Reply to D.C. needs to get a lot more car friendly

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's weird how much time and energy the city puts into bike lanes that hardly anyone uses, but no one cares that the subway has become basically unusable.

More people used to use the subway in a single day than people who use bike lanes in a year. The subway got far more cars off the streets than all this wishful thinking about bike lanes.

If we cared about the environment, we would focus on fixing the subway. [/quote]

I agree with this, even though I ride a bike with some frequency and appreciate protected bike lanes. I think it's an example of how policy often flows to the noisiest constituency. Cyclists in DC are very noisy in terms of agitating for bike infrastructure. That's partly due to a safety issue -- people have died cycling in this city, and it's often due to infrastructure that does nothing to slow or deter dangerous driving. So drivers in this city do absolutely insane things, with impunity, and it's very dangerous to pedestrians and people on bikes. When you fear for your life, you tend to get really loud.

But another reason cyclists are noisy is privilege. The cyclists in DC skew male, white, and well-educated. I happen to agree with a lot of their policy proposals so it's hard to criticize this, but I can't ignore the fact that most of the cycling advocates I know in DC are speaking from a place of privilege. Whereas metro serves a broader constituency, and the people who benefit most from a reliable, affordable, convenient metro network are much poorer and browner than the average DC cyclist.

I wish cyclists in DC would practice more self-awareness about this fact. I'm all for protected bike lanes and street scoping that slows down drivers and protects both pedestrians and cyclists. But I also wish that cycling advocates in the city would speak more about multi-modal infrastructure instead of just focusing on bikes. It's better for cyclists in the end anyway. If you can get more people out of cars and not metro cars or buses, the streets will be safer for cyclists and pedestrians. It's a win-win. You do not need to convince everyone to do a bike commute in order to make cyclists safer, and making cycling safer will also make it more appealing to more people.[/quote]

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