As semi-autonomous and autonomous cars become the norm, I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
The biggest gripe with riding in one is that they're slow, both because of super cautious driving and because they won't take freeways yet.
The USA driving test is so much easier than the UK one!
UK: Varied junctions and roundabouts, traffic lights, independent driving (≈20 minutes via sat nav or signs), one reversing manoeuvre (parallel park, bay park, or pull up on the right and reverse), normal stops and move-offs (including from behind a parked car), hill start, emergency stop.
California: Cross three intersections, three right turns, three left turns, lane change, backing up, park in a bay, obey stop signs and traffic lights.
My understanding is that the USA test is so much easier because it's hard to get by in most of the USA without a car, so if the test was harder people would likely just drive without a license instead.
A friend who's a cop told me that only when their department got specific state grants would they set up stings of drivers driving in a pedestrian walkway while someone was crossing the street. Here's an example of one such grant program, which is actually funded by the federal government: https://www.mass.gov/doc/ffy26-municipal-road-safety-grant-a...
Crosswalk Decoy Operations: These operations may involve a plainclothes officer acting as a civilian pedestrian and a uniformed officer making stops OR involve a uniformed officer serving as a spotter to observe and relay violations to an officer making stops. ... All Pedestrian and Bicyclist enforcement must be conducted during overtime shifts, meaning grant-funded activity occurs during hours over and above any regular full-time/part-time schedule.
At other times, he said he would only pull someone over if they were doing something batshit crazy and they happened to be behind the vehicle where it was easy to pull them over. Minor stuff and speeding they would rarely ticket.
The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Although more recently, the New York State Police have speed cameras set up in a few highway work zones, which is effective (double fines applicable, see https://wnyt.com/top-stories/where-are-automated-speed-camer...) but it still requires a person driving a car to set up the gear.
Additionally, most cyclists I see never stop at stop signs no matter how busy the intersection is.
That said, this is coming from me as a pedestrian, so maybe someone who was primarily a driver would have a completely different take from both of us.
The number of people who run red lights is giving me culture shock. You have to sit and wait at your own green light because 1-3 vehicles are still running their red light, and it's every time.
As a teen, I saw cops everywhere camping out for traffic violations. I got a few tickets myself for tiny infractions that don't compare to running a red light.
Of course, the icing on the cake is that Texas outlawed red light cameras in court.
Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
This isn't as much of a problem in NYC, but here in KC, unfortunately, neither the traffic stop nor the warrant are trivially safe tasks.
But I don't go barreling past pedestrians, and make sure I give them the right of way.
Did they? The only thing I knew they nailed people for was speeding through the EZPass lanes too fast.
There is talk in the UK of requiring sight tests for the elderly. Historically UK licenses required frequent renewal, when they were centralised for convenience they ceased to have a renewal step, and it was kinda-sorta reintroduced much later once they had photographs because of course a 40 year photo is unrecognisable. But because of the focus on photographs the renewal step is integrated to passports, and is a chain-of-likeness documentation process. If I look a big greyer than last time in the photo I upload, pay, wait a few days, OK, some mix of humans and machines says that's the same guy as the other photo except older, replace image, print new ID.
Since it's aligned with passports (which also care about image similarity) there's no room in that step for like "Do your eyes still work?" let alone "Do you know what this fucking sign means?" or anything resembling mandatory continuing education.
A woman had her dog in the cart at Costco that kept barking at people.
I joked with an employee during check-out "So anyone can bring their dog to the store these days?" and she said they stopped confronting these people because it's not worth it and makes things worse. Worse for who?
Man, I thought that was the exact type of person worth confronting in civilized society. If we can't police minor antisocial behavior, what can we confront? We wait until it's so bad that we have no choice?
I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.
The absolute most dangerous drivers I see on the road aren't bad drivers in the sense that they're unskilled at controlling their car. I can't weave between cars at 120 mph or cross three lanes of traffic to make an exit I didn't see until the last second without killing myself, but I routinely see people do that. Sure they don't care about driving safely and/or following the law, but they're probably sane enough to pull it together for a brief driving test.
The other big category of dangerous drivers is drunk/distracted (texting) drivers. Again, most of the people engaging in these behaviors are probably smart enough not to do them during a driving test.
What would be the alternative? There's no other way to inch uphill than to grind the clutch. It's fine as long as the engine stays below ~2000 rpm.
1) Are you going to fund that? Because it means a significant increase in testing examiners.
2) The data say over and over and over that the single best traffic safety enhancement would be to ban drivers until they are 21. People have to be in their 80s(!) before they are as bad as drivers in their teens and early 20s.
When I'm in the position that I have to enforce rules, I usually provide an alternative and explain to people that they're not the problem. I spell out that problems arise when you have a dozen people breaking said rule, or when the people who come after them decide to push the limits even further. As long as they see the rules enforced consistently and equally, I rarely encounter any pushback. But until my employer got all of the staff to consistently enforce the rules, things were getting pretty nasty (threats towards staff, people doing stuff that would endager lives, etc.).
Depends on the state because drivers licenses are their remit.
While I am sticking to the roads, I don't blame other cyclists for seeking refuge on the sidewalks.
But something like an operating while intoxicated is big bucks, which is why some places have drivers on the road with 12 DUI convictions (tens of thousands in state profit), and now we got cops and courts from legal cannabis states arresting people for smoking 8 hours beforehand because the criteria for guilt is ill-defined but the punishments are massive because they just copied all of the harshest (read expensive) drunk driving laws.
US cops and courts don't care about guilt, they don't care about safety; over and over and over again they have shown themselves to be a profit-seeking racket. Anyone who has ever been in or had access to the the details of someone's criminal case and seen the mountains of ridiculous extra fines and fees and ways to waste money for no gain knows how ridiculous it is.
That's not universal, but I do wish they would just learn those laws for their state.
In my state, they have equal rights, and that is that no one has the right of way. If you run into someone, it's your fault full stop. If you couldn't stop in time, then you were travelling too fast for the situation. If someone is blocking the sidewalk, they're a dick, but you can't do anything about it without getting arrested except to find another way around.
Also, if you're on a bike and about to pass a pedestrian, you must give an audible (to the ped) signal so as to warn of your approach. Even then, if you hit them, it's because you were going to fast to stop safely in case they wandered into your path.
I love the laws in my state regarding shared cycling/pedestrian ways, and sidewalks in particular. Very reasonable and fair.
Lol, like hell it would. The supposed "danger" is not worth more legislation and overreach.
Here in Argentina they if you don't pay, they just remember until you want to sell the car, or renew your license or a ¿anual? technical review of the vehicle.
You have to pay it sooner or later with late fees. It's not necesary to send a minitank to the front door of the home of the bad drivers.
... which kinda makes it hard to drive to work to get the paycheck that you need to pay the fine, at least legally. If you get caught it's a misdemeanor [1]
[0]https://dor.mo.gov/faq/driver-license/fact-nrvc.html [1]https://law.justia.com/codes/missouri/title-xix/chapter-302/...
That's actually not true. Most surveys I've seen show that drivers are at fault ~80% of the time.
Impounding vehicles is an option too. Like we do for parking tickets. That is routinely done without police interaction, or interaction at all with the driver.
I know in California if you ignore a red light ticket long enough they'll pull the fines (plus penalties and interest) from your state tax return.
Or is that a de-facto ban on cycling.
2. Sounds good
If they ride on the sidewalk, they should behave like pedestrians. That is, do not blast into the crosswalk at 20mph (impossible for drivers to safely check for in most environments), do not randomly enter the road from the sidewalk, pass pedestrians at a respectful speed and distance, etc.
If they ride on the road, they should behave similarly to motorists. That is, actually obey stop signs (rolling stop, or even treating it like a yield is okay), and actually obey traffic lights.
I'll even tolerate transitioning from one to the other at appropriate traffic stops. Just please don't get upset if I almost run you over for abruptly taking right of way you never legally had.
2) how much of this is because the drivers are young, and how much because they are inexperienced? If you ban teenage drivers, your 22-year-old drivers will still be inexperienced.
For your system to work, there would actually need to be cops watching traffic.
Since the pandemic, some cities just don't have as many police watching the streets as they used to.
For example, there is virtually no traffic enforcement in Austin now. You see the results with how much people speed now, and how awful some drivers behave on the road.
* Traffic enforcement capacity in Austin dropped significantly -- traffic citations fell about 55% between 2018–2022.
https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Audito...
* As a result, speeding tickets, which once averaged 100 per day in 2017, dropped to about 10 per day by 2021 -- a 90% decrease.
https://www.kut.org/transportation/2022-02-24/austin-police-...
But that's just science fiction. Cars are just going to be cars!
https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/new-yorks-most-dangerous-d...
Apparently the tickets don't incur any penalties against a driver's license, so these drivers don't face repercussions such as suspension.
But I've heard of areas that's it's easier, too, like your CA experience.
A Manhattan driver’s license addendum might be the way to do it. Keep a low bar for where one might need a car. But to enter Manhattan, you need to be autonomous or specially licensed.
Cyclists are not licensed and their bicycles are not tagged or inspected for safe operation on roads, unlike motorists.
Cyclists are rarely subjected to traffic law enforcement despite demanding all of the rights that motorists pay for and are licensed for.
Cyclists are a danger to themselves and others while operating in the same area as motorists, but are not required to carry insurance or wear safety equipment, while motorists are held to more stringent regulation.
In a nutshell, cyclists are free-riding risk takers who are arrogant to boot. When they start acting like motorists and pay taxes like motorists and are fined like motorists for violating the law, I will happily change my opinion.
Driving in American cities is the opposite of freedom. The necessity of regulating apes piloting heavy machinery in close proximity to each other and society is a major source of our modern police state.
“Yes I’ve been in an accident on my bike Mr. Poll Taker.”
“What? Of course it was the other guy’s fault!”
I agree with your overall point, but there are actually rules about what types of behavior are unacceptable for service animals. Uncontrolled or disruptive barking is one of those unacceptable behaviors.
The store would be entirely within their right to warn this person and remove the owner and/or ban the “service animal”.
That said, unless you have a legal team that aggressively embraces these sorts of acts against people who abuse the service animal rules, it’s almost always more practical just to let it go. Some of these folks have significant psychological issues, and you’ve already lost once you’ve entered a conflict with an unstable person.
You’re absolutely right, roadways are insanely expensive. That’s why it’s infuriating to see entire lanes expropriated for cyclists.
So I think ~level 5 self driving cars becoming common + a modification to prevent people using their cars just like we install breathalyzers for habitual DUI drivers is needed before revoking people’s licenses is really a meaningful punishment.
For the record, I support closing that gap, in addition to taxing the odometer on electric vehicles which don’t contribute to gas tax revenue but use roadways like other motorists.
IIUC, cars are pretty much universally permitted to go through red lights at least 1/3 of the time -- right on red is legal (AFAIK) in all 50 states. In many states, left on red from a one-way street to another one-way street is also legal.
Is there a specific state's laws that you think describe a circumstances when a bike may proceed through a red light, but it is unsafe to do so?
If so, how does that unsafety compare to your opinion on cars turning right on red?
Sorry if I wasn't clear in my wording. By "survey" I was trying to point to the specific kind of research methodology where you survey people about what has happened in the past instead of trying to control variables like in a typical experiment.
I wasn't talking about random internet polls or self-reported blame analyses, but actual research papers.
How many cyclists can fit in a space of one car? Or, would you rather that every cyclist was in a car instead? Would that increase or decrease congestion?
> occupy road space that was created through taxes on motorists while paying nothing for these benefits
So roads get funded in full by motorists and cyclists can't possibly also own motorized vehicles and they don't pay tax that definitely doesn't contribute to the roads that they surely wear down at a rate that's not on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands lower than cars. Oh and 16 lane highways are built because of all the damn cyclists clogging up the roads.
> Cyclists are not licensed and their bicycles are not tagged or inspected for safe operation on roads, unlike motorists.
A cyclist on the road is only a danger to himself. A motorist can mow down a school trip on a pedestrian crossing on a whim.
The latter two points just repeat the above. Yes, driving a 2 ton machine at 80 mph is going to have be a little more restricted than a 20 kg bicycle at 20 mph.
But the tax is still constantly being collected even though the rate isn't going up. This is like saying electricity must be free if you haven't had a rate hike in a while.
I don't think you understood what you wrote. Non-motorists subsidize motorists.
Feel free to look up the % of funding for roads that gas tax or w/e accounts for in your country.
Also look up the fourth power law, that'll tell you how much tax a cyclist should pay compared to a driver in terms of road wear. Say a cyclist should pay $1, how much should you?
Then check how many millions it costs to build a mile of highway and internalize the fact that cyclists are not allowed there. Nor do they use car parking. Nor do they cause 40 thousand deaths per year in the USA. What's the cost of human life again?
Once you figure all that out, we'll be ready to start talking about pollution and its effects.
That shift will happen all by itself. At some point, in a distant future, the price of the insurrance for human-driven cars will be so expensive that people because of that will choose a robot-driven car.
It is all about risk (the risk of the insurrance company loosing money) and an error prone and unpreditical human will be a considered high risk in that regard.
I'd like to challenge this part. I don't see the value of increasing the driving license tests. Reckless drivers can be reckless regardless of their initial driving license tests. You just need drivers with sense of responsibilities. they will get to know road norms as they go, which often is far more valuable than the driving license quizzes.
Context: I moved to a new place where acquiring a license can take more than a year. It turns into a game where driving license companies deliberately fail you just to get you to pay more.
Depends on the state. Some are specifically "if there's a vehicle detection sensor and it doesn't detect your bike after 90 seconds", others are just "cyclists may treat a stop sign as a yield sign and a red light as a stop sign".
Paying for our highways circa 1993 [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
I have taken driving licence exams in 3 different countries in the world and the NY exams was, by far, the easiest, less stringent one.
For the theory part, you can take the exam from home, on your own laptop and you just have to pinky swear you won't cheat. It's downright silly.
Also, traffic enforcement in NYC feels basically nonexistent. Drivers will run red lights, fail to yield at pedestrian crossings and will park wherever they feel like it. And the police won't do anything - in fact, the police are one of the biggest offenders.
It is a privilege licensed by the State and regularly revoked through due process or expiry.
While your concern about mobility and privacy are valid, I would contend that public safety is what it’s to be weighed against. Some people really are better riders than drivers.
Complaining about cyclists getting bike lanes is like complaining about pedestrians getting footpaths.
Vehicles have these things called license plates and take a license to operate. It's not dystopian mass surveillance or a technical challenge to have a camera assigning tickets for operating machinery dangerously in public spaces.
Road wear is not the main issue. Roads will deteriorate whether they’re used or not. They will deteriorate faster with heavier traffic, sure. But deterioration from temperature cycling, road salt application, and weather happens whether they’re used or not. If cyclists want to use this infrastructure, they should contribute to its upkeep.
If cyclists have a car and contribute by paying these taxes and fees, then let’s build a regulatory regime that exempts these users from cyclist fees and taxes. The point here is to make those using the infrastructure pay for their share of upkeep and their contribution to congestion.
Deer are only a danger to themselves too, right? People never experience damage to their vehicle or personal injury when they hit a deer? The damage and risk is not proportional to both parties, sure. But it is false to say that drivers experience no risk of damage or bodily injury when in an accident with a cyclist who disobeys traffic laws. Cyclists should be insured at whatever rate is necessary to protect against this risk.
Your school children example is not really applicable here. We’re discussing cyclists who want to be treated like motorists but refuse to act like them and obey common traffic rules. That is about as far as you can get from from an innocent group of school children crossing the street with the flashing red stop sign on the school bus activated.
You can’t have it both ways. If cyclists are going to use roads designed for and paid by motorists, they should be subject to the same rules, regulations, taxes, and enforcement.
You’re welcome to defend a double standard for cyclists, but it won’t change the fact that it is indeed a double standard and is inherently unfair.
Thus for many it’s a symbolic gesture until the next time something happens which is little different than simply doing nothing until the next incident like say 3 strike laws.
I think there exist situations where it's reasonable for cyclists to go through red lights. I think there exist situations where it's reasonable for cars to go through red lights.
Roads are designed for both bikes and cars alike, or do they not have bike lanes where you're from? Since bicycles and cars are fundamentally different vehicles, they should have different sets of laws applied to them. To try to apply the same set of rules would be inherently unfair. You're welcome to try to argue that that's actually fair, but you've currently backed up your stance with nothing but fake leading questions and baseless claims.
"The law prohibits the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges"
Not sure if there’s any real human drivers on the road anymore.
Of course people who really don't like that freedom will play up the privilige vs right angle as they see fit to advance their goals.
Roads deteriorate whether they’re used or not. If cyclists want to use them, they should pay to maintain them. I don’t know why you find this idea so controversial. Adjust the fees commensurate with their weight if you want, but by definition those fees should not be zero.
Roads are obviously expensive, hence why it is repulsive that cyclists pay nothing to build or maintain them, but actively increase the danger on them and degrade the efficiency of using them.
Pollution? In what world do cyclists not require fuel to operate? Cyclists use the most expensive fuel possible to operate: consumable calories. We burn fuel to operate machinery to produce food, then transport it to stores and then transport it home, cook it, and then use only a portion of the available calories to operate a bicycle because the human body isn’t 100% efficient.
You’re delusional if you somehow think cycling is good for the environment.
DC recently banned "right on red" but it is routinely ignored and the penalty is apparently a $100 fine. If the penalty was loss of license (maybe not on first offense) I think there's a lot of people ignoring the current rule that would not be willing to ignore the possibility of losing their license.
By your logic, this is fine because the kids aren’t pooping in the park which degrades it less.
Never mind that the park was created for dog owners, and their enjoyment of it is impaired by these new restrictions placed on them by people who shouldn’t even be there.
At least with Arizona, it's the whole state so most drivers won't have the habit.
Of course, if DC just wants to take in a lot of easy $100 tickets, this is exactly the way to do it.
To be like that, almost everyone would need to own a dog, and everyone including the non-dog-owners would have things delivered by dog, the dog park would have to actively block access to most places, and the fees for the dog owners pay for the dog park would have to be insufficient for the dog park and the park instead subsidised by general taxation even from the people who only get stuff delivered by dog… which would be quite fair and reasonable because almost all the damage to the dog park that the maintenance fees would need to cover, would be due to specifically the delivery dogs.
The actual point of the dog park fees in this scenario would be to reduce the usage of the dog park, due to everyone riding their dogs everywhere. Which is a heck of a mental image.
Roads aren't for pleasure, they're economic infrastructure that some people happen to enjoy.
You are using a state service whenever you use the road. It is a subsidy that people who are the largest offenders consistently choose to entrench.
Allowing cyclists to run red lights significantly reduces mortality. Waiting at an intersection is provably one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists.
Your “obvious” example is something that’s unknowable to you as an individual. You have no knowledge of the effective throughput of the road ahead of you.
The disdain you have for cyclists seems bizarre and misplaced. The idea that it’s a double standard is wrong — the standards are set to minimize harm and maximize effective throughput. Having separate rules is entirely consistent here. If we subsidized the lifestyle of cyclists as much as motorists, this would be a non problem.
There were no bike lanes in the city I live in until ten years ago. They took lanes on roads that were never designed to accommodate cyclists and and made them bicycle only lanes. The result is increased traffic congestion and more accidents.
The reality is that very few roads in America were ever designed to accommodate cyclists and in order to please a small but very vocal minority of people, lanes were stolen, in the literal sense of the word, from motorists and given to cyclists.
That is what it takes to keep cyclists safe on roads: redistribution of property from those who funded it and for whom it was designed for originally, giving it to cyclists. And even doing that can’t truly protect them when they do dumb things, like run red lights.
The truly unfair and dangerous thing here is propagating the illusion that cyclists can coexist with motorists. They can’t, for all of the reasons you yourself stated.
Obviously I’m discussing things as I believe they should be, not as they are, so I’m not sure what evidence you want me to provide, short of the logic inherent in the arguments I’m making. Feel free to point out where you think there are gaps in the logic.
Why are you okay with the double standard of redistributing property to the motorists, but not redistributing property from the motorists?
I find your position immensely hypocritical.
What do you think is the leading cause of death for Americans younger than 45?
Thank you for sharing that. I hope you feel better now.
> Allowing cyclists to run red lights significantly reduces mortality. Waiting at an intersection is provably one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists.
The second sentence of the abstract of this study would imply you're ignorant, but I won't stoop to name calling:
"Red light running violation of bicyclists is the major contributory factor to the crash involvement of bicyclists worldwide."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22143...
> Your "obvious" example is something that's unknowable to you as an individual. You have no knowledge of the effective throughput of the road ahead of you.
If I'm following a cyclist who is going 20mph in a 30mph zone, they're contributing to congestion. This is obvious to every human, even those who have never even seen modern infrastructure or the vehicles that operate on it. It happens when walking in hallways or on stairways. When someone is slow and people can't get around them, you get congestion.
> The disdain you have for cyclists seems bizarre and misplaced
I don't have any disdain for cyclists, only those dumb enough to try and coexist with motorists and arrogant enough to try and change traffic laws and infrastructure to fit their needs at the expense of everyone else.
I ride my bicycle at the park with my kids, and partly why I feel so passionately about this is because I don't want my kids riding in situations where they are very likely to get themselves injured or killed.
You're absolutely right, waiting at an intersection is one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists. This is because riding on roads with motorists is the most dangerous moment for cyclists.
There is no way to make it safe for cyclists to coexist with motorists. Mixing the two results in more people getting injured and dying. This should be reason enough to ban them from roads with motor vehicles, putting aside every other issue I've raised.
Allowing them to run red lights is a recipe for disaster. Use your brain: motorists reasonably and rightfully expect to have the right of way when the light is green. Literally every other moving object yields to them at intersections with a signal. Making an exception for cyclists will result in more people running red lights, and more corresponding injuries and deaths.
> The idea that it's a double standard is wrong — the standards are set to minimize harm and maximize effective throughput.
Go look up what the phrase double standard means. It is by definition a double standard. You can defend the double standard, but that doesn't change the fact that it is one.
> If we subsidized the lifestyle of cyclists as much as motorists, this would be a non-problem.
If by this you mean we should reduce the amount of subsidization to zero for both, I agree completely. Infrastructure should be paid for with use fees. If cyclists want to use it they should pay for it. If motorists want to use it, they should pay for it. Currently motorists contribute, while cyclists do not.
Dog owners are the motorists. Dedicated infrastructure was built specifically for them to use.
Parents with kids are the cyclists. They want to restrict how that infrastructure is used so that they can enjoy it in the way that is most convenient for them, at the expense of the dog owners.
Initially, dog owners used the park freely without any interference from parents with kids. But at some point, parents with kids felt they were entitled to use the dog park in ways it was never intended to be used, and changed regulations to restrict dog owners enjoyment of the park.
I intentionally left out any discussion of how these things are paid for to highlight the unfairness of this situation. It doesn't matter how it's paid for, since the infrastructure already exists for a specific purpose and is being used for that purpose.
To include the finance side of things in this analogy, it would be like funding the dog park with a special sales tax on dog food, which increases the unfairness of the whole situation when it's taken over by the parents with kids, who paid nothing to maintain or build it.
In case you don't understand how analogies work, they highlight critical similarities between two situations that are otherwise dissimilar to help understand the underlying concept. They aren't parallel in all respects, nor can they be.
If your best argument against my analogy is to introduce irrelevant dissimilarities to distract from the obvious point of the analogy, I'll take that as an endorsement it was effective.
I know that’s not really what you were getting at with you comment, but it’s worth noting when people try to demonize cars, as cyclists are wont to do: they’re the least bad and most versatile mode of mass transportation available.
The context in which the automobile met horses matters: contrary to your portrayal of roads, very few of them were actually paved in any meaningful sense. They were mostly compacted dirt, sometimes gravel. Lanes existed in a less explicit way, and speeds were much slower because pedestrians were always mixed in as well.
Cars were a vast improvement over this situation along every meaningful axis. They’re faster, don’t leave manure on streets, and are safer when you consider operation. Horses get spooked and buck their riders, they can kick, they weigh hundreds of pounds and can crush you. And most importantly, they were cheaper than owning a horse. People didn’t switch overnight for no reason.
To the heart of your comment, the reason why we have the infrastructure we do is because cars were so much more capable than horses. Traffic signals, lane demarcations, signage: all of these things came about because cars were so much faster than horses. Congestion doesn’t matter if you can get there in half the time.
When you need to get to the hospital, do you ride a bike? When you want to buy a couch at the store, how do you get it home? When you need to visit your grandparents the next state over, how do you get there?
Overwhelmingly, the answer is a motor vehicle. Unfortunately, the value of that vehicle is proportional to the infrastructure available to use it.
Here’s the rub: cycling is a luxury. Access to a motor vehicle when you need it is a neccesity. When you need to get to the ER, the last thing you want to do is be fighting a bunch cyclists to get there. When it’s snowing and -20F outside, you’re only taking the bike if you absolutely have too.
Your freedom of movement depends on infrastructure built for motor vehicles. Your ability to really do anything beyond get to work and back in a city depends on reliable and efficient access to a motor vehicle.
We should stop wasting money on bike lanes and build real public transit in our cities. The reason people feel compelled to use a bike is the alternatives are too awful to be competitive.
If you think that’s hypocritical, I don’t know what to tell you. Cyclists degrade infrastructure built for motorists. Infrastructure you need. Infrastructure they contribute to the upkeep of via gas taxes.
Not sure about the answer to your question without looking it up, but probably “car crash” given the context of our conversation.
[Citation needed]
That's really a...unique...take. The reduction in disease was due to things like antibiotics and water treatment facilities, and preventing contamination from human sewage. Horse manure does not cause widespread disease.
Are you just making things up? Like, that's LLM-level hallucination right there.
The rest of your comment is just you stating your opinion as though it's fact because I guess you live somewhere 100% car dependent. Just because your freedom of movement and ability to do things other than commute relies on a motor vehicle, does not make that true of others outside your bubble of wealth.
That said, as established above I'm either arguing with a robot or with a person who has no problem inventing swaths of history out of whole cloth, so I guess the joke is on me.
https://www.nytimes.com/1869/03/08/archives/velocipedes-thei... | https://archive.is/UDhZf
Bike cops in NYC in the late 1800s were likely more common than cars.
https://flatironnomad.nyc/history/brief-history-of-bicycling... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250713044710/https://flatironn...
> In 1896, then New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt launched the first-ever group of bicycle-riding officers. This team evolved into a 100-member organization with its own station stated Evan Friss, co-curator of the Museum of the City of New York’s 2019 exhibit Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History[0].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250319112028/https://www.mcny....
By the time this film was created in 1911, cars existed, but they had to share the road with pedestrians, cable cars, and horse carriages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx5sUa_2SD8
> This documentary travelogue of New York City in 1911 was made by a team of cameramen with the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern, who were sent around the world to make pictures of well-known places.
> Opening and closing with shots of the Statue of Liberty, the film also includes New York Harbor; Battery Park and the John Ericsson statue; the elevated railways at Bowery and Worth Streets; Broadway sights like Grace Church and Mark Cross; the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue; and Madison Avenue. Produced only three years before the outbreak of World War I, the everyday life of the city recorded here—street traffic, people going about their business—has a casual, almost pastoral quality that differs from the modernist perspective of later city-symphony films like Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s "Manhatta" (1921). Take note of the surprising and remarkably timeless expression of boredom exhibited by a young girl filmed as she was chauffeured along Broadway in the front seat of a convertible limousine.
Jaywalking wasn't even really a concept until ~1915. It's legal again in NYC as of last year. Jaywalking laws against pedestrians and other non-drivers could be viewed as a taking from or enclosure of the commons; in this case, roads as public thoroughfares for one and all. In this light, the behavior of drivers towards cyclists is a continuation of their hostility towards horse carriage users and pedestrians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking
https://www.cnn.com/travel/jaywalking-legalized-new-york-cit... | https://archive.is/Y2MCk
Folks have been cycling in NYC long before cars were common. Before that, folks were using the roads for all manner of pursuits. Roads are tools for living, and they're for everyone who needs them if a better option more suited for your mode of transportation isn't available.
I’ve not seen a single person pulled over in my neighborhood in the same time, another activity that was common.
Meanwhile traffic behavior has reached staggeringly wild levels.
My impression, which is certainly not backed with data, is that CPD no longer polices traffic violations. My cynical view is that it’s a work slow down in protest over all the trouble they’ve gotten in for pretextual stops.
I do see the insane driving. People going fast and weaving is the tip of the iceberg. Regularly now I see people using left turn lanes in intersections to pass people on the left and cut them off mid-intersection. Regularly I see people utterly spaced out on their phones, nearly stopped in the middle of the road -- these folks present a unique danger if you're doing the speed limit and not paying really close attention. But just generally, I think "good driving" went out of style during COVID, when a huge swath of people stopped driving.
These sorts of things I feel used to be addressed by the police in a very public way: you'd see that car that was weaving doing dangerous things pulled over a mile up the road as you continued on. THAT is what's changed, for me.
“Industrialization contributed greatly to the elimination of typhoid fever, as it eliminated the public health hazards associated with having horse manure in public streets, which led to a large number of flies, which are vectors of many pathogens, including Salmonella spp.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid_fever
I appreciate the compliment, but no, I’m not an LLM, just an ordinary guy who has more understanding of these issues than you do.
Here’s a wild idea: fact check the stuff you claim I’m making up before you make a fool of yourself.
I think this conversation is over. You’re clearly an angry, closed minded person. Have a nice day.
But by their numbers stop rates went way up for the 10 years between 2014-2024. But that was during the period when traffic stops were a primary strategy for crime prevention, that is the pretextual stops they got in trouble for.
Sadly, there was no checkbox for the officer to mark if it was a pretextual stop or not for study purposes.
I could probably isolate by stop location to some degree if I really wanted to do some digging. Maybe I can nerdsnipe ‘chaps into doing it for me.
In Texas, traffic cameras that automatically issue tickets are illegal. Courts ruled they violate the constitutional right to face your accuser. And look, that's how it should be.
And I certainly don't want my own car, phone, or anything else I own snitching on me while I drive.
After 2020, the city council cut about a third of the police budget and paused new cadet classes. At the same time, hundreds of officers retired early or left for better pay elsewhere. By 2023, patrol vacancies were over 30%. With fewer officers, APD stopped handling whole categories of calls -- traffic enforcement, minor crashes, and low-level 911 calls -- because they just didn't have the staff.
Then politics made it worse. Austin leaders (Blue) pushed for more oversight and accountability. The governor (Red) fought back with bills to hide misconduct records and block transparency. The Travis County DA started prosecuting misconduct more aggressively, straining relations even further. The result: a demoralized force, hollowed-out staffing, and a city caught between "fund them less" and "hold them accountable more," while basic policing collapsed.
So no, they weren't fired. But yes, many stopped doing the job -- leaving Austin residents stuck in the middle of a state–city standoff. And honestly, it feels like that was Governor Abbott's goal all along: "If you didn't vote for me, don't expect police to lift a finger for you." These days, even for traffic accidents, assaults, or vandalism, 911 just tells you to file a report online.