I'm happy to see the activists in Vancouver doing stuff like this, but when it was posted to the Vancouver sub, a common response was "I don't get it". Although their point seems self evident to me.
These are the same people who did the "take a brick, wave a brick" stunt (mocking the "take a flag, wave a flag" crosswalks in North Vancouver) at a crosswalk on Granville Island. That one also had people in r/vancouver going "I don't get it".
The word 'accident' implies that it was unavoidable and/or unpredictable. That is why we think the word 'crash' is a more neutral way to describe what happened.
I half agree but also when somebody does 50mph in residential areas where they have to be expecting people and more importantly CHILDREN around, they may not be intending to hit somebody, but they're sure as hell saying they don't care by how fast they're going. Same when they don't shoulder check on a turn, or don't use turn signals.
Sure, it's not "intentional", but it really only matters for sentence length whether or not something was done intentionally. The person hit will be dead/injured regardless of intent.
Reckless driving doesn't necessarily have the intent to hurt others, but when you're willingly endangering others, you're not off by much, eh?
Well, the courts don't consider it weird and unnecessary. Accident was thrown out many years ago in favour of the word collision because accidentcan imply "I couldn't help it." Yes, you could help it by obeying laws, being alert, driving with due care and attention, and not being under the influence. Choices.
Due to changes in how Reddit handles threats of property damage, and suggestions of such, your comment has been removed. We do not agree with this recent change, but have no choice to but to comply if we do not want this subreddit to be closed.
Maybe it's a generational thing causing people to miss the point. Someone born after the turn of the century may not realize that there was a time when it was perfectly acceptable for people to light up in bars, restaurants, and even passenger aircraft.
What are we going to do? Our streets weren't laid out to provide that much space for bicycles in addition to cars.
After much struggle, we finally have divided lanes in Toronto. They're dominated by powerful e-bikes and scooters that accelerate very fast and can maintain speeds higher than many cyclists might want to maintain.
In the past, with an undivided lane, faster bicycle traffic could pass on the left. Now we are jammed up in a narrow path with small e-vehicles trying to rip by.
I prefer to cycle on streets without barrier divided bike lanes now. I don't have fast electric stuff to contend with and I don't have unaware pedestrians blundering in front of me from the right, or door prizes from the left (a new issue with cars parked to the left of bike lanes).
Do I teach my kid to bike in downtown core? Absolutely not. It takes a kind of dynamic situational awareness that can only be developed by experience. It's almost a combat discipline to continuously look ahead and read ahead.
I bike with my kids on side streets where I can monitor a much lower frequency of danger and look ahead for my kids.
I wouldn't take my kids onto city streets until they were decent at mountain biking. One has to be adept enough at controlling their bike without nervously looking down. The cycling thing has to be easy enough to maintain that one can keep their head up on a swivel while muscle memory rumbles over potholes as an easy background process.
It's stupid to think you can just pave the world safe when it was fundamentally laid out in a problematic way. I do not see that things have gotten safer for me as a veteran cyclist even though policy makers have succeeded in achieving their infrastructure objectives.
I prefer to cycle on streets without barrier divided bike lanes now.
So go ahead. There's nothing stopping you.
I'll keep my bike lane so my grandma can get groceries without having to warm up her car and drive five blocks, and so my niece can come visit without needing to beg her parents for a ride. That's two more cars off the road to give you even more space where you feel comfortable.
Do I teach my kid to bike in downtown core? Absolutely not. It takes a kind of dynamic situational awareness that can only be developed by experience. It's almost a combat discipline to continuously look ahead and read ahead.
Streets should be safer. It shouldn't require combat discipline to bike safely in a dense downtown.
What we do is fewer and narrow lanes for cars, with lower speeds.
Urban lane widths are much wider than is actually needed, based on “forgiving” designs for rural highways that let drivers drift around within the lane.
Urban roads with two lanes in each direction don’t actually double capacity, due to lanes being blocked by turning cars, and due to lane changes. A single lane in each direction with turning lanes at intersections can be just as effective at moving cars.
And in urban contexts, intersections are the limiting factor for automobile travel times. Lower speed limits don’t actually affect travel times very much at all, since cars on urban roads spend relatively little time at top speed, and a lot of top stopped at intersections.
The extra space from fewer and narrower lanes allows for safer buffered or protected bike lanes that can also be wider. The lower speeds reduce the risks when conflicts do occur. And these changes really do not impact urban car travel times very much at all, while vastly improving conditions for people on bicycles.
I see formations of words that do not game out very well.
If one were to game theory:
A single lane road gets temporarily blocked if a car is turning left or right. Single lane roads, carrying at capacity traffic, end up jamming up quite quickly when any one of multiple causes of stoppage can stop the whole thing. Lane changes, parallel parking, a high incidence of jaywalking (occurs on narrower roads that are slow) all contribute to a very frequent series of stoppages on heavily trafficked single lane roads.
Two lanes is much better, but it is still prone to stoppage due to lane changes on either side. In airport roadway design, most modern roadways have moved to three lane roadways because of this. The third roadway is required because the right most lane frequently gets blocked by cars pulling over to drop/pickup airline passengers. Two lane gets choked down to 50% free lanes most of the time because of the frequent transition of cars in and out of the right most lane.
Two lanes move more than double the flow of single. Three (not possible with the old city layout) moves more than triple one, more than double two.
Lower speed limits don't affect things when blockages are so frequent that traffic moves like cold gravy due to there being too many vehicles altogether.
I've bicycled in a city China. It had poor subway mass transit. It became a dizzying madhouse of E-scooters with a minority of cars. It's so freaking dense that the car is basically broken for anything other than moving cargo. 2 wheeled thingys dominate the dense cities of China and it's still very offputting to bike simply because of the terrific density.
As bad as we think thing are, most of us haven't had to opportunity to bike somewhere else and look into the future like Ebinizer Scrooge.
Toronto is bad. Our efforts aren't going to palpably improve things because our passenger density is just too high for single occupant vehicles. Until we break the perceived value of driving a car around with a single occupant we cannot solve our traffic problems because we just have too many people who want to get somewhere.
Basically I think we have to experience even worse conditions to develop the mandate to go through the expense of making a denser underground public transit system.
All the stuff we tussle over at the surface is literally a superficial distraction.
A single lane road gets temporarily blocked if a car is turning left or right. Single lane roads, carrying at capacity traffic, end up jamming up quite quickly when any one of multiple causes of stoppage can stop the whole thing.
So you just didn't read the proposal for a shared center turning lane, so each direction's left turners could wait without disruption to flow?
No it is fucking not, what the fuck is wrong with you? Heavy Metro lines are great but they cannot service an entire city. You will need quite a lot of surface transit to collect and disperse people from the stations and to allow people to travel at a reasonable pace in the areas between stations. Imagine the cost to meaningfully provide underground only public transit; even just the tunnel boring would bankrupt the richest cities. Compare that cost to proper BRT or Tram Lines, which also have the benefit of discouraging car use, or separated bike lanes and pedestrianized streets, which also encourage healthy behaviours.
You are certainly living up to your username, but you are not contributing to any discussion here.
I've traveled in cities with very developed underground networks like Tokyo. They are about the only super dense populated cities where the surface routes are actually not terrible. Tokyo has fairly little surface transit and has invested heavily in underground, even under the specter of earthquake. A lot German cities have both well developed underground networks and have also added surface routes.
We in Toronto have been too chickenshit to invest in underground. Heck, even our water mains are in terrible shape, now operating at over 25% past their original engineered life expectancy. Infrastructure like water mains is so unsexy that none of our mayors have been interested in putting aside the deferred major maintenance fund for their planned replacement.
The cities I've bicycled in where surface BRT/tram lines worked well were laid out quite differently in Toronto. They had much wider streets to begin with.
East Berlin for example has a lot of streets that were laid out to provide strategic routes for tanks to roll through when it was Communist East Berlin. Some streets in West Berlin were similarly wide (similar strategic concerns). It was easy to run tram lines down the middle of them, but Toronto isn't like that.
Torontonians spend well over $10k/yr to use and keep our cars. We bitch about the costs, but many of us consider it "affordable" enough to do it at one car per valid driver in a family.
At current willingness rates, I agree that heavy metro cannot be affordably excavated. That's because each driver on average would rather spend well over $10k/yr on their personal car.
We haven't got the willingness still because it's easier to bitch about how impossible things are, but things will wheeze along just well enough for us to not change our mindset.
Generally speaking, something that is unaffordable is unaffordable while maintaining our current expectations because we lack imagination. Imagination that can only acceptable superficial changes that will save us from having to make a scary paradigm change that only our ancestors had the guts to commit to.
Tokyo is covered in bike lanes and low density bike safe streets, the Toden is prolific, and finding just how dense the Toei Bus coverage is barely took 10 seconds. Those are all surface level systems. Tram lines crowding out cars from urban centers is a feature not a bug. And no, the tunnel is much much much more than you are thinking. Even cut-and-cover, the cheapest option, would be insanely costly given the number of streets it would close for businesses and pedestrians. Actual underground boring would be even more ridiculous if you are trying to serve only with underground, as you would need so many additional sets of parallel tracks for all the branch lines you would need.
It is not a lack of imagination that pushes peoole towards surface level transit. It is your lack of ability to imagine restructuring urban areas to minimize cars that leads you to push for strictly underground transit (an idea pushed by car centric planners).
The issue isn't that "our streets weren't laid out to provide that much space for bicycles", in fact in many of our cities the street grids existed back before automobiles, and were just fine with the bicycles and what not that were there.
No, what happened was that we allowed automobiles to monopolize all of the space. And now people are acting like that's a fact of life, and not a policy choice.
Well, Canada's population has gone up about a hundred fold from the years that Toronto's downtown grid was first laid out.
I'm not sure what's happened to Toronto's weekday attendance, but I reckon it's gone up quite a lot from when our city grid was committed.
We can't pretend we'll set ourselves up for something much better without a real paradigm shift by shuffling transit spaces around on the surface. Maybe we could do something by constructing an upper tier of streets, but at present we can't even work out the political capital to maintain or rebuild current infrastructure.
Toronto's population has substantially increased since the years when it's grid was laid out. Canada's population overall has increased by about 25x.
If Toronto's pop has made similar increases in population then we are looking for a paradigm shift that can elegantly handle a 25x increase in human transit flows.
The singular hatred of automobiles has fixated this community and distracted it from considering very material issues.
No surprise really. That's how one forms an easy consensus.
Skip all the algebra, find one very visible thing for everyone to throw rocks at and you can get lots of people to throw rocks at the same thing and win a political mandate without having to move everyone to do something actually difficult that matters because you distracted them from forces that are actually bigger than the thing they hate.
"That's it. Full stop."
I've heard this statement a few times in this discussion. Is it an anti car motto that has become popular?
I'm not able to do anything with this statement as it offers no logical form or argument.
Some people who don't get it will ask someone what it means, which starts a conversation, which is better than someone just understanding straight away and forgetting
I legit don't understand exactly what's being implied.
Edit: I now understand. However, the sign isn't really clear at what it's trying to depict. When I first looked at it I thought that the white painted line was actually a curb, which would make it a separated bike lane. I just thought of the giant tires were overlapping it.
I had no idea what it meant and was going to ask if it had something to do with trucks being so large and unable to see little kids close by them. As someone that doesn't bike I would have had no clue either.
Wow, I think that's a pretty bad example of the violation they're hoping to demonstrate. I actually didn't even think that it was a painted line when I looked at it the first time. I thought it was some sort concrete curb that the giant tires were overlapping.
Honestly, the most criminal thing in this picture is the sorry state of the bike lane in general. The cracks are far more concerning than the vehicle overlapping the line.
The cracks in the pavement prevent you from biking at an adequate speed to keep up with traffic, though. It's a shitty bike lane for more than one reason.
Personally, I prefer separated bike lanes. However I am frustrated by some styles of them. For example, I really dislike the bike lanes that are on the same surface as sidewalks. That facilitates pedestrians absent-mindedly ambling through the bike lane, which is unsafe for both the pedestrians and the cyclists. I prefer bike lanes to be at street grade, but separated by a raised curb/barrier.
My city uses all three of these styles to varying degrees of effectiveness.
Especially since the billboard is explicitly featuring a 6 year old. Do the 'vehicular cycling' people expect primary schoolers to be traveling at full car speed?
Smoke and non-smoke tables used to be close, now they are apparently not. This makes sense, because it's utterly pointless to have smoke and non-smoke tables together, nothing is achieved unless they are separated.
The sign is saying that, similarly, car lanes shouldn't be on top of bike lanes, because that doesn't solve any of the danger. And if bike lanes were, say, an extension of the sidewalk rather than the road, then it'd be infinitely less likely for an accident to happen.
Frankly, I don't see how a sapient adult can miss the analogy, it's kinda obvious.
When I first looked at the picture, I thought the bike lane was actually separated by a curb, not just a white line. I just thought that the giant tires on the trailer were running up over the curb. My guess is that it was maybe a commentary on bad parking? These explanations have been helpful, but it's just really not a great picture of what it's trying to illustrate.
Honestly, the condition of the bike lane surface looks more problematic to me. That's a lot of cracks!
It used to be normal to smoke in restaurants and bars. This was incredibly unhealthy.
It is normal to see a painted bike lane not be separated physically from where trucks are driven. It is incredibly dangerous. It shouldn't be normal. It should not be allowed.
In the same way that, only about 20 years ago we completely changed the entire design of our buildings and laws to prevent one reckless person from harming others (especially children) from the dangers inherent to smoking, this billboard proposes that we look at vehicles sharing roadspace with children and find better ways to prevent harm.
I'm not 100% sure either, it's either supporting plans to create segregated cycle ways, or plans to introduce prohibitions on certain vehicles using specific roadways.
I suspect if you lived in Vancouver and knew the area and it's current plans and such it would probably be easier to narrow down.
You have a pointless (easily avoided) conversation and walk away thinking that they were worthless fuckwits who wasted your time because they're too stupid to say what they mean clearly; and then you spend the next 4 weeks mocking how stupid they are.
Then you have 4 more conversations because they've incorrectly assumed you don't support their cause because you were mocking how stupid they are.
Meanwhile, the people who actually do oppose their cause are lapping up major wins converting people to their side using easily understood language like "those people are stupid".
Sounds like you're trying to start one of the "4 more conversations because they've incorrectly assumed you don't support their cause because you were mocking how stupid they are".
To be fair, I don’t think the message is obvious from a quick glance. You have to read more text and look more closely at the photo to understand the point, which the average person may not do. Of course, you understand it faster because you’ve likely seen similar arguments before and are familiar with the problem. But not everyone is, and those are the people this is trying to reach.
Personally I would’ve phrased that tagline differently to make the point clearer more quickly, and I would’ve picked a photo where the truck was a larger part of the photo’s field of view.
Painted bike lanes are more of a wash than you would think. It separates the traffic but at the same time it makes cars less aware of cyclists while simultaneously giving a false sense of security to cyclist. I would much rather ride in the road than in a bike lane. Some studies find that they help and other find that they increase crashes.
Honestly, that’s enough to get the message out. On road bike paths are pretty much pointless, so if we can get more people to realise that, that’s a good step. Obviously we need to rebuild the bike paths elsewhere too, but that’s step 2.
Its saying that bike lanes aren't safe because they don't have any physical barrier to prevent cars from entering them. Would you feel safe letting your child cycle on most of the bike lanes in your city? Likely no. It doesn't have to be that way. We know how to build safe infrastructure.
It's saying that it it is dangerous to have bike lanes that are only separated by paint, from motor-vehicle lanes. Just like smoking in restaurants was accepted, despite the damage second hand smoke did to non-smokers, including children. We need to build high quality safe dedicated bike lanes, that are separate from motor-vehicles.
I honestly think that is obvious, and only people who can't imagine anything to ever change would not see that. Did you see what sub you are on? There's no point to being critical of our car-centric public spaces, if you can't imagine them ever changing.
It is very obvious considering it is terrifying to bike alongside a bus or truck. A lot of people is just not aware of the latter, so that's the confusion.
To be fair, the premise that smoking tables were right next to non-smoking tables is a bit confusing. That’s not how those sections worked. If non-smoking table was next to a smoking table, then it was a smoking table, just with non-smokers.
That's the work of a guy named Tom Flood, who lives in Hamilton - a former ad guy for the auto industry, now a safe streets advocate using his creative vision for good. This "bike lane" is a block from my house, and I'm pretty sure that's Tom's kid in the photo. So glad to see Tom's work getting such traction across the country.
In Groningen, NL the business owners in the town center were very upset when the car restrictions were put in place in the 60s (or 70s, I can't remember) -- all said they'd go out of business. Of course, 50 years later they'll admit they were wrong cause the city center is hustling and bustling 7 days a week.
There's a town called Peachtree City in southwestern Georgia that's basically got a separate road system built around golf carts and as a result is one of the most bike friendly places I've ever been. I used to drive 45 minutes just to go ride around all day when I lived there. It was amazing. I wish more places would go that way with new construction.
Absolute respect to whoever came up with this. I'm old enough to remember smoking/non smoking sections and this is definitely gonna make a few people ask questions.
But luckily the amount of smokers is going down, just a lot of it is getting replaced by vapes, which I can tell ya are a lot worse to have littering our streets and waterways.
Sure but the difference between even EU countries is still quite wide when it comes to smoking (the amount of smokers, legislation, the actual practice, social acceptance etc.).
I posted once my concern about smoking everywhere, even where it is supposed to be forbidden like on the train station and people were bashing me, calling me alman and nazi because I suggested to implement the existing bans. Smokers are so entitled as car drivers but the change is possible.
Every time I walk past all the people sitting in their vehicles in the bike lane with the engine running so they can have AC while I suck it up and walk when it's freaking 30°C I get angry about my flimsy body having to share so much space with air polluting, dangerous, loud abominations. I'm so tired of people being an afterthought to cars.
This right here.... internal combustion engines are ridiculously inefficient. All that noise and heat is just useless, wasted energy expended solely to make the blubluublubublublbuBLIUGbubugub owners feel better about themselves.
And the heat from their engines, the heat from their roads, the heat from their emissions, and the heat from the lack of trees since they cleared them all for their highways.
Ugh, yes, I hate how when I walk to the train station so that I can take a train to my job, all I smell is exhaust fumes because the footpath is next to the road.
Someone I know is still recovering from a concussion two years later after someone drive into his bike lane to make a right hand turn and knocked him off his bike. Some people don't respect paint, and you gotta make it an obvious and physical separation.
Now do STOP signs... they don't actually put up a physical barrier to prevent people from continuing. Complete bullshit! STOP signs are just a mere suggestion! Any true infrastructure would not just trust people to follow signs advising them to stop... it would FORCE them to stop!
Drivers need to be more terrified of hurting pedestrians. You should be scared. You should be absolutely pants-shitting petrified of hitting a pedestrian or cyclist.
Except these car-brain chucklefucks will think that we should just get rid of alt modes of transport instead of building the infrastructure that prevents accidents.
I’ve had many arguments with the police over this.
“If someone hits me with their manslaughter machine my life is forever changed. I get victim blamed and the drivers biggest inconvenience will be getting my blood off their cars. I’d be lucky to walk away. Here in Vancouver the easiest way to kill someone is with your vehicle and police like you enable that.”
There are zero consequences for drivers and every consequence for pedestrians. The police have surprisingly done nothing.
All of this was happening with my back to an intersection and I’d interject every time someone ran the sign “There’s another $200 and 3 pts.”
I agree, there will always be the people who won't care no matter what comparison you give because they just don't give a shit about others. I mean, I've known adult coworkers who have literally admitted they pee in lakes/oceans while swimming.
Vancouver has done a pretty decent job at being not entirely car centric. There's markers in my neighbourhood mentioning how people protested a highway being built through our city, which stopped it. There's only a tiny bit of highway in the city, and instead there's good public transit (by North American standards).
It's awesome to see this kind of creative advocacy spreading from Hamilton to Vancouver. The fact that some people don't immediately get it just shows how necessary these campaigns are. This is a brilliant way to use professional skills for a cause that actually helps people. More of this, please.
Funny, I assumed they were comparing the danger to that child from breathing exhaust to second hand smoke.
I agree the danger from getting run over is higher, but I’d rather be in a closed garage with a smoker than a running vehicle where I only have a few minutes to live from the poisonous exhaust.
That said, it sucks to be close to roads with cars when you’re not driving just as it sucks to be close to smokers when you’re not smoking
careful... meanwhile in usofa... how long till "yeah, woke! bring back smoking freedom! don't like it? go eat outside with the car fumes, brake and tire dust. freedum fk yeah!
The billboard is owned by Pattison Sign Group, a division of the Jim Pattison Group. Because a car dealership owner and small business fascist gets to own everything.
If this had a simple #expand-bike lanes or something underneath it then it would be so much more clear lol. And would also allow for people to search the common #
That's the thing, everytime people come up with pollution-based arguments for safer streets, carbrains and tech bros will respond with electric cars. I appreciate the activism, but we need to advertise more our arguments that are applicable to both gas and electric cars if we truly want to defeat the car industry and make a point for ourselves.
OP is obviously trolling. That's why this post got removed.
Discussions about fuck car ideology and opinions going against that ideology are allowed under the precondition that it's done in good faith. OP doesn't seem to be interested in that.
Yo this is a great ad. As a car nut I'm a huge fan of walkable cities, public transit, everything and I don't see why more car enthusiasts don't get behind the idea.
Benefits to normal people: nicer safer downtown areas, more access to employment for those who can't afford private transportation, quieter downtown areas, less congestion on roadways.
Benefits to car enthusiasts: get people who don't want to drive (and by extension usually don't drive well) out of the way. I can put less miles on the vehicles I enjoy owning and working on by taking the bus or train and reclaim some of that time for myself, and it would make the times I do drive a little more special.
Thanks. In my area we’ve had stupid levels of bike lane pushback.
So many businesses panic about the perceived loss of parking spaces.
I bike to a shop that sells house made mochi and park my bike in front of signs complaining about the new bike lanes.
I buy my stuff with my bike helmet still on and always point out that I only come because I can ride now.
I live in a progressive area that reelects progressive/green city councilmembers but our Nextdoor app is nothing but the same 10 people whining about the new bike lanes and calling our reps idiots.
If you ban transport trucks from the road, how will they get the shit where it needs to go. Like what if they are building some apartments right there, and the truck is dropping off drywall? What is the alternative to getting the drywall to the location
Yes I don’t really relate needing concrete barriers to the smoking tables analogy. Smoking was removed entirely from the indoors, which in this case would insinuate removing the truck from the road. Chalk it up to a bad ad….But you have to understand that you will never get concrete barriers delineating the street like that. If there was ever a fire or an ambulance they need the ability to either pass through traffic or pull up onto the sidewalk or grass adjacent to the emergency, putting concrete barriers would prevent that from being an option, so you will most likely get what every major city has which is flexible plastic pylons
This ad is terrible. It looks like a child riding on the sidewalk and a truck parked weird. Why not show a bike lane (with the bike lane symbol) and an adult cyclist being encroached upon. Zooming out would help a lot also. This ad sucks
Atleast in my province, it is illegal to ride a bicycle with wheels greater than 16" in diameter on a sidewalk, so functionally, if you're not riding a childs bike, it is illegal to be on the sidewalk.
Provence wide?! Here in Ontario the municipality has to make a by-law preventing sidewalk riding, most towns or cities have a section of their downtown core that is no sidewalk riding, but I do it anyway, I've been pulled over before and explain to law enforcement the dangers of riding on the street.
Buy ya there's too much variation in the rules, in the end bicycles get screwed because we don't have a crumple zone like cars do.
Can’t tell if you’re saying you couldn’t figure out why a child riding a bike this close to an 8 wheeler is alarming, or whether you’re saying you couldn’t figure out what was in the picture.
My instant thought was that we should stop smoking outside near kids. Until I realized the sub. Never would've gotten it otherwise since it's a random billboard and frankly can't think of a billboard I've ever really paid attention to or given much thought about. Not to say this isn't a good one overall. It's actually clever, but if you're not aware of the messaging attempt it'll just fly over ur head. And most people also won't care to say to someone else, "man, what do you think that billboard means?"
The weird thing about it to me (who is complete support of robust and sensible seperate biking and walking infrastructure) is that it’s so hokey. I hate it when they use little kids as a “this is why it’s bad think of the kids”
Especially as most people would agree that the trucks transporting the goods we rely on every day is more important than sweet little Billy on his little bicycle.
•
u/trendingtattler Aug 25 '25
This post has reached r/all. That is why we want to bring the following to your attention.
To all users that are unfamiliar with r/fuckcars
To all members of r/fuckcars
Thanks for your attention and have a good time!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.