5 ms·

I live in the most densely populated state in the US. The car mandate is INSANE. I'll drive somewhere, then figure "the next place I need to go is a five minut

by i80and 3y ago

I live in the most densely populated state in the US. The car mandate is INSANE. I'll drive somewhere, then figure "the next place I need to go is a five minute walk. I'll walk!" Then the sidewalk disappears and I'm trudging across lawn next to 60mph traffic. Another time I wanted to walk to a shop right on the other side of the road. It would have taken 45 minutes. The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild.

swayvil 3y ago
It's dominance by business that's to blame. Business says "put money in the hole. Deliver money to hole with fast wheeled box." Everything else is disposable, sacrificial.
marliechiller 3y ago
Thanks for this anecdote. It really made me realise I take a lot of infrastructure for pedestrians for granted here in the UK
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Not just the UK. The US really is an outlier. Pedestrian infrastructure is better almost everywhere else. Certainly in every country I have visited from Canada to China and a dozen others in between.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    In my experience, Canada is similar. We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford. Calgary and Edmonton were worse.
ponector 3y ago
Why not to use a bicycle? I've spent a summer in Fairbanks, AK and it was totally fine to navigate anywhere around the city and suburbs by bike. Almost no bike lanes there, of course.
- i80and 3y ago
  Safety. Friends have lost friends cycling on mixed-mode roads. Drivers don't expect to see cyclists, and the normal traffic speeds involved leave little room for the kind of error that even benevolent humans make all the time, to speak nothing of the many hostile drivers. I would love to cycle. I love bicycling, and am glad it was an option for you! But I don't believe it's viable where I am without significant structural changes.
- stetrain 3y ago
  Cycling on 45mph+ roads (really stroads, or in-town highways) with no separated bike lanes or sidewalk is pretty dangerous. This kind of road is kind of the normal in most American suburban towns or even bigger cities outside the actual downtown area.
  - whaleofatw2022 3y ago
    In some cities/counties you can't even ride a bike on a road where the speed limit is over 35 (unless it is a county road with implicit limits) Detroit comes to mind, not sure if the rule is still on the books tho.
krzyk 3y ago
Yeah, I still remember that when I was in Texas, there were people that stayed in a hotel very close to the HQ of our company - it was just on the other side of a big road (few lanes) - but as Europeans think, they assumed there is a pedestrian crossing, but there was none, there was no sidewalk, nothing. The only way to get to the other side of the road was using a vehicle - there were few hired shuttles that were driving people from hotel to work and back, quite insane. A week before I was in SF and public transport there was decent, but the vehicles were like from 1950s in comparison what I'm used to use in my country, e.g. if I wanted the bus to stop I had to pull a wire (yes, a wire!) to notify the busdriver that he/she should stop on the next bus stop. That's just one of the issues, and the quality of the bus was no where near the current ones we had in Europe. On the other hand the bus drivers were very friendly and open.
- i80and 3y ago
  I take the bus into my local (INCREDIBLY WEALTHY) downtown out of principle, and I have yet to see a bus where less than half of the seats are ripped and torn and maybe duct taped. The city bus drivers are usually pretty chill, though! The systemic under-funding and under-utilization are certainly not their fault.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Hate to play the one-up game but this is too crazy not to share. I was doing consulting at Travelocity/SABER, which was in the no man's land between Dallas and Fort Worth. The company put me up in the Marriott on the other side of the highway from their campus. Not only were there no sidewalks for the short distance, there were rough rocks covering the shoulder like you'd find along a seawall, so you couldn't even trudge through the weeds and mud to get over to the campus if you were determined to do so. On the good side of things, Google Street View shows that they are now installing sidewalks, but I have to wonder who decided back then that the rocks were a good idea in the first place? It's a rural area, relatively speaking, and unlikely to have been done for anti-camping reasons. At least two decades of people had to take shuttle buses between the hotel and campus regardless of their desire to walk.
- MisterTea 3y ago
pengaru 3y ago
> The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild. This is one of the major factors I appreciate about the places I've lived in California; for the US it's an exceptionally good environment for pedestrians and cyclists. Still not great by any means. But whenever I visit friends/fam back in IL where I grew up, I'm teleported back to that cultural hostility in a big way. It doesn't end there though, even as a driver there's rampant aggressive hostility/road-rage behavior to contend with. It feels like the entire region is full of people fighting for scraps on the streets, just without getting out of their cars. Pedestrians/cyclists are basically just bystander casualties to the mess without infrastructure to isolate them from it.
- fyrn_ 3y ago
  Many parts of California are very bike hostile. From personal expirence it's way worse then Portland or Seattle. A lot of it is cultural though, there in the bay area many drivers dislike bikes and blame them for traffic, etc.

by i80and 3y ago

swayvil 3y ago

It's dominance by business that's to blame. Business says "put money in the hole. Deliver money to hole with fast wheeled box." Everything else is disposable, sacrificial.

marliechiller 3y ago

Thanks for this anecdote. It really made me realise I take a lot of infrastructure for pedestrians for granted here in the UK

kwhitefoot 3y ago
Not just the UK. The US really is an outlier. Pedestrian infrastructure is better almost everywhere else. Certainly in every country I have visited from Canada to China and a dozen others in between.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  In my experience, Canada is similar. We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford. Calgary and Edmonton were worse.

ponector 3y ago

Why not to use a bicycle? I've spent a summer in Fairbanks, AK and it was totally fine to navigate anywhere around the city and suburbs by bike. Almost no bike lanes there, of course.

i80and 3y ago
Safety. Friends have lost friends cycling on mixed-mode roads. Drivers don't expect to see cyclists, and the normal traffic speeds involved leave little room for the kind of error that even benevolent humans make all the time, to speak nothing of the many hostile drivers. I would love to cycle. I love bicycling, and am glad it was an option for you! But I don't believe it's viable where I am without significant structural changes.
stetrain 3y ago
Cycling on 45mph+ roads (really stroads, or in-town highways) with no separated bike lanes or sidewalk is pretty dangerous. This kind of road is kind of the normal in most American suburban towns or even bigger cities outside the actual downtown area.
- whaleofatw2022 3y ago
  In some cities/counties you can't even ride a bike on a road where the speed limit is over 35 (unless it is a county road with implicit limits) Detroit comes to mind, not sure if the rule is still on the books tho.

krzyk 3y ago

Yeah, I still remember that when I was in Texas, there were people that stayed in a hotel very close to the HQ of our company - it was just on the other side of a big road (few lanes) - but as Europeans think, they assumed there is a pedestrian crossing, but there was none, there was no sidewalk, nothing. The only way to get to the other side of the road was using a vehicle - there were few hired shuttles that were driving people from hotel to work and back, quite insane. A week before I was in SF and public transport there was decent, but the vehicles were like from 1950s in comparison what I'm used to use in my country, e.g. if I wanted the bus to stop I had to pull a wire (yes, a wire!) to notify the busdriver that he/she should stop on the next bus stop. That's just one of the issues, and the quality of the bus was no where near the current ones we had in Europe. On the other hand the bus drivers were very friendly and open.

i80and 3y ago
I take the bus into my local (INCREDIBLY WEALTHY) downtown out of principle, and I have yet to see a bus where less than half of the seats are ripped and torn and maybe duct taped. The city bus drivers are usually pretty chill, though! The systemic under-funding and under-utilization are certainly not their fault.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Hate to play the one-up game but this is too crazy not to share. I was doing consulting at Travelocity/SABER, which was in the no man's land between Dallas and Fort Worth. The company put me up in the Marriott on the other side of the highway from their campus. Not only were there no sidewalks for the short distance, there were rough rocks covering the shoulder like you'd find along a seawall, so you couldn't even trudge through the weeds and mud to get over to the campus if you were determined to do so. On the good side of things, Google Street View shows that they are now installing sidewalks, but I have to wonder who decided back then that the rocks were a good idea in the first place? It's a rural area, relatively speaking, and unlikely to have been done for anti-camping reasons. At least two decades of people had to take shuttle buses between the hotel and campus regardless of their desire to walk.
MisterTea 3y ago

pengaru 3y ago

> The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild. This is one of the major factors I appreciate about the places I've lived in California; for the US it's an exceptionally good environment for pedestrians and cyclists. Still not great by any means. But whenever I visit friends/fam back in IL where I grew up, I'm teleported back to that cultural hostility in a big way. It doesn't end there though, even as a driver there's rampant aggressive hostility/road-rage behavior to contend with. It feels like the entire region is full of people fighting for scraps on the streets, just without getting out of their cars. Pedestrians/cyclists are basically just bystander casualties to the mess without infrastructure to isolate them from it.

fyrn_ 3y ago
Many parts of California are very bike hostile. From personal expirence it's way worse then Portland or Seattle. A lot of it is cultural though, there in the bay area many drivers dislike bikes and blame them for traffic, etc.