Submitted 2 days ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fc3b4128-70a3-49a2-b6e3-d562b2c66134.webp
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 NY, 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?
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.
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, obviously.
They want to scare cyclists into not cycling at all
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.
Muricans and their cars xD
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
No, it is not legal. This bike path is part of the Bay Trail, which was enacted by State legislation. The BCDC was specifically created by the legislature to ensure maximum feasible public access to the Bay. So voting to close the path violates any number of laws and policies.
As for driving while distracted by the phone…yeah that’s also illegal.
Probably driving in the bike lane
c/FuckCars
It’s supposed to be mildly infuriating, but it actually made me laugh. Not because I like or agree with the idea, but just at the absurdity of it.
I don’t understand the upset, cause he oee we is a car? Is that enough to make someone a bad person now?
No, it’s because he was in the video conference while driving showing that he was distracted and danger to pedestrians and cyclists.
If he’s doing to drive recklessly he has no business deciding any matters of road safety.
So when mum calls to ask if we need milk, she’sa villain!
Distracted driving is pretty irresponsible and dangerous.
Just this morning some guy blew through a stop sign and almost hit me. He had his cell phone in hand. Maybe he was on a meeting, too.
I’m a school bus driver. Last year I had a cop blow past me at 40 mph in the opposite direction when I was stopped with my red lights flashing and stop sign out, about to let off a large number of kids who cross the road at that stop. If I hadn’t kept the door closed, they probably would have been hit. I glanced down at the cop as he passed and he was driving with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right handing holding his phone - he never saw my bus at all.
We now have the external cameras that auto-ticket cars that pass us when our red flashers are on, but I wish to fuck we’d had them last year to catch this guy.
Would you tele conference from traffic? Fo you think that’s a good idea? Why or why not?
Yes… let’s reschedule a public hearing because one person had a conflict? Maybe we could just adapt to people having lives and working?
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.
It was scheduled. He could have taken measures, He could have parked for a while . This somehow is his job…
I do take calls in the car but when I need to focus on the call I either ask to call back or park. If I don’t need to focus that means the call isn’t important enough to keep it going for too long.
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.
One person was in their car tele conferencing from FUCKING TRAFFIC you stripped and rounded nut.
Fantastic insult, if I’m being honest. Also, yes.
video chatting with a screen visible to the driver? fk no. also his setup and use of it violates cvc 27602.
Every car now has screens visible to the driver
Unless the conflict was like “someone close to me is giving birth” tier, he could have scheduled better.
Your handle is definitely appropriate.
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 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 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.
I think that is 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
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.
If their time is so valuable, maybe they should ride a bike instead of trapping themselves in traffic?
The average American commute is 41 miles round trip. I guarantee you that a large number of people stuck on that bridge every day have a much shorter commute, could ride a bike instead, and would actually spend less of their time commuting by doing so.
Those are the people you should be angry with because they’re the ones that are directly wasting your time with their frivolous driving trips. The more we get people riding bikes, the less problems those that are required to drive will experience.
Also, maybe if the average American car wasn’t a wasteful hulking behemoth there would be more room for more people on the roads. 🤷
That bridge is too long for bike commutes.
If america had better bike infrastructure everywhere there would be more people riding bikes. Maybe improving bike safety everywhere would increase the number of bikes.
More people commute through the bike lane than a single car lane. Congestion will get worse if you get your way. Are you sure you want that?
is that you mr commissar
That car lane is such an offensive waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure.
Replace it AND the bike lane with a train that can carry 10x as many passengers at a time as both the car and bike lanes combined! Bonus, it can even fit bikes on it! No such luck for the cars though… too bad.
You should reconsider everything about your life that led you to typing all that stupid shit you just typed.
It’s almost like for some reason, there’s mysteriously no fast public transit which easily could connect the north bay with the peninsula or the east bay and that’s why the traffic sucks ass.
Yes, so the proposal is to replace the unused bike lane with a bus lane.
So what? Calls suddenly not allowed anymore?
Chainweasel@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Why are all the top level comments from people defending reckless driving?
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
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.
OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
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.
kepix@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
BigBenis@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Careless/reckless driving 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.