this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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Congestion pricing is such a good idea everywhere there is rock solid public transit alternatives. Where there's not, it just becomes a tax on the poor.
Can you explain congestion pricing?
Think whole road tolls you can change based on a schedule, or based on current and expected traffic. All of it is meant to either disincentiveize driving to cut down total traffic, or at least shunt it to less congested times or roads.
Aside: I 1000% don't consider individual toll lanes to be a type of congestion pricing. Those are just convenience surcharges (looking at you too TSA Pre check) and are complete elitist bullshit that hurts everyone but the city that takes in the fees.
How about you explain how BigFish@'s comment is wrong instead. You clearly have a point to make, so do the work to make it.
I'm genuinely asking. Chill
OK, but in that case, usually you'd want to send that sort of request to google instead of looking for a lemmy thread of questionable veracity to educate you. I'd be careful what you ask for and to whom you ask, but you do you.
If you can afford a car, you can afford an e-bike, even a cargo e-bike. Cars are luxuries compared to bicycles. Never forget that.
And if you are too poor to live near your employer?
I don't know where you live, but that's just not true in large swaths of America. The other options add multiple hours round trip anywhere and in many parts of the US it's not an option.
My work is currently a 20 minute drive down a freeway going 60 mph. There is no bus to take that route. There isn't even a connection, or a transfer, the only other option would be a cab.
Fortunately, places like this aren't likely to need congestion pricing
I'm just talking basic economics. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. A car is, by any logical definition of the word, a luxury purchase compared to an e-bike. You just live in an area where you've decided that everyone needs to get around in luxury vehicles, and you've built that into your infrastructure. This would be like building all of our infrastructure to only accommodate stretch limos, and then trying to argue that limos are a necessity. It's comically absurd. It's a clown world.
I did not decide that. The cold hard reality is that my work and my home are 15 miles (24km) apart. That's a 1.5 hour bike ride, 3 hours round trip. You are absolutely right about costs, but I have NO option to bus, I cannot bike that daily, none of my coworkers live next to me.
I want more public transport. I would rather live with just a single car in my household that we use solely for large trips and moving large amounts of stuff. God knows it would be cheaper. I'd like that. I can't feasibly do it.
How are you going to take an ebike for anything besides a short distance on non highway roads?
A car can be used to move an entire family safely. You need 3-5 bikes to do the same far less safely including the very young, old, infirm.
Fatality rate for sedans is 2 per billion vehicle miles. Bikes are about 110.
Bear in mind that this is in the US which has bad drivers driving aggressively in environs ill suited.
Furthermore the average person commuting by car commutes 30 minutes by car the average bus rider an hour.
These are often distances too great to bike.
If you are moving a full car of people, it's probably the best way to get around. However the average occupancy of a car is 1.2 people. The vast majority of cars have just 1 person, often driving less than 5 miles which is an easy distance to cycle.
Having more people cycling means the roads are less congested for the people who really need to use them. And with less people driving and more cycling, it should hopefully get safer.
People need the car for the average commute which is more than five miles its about half an hour by car which means half of commuters drive longer. Having already expended substantial resources on the car the cost of a 5 mile jaunt is about $1 to 1.50 round trip and 10 minutes or 30-45 minutes including waiting and 3-5 for the bus.
Alternatively if the wealter is neither very cold hot or rainy and you have an extra hour and don't mind arriving sweaty and rumpled you could bike and risk your life more than driving a 1950s car!
Its an impractical idea that doesn't scale compared to telecommuting and improving public transit.
The danger comes from cars, and the reason the distances are so great is because the landscape was designed for cars. Those fatality numbers are biased to make it seem like bicycles are dangerous by framing it in terms of the mode of transportation the victim was using, instead of the agent causing the fatality, and by comparing the numbers to VMT.
But, spin it differently: Capitalist elites ~~bribed~~ lobbied politicians to force you to spend your money and time on a motor vehicle to schlep your family around like sacks of potatoes to all your destinations by locating them unreasonably far away, so that the huge amounts of space needed by motor vehicles fit in between, and they could enrich themselves by selling motor vehicles. Now it's become an arms race of bigger and bigger motor vehicles, further lining the pockets of the capitalist elites, at the expense of people's (especially children's, the disabled's, and elderly's) agency and freedom—because otherwise they'll die under the bumpers of the maniacs operating motor vehicles that you'll encounter in all of those extra miles you're forced to travel.
Different spin, different bias, but still 100% fact.
VMT is the only reasonable metric to compare relative safety. It is literally the only metric that tells you how safe your family will be traveling.
The fact that its cars that mostly make bikes dangerous is important but mostly irrelevant to any individual making decisions.
Same with America being spread out. Mostly it is because it was cheaper and therefore more profitablr for individual actors not some grand conspiracy.
The elderly, young kids, and especially the disabled don't need safer bike lanes they need better public transit
I strongly disagree with VMT as the proper measure, and here's a simple, constructed example of why:
There are two cities of about 200,000 people. One is compact, and easy to get around by transit, walking, or biking. The people drive around 2,000 miles per year each. The other is a low-density, mostly suburban area, and people drive around 15,000 miles per year. They have the same casualty rate per VMT of 3 per million miles.
Those two cities aren't equally as safe. Not even close! The one city would have 1,200 crashes, injuries, or deaths each year, and the other would have 9,000. That's a major difference which should be accounted for in policymaking and land-use decisions.
As far as the American landscape, it's spread out not because it was cheaper. How could that be, when it takes more infrastructure to spread out? It was more expensive, and that was actually the point of car-dependent suburbs. They were more expensive to build and maintain, which kept the undesirable people out. Then, the desirable people were subsidized, through the GI Bill, tax breaks, mortgage lending standards (e.g. redlining), and the like.
I don't claim it's a grand conspiracy, but it is verifiable history.
The metric you desire ought properly to be determined by what problem you are trying to address. We aren't building America like sim city we are deciding what to do with our existing situation. For a person deciding what to do they need to weigh the actual consequences of various choices. Deaths per billion not million vehicle miles captures the actual costs of doing so. 2 for sedans 110 for bikes.
Anyone who drives 15,000 miles isn't replacing their car with a bike. You would be asking them to bike 288 miles per week which is absolutely insane. Nobody is doing this. If they drive 5000 they might but at the cost of a drastic increase in risk. This leaves us where we are now where almost everyone either can't or won't.
Not true.
I haven't owned a car for most of my adult life, and things start to get really difficult in winter with snow (insufficient bus routes in a given area, and sidewalks/bike lanes covered in snow and not able to be transversed).
When job-hunting I had to exclude a lot of places because of how impossible it'd be to do the commute in winter. Given how expensive rent is, plenty of people are forced to live with relatives or live in certain cheaper areas long past when they'd prefer to leave, which means if the roof over your head is in an area without sidewalks/bike lanes/public transit, you rely hardcore on a car to get to work and back. And if you don't have that car, you basically lose your job. Maybe you can sustain it over the summer, but once winter snow kicks in you're pretty fucked the first hard snow or ice that comes through. If you're lucky, it's close enough to walk--but not everyone is lucky like that. Also, if your job has mandatory overtime and you're doing 50-60 hour weeks, walking 2-3 hours one way to work is a no-go.
I say this as someone who regularly biked/used public transit in Chicago winters. Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.
Another way to say this is that designing an entire landscape around the car has shaped everybody's lives in ways that make millions of people poorer/deeper in poverty.
I'm talking the machines themselves. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. Yes, infrastructure sucks in many places. That doesn't change the fact that a car is objectively a luxury compared to a bicycle. You live in an area that has made getting around in a luxury vehicle the only practical option. That doesn't mean cars aren't luxury vehicles. People who live in areas that mandate that the all homes must be at least 10,000 ft^2 don't automatically become poor.
Cars are a luxury, while bicycles are utility. We just build our cities with classism in mind. We build our cities to require expensive luxury travel modes, all in some misguided attempt to keep the poors out.
Your definition of objectively is off. Just because there is an alternate universe where cars would be a luxury doesn't mean that cars are a luxury for all timelines.
Status quo of now demands a car. It sucks. We are now stuck in a vicious cycle of people need cars because there's no public transit -> people don't need public transit because they have cars -> people need cars because there's no public transit
@IonAddis needs a car. Without it, their job options are limited. Much like me. We'd like to ditch our cars, but we can't.
Aw, c'mon, cars are objectively speaking luxury items today. A modernized Daihatsu Opti with a sticker price of about $5,500 (the inflation-adjusted price of a Ford Model T) would completely meet the requirements for getting and keeping a job.
Sure would, where can you buy those?
I have the same question. I can't. Cars are all luxury items nowadays.
bicycles are good too, though maybe not for the longer distances that you would put congestion taxes on
Can be good. I ride my bike when I can, but my area IS NOT built for it, so it actually pretty risky. Heck some normal routes for me would probably get me stopped by the cops for recklessness.
I've biked a lot in my life, and I'm very aware of my surroundings, and I know when to stop riding and start walking the bike.
For some reason...most bikers are NOT like me. I don't know why, they just aren't. They're dumb and clueless and, especially if they're men in athletic spandex, really entitled and do really dangerous shit. They get on bikes with their car-brain still loaded, and make decisions like they have a shell of metal and crumple zones and airbags around them. Even though they're just squishy flesh on a bunch of metal tubes.
Last summer, I was driving through a construction zone, and some 9-5 commuter guy on a bike decided to bike through the construction zone too, right along with all the cars. The road was narrow even just for cars, and the pavement had been ripped up and filled in as they did work to replace water mains underneath the road, and he was trying to bike through it, next to the cars. I was worried for him and kept looking in my rear view after I passed him. Good thing I did. Behind me, a truck pulling a small trailer clipped him accidentally (since the trailers swing back and forth a bit when navigating an uneven, narrow construction zone), and it clipped the front tire of his bike and he fell. It wasn't even purposeful, the guy who clipped him stopped too to make sure he was ok. It was just a dangerous area to bike in. I got to the guy first, so I stopped and called an ambulance for him.
Overall he got away lightly. He was shaken and bruised and had a small gouge on one finger, and was able to refuse the ambulance and have a relative drive him to an urgent care. But when we looked at his helmet, it was cracked, and if he hadn't been wearing a helmet even that light lovetap he got from the trailer might have been much worse. The helmet probably saved him from even more serious harm.
I didn't say it to his face, because I figured he'd learned his lesson, but it was REALLY fucking stupid to try to ride a bicycle through a construction zone like that, helmet or no. He was just a dumb 9-5 commuter guy in a dress shirt and tie trying to save on gas or the environment or whatever--and I guess he just never thought about what he was doing beyond that. He had car-brain, and was trying to ride his bike as if he were still in a car through a zone where it was really dangerous to NOT be in a car.
It doesn't matter if the laws say cars need to share the road with you or whatever--the laws of physics are much more concrete than the laws of mankind, and you need to pay attention to your physical surroundings and get off when you end up in a situation like that.
Anyway. My whole point is--yeah, some areas just aren't safely bike-able.
Dude should have taken the lane. Single lane roads are extremely safe for bicycles, as long as no one is recklessly passing each other.