A safe space to complain about jackass humans

or all of them

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I have this thought frequently and then I remember the times my dumb ass has clipped them when riding my bike (especially those yellow ones)

It’s only been a couple times but I was glad they weren’t full of concrete each time

now the white ones they put along the bike lane on 35mph roads, I think those could be booby trapped more “safely”

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Like by height? Or just pick half randomly?

half randomly. enough so that people think they are all filled with concrete

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paging world bollard association.

though i still have the unpopular opinion that protected bike lanes are worse than just a wide buffer

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Ok, John Forrester, whatever you say.

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We don’t get much of either here. But both are better than paint at least.

You know I kind of agree but!

There’s a road I have biked for years in my neighborhood. Runs along what used to be the airport but is now next to a park in a new development. Big easy curve, 35mph limit that I’m sure many/most cars are 5-10 over. It was just a painted line for years and some drivers flirted with it but I never got clipped. They put up flex posts 2 or 3 years ago, and they are all covered in tire marks but I had never seen somebody in a passenger vehicle hit one while I was biking through.

I was biking along this road the other day and a driver passed me, really getting close to the posts and definitely running over the white line. I was mad but whatever. I put my head down and like 5 seconds/100 yards down the road that same car got into the posts with a big CRACK THUNK and I will say it only hit 1 before it jerked back into the lane!

So they are ugly and I kinda hate them and they don’t really keep anybody from killing me but maybe they kinda work?..

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But imagine if they’d been bollards!

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i like room to maneuver around whatever parked in the bike lane without interacting with a curb or secret bollards.

unpopular opinion, i know, and it comes from a “bikes guy” who is ok at bike handling. but i think that more “wide painted thing” can be accomplished in more places with the same budget as “wide area cars definitely can’t go, but the area for bikes is less wide”.

i’m all for anything anyone does, though. it’s all fucked and we are ducks in a game of duck hunt so i’ll gladly accept anything at all that is done that isn’t a sharrow

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I feel ya, I’m just goofing.
I came of age in a time when there were zero considerations given to bicycles on the streets of Chicago so I ended up, to some extent, a vehicular cyclist by default, though vehicular cycling is an authoritarian dogma and I’ve always had more of an anarchist bent.
Forrester and his cronies were responsible for holding back bicycle infrastructure for decades. Fuckem.
Now that there are some real bike lanes around, I sometimes miss the old ways but know that me and my passengers are way safer in a parking protected bike lane even if it sorta feels like a glass-filled gutter ghetto.

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the big problem with vehicular cycling is that it works most acceptably if you are a big strong athletic white man, aka one of societys silverback gorillas. and speaking as a member of that demographic, it kinda sux even for us. So it’s hopelessly inegalitarian and guarantees that cycling is not accessible to huge swaths of people. there is zero surprise that this was a white/ middle class/ middle age guys idea.

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TaKe tHe LaNe BRo

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I personally know a few guys like this that were killed or maimed by motorists.

But yeah… the baked in misogyny and racism of this ideology is pretty lame.

Trying to explain why we need better infrastructure to bike bros.

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The constitution asks us to consent to be governed. Some of us need to agree to dial back our urges to allow others their rights. I’ve been splitting lanes since before there was any green paint but all of the city bikes create visibility that makes me safer.

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sure, but the infringement in this case is often injury by a vehicle

How has this person not had her license revoked forever?

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Kinda hard to tell from these pics but the only thing separating the 60mph traffic on DLSD from the Lakefront Trail is a six inch curb and a few feet of grass. That’s how it is on the vast majority of the northside and much of the southside too, though there’s a little more physical separation down that way. It’s insane road design that preferences drivers’ view of the lake over the safety of every single park user.


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That’s like 100x safer than most of our MUP!

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Yeah, that’s a pretty solid separation. A guard rail would be nice, but a dedicated driver could get through that too. We’ve got lots of suburban areas where the only infrastructure is a painted bike lane on a 4 lane road with 45mph speed limit (55 actual speed).

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