[haswell]

Agree that bad drivers kill people constantly, but I’d argue this isn’t the end of the story.

As a cyclist, I’ve had plenty of close calls with bad drivers. I’ve also witnessed insane behavior by cyclists that obviously led to the subsequent vehicular entanglement [0].

On balance, cars cause more issues for bikes than the other way around. But a subgroup of cyclists are not innocent here, and plenty are directly at fault for their own injuries or for forcing cars into dangerous situations.

All of this to say: this isn’t a bikes vs. cars problem, it’s a city planning and transportation infrastructure problem.

- [0] Like the cyclist that turned the wrong way around a traffic circle to go the wrong way down a one way street and was surprised to land on the hood of my car as I made my way the correct way (and only legal route) around the circle. I was equally surprised because the center of the circle was filled with tall plants. If he’d been going faster, things could have been much worse for him. It would have counted as a vehicular accident but the cops and insurance folks were 100% in agreement that the cyclist did the dumb thing here. The point of this anecdote: if that cyclist died, it’d be “another cyclist killed by a car”, but that’s hardly the whole story. Encounters with cars have a high risk of being fatal. That does not mean that drivers are always the issue.

[yunwal]

The OP was advocating for banning bikes and bike lanes because they’re dangerous. Cars kill people. Bikes do not. Nothing you’ve said changes that. There will always be shitty, unnecessarily risk-taking people in the world. They exist on bikes, they exist in cars. I don’t think the proportion is significantly different among one population vs another. I’d rather have them on bikes.

[haswell]

> Cars kill people. Bikes do not. Nothing you’ve said changes that.

The point I’m trying to make here is that countering an argument against bikes with “cars kill people, bikes don’t” is oversimplifying the problem much like “ban all the bikes” is oversimplifying the problem.

Neither of these positions moves the conversation forward and both of these positions discard a wide spectrum of complexity.

If we are to take this issue seriously, it involves infrastructure improvements to make cyclists safer, citations against cyclists who are obviously endangering others, and hopefully movement away from the need for cars to begin with.

Focusing on the binary version of this gets us nowhere.