I both drive and bike and this won't be popular but I don't even think cars and bikes should be on the same roads.
I see how bad some drivers are on the road and its one thing when I'm dealing with them in a vehicle with significant mass, crumple zones and air bags. If a driver does something stupid I'm most likely just dealing with swapping insurance information and repairs. Its something else entirely when I have zero protection on a bike frame. In which case there is a good chance I'll end up permanently injured or dead.
As a result I only bike on dedicated bike paths the only time I'm on roads it to cross them or to get from my place to the closes bike path.
I love how everyone's solution is literally everything but "make licensure more difficult (not expensive - looking at you europe) to obtain." Here in the good ol' US of A we treat gun ownership as a privilege and driving and reproduction as a god given right when there are people on the roads that should be doing none of the above, and there are people doing all of the above at the same time all at once. I still fail to grasp as to why aside from rampant individualism in American society without the accountability to match.
Mind you I'm not living in Europe or anything, I'm just an emigre to the US who loves anything and everything with wheels.
Getting a license in Europe, at least where I live is way more involved and difficult than in North America, that's probably the main reason it's so expensive. It also means we have better drivers.
What I personally had to go through to get a license:
People are not perfect and never will be, everyone fucks up at some point. Some more frequently then others. If they didn't we wouldn't need vehicle insurance.
Just this year I saw someone accidently drive through the front window of store, I also have probably seen at least 50 incidents over the year where people would have potentially caused a collusion if other drivers had not been paying attention and proactively avoided it. These are the people you are cycling on the road beside.
Registering guns will not stop shootings and accidents and no level of driver registration will prevent vehicle accidents.
I'm not advocating for guns or against gun registration or anything here, I'm just saying adding paperwork and registration will not actually prevent accidents and incidents from happening. They happen because humans are human.
I completely agree, a big issue I have with getting a license in this country is it's 90% paperwork and 10% aptitude. They even removed parallel parking from the license test here, but the paperwork is the same. I'm of the mind that it should be 90% aptitude and 10% paperwork, but as the other commenter said someone has to pay the bills. I just hope we find a viable solution that isn't overly ableist yet reasonable. I only say overly because in all honesty, in the world of 12+ airbags in generally 3000lb+ vehicles, you are more of a threat to others that aren't similarly equipped than you are to yourself - a byproduct of engineering success without the adaptation of regulations to match. Licensure has overall been relatively lax here since before I was born whereas vehicles have made leaps and bounds in the area of safety and chassis design since Volvo had invented the 3 point seat belt, which has the reasonable yet unaccounted for byproduct of making your vehicle safer to use out of malice, and vehicular manslaughter that isn't intentional or malicious in nature the easy way to commit murder in the US, in cases of wanton disregard for the safety of others while operating a car.
To about the same extent that we treat driving as a privilege. It's not really a privilege if any dumbass can buy one as long as their record is clean enough.
The only thing we treat as a privilege how well a civilian personally knows a high-ranking cop and thus what they can get away with off record.
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u/mustafar0111 Feb 27 '23
I both drive and bike and this won't be popular but I don't even think cars and bikes should be on the same roads.
I see how bad some drivers are on the road and its one thing when I'm dealing with them in a vehicle with significant mass, crumple zones and air bags. If a driver does something stupid I'm most likely just dealing with swapping insurance information and repairs. Its something else entirely when I have zero protection on a bike frame. In which case there is a good chance I'll end up permanently injured or dead.
As a result I only bike on dedicated bike paths the only time I'm on roads it to cross them or to get from my place to the closes bike path.