A blog post earlier this year complained about how the city council wanted to convert more vehicle lanes into bicycle lanes on the city streets. See previously: Midland, TX, city leaders have adopted the crossing guard mentality when it comes to bicycles.
The efforts should be directed at getting drivers where they want to go in the minimum time, not slowing them down for the benefit of that tiny percentage of commuters who ride bicycles on city streets.
Seems I'm not the only one annoyed by bicycles. Kat Timpf of the Greg Gutfeld show has her own take on the ridiculous effort to give bicyclists more respect than drivers want to give them. See Experts: Stop Using the Word ‘Cyclist’ Because It ‘Dehumanises’ Bike Riders. Excerpt:
It all started with a study, conducted by researchers at Queensland University of Technology and Monash University, which found a connection between the dehumanization of bicycle-riders and aggressive acts toward them.
The Daily Mail reports that QUT professor Narelle Haworth said that the study found that 55 percent of non-cyclist respondents actually said that they consider cyclists to be “not completely human.” As annoying as people on bikes can be when they’re blocking up the road, that’s obviously pretty insane. What’s also insane, though, is what Haworth wants to do about it: Push people to stop using the word “cyclist,” and instead use the much wordier “people on bikes.” ...
Haworth also recommended making the infrastructure more bicycle-friendly so that cyclists (whoops, sorry!) wouldn’t have to share the road with vehicles.
He may have a point with that last one. But instead of altering the streets to accommodate bikes, it would certainly be more driver friendly -- and serve more people -- to ban bicycles from city streets and build a velodrome or put bike paths in existing parks.
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2:19 PM 4/9/2019
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