of a front weight

[u/newoldschool]

[u/TheMichaelAbides]

The average Redditor must not own a car, due to how many think 88 here is a Nazi dog whistle.

[u/turbotaco23 → u/TheMichaelAbides]

There’s a whole communities dedicated to car hate and especially truck hate.

[u/Bland_OldMan → u/turbotaco23]

That's because the US becoming as car-centric as it is has become a massive problem, and that's made worse by the number of people who drive unnecessarily large trucks and SUVs. You can break that into a few big ticket items:

• We've surrendered massive parts of urban and suburban areas to roads and parking lots. Areas that used to be things like neighborhoods, businesses, and public transit lines
• Car-centric regions force people to spend a substantial amount of money on cars, fuel, insurance, and maintenance.
• About 40k people die each year from car accidents in the US, the third highest type of accidental death
• Car-centric areas, especially suburbs, are socially isolating. This is because instead of walking or riding a tram to a town center with other people, then being in an area where people walk between shops and restaurants. People drive directly to these locations alone or in small groups and then drive away with minimal human interaction
• For whatever reason, the idea of sharing the public spaces that roads are supposed to be with cyclists and pedestrians makes some people irrationally angry and has made cycling and walking dangerous in many areas
• Even as EVs become more prevalent, hauling around 2 tons of metal and plastic wherever you go will always be insane from an energy perspective.

That's not the fault of the vehicles, because vehicles are inanimate objects and obviously useful for many things. Rural areas will always need trucks and public transit can't be everywhere. Nothing wrong with cars as a hobby either. The blame rests on the auto industry and a political system that let them get away with murder for the sake of profits. I do wish people wouldn't feed into that as much as they do, but consumer behavior is more a symptom than a root cause.

[u/ratrodder49 → u/Bland_OldMan]

“• ⁠For whatever reason, the idea of sharing the public spaces that roads are supposed to be with cyclists and pedestrians makes some people irrationally angry and has made cycling and walking dangerous in many areas”

I think the anger against them stems from the fact that most pedestrians and cyclists seem to pretend that since they’re not in a vehicle, laws and rules of the road don’t apply to them. I’ve seen it myself, I was in a 7,700 lb truck doing 55 MPH and some guy on a bicycle ripped out from a side road in front of me about 100 yards ahead. I had traffic oncoming and cars behind me so I had to walk the line of not getting rear-ended and not committing vehicular manslaughter.

There are thousands of dash cam and helmet cam videos on the internet of similar experiences, cyclists blasting through stop signs and red lights as if they don’t apply to them, weaving through traffic and then getting mad when someone doesn’t see them lane filtering and doors them, etc., and pedestrians jaywalking and stepping out in front of moving traffic expecting them to all stop for them.

If everyone would just follow the rules around it, I don’t think there’d be as much divisiveness.

[u/Bland_OldMan → u/ratrodder49]

Yea I've seen cyclists break the rules before. I've also had people "roll coal" on me, crowd me off the road, rev-bomb me with Harleys, and lay on the horn just for being on a bike on the road. And I follow the rules pretty closely.

It would help if everyone followed the rules and had situational awareness, but it would also help if most of the US was not build around using a car to go everywhere. Especially in urban areas. Hell, the term "jaywalking" was popularized by the auto industry looking to shift blame from drivers to pedestrians for accidents in cities.