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
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.