There's electric bikes in China that are more like a Vespa than anything. Commuting this way was pretty great when I owned one. The range is perfect for urban commuters, charging it at night is basically negligible in your power bill, it slips right past the cars so there's no such thing as traffic (whatever cars pass you, you pass them right back by the next red light), likewise parking is a non-issue as it takes a fraction of the space, and its so dirt cheap that even if its stolen or totaled or breaks its not a huge pain. It doesn't have trunk space but for an urban commute that doesn't matter much. There's just enough under-seat storage for a laptop and some stationary. Look into it, the import laws on cars probably don't apply, and if they do even with tariffs the vehicle is so dirt cheap to begin with you may as well eat the cost. It cost a low 3-digit US dollar value back when I bought one.
As an American who grew up feeling annoyed and aggressive toward people driving motorcycles, but now drives a motorcycle regularly for the past 10 years, it never had anything to do with how poor someone was. Motorcycles aren't the most practical vehicles on American roads, so I always perceived them as a sport, not a necessity. And motorcycle drivers has a reputation for pulling stupid stunts and causing accidents on the highway. 19 year old kids would buy sporty motorcycles, drive 2x the speed limit on the highway, swerving between lanes of traffic, doing wheelies, etc. Or a gang of gnarly men would ride into town and parade through the streets on their Harleys. When these are your stereotypes of people on motorcycles, any time there is a motorcycle approaching you or blocking you, it's easy to feel annoyed and aggressive. Motorcyclists (and cyclists) are not seen as poor people choosing practical transport. They are seen as hobbyists pursuing a luxury at the expense of others' convenience and expectations.
Of course, I don't see things this way anymore but I'm fairly confident that this is a common mindset.
Cyclists are perceived as the opposite: hobbyists who go too slowly and hold everyone up. By the simple act of riding down a busy street, a well-placed cyclist can necessitate hundreds of questionable overtaking maneuvers as each car has to pass them. "Trail of chaos" in other words.
And most of those cyclists would love to be on a bike lane instead, but those often just don't exist.
From personal experience it's also annoying when I get hate from car drivers who assume I deliberately use the road instead of the "bike lane" which is in fact only meant for pedestrians, but try to explain that in half a second while passing and when the official road markings are only visible with forensic tools.
I think that may be from people who are in a rush. As a novice driver it may be difficult to deal with cyclists, but anyone with sufficient driving experience should be able to easily handle that.
The only time I've ever been annoyed at cyclists is when there was some kind of a parade procession in front of me, with cyclists fanning out across the entire road. It happened suddenly as well, which startled me moreso than making me angry.
While LA is hardly a paragon of bicycling accessibility, it does have a ton of dedicated cycling routes (I’m talking 8-12+ ft wide, dedicated pathways) that can get bicyclists to most of the major hubs throughout the city. Even still, you’ll see the occasional bicyclist(s) who wants to drive down Washington Blvd during rush hours Because-They-Can(TM) and the cycling path is a little too inconvenient for them, holding up hundreds of cars.
I have nothing against the majority of bicyclists, but those occasional entitled few are the only ones people see; which can easily paint their opinions of all of them.
There are lots of roads in the US where there’s no sidewalk and you have to walk along the edge of the road if you’re a pedestrian. What’s silly about this? In general, it is perfectly legal to use roads for cycling and walking (though I'm sure there is some variation between jurisdictions).
It's silly because it's often dangerous. A lot of these roads are busy, and the speed limits can be 35-50 MPH. For better or for worse, drivers are just _not_ anticipating pedestrians on these sorts of roads, but some people have no better choice.
It's silly that you think that this is anything to do with being a person. Why can't I walk in the middle of the road, you know, like a person? It's just such a bad faith argument.
The context was cycling on rush hour Washington Boulevard, which isn't absurd if it's the easiest route to your destination, any more than walking down a road is absurd if you don't have an alternative.
The context (sigh) here is that I'm saying "like they're people" is not a good argument. Drivers are also people. It's not an argument. I don't know why the topic keeps drifting off this.
Being a person is a good prima facie argument for being allowed to access public infrastructure. There may be countervailing considerations, but you didn't provide any (other than by apparently suggesting that it was somehow absurd for people to walk on roads).
But I'm not the author of the "like they're people" comment, so I'm not particularly interested in defending that particular line of argument.
It's almost like, in a society, you sometimes give up some of your personal entitlements for the greater good.
It's why you'd also be called entitled for using an elevator for your personal enjoyment, for defecating in a public pool, for playing around in a turnstile or for refusing to get vaccinated during a worldwide pandemic.
Yeah, you're the one comparing riding a bicycle on a public road to shitting in a pool. I really cant imagine why you think other people are acting entitled.
I also compared it to right-wing antivaxxers...come on buddy, that's the easier claim to discredit!
Or, you could use the rational side of your brain (the portion that most people develop in their preteens) and apply it to the abstract concept of your singular need/want being less important than another hundred's. Especially if there's a dedicated piece of infrastructure built just for you. Kind of like a bike lane 30ft away, or a restroom six feet away from the pool.
In other words, the literal definition of being entitled.
We all paid for the roads too ("we" includes cyclists), and we paid for them to accommodate any vehicles that are legal to operate on them, which in most jurisdictions includes bikes.
But cars can't drive in bike lanes. Therefore cyclists enjoy EXTRA privilege at all taxpayers' expense, which I'm fine with. But if cyclists aren't going to use them, they should be removed and the space reclaimed for ALL vehicles (including bikes).
So, your assumption is that they are all just a bunch of uppity jackasses instead of semi rational human beings? Go give those routes a ride chum, you'll probably figure out whats going on in a hurry.
I think we’re trying to figure out what conclusion you draw from that. Do you think the cyclists are doing it just to annoy you? If not, then why? Isn’t it likely that the dedicated cycling infrastructure is less adequate than you assume?
I don't care why they're doing it. The case I witnessed involved a generously wide bike lane with excellent visibility, and bikers deliberately riding outside it and blocking traffic. Do they all do it? No. But it happens.
Except that I gave a specific example (Washington Blvd) which has a notoriously well maintained and accessible bike lane 30ft away; to give a specific example of the entitlement I was referring to.
But then why do you think the cyclists are not using it? Again, do you think they are doing it just to annoy motorists? This doesn't seem plausible on the face of it.
I can’t answer for what’s going on in their heads, but why do you immediately assume everyone has good intentions? Maybe they didn’t like the traffic in the bike lane and wanted to move faster, maybe they had a chip on their shoulder, maybe they are simply oblivious to the world around them, I don’t know. I can just say that I could literally turn my head and see dozens of cyclists on the bike lane riding with zero issues. The fact that he couldn’t do the same means the problem is his, not mine and the other hundred+ people they were impeding.
You seem to be missing the entire point. This isn’t about the 999 cyclists that use the lane, as expected; but mostly go unseen. It’s about that 1 cyclist that acts in a completely entitled manner being the one everyone sees.
Just go re-read my original post that you downvoted, I wasn’t blaming cyclists in general. My point was an occasional entitled cyclist (who 100% exists, just like entitled cagers and motorcyclists) gives a bad name to all cyclists because the good ones go mostly unseen.
It seems weird to me to think of this in terms of good or bad intentions. The cyclists presumably want to get to their destinations as quickly and easily as possible. In some cases that means going on a road.
Bikes are allowed to go on roads, so I don't really understand why this annoys people. I guess if you really don't like it you should advocate for legislation to change the rules.
The annoyance is that they have a car free road 30ft away, while the cars do not have a bike free road.
It’s well understood that bikes can impede traffic. The world accepts this, especially on a normal day. It’s why we build special lanes for them (in addition to their safety concerns). But if you have your own special infrastructure, just for you and you’re using the other infrastructure, adding 15-30mins to hundred’s of people’s daily commutes for your convenience, that’s the literal definition of entitlement.
Yes, you’re allowed to do it; just like I’m allowed to get into the elevator and press all of the buttons for my own joy. In either case, we are assholes to most people.
>It’s well understood that bikes can impede traffic.
I haven't seen this myself. Here in London there are lots of cyclists on the road, and it doesn't seem to interfere with car traffic. It's relatively dangerous to the cyclists, of course.
cycling is my dominant way around the city during the warm months here. i used to take complicated, meandering routes to stay on the residential roads during my trips so i could avoid that type of passing. but at a certain point, i step back and realize that it doesn’t make sense to radically inconvenience myself in order to make auto drivers’ lives more convenient. we both pay for public roads: i have as much right to the good routes as any other resident; if it’s not working for you then vote for better infrastructure (in this case, perhaps a bike lane).
also FWIW this same problem exists in dense residential streets, just with the roles reversed. all those narrow intersections with no clear right of way and so many cars parked by them that you can’t see far: cars have to slow down way more for that whereas cyclists have maneuverability that lets them go a bit faster — until they catch up to a slow car on the same street. so anyway, don’t think that slowing down other classes of vehicles is a problem exclusive to bikes: on a mixed-use road every class of vehicle, including yours, will at some point require another vehicle to slow down for you.
I get annoyed at cyclist and I am one! I just won't ride a bike on a road without a bike lane because it terrifies me and morning commuter traffic on a road with a half-meter shoulder with barely awake hurried drivers going 50+ miles an hour is the worst place to bike.
Eventually I just moved within walking distance of work but would have loved to be able to get exercise biking 5-10 miles each way.
Once on the way from NYC to a long island beach, I saw about 10 or 20 on crotch rockets just splitting traffic and doing crazy stunts down the parkway. I'm pretty sure some new stereotypes were born in me that day, but I never saw that happen again (though I didn't live in NYC for very long, just a few months).
Theres this weird animosity, people in cars like to get outraged at people on bikes. I can't pinpoint why, but its almost like a xenophobic reaction? Some people see a bicyclist and launch into a tirade about how aggravating the 'bad ones' are. Real self righteous stuff.
Conversely being on a bike there is a real sense that people in cars are out to do you harm. Theres the people who try to rattle you - honk their horn at you to vent their outrage, completely unaware of how fucking loud those things are, or run you off the road, that sort of thing. The real unnerving stuff is the people who come close to murdering you by accident, just not paying attention as they maneuver their vehicles. One time I made eye contact with a woman while I pulled my bike out from under her SUV (just a foot or two under, right between the wheels on the passenger side, real lucky break for me) as she sped away - people do hit and run but I never experienced it as a driver and don't think a car ever stopped to see if I was alright let alone exchange details when I was on a bike.
I never got the impression it was a class thing. I think part of it is that a bicyclist is not at all threatening and rather vulnerable in fact. The other part I suspect is just regular old 'not one of us' shit - if you listen to people they'll basically tell you how they think they should be allowed to wantonly mistreat bicyclists because they felt mildly inconvenienced at one point.
There's also big in-group out-group thinking going on here. People generally see members of the in-group as individuals like themselves, and the out-group as some kind of monolith. They have some empathy for the in-group but none for the out-group.
If a driver runs a stop sign, it reflects badly on that driver. If a cyclist runs a stop sign, it reflects badly on ALL cyclists, etc. It works the other way around too.
One of the unwritten rules of driving is to try and not hold up or inconvenience the drivers behind you. People get aggravated with large farm machinery holding people up but understand that machinery has a purpose and needs to get from A to B.
The same people think Bicyclists aren't trying to get from A to B but are just out for a ride and happily breaking the unwritten rule. That is where the outrage comes from, they think the cyclist doesn't care about the irritation they're causing the drivers so the drivers decide to take it out on the cyclists.
Americans are aggressive as hell. I'm willing to bet that cyclist are maimed and murdered hourly by aggressive drivers and get away with it. I was personally ran off the road by an SUV because I apparently angered the driver, because yeah, killing me totally teaches me a lesson.
My sister moved to the US for her husband to study there, he was murdered by a NY city garbage truck white riding a bicycle last year.
Apparently this is not uncommon, almost routine. The driver ran off, and the next day another person - not the real driver - turned himself in to the police. Apparently the Mafia has sone exchange program with the garbage companies, they do each other favors. Somebody will now sit in prison for decades, for a murder the detective knows he did not commit, apparently to repay some debt. And my brother-in-law's murderer is still driving garbage trucks on roads with cyclists.
He was not targeting by the Mafia. Rather, he was riding a bicycle and a garbage truck served into his lane, running him over, then sped off.
I have been told that these NY garbage trucks _often_ intimidate cyclists. They are known for reckless driving and accidents. In any case, there are two reasons that the police are treating this as murder. One of the reasons is that the driver left the scene. I forget the second reason.
For some reason in Australia this got picked up by the media who made a small culture-war type conflict of cars vs cyclists. It's now open season on cyclists by car drivers (and very occasionally the other way around) - every regular cyclist has a tale to tell of car drivers being openly aggressive (I had a beer bottle thrown at my head by a passing car - luckily his aim was as bad as his judgement).
I mean, I've seen plenty of jackass drivers threatening or acting aggressively to cyclists in Europe. Even the Netherlands, of all places.
The biggest difference is there are more protective laws / dedicated bike lanes and the critical mass of cyclists means you might be swatting at a bee swarm.
Interestingly in Spain cyclists are well-protected and ordinary drivers who otherwise might drive pretty unsafely, take care of them. Coming from a different place it's so weird to experience someone driving 35 km/h behind a cyclist on a country road because there is a solid white line and a "no overtake" sign. Even if they do overtake (legally) they always keep at least 1.5 meters. There was a huge awareness campaign about this and it is working.
Is that true? 30 years ago I heard that Spain was notoriously unsafe for cyclists and some car drivers might intentionally endanger or hit cyclists in ways we now hear from the US. If that was true then, and now the attitude in Spain has changed so much, I dare say there's hope for the US as well.
The law protects the cyclist but he/she has much more skin on the game. There are still accidents resulting in deaths and not all find the culprit car.
Note that in Spain it is legal to cross the solid white line to take over a cyclist.
Sure, It is sometimes annoying but having more cars would also created more traffic.
Taking a school trip to Tunisia was a huge eye-opener how liberally people can interpret driving rules. Think of: tourist bus driving on the wrong side on the road to avoid traffic. On a highway, exiting from the left-most lane without signalling etc. Interestingly, they told us that this is still nothing compared to how it is in southern Tunisia - Sfax. I don't really want to go there, I value my life too much.
Not to mention failing to stop at the clearly marked lines at intersections. They seem to stop either a car length behind the line or a car length over the line in the crosswalk.
Also related to both, cutting corners (literally) when making turns, american drivers seem to have a real problem with tight turns. One reason why it’s risky to stop over the line incidentally, as a car making a shallow turn is very likely to step into your lane if they don’t take an over-wide turn instead.
These are not necessarily the same thing. In Indonesia, people completely ignore lanes, and instead fit cars and other vehicles into the available space as if it's a tetris game. But they have a lot of mopeds and surprisingly few accidents, because when it's that crowded, they go slow.
It’s complicated. If you lose your license for drunk driving, you can still drive a moped, so there is a reputation that the person driving the moped has a bad past.
Plus, there just aren’t very many on the road so they stick out as unusual.
And there is a cultural obsession with big vehicles being tied to masculinity.
Which means that many (15%?) drivers would feel happy or even a little justified to blow past a moped on the road.
> And there is a cultural obsession with big vehicles being tied to masculinity.
This is definitely regional. In California, social status (/"masculinity") is tied to luxury brands. Especially in the metros, if you were driving a giant truck you're going to be laughed at (more often than not) as parking is going to be impossible for you and you're going to be spending 150usd/5days to fill up.
In Cascadia/Northern California, eco-drivers (Prius, Tesla, etc) are seen as the self/entitled assholes.
And in Colorado, it's people with AWD/4WD cars (especially, Subarus and Jeeps).
"Trucks" as a social status signifier is confined more to more rural and Southern states.
This is a weird cultural thing about the US. I once read about an experiment were people were sorted from rich to poor, and were then given an amount of money to give to a person next to them, either just a bit richer, or just a bit poorer.
In practically every country in the world, this experiment resulted in people giving money to the poorer neighbour. Only in the US did they give it to the richer neighbour.
America's really big. The part I'm in, ebikes are en vogue, with people giving up cars to get ebikes, and car drivers give them right of way. I'm sure elsewhere in the US it's different yet again.
You mean fat-tired e-bikes? I see them a lot in Amsterdam too. They're definitely more like mopeds and scooters than bikes, unlike regular e-bikes that pretend to be bikes. I'm not sure which ones I prefer (I'm not a fan either way), but they're both a massive improvement over the old fuel-burning two-stroke mopeds and scooters. (By Dutch law, two-stroke engines didn't have to meet the same pollution rules as 4-stroke engines, so these things were pretty dirty.)
These are terrible. Frequently modified by the seller to work just by squeezing the throttle. In any case, even if they don't do that, all it takes is for people to lazily flop their legs to trigger the sensors just enough so that the engine can kick in. These are, by all practical intents and purposes, scooters without plates and without mandatory helmet.
I also dislike that these modified ebikes (not just the fat ones, but also some older models of vanmoof) can do 35-40 silently on a bike lane. I've had a couple close calls because they caught up to you almost three times as fast as a regular person on a regular bicycle do and, unlike the dirty mopeds, they are noiseless so you don't hear them coming with enough notice.
the speed thing isn't something that can be easily regulated without proper enforcement; it's trivial to convert a bike to an e-bike, and the open source firmwares and controllers out there are free of mandatory or regional speed-limiters.
it's nice that vanmoof tried to help on their side, but it's something that should be enforced at the local traffic/policing level.
I don't have a good impression of chinese electric bikes. They don't make very much noise behind you (unless they have a speaker) and the people driving them are often doing dubious things that maybe the bike shouldn't be doing, like balancing a bunch of empty water bottles.
But I guess I feel the same in SEA where instead of electric bikes you have to contend with a sea of gas mopeds.
