Politicians in the Bay Area want to remove bike lanes from the Richmond-San Rafael bridge because they are worried about traffic congestion.
Cyclists say removing these bike lanes will put them in danger.
https://richmondside.org/2025/08/05/richmond-san-rafael-bridge-bike-path-final-vote/
https://bikeeastbay.org/rsr2024-2/
During the public hearing, commissioner Karl Hasz was spotted driving his car
The bike lane is like 1/3rd the size of the car lane and has more people on it.
No, in this case it’s a two way cycle track that takes up exactly one car lane. Before the bike path it was a shoulder, but if they removed the bike path they’d almost certainly turn it into a flex lane like the bottom deck of the bridge.
That being said, I’m sure it would induce demand and cause even more people to commute from Richmond (or worse, far flung suburbs like Antioch) to Marin until traffic is worse. And there’d be no way to bike since bikes aren’t allowed in the car freeway lanes, and there are no alternative routes over the bay.
Also do you have a source for more bikes using it? I’d look it up but am on my phone and too lazy.
Probably driving in the bike lane
Why are all the top level comments from people defending reckless driving?
you need to understand, that the murican car industry has made everything unreachable by walking and biking. its a total alien form of transport in newnaziland.
Careless/reckless driving is entirely normalized in America. Think of the number of people you see speeding, rolling stop signs, blowing through pedestrian crosswalks, speeding up to make the yellow light and “accidentally” running the red. Think of all the people who chat on the phone, attend work meetings, watch videos, do their makeup, and eat entire meals while behind the wheel of a moving car. Think of all the people you’ve heard essentially bragging about how much they speed, who bemoan all the “slow” people on the road who are just going the posted speed limit, or who feel they’re being unfairly targeted when they get a speeding ticket for going ten-over.
Chances are if you’ve driven a car in America then you yourself are guilty of having done some of those things. I know I certainly am, though I’ve been intentional about taming my own hubris behind the wheel over recent years. But it’s hard to accept that what is normal to you is also wrong or dangerous. Especially in a survivor biased environment like reckless driving culture, where nothing bad generally happens to you until it does and then as people get more reckless the higher the chances are you won’t walk away from an accident. And so when you see a post online shaming people for something you do on your way to work every day, you get defensive because to you that’s just normal behavior.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not defending these people or their actions, just offering an explanation for OPs question. Still, I expect to get downvoted for the very reason I just articulated.
Based on this and a couple recent other threads I am becoming pretty convinced that more and more of the people on Lemmy are children.
Edit: I can admit that I was a dumbass who thought that I could do all the things while driving as a teenager. I am guessing the people downvoting me are either teenagers or people who don’t remember being teenagers.
I don’t know man, Lemmy seems to downvote people who make generalizing claims, period.
Your comment didn’t seem to ring with the community, that could be because they’re of the age group you’re citing as the group supportive of this shitty behavior (distracted driving), or it could be because the base of your stance didn’t root itself in examples they could identify with and so they downvoted an opinion they disagreed with.
I’d say the most likely reason people downvote is because they disagree, I wouldn’t have much knowledge on their age though so I won’t make claims on that part.
I think that’s part of the problem though. Downvoting isn’t for disagreeing it’s a vote that a comment detracts from the conversation as a whole.
I hear you and agree with that concept.
I think that, if your goal was ultimately to further the conversation (in it’s format, I don’t see anything wrong with what you initially wrote), adding examples of what you mean by recent interactions pointing towards the user base being more skewed towards teenagers. That might have deterred anyone who was unsure of whether you were being genuine or just bashing on the next generation the way we’ve seen historically.
If you’ve ever driven through American cities, you’ll see that a high percentage of drivers aren’t really driving. They’re using their phone and tangentially feeding occasional input into their vehicles. Automakers keep adding Federally required “safety” features to cars like auto-brake and lane-departure correction, I’ve heard from some people they use those to make an ersatz “autopilot” and just let the car ping-pong down the road while they use their phones. Others, as soon as they *almost *come to a stop, the phone is already in their hand again and they’re paying zero attention to their surroundings, probably thinking they’re being a “smart” cell phone driver.
It is rare I see a USian driver actually operating their vehicle as their sole focus these days.
I’ve personally got in the habit of managing cars behind and in front of me with longer stopping distances and early brake flashing to get their attention off their phones and back on the road so I don’t become an SUV sandwich, and also a quick polite horn toot when the drivers in front don’t realize the light cycle has been green for 5 seconds because some other driver didn’t pull forward, because all of the front drivers are on their phones.
So, they probably feel like they have to defend their idiocy.
Muricans and their cars xD
Did anyone call him out for this during the meeting?
There’s a public comment section, right? Straight up ask why he feels it’s appropriate be deciding matters of public saftey while actively endangering the public himself by distracted driving during this very meeting.
From my experience with a different fight in NYC, these people don’t give a shit. They have no shame, they only care about their golden kickbacks.
How do people not vote them out?
Quick, without googling, tell me your state level representative, and give me a summary of their votes on key issues.
Exactly. We can only deal with so many issues in a 24 hour period. With trump, there’s 47 new issues every day. Fraud overload. No way to respond to all the trash. We need the boondocks saints to just get rid of the bulk of the garbage and let’s see how the surviving trash changes almost overnight.
I mean, the point I was trying to make is that if you aren’t actively engaged in politics, you won’t know any of those things. Heck, I’m pretty engaged in my local news, taking maybe 15-30 minutes a day to read about local and state issues, and off the top of my head, I couldn’t tell you who my state level rep is, or what they’ve voted for recently. That’s why people don’t vote then out, there is an apathetic disconnect between the politicians vote, and the shitty policies that they support. Hence why people keep actively voting for politicians who undermine and harm them, the people voting can’t be bothered to connect their vote to the policies that are enacted.
I fully agree. It’s just not easy and I don’t like feeling like I could shoot a politician in the face and lose no sleep. It’s pure hatred, gotta tune some out before you go crazy
How does putting slow-moving bikes into traffic somehow fix congestion? Some dipshits are under the same impression in Canada, too… Like, have they all forgotten how much a single cyclist can fuck up traffic?
The solution is obviously that the bikers are to join the daily traffic jam in a car, instead of entirely skipping the queue like selfish bastards.
/s, for the satire-impaired.
Cyclists weren’t allowed on the bridge at all until the bike lane, since it was a freeway bridge, so they hope they’ll just go away (and probably encourage them to buy cars or take the once-an-hour bus).
Lol so basically “think of the kids” once again forgetting about the kids.
So what? Calls suddenly not allowed anymore?
Do you also watch Movies while driving? No hand interaction necessary. Just press play at the start of the ride.
Of course that’s illegal.
Comparing watching a movie with a video call. Good one.
Video call is worse, you’re right nice
Sure sure. A video call without content shared on the screen is worse. Mhm. Please share more of your wisdom.
Mhm. Yeah, sure bud. Wisdom! lmfaoo
Is that even legal? Just holding your phone while driving can cost you a fine of €. 430 here.
It’s probably on a hands free mount rolling at the camera angle.
However, it’s still illegal to have video playing within view of the driver, so he’s still breaking the law
That bike lane is such an offensive waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure.
A handful of bike activists got a recreational lane that sees almost zero use, while every day thousands of people trying to get to work are stuck in traffic next to an empty lane.
It’s a well-known fallacy in urbanism that bike lanes “see almost zero use.” Bikes have much less visual weight than a car, so one driver in a lane will look like a lane being used while one bicyclist in a lane will look like the same lane being “half-used.” In addition, bike lanes are much more efficient at keeping travelers moving at a constant rate so that they don’t bunch up, meaning that a busy road with backed-up traffic will look like it’s getting more use than an adjacent bike lane, when what’s actually happening is that the bike lane is just moving travelers more efficiently.
Furthermore, the “induced demand” phenomenon means that adding capacity actually doesn’t reduce traffic, at least not in the long term. We have decades of data proving it. The amount of cars that the lane can accommodate will invariably be taken up by people taking that route who had previously taken a different route. The only way to reduce traffic for a given route is to either create more routes or remove traffic from the road. Bike lanes do both.
In reality, for most routes, if you compare the number of people being moved on the bike lane, you’ll often find that it equals or even exceeds the number of people being moved on the car lane immediately adjacent to it. More importantly, they also tend to reduce the number of drivers on the same route and nearby routes as they encourage travelers who would ordinarily be afraid of biking to ditch the car.
I can’t speak to that specific bike lane, of course, but in general the argument that “it’s not doing anything!” is a fallacy, and replacing the bike lane with a motor vehicle travel lane would almost certainly result in worse traffic, not better.
On one hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if this bike lane actually doesn’t get as much use, considering it’s across a 5 mile bridge, and neither end has a lot lot of destinations until you get further inland. There aren’t any 3 mile trips being replaced, and most cars are traveling farther (think Berkeley to Novato or Richmond to Santa Rosa).
On the other hand, there is no other cycling alternative to get between those places. The bridge is a freeway so bikes aren’t allowed in the car lanes (and weren’t allowed before the bike lanes). Sure there’s Golden Gate Transit route 580 with bike racks but it’s hourly, gets stuck in the car traffic (but even worse since it takes very congested exits), and you can’t take oddly shaped cargo bikes or trailers on it. So anyone who commuted by bike would be screwed.
Five miles. Dang, I hadn’t processed that. Even at highway speeds, that bridge would take more than five minutes to cross; if you’re a strong cyclist, you could do it in, what, 30 minutes?
Still, you’re right. The next closest way for a bike to get around would be something like 20+ miles out of your way in one direction or the other, it looks like. So it would turn any hour-long errands you might be able to run by bicycle into day trips of 4-8 hours.
I dunno. Tough choice.
I personally still firmly believe in keeping the bike lane. Cars have 2 other lanes they can take, but bikes don’t have many other options. I don’t believe they can go via San Francisco or highway 37 so it’s an even bigger detour than I thought. The hourly bus theoretically works if you have a “normal” bike but cargo bikes, fat bikes, recumbents, trikes, and heavier e-bikes are screwed.
The only compromise I could see is closing it off to bikes during rush hour only, but providing a shuttle bus or van, ideally one that’s always waiting at the side of the bridge (not some number you have to call), has room for cargo bikes/trailers, and only covers the actual bridge to minimize headways and traffic delays. And even then it would just result in induced demand as people start commuting yet longer distances.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the less I think they should get rid of the lane. If anyone at all relies on it, it’s worth the lane.
I think that if public transport is using that road, the bus will still transport more people/day, but I’m a bit uncertain if much of public transport is available in this case, or pretty much anywhere in the US
Sadly I doubt the once-an-hour bus service that’s notably slower than driving and gets stuck in even worse traffic than the cars (because it has to take congested off ramps to reach stops) is getting enough ridership to make a dent. One time the bus was so delayed I missed not only my timed transfer, but the transfer that came an hour later.
I don’t know the local specific, but what I was talking about is more like the bus that comes at least every 15 minutes, and those do get quite a lot of ridership in my experience
Yeah sadly not the case here. Marin is quite suburban and hourly bus service is standard, with the only people taking it being those with no other option. They seem to be slowly moving toward half hourly at least
You mean the 3ft wide lane you couldn’t fit a compact car in? Who’s going to drive in that lane? Brodizers? Mall crawlers?
No. The bike lane is full width and the proposal replaces with a full car lane.
Get educated before you try schooling others.
Source?
I live there.
Opinions don’t count.
You reject first hand experience because it conflicts with your political biases.
Please tell me o wise traveler, how us Bay Area residents should convert full freeway lanes into unused bike lanes.
No I reject it because sounds like every other time I’ve heard push back on bike lanes. My city is currently going through a similar fight and I have heard your argument several times with no backing information.
Your comment doesn’t pass the smell test.
What do I know, I only live there.
Yes… let’s reschedule a public hearing because one person had a conflict? Maybe we could just adapt to people having lives and working?
One person was in their car tele conferencing from FUCKING TRAFFIC you stripped and rounded nut.
When you are driving your attention should be on the road not on the phone while a hearing about bike lane is going on
which is kind of funny wanting to remove a bike lane that help protect cyclist while driving dangerously
So can’t talk to passengers either then? It’s hands free once it’s setup, there’s nothing inherently wrong with what’s being done actually.
Ah yes, the classic “these things share one property so they share all properties” argument.
Blinking closes your eyes. You can safely drive and blink. Thus, you can drive safely with your eyes closed.
Wow, that’s a good one, I should remember to try next time I drive
But yeah, I ride a bicycle, so what do I know about safety anyway. So touching when people remove bike lanes to improve traffic, because they care <3
Being on a video call while operating a motor vehicle is dangerous and should be illegal in any sane jurisdiction under distracted driving laws.
As long as it’s setup, how’s it different than talking to a passenger? It’s completely hands free at that point.
Considering the frame they caught him in he’s not looking at the road. Is it eyes free?
So can’t shoulder check or look at your passengers? Can’t adjust volume or other settings on your dash?Wrong thing to complain about lol. There’s hundreds of things that take your attention away from the road for a second or two that’s normally done while operating a vehicle already.
As a driving instructor myself: you’re the person I warn my learners about 👍