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- Hacker News
- What's a "DEI bike lane"? Like woke, DEI has lost all meaning at the political level of discourse. It's just whatever the current regime dislikes.by goatlover
- Real Republicans do not bicycle. Plain and simple.by quantified
- Making things better is Progressive, and Progressive is woke, and woke is DEI. So to fight back against DEI find the things that make peoples’ lives better (like bike lanes) and destroy them. Just tear them up, and you’ve won the culture war and saved America.
This is the official GOP policy, the best of what the GOP has to offer. Fight friends, betray allies, threaten your neighbors, drop bombs, smash bike lanes.
by f17428d27584 - It's just a way to keep the culture war hot. They need people on Reddit mad, the media questioning what a DEI Bike Lane is and ridiculing, etc. The actual policy they've implemented, excluding the border, has so far been an abject disaster and even their own base is unhappy. "DEI Bike Lanes" is a way to throw their voters some red meat while stirring the pot.by brentm
- In a nearby suburban town, the GOP Chair forced a referendum on a road project.
New York has a complete streets program where bike lanes and pedestrian friendly crossings are included in most projects. Iirc 4-5 people have died crossing this road.
The call to action was that “those people” would use the bike lanes to leave the city, connect to the Democrat bike trail and rape, murder and rob the townsfolk.
Old fearful white people are terrified of this stuff.
by Spooky23 - From what I've seen and heard, the propaganda is blaming pedestrians for being "distracted". I've heard ads on the radio telling kids to look up when walking and not walk distracted (because automobiles are dangerous). This is absurd and I'll spell it out: larger cars designed to generate more revenue and distracted drivers are problems, not people walking around with their heads down. Nearly everything is backward and designed to make money or blame poor people who don't know any better.by Freedumbs
- Kids have repeatedly been warned to pay attention when walking near roads for as long I can remember which is over 60 years.
Even getting hit by a subcompact car can kill someone if they just step out in front of it not giving it enough time to stop.
by tzs - I have friends who despise cyclists but oppose bike lanes. Bike lanes would take cyclists out of your lane and into their own lane. Plus if more people start cycling because there's infrastructure, that's less car traffic in the way of your truck! It just seems like a win-win for everybody. I've given up hope on transportation in the USA. It certainly won't be fixed within my lifetime.
- I don't know if you noticed that, but when they make bike lanes they don't cut them off the sidewalk, they cut them into the car lanes, either taking a lane out or making the existing lane very narrow. Unlike a cyclist, which you see once in a blue moon, the reduced lanes are there forever, you drive through them all the time. Does this explain the paradox to you?
I, for one, cycle and still oppose bike lanes - they don't make cycling much safer (a car can easily jump a curb and most of these don't even have a curb, just some paint and plastic bollards in the best case) but impede traffic for everyone. If you want to increase cycling adoption you will piss off much fewer people and be 1000% more efficient by reigning in bike theft instead of building these lanes.
by pandaman - But as much as those people despise cyclists, bike lanes continue to proliferate in urban areas.
Just because there is not unanimous support for good policies, doesn’t mean they can’t be implemented.
Also a big win for local policy making, which used to be a preference of the right.
by jimbokun - Some people despise drug users on their streets but oppose safe injection (a.k.a. overdose prevention) sites, which would move the drug users indoors.
It's often an act of power, like a mob. It's the corruption of power made viceral.
> I've given up hope on transportation in the USA. It certainly won't be fixed within my lifetime.
Exactly the response your enemies planned. Act aggressive enough and the other side will give in. You're their best friend when you do it and every time you post it.
by mmooss - I think disliking cyclists is the core position for these people. They don’t want cyclists in the road and they don’t want to pay for infrastructure for cyclists, like bike lanes.
- Yep, I'm perfectly content to use the full lane if there's not another option. And that doesn't mean squeezing into the shoulder. No, that means riding left of center to prevent assholes from passing unsafely on my left.
The funniest thing is that tactical use of bike lanes, neighborhood greenways, etc, actually serves to funnel cyclists into specific protected routes such that the majority of other roads have fewer cyclists utilizing them. From my home in Seattle, I can ride several miles to work on roads that were already low traffic volume, but which are faster because cyclists get priority, and cars get diverted away. Before this existed, I just used the main roads that cars did, because it was faster.
Like, if you hate bicycles, you should love bicycle infrastructure. It's better for everyone.
by supern0va - Great, more ammunition for bad faith arguments from all sides.
Unfortunately there's a healthy subset of the Democratic party which is also against road infrastructure improvements like bike lanes and traffic calming. Car brain is an affliction which does not discriminate.
by foco_tubi - There is a difference in being against bike lanes and calling them DEI.
Only one of them is totally nuts
by croes - What does it add to both-sides this issue? It's not even addressing the post, it's just redirecting some of the blame to a group who have nothing to do with what the article addresses.by muwtyhg
- People who dislike this situation need to stop taking the Trump administration's (and allies') statements at face value, like David Harkey does in the article, and stop calling them crazy. Either way, they are playing you and distracting you, and you are inadvertently acting as their messengers.
Using the universal analytical tool cui bono (more powerful than an LLM) and their own explicit words, there's a consistent, non-crazy strategy: Support the fossil fuel industry in every way possible (which appeals to some people; I'm not writing a critique; you should understand this.):
Regarding 'crazy', it's a form of aggression - demonstrating there is no length to which they won't go, to intimidate the other side into backing down. It's been the American neo-right rhetorical tactic going back decades - be aggressive, and if that doesn't work, be more aggressive. Because nobody else has figured out this very basic tactic (used by even by animals), people keep backing down and the tactic keeps working. You see people every day saying they are hopeless, tired, resigned, etc. Why would the neo-right stop - this is working amazingly well!* Destroy or acquire national competitors: Venezuala, Iran, even Nigeria * Buy off domestic competitors: using tax dollars to bribe renewable energy developments to stop * A million other policy and political actions, major and and minor; even opposing bike lanes.(If you doubt it, see if my hypothesis predicts future events.)
by mmooss - “DEI bike lanes” heh, despite cycling being over represented by middle aged white guys.by fassssst
- imo cyclists are different than commuter bikers and the former have a seeming tendency to prefer routes with no bike laneby boogieknite
- It's pretty clear that from the other side of the border that the man in charge is literally acting like an 80 year old 4chan b troll.
He's just trying to get under everyone's skin and it's working.
Look at those crowds of bikers... ICE protesters... no king protesters...
He's a showman and he loves it.
Stop giving him airtime.
So what if federal funding doesn't recognize bike lanes or whatever this is about?
Vote in competent city Councillors that will get bike lanes prioritized in your city if that's what you care about.
- A big part of the issue is that federal funding drives probably the majority of significant projects at all levels. We have a completely broken system where every project is a targeted towards winning a grant as much as if not more than the actual local need.
Milwaukee WI has had several (awarded!) street reconstruction grants killed by this admin because they included bike lanes. They weren't bike lane _projects_, they are to primarily to rebuild crumbling unsafe streets, but they included bike lanes so the Fed's rescinded the grants and now most of the projects are dead. There's no local money to do it without the grants.
The real fix for this is to fix the stupid system we have, but for now it's what we're stuck with and this has a real impact you can't overcome locally.
by kgermino - How do children get around? They bicycle. For a party claiming to be pro-life, pro-family, pro-child, they don’t act like it.by paj26
- Nah, pro-family means pro nuclear family mom staying at home waiting for dad in his car.
- "This is a common sense approach despite the Left's belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda."
The government we deserve.
Nobody bother thinking coherent thoughts, insults and spurious non sequiturs are policy now.
by f17428d27584 - That's one of the many problems I have with the current regime: they can't say anything without framing it as an opposition to some exaggerated bogeyman. I get it, politics is about messaging. But can't these fools, for once, rise above it and just do something without taking a jab?by jimt1234
- "Since nearly 80% of the population uses cars to get to work and their important medical appointments, we are taking a closer look at federal guidance to ensure American families have the infrastructure they need," the spokesperson said. "This is a common sense approach despite the Left's belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda."
Jumping straight into the middle of the article you might believe you stumbled onto The Onion.
- I’m getting somewhat sick of Christian Nationalist trolls running the US government.by mypalmike
- I don't get it. Aren't most bike lanes on the far right?
- This logic fails on a couple levels. One, bike lanes are often not wide enough to support another car anyway. Two, Braess's paradox[1] is an effect that's been noticed for as long as we've had cars that adding a lane to a roadway will often show no improvement, and perhaps even add detriment, to a local traffic system.
So I guess it's a common sense solution if you don't understand the first thing about roadway design?
by techjamie - by scoofy