Made the same choice as this woman many, many times. All you can do is hope the drivers of whatever vehicles are behind you decide not to murder someone that day.
One time I saw a Camaro parked in a bike lane, I was taking a bus home that day.
Out of nowhere a group of kids on bikes turned the corner and threw a bunch of hard drives at the Camero. They put holes in the door along with dents and even smashed the driver side window open.
Hard drives?? Where tf are you that kids just have stocks of hard drives to throw ahah, but truly I think most of the youth are on the right track in this regard
In the before times when Pentium 4 systems clogged the curbsides, you ended up with a loooot of IDE 40-80 gb drives and not much to do with em....
A few weeks ago I saw a luxury SUV parked in a bike lane on an otherwise sketchy road. Rather than take the risk of going around it, someone (sadly not me) destroyed the driver-side mirror and freed up part of the lane. The people learn through observation.
If something encloses the Commons, sabotage it. Cost them more money than they save from the convenience.
With a pack of traffic cones you can block off the street. Doesn't do anything about the dumpster, but may help cyclists and infuriate automoboids.
automoboids
that's a new way to label something an -oid cool
Locally an 80lb bag of instant concrete is $5 while storms are free. If it has a lid you can make it unusable, if it has truck connection points you can make it unserviceable, and either will have financial penalties for the person renting it. That person now knows it isn't welcome in that spot. If the spot is illegal, reporting it to the city with either of the above starts the clock for fines.
Same. The bike lane is also just the "put my shit here" lane so I spend lots of time in and out of it as I am forced to go around whatever bullshit is parked in the lane. I usually try to signal and move in the car lane way in advance but that's dangerous too since folks will sometimes then go into the oncoming lane to get around me. It's scary to bike and it really doesn't have to be
If someone dropped a dumpster in the car lane officials would be apoplectic
A bike lane isn't a bike lane without physical barriers.
Outside of "i shouldn't have to/ it's the LAW" why not just like slow down and go around on the sidewalk
I don't understand the "bicycles are vehicles " thing people have especially when it leads to shit like this almost constantly. People are assholes and can't drive, it seems like the obviously solution is to absolutely never share space with them when it can be avoided. But people seem to think riding a bike on a sidewalk is just as bad as driving a cybertruck through a bike lane so idk. People seem to really be on some shit with this. I used to ride my bike on the sidewalk 100% of the time for years at college and there was never any issue, you don't have to go 25mph around pedestrians. If riding on the sidewalk were seen as an acceptable solution then this person might still be alive (since whether or not this dumpster had a permit is meaningless, the same thing would have still happened either way)
How am I supposed to get to the sidewalk when it's cars parked bumper to bumper between my lane and the sidewalk. Which is also full of people and doors that fly open from buildings and cars. Assuming the sidewalk is even clear and isn't full of restaurant tables. It's dangerous on the sidewalk because it's unpredictable.
Also victim blaming bikers for trying to keep themselves and others safe while dying to oblivious drivers might be the most braindead take I'm going to see this week. Unless I open up my stupid lib family chat again but I swore that off for a while.
if you're in a bike lane and it's road to your right and sidewalk to your left (i.e. literally what is pictured in this article) idk where the parked cars are coming in, and there's a dumpster in front of you so idk I just know what choice I'd make. I'm never biking in traffic if I can avoid it and the sidewalk bike cops can eat me
Also victim blaming bikers for trying to keep themselves and others safe while dying to oblivious drivers might be the most braindead take I'm going to see this week
if you wanna be mad about it be my guest but it's not really victim blaming bicyclists to say "hey why don't people just do this thing that's safer for everyone involved than treating a bike like it's a car when that repeatedly, continuously kills people because drivers are a danger even to other drivers"
I just think it's absurd that it makes more sense to some people to go bicycle = car than to treat them more like pedestrians and encourage sidewalk travel, but then pedestrians get just as mad at the idea as bicyclists do about bike lane infringement
The thing that's safer for everyone is for cars to slow down and pay attention. Bikes have nothing to do with it.
Which isn't going to happen, so i guess people are gonna keep dying and I'll keep being the asshole for going "what if we didn't equate bikes to cars"
lol reply to my comment coward, you don't even bike
talking about what cyclists should do when you don't even bike. basically medieval philosophy.
How does someone with the reactionary viewpoint of "bad things happen because of the victims and society can't possibly change" find their way to a leftist website. Are you sure you didn't mean to make a dot world account instead?
Why do people get so fucked up turbo mad at "hey maybe it's fucked to expect bikes and cars to share the same traffic" but sure i'm a fucking reactionary dawg, what the fuck ever
"I WANT to bicycle with ten ton murder machines, you're actually an ASSHOLE for SUGGESTING mixing with pedestrian traffic would be safer"
Mixing with pedestrian traffic is absolutely not safer for pedestrians. It's also way less efficient, it would take ages to bike everywhere dodging pedestrians and tables and chairs and trash cans and doors and plants and dogs and whatever else the fuck is on the sidewalk. Maybe where you live your sidewalks are weirdly completely empty and so it makes sense but where the rest of us live riding on the sidewalk is incredibly difficult and dangerous and slow. Seriously just go outside and use your eye balls and think about it for more than zero seconds. This shit is not complicated. Or since you clearly don't bike maybe go talk to people who do.
They probably no helmet no bell ebike at 30mph on the sidewalk and act as if they're somehow making the world a better place as families and the elderly dive out of their way to avoid being run over.
nah bro every time there's an obstacle in the bike lane just come to a complete stop. then dismount your bike and heave it up on the sidewalk past whatever random bullshit obstacles are in the way, then roll along the janky sidewalk for a bit, then dismount again and lift your bike back on the street. then put all the effort into getting back up to speed. This is something all cyclists should do on their commute route they bike every day for every obstacle in their path. Yeah nah I don't bike why do you ask.
Actually it's too dangerous on the road so bikers should just get inside cars instead. See I solved it wow I'm so smart!
Where I'm at there are a few bike lanes, but they are rare and the drivers so terrible that I have been yelled at while on the road "ride on the sidewalk, it's safer!" Most people don't seem to mind bikes on the sidewalk here, it's easy to ride slow and avoid people and they know it's a risk to your life to ride in the road.
Riding on the sidewalk actually works kinda well on stroads but in cities with lots of pedestrian traffic like Toronto you really should have some kind of dedicated infrastructure. The Dutch have set the standard here.
A dumpster that may have played a role in forcing a cyclist out of the bike lane.
The dumpster must be treated as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Funny, because as I understand it the idea that property can be assumed guilty until proven innocent is already enshrined in American law under civil asset forfeiture or whatever it's called when cops can legally rob you
Edit: just read this took place in kkklanada, disregard me
We must investigate whether the cost of the permit would be higher than the cost of a funeral and prosecute the case accordingly!
Toronto police said on Friday that no charges have been laid, noting it’s an ongoing investigation. They would also not confirm details around the circumstances of the collision.
While it’s up to the city to enforce permits, Saxe said “there’s no way of knowing” a company was going to “illegally drop a bin” there for a few hours.
burning zombies in
might catch my house on fire! I wanted to warn everybody of these silly zombies so they could stay clear.
This article sucks shit. Like, it's super wish washy and reads as if they are actually blaming the cyclist. Shouldn't the dump truck driver be charged?
It's infuriating but also it must be admitted that carceral approaches to traffic safety will not work. However, I do very much like the idea of going after the company who put the bin there that blocked the safer bike infrastructure that existed.
Is there a way to make those big steel bins unusable, quickly, without big power tools? Given their nature I can't imagine that just throwing corrosives in will do any permanent damage. But if there's a way to make a bin permanently unusable without getting caught, with just what one can casually carry, then maybe some property destruction will incentivize the bin owner to stop pulling that crap.
The cyclist “left the bike lane,” according to Duty Insp. Jason Bartlett
the cyclist swerved into oncoming traffic
Just look at this fucking language, they make it sound like the cyclist made the choice to fucking die
Anti-cyclist language is as common as copaganda in the media once you know how to look for it. I've been commuting by bike for 10+ years and it's unbelievable how biased the North American media and public are against cyclists
Yesterday I was riding my bike down the road going home, and a car suddenly turned to the right in front of me. I had two choices:
- Continue straight or dodge right and smash into the car
- Dodge left around the car, but into the lane of traffic with cars behind me, risking a collision with a different car
I opted for 2 and luckily was not hit by the traffic behind me, but cyclists are forced into these bad decisions EVERY FUCKING DAY we ride our bikes. If I had been hit, it would have been waived off as an unfortunate accident, and I would have become another statistic in our dogshit car-centric world. I fully expect to meet my demise at the wheel of some carbrained idiot some day, it seems inevitable.
I'm so upset that this woman was killed for no reason, and that her killers will never be brought to justice, and that the frothing lizards who enjoy driving believe she brought this on herself
I live in cyclist paradise (doesn’t feel like that but compared to the rest of the world it is) and when I was young, car hitting cyclist who has to swerve on the car lane due to obstruction was one of the most common causes for car on cyclist accidents. It’s a super dangerous situation because cars don’t pay attention and go way too fast. The only effective solutions are to make cycle lanes that are separate from car lanes, or to make the car lane much smaller so that cars don’t feel safe driving too fast.
When I was a kid my parents basically told me to look behind me if the car behind me is actually slowing down for me to pass, and if not then to not go into the car lane but to stop in front of the obstruction and to only pass when I was sure that no cars were coming. Maybe this strategy helps one of you out there but I can also imagine it not being realistic due to heavy traffic/low patience. Obviously it would be much safer to avoid these situations with the solutions I mentioned above.
