User:JMyles/Why Car Lanes Divide Us

Whatever else the recent hullabaloo regarding "bike lanes" is, it's certainly mystifying.

I ask that you permit me an observation to inform the rest of this essay, and I think that it's sufficiently obvious to any urban cyclist as to be taken as read: the chief function of bike lanes is to present an urban plan where cars are the default, and bikes are relegated to a subsection of the roadway, with something like 99% of the mileage in the USA consisting solely of paint and no infrastructure, and a significant portion also existing in a door zone.

So let me stick my ahead above the parapet and say what I'm hearing the cyclists and urban planning geeks around me conclude: ***bike lanes suck***. They fail to fulfill the most important role of urban infrastructure: to calm traffic. Not only are bike lanes not a step toward urban joy, they are a step away from it by entrenching the auto industry subsidy that is the contortionist dance needed to accommodate cars near and even in the centers of our cities.

Moreover - and especially evident in the hostile dialogue on reddit and elsewhere, where the focus seems entirely on castigation of 'carbrains' and not at all on the comparative efficacy of various, this style of dialogue allows us to politely say what must by now be the obvious and unstoppable conclusion of the e-bike age: **cars do not belong in cities anymore**.

Perhaps the history of the growth of urban joy will view car roads in cities as an important part of the economic development in the 20th century - and of course this benefits the states that actually monopolized opportunities for economic development in that time period via foreign and trade polices - but certainly not for the next century.

So I offer a simple, actionable approach for the bold and strong among us: take the lane and ride at speeds and in formations which encourage the meek, young, and elderly among us.