“To have all of us delayed and sitting in burning fossil fuels so some rich people can ride their bikes across the bridge when they feel like it and make me use my inhaler more often, it sucks.”
Several speakers argued that backed-up traffic from the bike path causes pollution — an argument propounded by business leaders in the Bay Area Council, which pushed the argument in online ads calling for converting the bike lane to reduce pollution. Lisa Klein, a Metropolitan Transportation Commission staffer, said that regional air quality officials have assured transportation planners that’s not the case.
In its ad and email campaign, the Bay Area Council also argued that the bike lane benefited wealthy people while the pollution it caused harmed mostly low-income people and communities of color.
The Bay Area Council includes such famous givers-of-a-shit about low-income people as Amazon, Walmart, BlackRock, and McKinsey.
There's been a long running issue about adding bike lanes to Connecticut ave in DC, which has a lot of retail and restaurants, and is also very busy traffic wise. I have seen every bad faith argument imaginable against them: it's bad for workers because less business, it's bad for workers because too much business, it will be bad for DC Metro because people will bike instead of taking the train, it's ableist, it's ageist, etc etc. I think the best one was that cyclists are more likely to die in a traffic collision than people in cars, adding the bike lanes will cause more traffic fatalities.