The United States isn’t Denmark or the Netherlands; we have been building bike unfriendly roads for a century, and it’s not going to be trivially undone by painting a white line on the side.

It is my assertion that bike lanes, as implemented, are a rock chewing stupid idea.

For about a century now, we’ve had two kinds of travel lane: Sidewalks, and traffic lanes. Sidewalks are for WALKING, traffic lanes are for all vehicles of every description. Every vehicle is supposed to behave the same way following the same rules, regardless of performance. A bicycle, moped, motorcycle, car, truck, all of them are supposed to follow the same rules.

When there are traffic lanes only, no sidewalks, we have rules for how traffic flows. For example, right-turn only lanes at an intersection are right-most, followed by turn-or-straight lanes, then straight only lanes, then straight or left lanes, then left only lanes. Having a lane that goes straight to the right of a right-turning lane is a recipe for collisions.

We do that all the time with sidewalks. Pedestrians are expected to exercise a lot of caution when entering crosswalks to avoid conflict with vehicle traffic. Pedestrians are expected to treat EVERY intersection as if it has a stop sign for them, or they are expected to obey crosswalks with signal devices that are interlocked with traffic lights.

Bike lanes as I have seen them implemented are a lot like sidewalks; slower traffic is placed to the right of traffic lanes…except they do not expect to treat every intersection as a stop sign, and they interpret green lights for straight through as for them, even in conflict with right turning traffic.

So we have a travel lane positioned similarly to how sidewalks are positioned relative to roads, but without the rules that make sidewalks safe. It doesn’t help that, where they do implement lights or whatnot, they increasingly do so in non-standard ways that generations of drivers have not been trained on. There are new kinds of lights at crosswalks, new and weird nomenclature at intersections rather than "No Right On Red 🔴 " signs that have been around for years. It’s not implemented well, and it’s getting people killed.

As for e-bikes: They’re basically not regulated, there’s supposedly a classification system for them, which people ignore. There’s no enforcement, and they do whatever the hell they want, including riding at travel lane speeds on sidewalks, which causes collisions because no other traffic, vehicle or pedestrian, is expecting 20+mph traffic on the sidewalk. They either need to be regulated like mopeds, or they need to go away. “But the motor is electric not gas” fucks with people’s brains. Somehow people aren’t riding Honda Metropolitans or Yamaha Zumas on the sidewalks at 20 or 30mph but that’s happening with e-bikes.

Yeah go die in traffic with all the other zealots.

Having a quasi-religious hatred of automobiles only causes people to demand things like bike lanes right the fuck now, paint the lines on the asphalt, NOW. They don’t put in traffic lights with dedicated bike lane lights that would stop car traffic to let bike lane traffic safely cross, they don’t close some roads to automobile traffic, they paint the lines on the road. And then cyclists think that white line on the pavement somehow keeps them safe when they cross paths with a sedan, when the presence of those lines fundamentally breaks the safety algorithm the roads are built on in the first place.

e-bikes should be outright illegal. We should be imprisoning containership crews for landing with them on board.

There might be a world, after we’ve pulled the last billionaire’s lungs out, when humans are back in control, that we can do research into defecating video that can identify bowel cancer just by letting a computer watch someone take a dump.

We do not yet live in this world though.

Their parents didn’t hit them hard enough.

Okay, we’ll rename American football to Cricket.

Yeah, none of you guys are the main character, I’M the main character.

I wonder if you could use four of the LEDs themselves to form a full bridge rectifier?

I’ve seen that cropping up in a lot of videos lately from tech adjacent creators. Cathode Ray Dude veered off in his video about an HP laptop that had a feature that overwrote the Windows boot splash screen with a calendar view using the “Ring -2” management system into this kind of beautiful screed about basically why society is unraveling.

How many moon landings have been done in metric?

An Ask Lemmy topic recently was “what are some video games that don’t exist.” I gave three answers, but held one back because it does technically exist.

SQIJ! for the ZX Spectrum was designed to be terrible by a programmer that, as I understand it, was contractually obligated to program a game, but had grown to hate the company. He wrote a game that turned the caps lock on so none of the movement keys worked, and if you edit the code with a memory poke to turn caps lock off, you’ll find there’s no game. It was written in BASIC, and the first line is the most passive aggressive thing I’ve ever read:

1 goto 2

Well you see, Americans called the game with goalies “soccer” because that’s what the British called it back when we were crown colonies, so when we invented the game with linebackers, we called that “football.” then everyone else heard our word and decided to change the game with goalies’ name to “football.” So as usual, America continues to be correct, and the rest of the world is bound and determined to fuck it up.

You know, I’ve got one of those who doesn’t have any power. His lack of hilariousness is at a maximum.

I’ve seen a few other factors that might contribute to increased pedestrian/cyclist deaths on our roads:

1. e-Bikes. e-Bikes are mostly a goddamn mistake. The ones that don’t make the bike go any faster than you yourself can pedal it, just make pushing the pedals easier? Those are fine. Anything else should be classified as a moped, and I don’t know why they aren’t. People are riding them at 20+ miles per hour on sidewalks and getting backed into out of blind driveways that weren’t designed with traffic that speed on the sidewalk. Plus you’ve just got more people on 2-wheelers mixing with car traffic, which is a game they lost at the character select screen.

2. Half-assed attempts by DMVs to add bike lanes and walking paths. All the squawking about walkable cities this and fuck cars that you bots have been bitching about has been heard. In my area, where new housing developments or shopping centers are going in, the DOT now requires bike lanes and sidewalks in such places. They connect to nowhere because the main roads aren’t all being modified to add such features, not until they need major modifications themselves. So you’ll see bikes and pedestrians on highways they didn’t used to appear on.

Another problem I’ve seen is the mixing of bike lanes and turn lanes. Our roads have long been built such that any lane that is allowed to turn right does not have lanes that can go straight to their right. So if you have the right of way to turn right, by green circle or green right arrow signal, it is logically safe for the driver to proceed. Until they added bike lanes to the extreme outside next to the curb. We didn’t add signals for these bike lanes, they’re supposed to follow the same signals as cars. So. You’re sitting at a red light with your right turn signal on. It turns solid green. You go. The cyclist overtaking you in the bike lane also saw the light turn green, he tries to go straight, he is crushed to death under your right rear tire. This didn’t used to be a problem, it is now.

3. Walkers and bikers be out here going full retard. My neighborhood is a grid system full of stop signs. There are two North-South streets a couple blocks apart where all the stop signs are crossing, so these are main thoroughfares through town. Cars go the posted speed limit of 35 along there. Between these two streets is another that has stop signs on most blocks. Cars don’t tend to travel down that road because they constantly have to stop. Guess where everyone decides to walk and bike? EVERYWHERE EXCEPT THE ROAD WITH NO CAR TRAFFIC. People go out of their way to play in traffic. I guess you can’t earn a living by getting a job anymore, so you’ve got to get your pelvis crushed to have your day in court.

There will never be another general election in the United States.

Actors are creative people too. Several of Harrison Ford’s most iconic moments were ad libs. Famously, in Raiders of the Lost Ark he was supposed to have a whip vs sword fight during the Marian is kidnapped sequence. But he wasn’t feeling well, so he pulled his pistol and shot the swordsman instead, and then they rebuilt the scene around that. Also, Han Solo’s “I love you!” “I know.” moment was Ford.

“The writer writes, the director directs, the actor acts” is how you get the sludge Hollywood makes today.

So, do you remember back in like, 2004, when “feature phones” like the LG EnV or the Sidekick came out? It had a little more OS to it than a typical flip phone, they often had full keyboards, integration with intant messengers at the time, web browsers, etc? Some were more media focused and had mp3 oriented features, some were social machines for emailing and texting, some were more camera oriented, some more game oriented, you could get a phone that fit your interests.

Microsoft intended to shoulder into that market circa 2008. The year after the iPhone launched. It then took them two years and a billion dollars to develop. Through in-fighting with development of their OTHER mobile product, Windows Phone. And finally in 2010, the era of the iPhone 4, they released the Kin.

The Kin did not perform well, it was very mediocre hardware.

It had no app store or software library at all.

It couldn’t access several instant messengers that were popular at the time.

The few people who did buy one returned them.

It wasn’t Verizon’s fault that Microsoft pulled a Microsoft and poured tons of money into arriving at a trend too late to compete with an overpriced mediocre product.

I am gonna try this.

Mine too. war stories of 16k of RAM and 20MB hard disk drives the size of washing machines.

It’s not compatible with newer motherboards. Anybody with the last couple generations of computers can’t use it.