this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Trying seriously to bike anywhere on my city's painted bike lanes is taking your life in your hands. I'm on the city bicycle commission and when we tried to pressure the city engineers to put in some flexible bollards to keep drivers out of the bike lane, they complained that they get broken all the time and they're hard to keep up on. Someone else on the commission beat me to the punch and said "if those bollards get broken too often, imagine what it's like to be a cyclist on that lane".
Yeah. Look, I've got to be honest with you, this is a huge problem in regional Western Australia also.
If you ride every day then one or two times a week you're going to encounter some asshole driver who genuinely believes that you shouldn't be on the road and at times these interactions are dangerous and upsetting.
I spend a lot of time pondering people's attitude to riders. My supposition is that it's a combination of a bunch of things, but a large part of it is simply that people would prefer not to be reminded of the fact that they are sedentary and don't exercise.
Personally, I think this is a problem with people, lifestyles, and culture, rather than a problem inherent to suburbia. It's worth pointing out that these are the people you need to convince that walkable cities are superior. I think our micromobility brethren, on escooters and so on, will help us by putting more "sedentary" type people into the bike lane.
I'd argue that the sedentary...uh...ness(?) is inherent to the car-dependent suburban lifestyle. The way our suburbs are, you've got to REALLY want to use a bike, like you're either making a statement or too broke to do anything else, to choose to bike anywhere. It's just too dangerous and inconvenient to be practical. There's no reason to walk or bike anywhere in walking or biking distance, and plenty of reasons not to (many of them to do with the urban design and zoning codes). People living in walkable and bikeable cities don't walk and bike because they want to, they walk and bike because it's more practical than driving.