I’ve been an avid cyclist most of my adult life. I’m all for separated bike infrastructure, and it would certainly save lives. But it doesn’t address the actua

I’ve been an avid cyclist most of my adult life. I’m all for separated bike infrastructure, and it would certainly save lives. But it doesn’t address the actual problem: the enlarging of vehicles and reduction of line of sight for drivers is a danger to everyone. I’m also an even more avid pedestrian. I routinely encounter drivers who struggle to see me over their hood, or even the increasingly high floor for windows in auto designs almost across the board. I’m above average height for US men, but I’ve even had to navigate around trucks with hoods so tall it would be nearly if not totally impossible for a driver to see me at all, much less see my pup. I’m not exaggerating, I walked across an intersection just the other day where I had to stand on my toes to see if a driver was even at the wheel in a huge truck stopped at a stop sign, while simultaneously forcibly shuffling my pup ahead of me so the potential driver wouldn’t see me clear the intersection and assume that’s all there is to it. All the while, I was imagining what would happen if there was a driver at the wheel and we couldn’t make all of the necessary communications for a safe crossing. This truck wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, the intersection wasn’t either. The experience is even more common for navigating around vehicles in reverse. I’m not going to make any policy suggestions, and I don’t care about how this affects elections or relative success of any political perspective. I will just say that balancing public safety without requiring automobile accommodations for it is inherently untenable.