For the record, I love my bike and don't own a car. However, the local cycling "activists" in my community are from the same mold as the YIMBY, neoliberal urbanist types. Overwhelmingly white, PMC and childless, who view bicycling and bike infrastructures as the harbinger for livable cites.

When you're a coder or social media marketing douche sitting on an ergonomic chair for 8 hours, cycling for five minutes to and from your loft is an ideal arrangement. However, cycling is a lot less attractive to a blue collar worker who has to travel to a exurb for their grueling 9 hour retail or Amazon warehouse shift standing on their feet. They would much rather nap on the bus after a shift than push pedals for 5 miles.

There is significant research that bike lanes are a trojan horse for gentrification and neoliberal housing development.

In my mid-size city, the twittersphere about local city politics is disproportionately geared towards cycling. It's become a cool kids club for PMCs to get involved in municipal politics, while ignoring much more desperate issues like homelessness and police brutality.

  • 000ppp [any]
    1·
    4 years ago

    Once again, working class people commute by bicycle more than any other demographic group. Maintaining cars as the dominant mode of transport is incredibly financially oppressive. And, as just explained, building networks for bicycle infrastructure is essential to having mass transit work at all.

    Finally, if you're concerned about creating a better bus network, there is plenty of money for that if you reduce the amount spent on subsidizing automobile use which eats up the vast, vast majority of transportation budgets. Your fixation on bike lanes as a problem is based on an irrelevant cultural anxiety, not on any reality. You're like one of those conservatives getting apoplectic about the state spending 10 million spend on the NEA while the military eats up trillions. Your concern is completely misplaced.