite a bit of wind protection and a reasonable amount of rain/snow protection. It’s like a pogie but for the whole body.

I’d link to my local producers of them, but they’re on vacation right now. Apparently TerraCycle (https://t-cycle.com/) has joined REI in protesting consumerism this black friday.

The brands mentioned here (Topeak, Silca, and Park Tools) all have rebuild kits and they’ve been around for a long time. I wouldn’t hesitate buying any of their models.

I’ve been using a Topeak Joeblow for more than 10 years now. I don’t exactly remember when I bought it, but I’ve thrown it around quite hard and it still works great today.

That said, it’s not possible to have a forever-pump because all pumps have seals. These seals will slowly degrade over time. What you should look for is a company that sells spare parts and rebuild kits. Ideally a company that has been around for a long time so you can have a decent expectation that they’ll still be around when you need a rebuild kit (new-old-stock doesn’t work great for rubber/leather goods). Bonus points if the rebuild kit looks like parts that you could make or find from a local hardware store; just in case the company does fold.

Studies have shown that blinking lights improve reaction time to bikes on the road. The most common issue is determining the distance to the bike. This effect is more pronounced during night.

That’s why I use my bike lights all the time set to blink with a multi-second on phase. It makes me more noticeable and easy to estimate distance.

Also cars do have blinking lights these days. The newer car models like to blink the center brake light for a second before going static. Motorbikes have also long had rear blinking and “breathing” front light.

The honking thing specifically is another skewed fact. The neighbors want the Waymos, they just had a hard time getting ahold of the right folks at Waymo. That includes Sophia Tung, the neighbor who set up the honking video stream that Jason used.

As a local in the area, I can say for certain that the majority of SF wants the cars there. There’s more resistance further down the peninsula, but it’s intermixed with anti-taxi messaging. It’s hard to tell if it’s about the cars or about “those kind of people” having access to their city.

San Francisco neighbors say repeated Waymo honking is keeping them up at night

Christopher Cherry who lives in the building next door said he was “really excited” to have Waymo in the neighborhood, thinking it would bring more security and quiet to the area.

The residents who spoke with NBC Bay Area said they are not opposed to having the Waymo cars nearby. But they say they want to see a more neighborly response from the new autonomous vehicle company on the block.

“We love having them there, we just would like for them to stop honking their horn at four in the morning repeatedly,” Cherry said.

San Francisco neighbors say Waymo honking continues, global audience follows along live

The incidents were captured on resident Sophia Tung’s YouTube live stream

Tung and many of her neighbors said that they are Waymo customers and actually like the Waymo technology. But what they don’t like is the repeated, overnight noise.

Well, formerly operating companies. The Uber and Cruise examples stopped both of them dead. Uber left the business entirely and Cruise had its license to operate revoked.

That’s just omitting info. There’s also straight up wrong stuff, like residents not wanting it. As crazy as it sounds, at least with SF, the residents’ reps wrote the regulation law and haven’t had a measure to reject self-driving cars (at least K passed). The majority want to see these cars. Also, Facebook dumped their move fast motto a decade ago because of how bad it was (self-harm problems).

It’s unfortunate too. I like Jason’s rants, but it’s too distracting when he gets a quick google level of facts wrong.

Interesting! Thanks for the explanation. :)

Has something changed recently? When I was in Tokyo, admittedly more than a decade ago now, the bike lanes were tiny slivers of paint. And I do mean a sliver; they were not much wider than a foot. It would be unsafe to use them in traffic.

San Francisco’s critical mass was successful to the point it almost doesn’t exist anymore (it’s not necessary anymore with better political engagement). I believe it was successful because it:

• started at the same location and time (once a month on a Friday)
• occurred during evening commute hours
• had no formal leadership
• no planned route until just before departure

This combination meant authorities had no ability to shut it down. What office could the raid? How could they bring a lawsuit?

Once a month on a Friday meant it didn’t have to be about your commute. Rather you’d leave work and ride to the start point. It was a protest first and a utility second (though the route did start from the financial center of the city).

Take a look at bike parties if you’re looking more for a community ride. They bring more of a general supportive base than as a protest.

Mozilla invented Rust to rewrite the rendering engine. Read the history of Servo and bring a tissue to cry into.

Parking regulations don’t apply to public projects. Strong Towns well documents the problem with parking regulations as they are written and applied in practice. I highly recommend checking it out.

Underground spots are roughly 20 to 50 thousand dollars each. Surface lots are only a few thousand per spot.

Do you want to invest in my coffee shop idea? I need a few million dollars to build the required parking.

Bike lanes on roads are practically free. For example, when repainting the road after resurfacing maintenance. It doesn’t take more paint to mark out a bike lane than it does for car parking.

Bike infrastructure at its core is a political issue. If you follow cyclist money, you’ll soon find it spent on bicycle advocacy groups. It’s the best bang-for-buck and addresses all the other barriers, like shop owners complaining about the free public parking they’re not paying for.

Critical Mass was so successful in San Francisco that it almost doesn’t exist anymore. These days discussions of bike lanes is more about what kind of lane rather than if bikes should even be allowed on the road.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11941576/the-night-that-changed-san-francisco-cycling-forever

The article says part of the plan is to use fine money as a way to inject cash into the bus system. That seems like a good idea, but I’d like a local’s opinion! Is the bus system not working due to lack of routes? Long intervals? Something else?