HOT TAKE OF THE DAY bicycles are not cars. When you get into a car you suddenly need a hundred times the road space of a person on a bike, you can’t see around you very well, and you can’t hear anything.
But cars exist to move people; that is the economic justification for all we do for these machines. Until we focus on the real reason cars (and bicycles and scooters and sidewalks) exist, we will pour staggering amounts of money into a deadly, ugly system that only serves upper socioeconomic classes. And even them, not very well.
Local planners in my town have occasionally risked their offices to calm automotive traffic and accommodate pedestrians and cyclists. The public reaction is that there must never be any interference in the flow of “traffic,” by which they mean cars. Improvement is consequently uneven and slow.
Idaho has an unusual law that allows cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs. Since a bicycle has very different operational parameters than a car, including far superior visibility, it makes sense not to discard momentum when cross-traffic is distant. We now know this actually reduces accidents, though people can disagree as to how it does so.
georgewiman 