being a pro-bike activist in a very car-friendly french city, this argument comes up in every. single. comment section. no matter whether there's anything relat

being a pro-bike activist in a very car-friendly french city, this argument comes up in every. single. comment section. no matter whether there's anything related to actual bikes in there, or whether accidents were the topic at all. Literally in comments on articles like "hey we're organizing a bike ride for kids this weekend." So forgive me if it's a bit hard to take this seriously. I'll still try to address this because for once I'm not handicapped by my lacking French. :D The reason you don't feel as threatened by cars as you are by bikes is (without knowing you in person) twofold: 1. As societies, being collectively used to cars and accepting things we'd never accept in any other context when things relate to cars. Search the webs for "motonormativity" if you want the slightly more academic take on this. Since you were a kid, you were probably taught how to "co-"inhabit the road with cars. I put the quotes there because in most places, it's really cars who inhabit, and everyone else who's accepted onto the road, provided they don't impede on drivers' comfort. 2. Infrastructure is built in most places to more or less cleanly segregate pedestrians from cars. There's nothing stopping us from doing the same for bikes and pedestrians, but in most places we don't. Even though inside cities bikes can and do often move faster than cars, and therefore have a higher speed differential wrt pedestrians, their infrastructure is often woefully inadequate to deal with this. Here in southern france they even often put bikes explicitly on the sidewalk, which comes down to a "no biking" policy. Even where bike lanes are put in place, they're often ill-conceived. It turns out, the bike/pedestrian interaction in traffic is not at all the same as the car/pedestrian interaction. The Netherlands and other places have decades of experience in this by now, yet somehow this knowledge is not actively pulled by hesitant local authorities. I was already quite interested in all of this but recently I also read "Movement" by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet [1] and I loved it. If you're wondering why certain things in cities suck so hard, IMHO it's a good start. [1]: https://islandpress.org/books/movement https://islandpress.org/books/movement edit: had swapped "cars" and "bikes" in one sentence, that made no sense. :D