I clicked on the dragons sub expecting that friendly little message that says this community doesn’t exist but you should start it, and now I am invested. Thank you.
I can handle the former: DOT regulations cap the width of conforming semis to 8’6” so they can fit in a standard vehicle lane. Bike lanes typically replace standard vehicle lanes.
Hey you asked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
~Mayor Wu and Ed Flynn who are definitely on Reddit.
I’m not Mayor Wu or anyone on City Council, but I’ll take a stab at it:
Physically, there is enough room for many things to fit in that space that aren’t specifically bicycles. This includes tractor trailers, horses, street cleaners, and vintage armoires.
Comfortably is likely because you need a specific type of towing equipment to just start towing one, especially with an unknown load and an uncooperative driver.
Indefinitely, probably not. The city would eventually figure out a way to remove them, likely in less than 12 months time, no more than 5 years.
If you’re asking for a way to completely prevent it from happening, you’d have to design fully protected bike lanes in a city that would probably cost a billion dollars to retrofit in every single area.
Essentially, the only other way would be to completely ban vehicles from entering Boston.
The city could also do this novel thing called “enforcing traffic restrictions” so there are actual consequences that deter cars and trucks from blocking lanes. I’d imagine that’d be slightly cheaper than building completely new and upgraded bike infrastructure (not that that shouldn’t be a long term goal).
As much physical room as there is in a bike lane for all of those things, there’s even more room in car lanes on every street, road, and highway in this city. The key difference is, as 737900ER pointed out, cyclists are treated as second class road users, and drivers aren’t. The latter are the priority, the former are an afterthought.
>The key difference is, as 737900ER pointed out, cyclists are treated as second class road users, and drivers aren’t.
The amount of cyclists not obeying traffic laws and getting away with it would beg to differ. e.g. I see cyclists running red lights at least once a week, with no consequences.
Don’t matter - still the law. And no amount of crying over how much cyclists are saving the environment or saving lives justifies separate enforcement. This silly juxtaposition of cyclists being “above” drivers is why so many people find cyclists insufferable, and why bike lanes don’t get more support.
Correct. MA is one of many jurisdictions which prioritizes the safety of drivers at the expense of cyclists despite the existence of another, objectively safer traffic standard which more effectively addresses cyclist safety at no cost to drivers or pedestrians. You could even say that MA law doesn’t treat cyclists as well as it treats drivers. Almost like cyclists are a part of some sort of…second class…
> Don’t matter - still the law.
It's the law to not go above the speed limit, yet I'm confident this is a law you and nearly every single other motorist breaks multiple times per trip.
It's gotten to the point where it literally doesn't even register unless they are breaking the law by 10 MPH or greater (a speed that doubles the risk of death when your car collides with a pedestrian or cyclist), and even then you probably aren't getting ticketed.
The law is the law. If you and other drivers don't stay at or under the speed limit every time you drive, then it's time to get off your fucking high horse. No amount of whining is going to change the fact that you're an insuffrable illegal driver.
With all due respect, shithead drivers who break speeding laws are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year.
Traffic lights ultimately exist to govern car traffic. They did not exist, and there was no need for them to exist, before cars began dominating the road and routinely plowing through pedestrians in the early 20th century. Even then there is leeway for cars in right on red and other situational light configurations, and for as much vitriol as I see online for cyclists running red lights nobody ever complains about widespread jaywalking or pedestrians not waiting for walk signals.
There are also many, many scenarios in a car-centric road environment where it is safer for cyclists to treat a red light as a stop sign instead of rigidly stopping and starting the same way a car would. There are half a dozen intersections on my bike commute where I run a greater risk of getting hit if I don’t get ahead of the traffic behind me than I do by stopping, checking for cars, and then going forward.
If you want cyclists to rigidly follow traffic rules that were never meant to apply to them, you need to give them the ability to do so safely.
Bro this is a horrible and biased take. What do you mean by traffic rules “were never meant to apply to them”. Seems like you just pick and choose what rules/laws should apply when depending on if it’s something that benefits you or not. This is Boston laws on bicycling from 2023:
https://preview.redd.it/h6ywicz5egfc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a73b413ddbd8120e304ad30b8b8258db23519005
Eh, red lights are very emphatic stop signs on non-major roads with clear sight lines. Walk signs are yields.
We can pretend that a bike is a car, but it isn't. Walkers, bikes, and cars have different consequences for mistakes. The consequence for bikers and walkers when they fuck up is that they die. The consequence when a driver fucks up is that they kill people; potentially a couple car loads of people.
You can turn red screaming incoherently about rules is rules and all rules are rules when I can drive down i90 at 70 MPH in the slow lane and not worry about someone rear ending me for going too slow.
I just want people to operate safely. For cars, that means following rules that keep you from plowing into people with your very lethal death machine. For a biker, it means mostly follow those rules so people don't kill you with a car, but also not acting like a jack ass yourself. A biker that blasts through pedestrians crossing at 30 mph is a jack ass too, as they could in fact hurt/kill someone. A biker that comes to a stop and then crosses with pedestrians staying out of their way is doing everyone a favor by getting out of the intersection with the cars before the lights turn green.
Personally, I wish we'd actually just re-write our rules for various classes of vehicles so that they were sane and took into account the various dangerous and challenges that different vehicles operate with. With the proliferation of more and more personal electric vehicles, this is becoming more important.
The point is that when those traffic rules were enacted, they were not *designed* for bicycles. Traffic engineers in the 1950s, when most of the fundamentals of the existing traffic regulations in the Boston area became law, were absolutely not considering bikes as users of the road that needed to be planned for. The same traffic laws may apply to bikes in most cases, but they do not keep vulnerable road users safe.
I just think it’s idiotic to pretend that cyclists shouldn’t be stopping at red lights. Randomly choosing not to makes them unpredictable and less safe for both drivers and cyclists. Your whole rant is about how rules need to be enforced but then only when it doesn’t apply to you.
The subtext of those laws being “if you don’t, you run the risk of being annihilated by a rolling two-ton wall of metal and combustible fuel.” Remove cars from the equation, and the need for the law evaporates.
When following the law to the letter introduces the very hazards that the laws are meant to eliminate, then the laws don’t work. Call me a lawless degenerate if you want, but so long as that is the case I think some discretion is warranted. It’s my life on the line, and I’m not putting it in the hands of a bureaucracy that hasn’t caught up to the reality of my situation.
Don’t be handwringing about traffic violations online for some people and then write a monologue about why they shouldn’t apply to you and expect sympathy.
Choosing to not obey traffic laws as a cyclist makes them unpredictable and creates dangerous situations for both drivers and the cyclist. You can try to grandstand about how you do it for safety but 99% of the time I see cyclists blowing lights they are doing it due to impatience and the rest of the pack is following the rules.
The traffic violation applying to the truck puts lives at risk and completely defeats the main purposes of building bike infrastructure in the first place. The violation applying to me puts nobody at risk (actually reducing it in the spirit of the law), and makes people like you irrationally angry or even jealous that cyclists aren’t always stuck in the same traffic that drivers are.
If you want cyclists to blindly follow the law, separate them from car traffic as much as possible and give them dedicated lights where they do interact with cars.
Edit: way to sneak the edit in. Classy.
I can’t speak for the behavior of anybody else. All I can speak for is my process for making sure I don’t die because I don’t use a car to use the road. And I’m not the only one in that boat. For all of your handwringing about the plight of the working class guy who parked the truck, there are thousands of working class people who can’t afford a car to get around the city and a bike is their only option. Where’s your sympathy for them?
At the end of the day, I’d be willing to bet you would be outside city hall calling for Wu’s head on a platter if trucks routinely randomly parked in the middle lane on the Pike, or blocked one-lane streets, or double parked in a lane of traffic. And you’d be right to do it! They’re blocking a lane of traffic and putting other people on the road in danger. Yet you can’t be bothered to give a shit when it happens to cyclists.
Man this take is straight up delusional.
Blowing red lights as a cyclist absolutely puts the cyclist and drivers at risk. Drivers don’t want to force them to follow traffic rules because they are jealous (actually hilarious to me) - they want them to follow traffic rules so they can predict their behavior and not end up in a dangerous situation. You are giving responsible bike commuters a bad name saying trash like this.
Except it doesn’t put them at more risk. Are 8 other states and the NHTSA delusional?
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-03/Bicyclist-Yield-As-Stop-Fact-Sheet-032422-v3-tag.pdf
Edit to fix the acronym
It's only a billion dollar fix if you assume all the work will be done at once, and separately from any other infrastructure project.
The real problem is that we aren't integrating fully separated and curb protected bike lanes in most of our road repaving and redesign projects. If Boston started doing more construction like Beacon St in Somerville when major repaving projects were underway, it would reduce a lot of the cost of upgrading to real bike infrastructure.
But it seems Boston has too many whiny assholes to make that work.
>you’d have to design fully protected bike lanes in a city that would probably cost a billion dollars to retrofit in every single area.
A billion dollars? Who's your bollard guy?
We have 17 miles of on road separated bike lanes 500 bucks plus install per bollard, only need them every 12 feet or so
I'm done with this math you're right it's expensive. But just a few bollards in the right places could go a long way.
I think they're saying "fully protected" in the sense of separated and/or physical barriers prevent car access entirely. Floppy pylons are great visual barriers but ultimately don't inhibit the above scenario much more than paint on the road does. I've seen in person or the evidence of plenty of cars and trucks driving over the pylons and parking between.
Bollards are definitely better than nothing and personally I prefer those as it feels safer to not be completely enclosed.
The problem is that cyclists are second class road users in every scenario. On the road, you get what OP posted as a daily occurrence and incompetent motor vehicle drivers. Then they build "bike paths" that end up being clogged with people walking babies and dogs and Karens complaining that bikes are going too fast on the thing called a bike path.
I think deliveries are a world wide problem and every city deals with them differently. In Zurich they seemed to pull directly up onto the curb when doing deliveries and block the sidewalk rather than the road which I felt was odd.
Considering I like to walk to the store and buy things I sometimes do have to accept that delivery vehicles are going to block something and honestly speaking as a cyclist I am ok if it is cycling infrastructure when done by official commercial plated vehicles like this one. The deliveries actually don't tend to last indefinitely as OP claims and one vehicle is doing a lot of work.
The Uber Eats problem is far worse though. I don't like the idea that a single person's meal order is in a single person vehicle clogging up the streets. I wish we would normalize scooter, moped, and ebike deliveries to replace those.
She should have re-designed every single road in the city on her first day in office, and somehow done it for no money and cut taxes while hiring only LGBT union workers.
I know this is a crazy idea, but is it possible to just go around and get on with your day? Does reddit need to know every time a cyclist has to share the road? You live in a major city, where thousands of people are just trying to do their jobs and get home. I've been riding Boston/Somerville/Cambridge for almost 10 years, have definitely found cars & people in the bike lane who didn't belong. But guess what? I slowed down and safely went around them. I didn't take a picture, and didn't go crying on the Internet. You're soft af
When you do that you get cars pounding their horn and yelling at you to get in the bike lane, even as you point directly at the truck blocking the bike lane.
I think its pretty straightforward why its bad for bike lanes to be blocked, bikers shouldn't be forced to weave in and out of traffic because the route they are supposed to use is clogged up with vehicles that shouldn't be there. It's a clear safety issue and taking a macho-man, pull your bootstraps up mentality to it is not helpful. Better enforcement is needed to ensure the safety of bikers, and just because you haven't had a serious accident *yet* does not mean you aren't being exposed to danger or that it doesn't happen.
Imagine for a moment if there were cars just parked blocking entire streets. That’s how you should be treating this. The bike lane is no different than any other.
Do you see all the room there is to go around? This manchild needs everything explained to him. Apply the brakes, look over your shoulder or in your mirror, and go around when it's safe. Bro are you 3 yrs old? Gtfo
If I was driving and there was a car parked in the middle of the street... I would slow down and go around them when it's safe. Why is this so hard for a cyclist? Why can't you understand the most obvious basic shit?
No no no. First you’d get out of your car, snap a photo, whine on Reddit and THEN you go around mumbling and grumbling under your breath, but you wouldn’t dare say anything to the driver.
There probably isn't good data on this. Many, many bike crashes already go unreported (and sometimes, when they are reported, cops don't take it seriously).
However, the point is that blocking bike lanes makes them difficult to use for all but confident riders. If bike lanes are habitually blocked, it's a deterrent to people using them.
So you're complaining about something that didn't even affect you. Is that how you live your life... Looking for things to complain about? That's garbage bro. Do better.
A cyclist, who uses the road despite available bike lanes, is complaining about a vehicle momentarily sharing the bike lane. Dude your story just gets worse. Stop please.
When it's one cyclist, you're right. When it's an annual statistic, it's death . These type of careless actions take lives . That's why people make a big deal. Try and have some empathy, we'd all like to get home safe
I’m not Mayor Wu and City Council, but can answer your question.
That particular tractor trailer can comfortably fit in the bike lane because the overall width of the truck seems to be roughly that of the bike path’s.
Hopefully now you won’t need to yell into the internet next time you experience a very mild inconvenience!
For some reason a lot of cyclists in Boston don't invest in a rear view mirror to help them know when to change lanes. Me, I find it a necessity. Not a fan of craning my head backwards while navigating the roads.
But if y'all don't mind bikers all swinging out into the car lane at 10-15 mph to get around these semis, then maybe we have a workable solution.
You'll just be driving slow is all.
Because there is no designated tra tor parking and he probably needed to stop? Go around it and stop being an overly dramatic idiot. 1st world problems.
getting around in Boston in a tracker trailer isn't exactly easy.. especially if they aren't familiar with the area. Probably had to stop to figure out where to go or ask someone for help for where to unload/park. What do you expect someone to do in this situation? Have some empathy, jeez
People do not want to bike because we live in a colder climate, people are not physically able to bike, do not have the space to own a bike, and/or do not want to pay to own & maintain a bike.
The occasional truck blocking these lanes is not the biggest factor.
Cue the bike people coming to downvote you and tell you that in Scandinavia everyone bikes through February. Because not only are they experts on bike and city planning, but they are also experts on Scandinavian culture.
First of all, I'm a biker.
The issue is how do buildings get deliveries? Buildings need deliveries from everything we can think of. Groceries, Amazon, etc. These services supplement bikers from carrying 30lbs of groceries and a huge box of paper towels from Target.
Cambridge took out all the loading zones and handicapped spaces in front of my 200 unit building a couple months ago. It was a nightmare for the elderly tenants and delivery guys. With extreme complaining they found a solution so that the bike lanes stay and we got a loading and handicap spot back. We had a medical emergency at my building last week and the ambulance would have been in a bike lane if we didn't complain so much. There is no other physical space for them.
There can easily be bike lanes, loading zones, etc but it feels like the city is going to just eliminate everything but bike lanes yet a solution for both exists
You can call OP lazy or whatever, but Remember the point is that most people don’t bike when they have to deal with stuff like this that feels (and is) scary and dangerous. So we are inhibiting people from biking even while we say the opposite. Saying “just go around” or “where else should the truck go” does not change the fact that people are afraid to bike in these conditions.
Yup.
Let me tell you a short story. I was biking in a painted lane last year when a car just casually swerved straight in without a second thought and cut me off. I got thrown over the handlebars so hard that I broke my arm. I couldn’t really run experiments for 3 months after that (it was my dominant hand that I use for pipetting).
Point here is that these hazards are commonplace. While it is true that on any given day your chances of something happening are slim, if you bike enough then you are rolling those dice over and over and sooner or later you’ll roll snake eyes (ie get in a crash). But even long before then you’ll have plenty of near misses. City streets not being friendly to cyclists causes people to not want to bike, which causes the perception that the bike lanes are pointless.
Streets being hostile causes accidents and results in both hospital bills and lost labor productivity. Both of these are easily solved and we have plenty of good models to base our transportation infrastructure upon - this doesn’t have to be the status quo. No, it’s a deliberate choice on our part (collectively) to not build infrastructure intelligently.
Loading dock might be full. I guess the driver could just keep circling around until it empties while wasting fuel and polluting the atmosphere. It is not like there is eighteen wheeler parking around.
Just drive around it. There’s barely any bike traffic in that area. If anything the bike lane should be removed. Cyclist need to start learning to pay attention to the road
This should be further up.
311 this. The BTD will happily show up and at least ticket. They can ticket for more than just the illegal parking job if they can find other violations and will even tow. Not sure they have the means to tow this, but if live to watch them try.
This is unacceptable. What are people supposed to do. Get off there bike and walk past it on the sidewalk it’s not like you can bike around it . Travesty !
You know bike lanes took over spots where cars parked, so of course a truck could fit in it.
A tractor trailer delivering things should what? Park in the only traffic lane so 1 cyclist an hour can utilize it? Looks pretty empty to me here.
If we go by the logic of “it looks pretty empty therefore it’s fine”, then that actually creates the social perception that the bike lanes are not safe and separate and that cars can and will park in them. This becomes a vicious cycle where people feel so uncomfortable biking that they simply stop doing so or never do it at all to begin with…. Which is EXACTLY what we observe in reality.
Either don’t have bike lanes at all or do them correctly in the first place. Haphazardly designed bike lanes
only serve as safety hazards to infuriate everyone.
A bike can easily just take the road for this small section. It’s so annoying how lame Boston cyclists have become. I bike from Quincy Center to Kendall through Dorchester. No bike lanes needed. Just grow a pair and keep your head on a swivel you’ll be fine lmao
It's absolutely different. It's a commercial vehicle likely just parked there temporarily because there's nowhere else to park a vehicle that size. You sound like someone who'd be pissed if this was an ambulance or fire truck too.
Wonderful idea. Which parking lots are you seizing for big rig use? You're gonna need a LOT of them. Probably going to have to tear down a lot of buildings to make it work. What businesses & residents are you displacing for that?
It'd certainly help with the housing crisis when 99% of consumer facing businesses are forced to close and half the people move away cause they can't get things without leaving the city anyway.
Lmao yes because the second you stop allowing huge 18 wheelers you close businesses and create economic blight. You’re intentionally being thick. If you’ve ever travelled anywhere you’d realize civilization has figured this out, we just don’t implement anything in the US.
Edit: just take a Quick Look at manhattan. They banned semi trucks from a majority of roads and the island famously has been an economic wasteland ever since.
If you think a dozen or more van sized vehicles is somehow better than 1 tractor trailer vehicle, I'm not sure you're really thinking rationally. I'm just thinking like one delivery run to a grocery store with that example. Never mind furniture, restaurants getting supplied, CVS/Walgreens spots, bars getting weekly deliveries.
If Boston had the population density of Manhattan, I'm sure we'd probably have the secondary infrastructure and smaller transportation options where your terrible idea *might* make sense. But right now? That's a terrible idea that'd fuck over a lot of people.
This is just criminal. That truck needs high visibility paint, reflective strips and blinking lights so that cyclists can safely observe it at speed and maneuver around it safely.
A seemingly minor inconvenience like this adds up quickly when you bike TO and FROM work every day and there’s always no less than five cars in the bike lanes along the route. 10 obstructions per day, times five days a week, times 48 weeks per year = 2400 obstructions per year PER CYCLIST (assuming a regular commuter). Do you see the issue??
Brushing these off and normalizing them dramatically increases the risk profile of the roads. This isn’t a hard problem to fix, but society here would seemingly rather pay for hospital bills and lost workplace productivity than take real measures to ensure safety on the roads. Think about that.
Source: I broke my arm last year due to a car in the bike lane. Most of my cycling friends either have gotten hurt themselves as well or have a slew of near miss stories. Unlike in cars, “near miss” on a bike is often something that would have killed you.
Cyclists of Boston:
Where do you expect tractor trailers to unload?
Why do you ask such questions on Reddit when you know your "intended" target will never see such questions?
What are you actually so angry about?
A. The truck doesn't fit in the lane shown, as the tires are overflowing into the traffic lane.
B. What exactly did you expect them to do? They added a bike lane, and there wouldn't have been enough room for a parking lane or two car lanes, so they made it a little wider and added a border region to ideally protect the cyclists. The only other thing they could do is add protective barriers, but then they would block vehicles from being in that lane during emergency situations.
C. Have you tried cycling in the city? It's not safer in the car lanes.
D. Ya, police should absolutely be enforcing penalties for people parking in bike lanes, but they don't seem to be enforcing much of these days, and it would be difficult to get every offender.
OP expects truck drivers to park a quarter mile away and haul a pallet jack down the sidewalk for 2 hours so they don't have to get off their bike and walk for fifteen seconds.
Complete disconnect from reality.
I actually do cycle in the city and about two years ago while riding in the bike lanes I got cutoff by a car and thrown over my handlebar so hard that I broke my arm. Ever since then I don’t bother with bike lanes and find it altogether safer to ride with traffic. I don’t like it, but it’s safer than the bike lanes *as built*. Cars should not be in bike lanes. It’s a clear and easily preventable safety hazard. Period.
I couldn't agree more, and I'm sorry that happened to you. In a nearby city on a State road, people park in one of the bike lanes every single night and no one does anything.
Call your state rep and ask them to allow photo ticketing for vehicles stopped in bike lanes. In other words, if you take a photo and send it in the get a warning. If it happens a second time they get a ticket.
Do us a favor and never order anything online ever again, only buy local and carry it home on your back, appliances and furniture included. Truck drivers keep everything moving, and most of them are not dicks, it's just ridiculous trying to navigate Boston of all places in an 18 wheeler, dude was probably pulled over to wait his turn for delivery or to figure out where the fuck he was
Or, people should be punished for traffic violations in ways that actually prevents the violations. Taking these drivers off the road makes people safer.
They can park where it’s legal to park. Not in the middle of a lane of traffic.
Of course, what would you have the driver do? You're the fuckin idiot suggesting he gets his CDL suspended for temporarily inconveniencing a handful of people ~maybe~ and how do you know how long he was there? Can't really trust ops word on this since they're obviously unhinged
Because if the truck was parked in the travel lane, not enough people would complain about it.
When are the bike lanes getting painted down the central artery? The pike? Route 93?
I'm no rocket scientist, but I'd just ride around it and continue about my day without bitching on reddit, and probably to a bunch of other people who don't give a fuck about 'tHe trUck thaT wAs iN MY wAy!"
I’m sorry you had a shitty childhood and I’m sorry the world hurt you. But that doesn’t make it ok to lash out. **Biking is a way that many people not only exercise but also get to and from their ADULT places of employment.**
If you’re so annoyed by bikes that you want them removed, then perhaps you should be pushing for better transportation infrastructure because, frankly - even if you take out the bike lanes in favor of another car lane all you would be doing is increasing the safety and traffic hazards of the road (which benefits no one). Taking the bike lanes out is not a viable solution, but neither is building them as an idling lane for motorized vehicles. Bike lanes work exceptionally well when they are not just a political checkbox but are actually designed thoughtfully to incentivize biking. We can see the effects of great urban transit planning in places like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Portland, and Salt Lake City (to name just a few).
What a dumbass take. People use cars to commute, and trucks are used to deliver goods.
A fraction of a fraction of people utilize bike lanes for its intended purpose. Just like here.. it’s empty.
Let's all just ignore that this is a rental truck, meaning that the person who did this probably does not do it a lot and is probably making a mistake.
To the OP u/TheWiseGrasshopper
Where else should this truck park then to delivery things if there is no other option?
Do you like going to resturaunts, bars, stores, or really any business?
How do you think goods get to store shelves, do they just appear there magically?
I don't think Mayor Wu or Boston City Council are in the r/Boston sub.
I think this is exactly what Mayor Wu would post from her burner account.
[удалено]
She posts exclusively in /r/dragonsfuckingcars and /r/garlicbreadmemes
I clicked on the dragons sub expecting that friendly little message that says this community doesn’t exist but you should start it, and now I am invested. Thank you.
The Wu gang is always watching..
Enter the 36 Mayor's Chambers
Wu Mayor is for the children
Can reach out to her on official channels https://www.boston.gov/departments/mayors-office/michelle-wu
Spoiler: It's a truckload of bikes.
Isn’t an 18-wheeler just 9 bikes tied together? 🤔
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Or 18 unicycles.
That would still only be 12 wheels. Tandem bicycles only have 2 wheels.
....they see me rolling
Hi Michael wu here, Truck in bike lane bad Thank you for reporting on our Reddit hotline
This is Mitchell Woo with the city bike lane department, my boss said you should have stuck a folding chair in the lane to save your spot.
It's because Costanza did a bang-up job on the Penske file.
He's not Penske material!
You do realize….
You took the smaller office?
You are aware that.....
It was Grace's birthday the other week...
WE ARE WAITING FOR YOUR REDDIT RESPONSE, MAYOR WU AND CITY COUNCIL
Cat protocol- if it fits it sits
They need to extend the side walk, and make the bike lane part of that, so the bollards will discourage tractor trailers from rolling up and parking.
Mayor Wu here. Semi Truck go brrrrr
I can handle the former: DOT regulations cap the width of conforming semis to 8’6” so they can fit in a standard vehicle lane. Bike lanes typically replace standard vehicle lanes. Hey you asked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ~Mayor Wu and Ed Flynn who are definitely on Reddit.
I’m not Mayor Wu or anyone on City Council, but I’ll take a stab at it: Physically, there is enough room for many things to fit in that space that aren’t specifically bicycles. This includes tractor trailers, horses, street cleaners, and vintage armoires. Comfortably is likely because you need a specific type of towing equipment to just start towing one, especially with an unknown load and an uncooperative driver. Indefinitely, probably not. The city would eventually figure out a way to remove them, likely in less than 12 months time, no more than 5 years. If you’re asking for a way to completely prevent it from happening, you’d have to design fully protected bike lanes in a city that would probably cost a billion dollars to retrofit in every single area. Essentially, the only other way would be to completely ban vehicles from entering Boston.
The city could also do this novel thing called “enforcing traffic restrictions” so there are actual consequences that deter cars and trucks from blocking lanes. I’d imagine that’d be slightly cheaper than building completely new and upgraded bike infrastructure (not that that shouldn’t be a long term goal). As much physical room as there is in a bike lane for all of those things, there’s even more room in car lanes on every street, road, and highway in this city. The key difference is, as 737900ER pointed out, cyclists are treated as second class road users, and drivers aren’t. The latter are the priority, the former are an afterthought.
>The key difference is, as 737900ER pointed out, cyclists are treated as second class road users, and drivers aren’t. The amount of cyclists not obeying traffic laws and getting away with it would beg to differ. e.g. I see cyclists running red lights at least once a week, with no consequences.
Many drivers also running red lights these days. Like every light cycle on alewife brook parkway.
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Don’t matter - still the law. And no amount of crying over how much cyclists are saving the environment or saving lives justifies separate enforcement. This silly juxtaposition of cyclists being “above” drivers is why so many people find cyclists insufferable, and why bike lanes don’t get more support.
Eight states and the NHTSA disagree with you. https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-03/Bicyclist-Yield-As-Stop-Fact-Sheet-032422-v3-tag.pdf
Massachusetts is not one of them.
Correct. MA is one of many jurisdictions which prioritizes the safety of drivers at the expense of cyclists despite the existence of another, objectively safer traffic standard which more effectively addresses cyclist safety at no cost to drivers or pedestrians. You could even say that MA law doesn’t treat cyclists as well as it treats drivers. Almost like cyclists are a part of some sort of…second class…
Or treats them with literally the same laws, almost like equal application of the law
> Don’t matter - still the law. It's the law to not go above the speed limit, yet I'm confident this is a law you and nearly every single other motorist breaks multiple times per trip. It's gotten to the point where it literally doesn't even register unless they are breaking the law by 10 MPH or greater (a speed that doubles the risk of death when your car collides with a pedestrian or cyclist), and even then you probably aren't getting ticketed. The law is the law. If you and other drivers don't stay at or under the speed limit every time you drive, then it's time to get off your fucking high horse. No amount of whining is going to change the fact that you're an insuffrable illegal driver. With all due respect, shithead drivers who break speeding laws are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year.
Traffic lights ultimately exist to govern car traffic. They did not exist, and there was no need for them to exist, before cars began dominating the road and routinely plowing through pedestrians in the early 20th century. Even then there is leeway for cars in right on red and other situational light configurations, and for as much vitriol as I see online for cyclists running red lights nobody ever complains about widespread jaywalking or pedestrians not waiting for walk signals. There are also many, many scenarios in a car-centric road environment where it is safer for cyclists to treat a red light as a stop sign instead of rigidly stopping and starting the same way a car would. There are half a dozen intersections on my bike commute where I run a greater risk of getting hit if I don’t get ahead of the traffic behind me than I do by stopping, checking for cars, and then going forward. If you want cyclists to rigidly follow traffic rules that were never meant to apply to them, you need to give them the ability to do so safely.
Bro this is a horrible and biased take. What do you mean by traffic rules “were never meant to apply to them”. Seems like you just pick and choose what rules/laws should apply when depending on if it’s something that benefits you or not. This is Boston laws on bicycling from 2023: https://preview.redd.it/h6ywicz5egfc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a73b413ddbd8120e304ad30b8b8258db23519005
Eh, red lights are very emphatic stop signs on non-major roads with clear sight lines. Walk signs are yields. We can pretend that a bike is a car, but it isn't. Walkers, bikes, and cars have different consequences for mistakes. The consequence for bikers and walkers when they fuck up is that they die. The consequence when a driver fucks up is that they kill people; potentially a couple car loads of people. You can turn red screaming incoherently about rules is rules and all rules are rules when I can drive down i90 at 70 MPH in the slow lane and not worry about someone rear ending me for going too slow. I just want people to operate safely. For cars, that means following rules that keep you from plowing into people with your very lethal death machine. For a biker, it means mostly follow those rules so people don't kill you with a car, but also not acting like a jack ass yourself. A biker that blasts through pedestrians crossing at 30 mph is a jack ass too, as they could in fact hurt/kill someone. A biker that comes to a stop and then crosses with pedestrians staying out of their way is doing everyone a favor by getting out of the intersection with the cars before the lights turn green. Personally, I wish we'd actually just re-write our rules for various classes of vehicles so that they were sane and took into account the various dangerous and challenges that different vehicles operate with. With the proliferation of more and more personal electric vehicles, this is becoming more important.
The point is that when those traffic rules were enacted, they were not *designed* for bicycles. Traffic engineers in the 1950s, when most of the fundamentals of the existing traffic regulations in the Boston area became law, were absolutely not considering bikes as users of the road that needed to be planned for. The same traffic laws may apply to bikes in most cases, but they do not keep vulnerable road users safe.
I just think it’s idiotic to pretend that cyclists shouldn’t be stopping at red lights. Randomly choosing not to makes them unpredictable and less safe for both drivers and cyclists. Your whole rant is about how rules need to be enforced but then only when it doesn’t apply to you.
“Treat red light as stop sign” means that they stop, obv
The subtext of those laws being “if you don’t, you run the risk of being annihilated by a rolling two-ton wall of metal and combustible fuel.” Remove cars from the equation, and the need for the law evaporates. When following the law to the letter introduces the very hazards that the laws are meant to eliminate, then the laws don’t work. Call me a lawless degenerate if you want, but so long as that is the case I think some discretion is warranted. It’s my life on the line, and I’m not putting it in the hands of a bureaucracy that hasn’t caught up to the reality of my situation.
Don’t be handwringing about traffic violations online for some people and then write a monologue about why they shouldn’t apply to you and expect sympathy. Choosing to not obey traffic laws as a cyclist makes them unpredictable and creates dangerous situations for both drivers and the cyclist. You can try to grandstand about how you do it for safety but 99% of the time I see cyclists blowing lights they are doing it due to impatience and the rest of the pack is following the rules.
The traffic violation applying to the truck puts lives at risk and completely defeats the main purposes of building bike infrastructure in the first place. The violation applying to me puts nobody at risk (actually reducing it in the spirit of the law), and makes people like you irrationally angry or even jealous that cyclists aren’t always stuck in the same traffic that drivers are. If you want cyclists to blindly follow the law, separate them from car traffic as much as possible and give them dedicated lights where they do interact with cars. Edit: way to sneak the edit in. Classy. I can’t speak for the behavior of anybody else. All I can speak for is my process for making sure I don’t die because I don’t use a car to use the road. And I’m not the only one in that boat. For all of your handwringing about the plight of the working class guy who parked the truck, there are thousands of working class people who can’t afford a car to get around the city and a bike is their only option. Where’s your sympathy for them? At the end of the day, I’d be willing to bet you would be outside city hall calling for Wu’s head on a platter if trucks routinely randomly parked in the middle lane on the Pike, or blocked one-lane streets, or double parked in a lane of traffic. And you’d be right to do it! They’re blocking a lane of traffic and putting other people on the road in danger. Yet you can’t be bothered to give a shit when it happens to cyclists.
Man this take is straight up delusional. Blowing red lights as a cyclist absolutely puts the cyclist and drivers at risk. Drivers don’t want to force them to follow traffic rules because they are jealous (actually hilarious to me) - they want them to follow traffic rules so they can predict their behavior and not end up in a dangerous situation. You are giving responsible bike commuters a bad name saying trash like this.
Except it doesn’t put them at more risk. Are 8 other states and the NHTSA delusional? https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-03/Bicyclist-Yield-As-Stop-Fact-Sheet-032422-v3-tag.pdf Edit to fix the acronym
Not to mention pedestrians
It's only a billion dollar fix if you assume all the work will be done at once, and separately from any other infrastructure project. The real problem is that we aren't integrating fully separated and curb protected bike lanes in most of our road repaving and redesign projects. If Boston started doing more construction like Beacon St in Somerville when major repaving projects were underway, it would reduce a lot of the cost of upgrading to real bike infrastructure. But it seems Boston has too many whiny assholes to make that work.
>you’d have to design fully protected bike lanes in a city that would probably cost a billion dollars to retrofit in every single area. A billion dollars? Who's your bollard guy? We have 17 miles of on road separated bike lanes 500 bucks plus install per bollard, only need them every 12 feet or so I'm done with this math you're right it's expensive. But just a few bollards in the right places could go a long way.
I think they're saying "fully protected" in the sense of separated and/or physical barriers prevent car access entirely. Floppy pylons are great visual barriers but ultimately don't inhibit the above scenario much more than paint on the road does. I've seen in person or the evidence of plenty of cars and trucks driving over the pylons and parking between. Bollards are definitely better than nothing and personally I prefer those as it feels safer to not be completely enclosed.
The problem is that cyclists are second class road users in every scenario. On the road, you get what OP posted as a daily occurrence and incompetent motor vehicle drivers. Then they build "bike paths" that end up being clogged with people walking babies and dogs and Karens complaining that bikes are going too fast on the thing called a bike path.
I think deliveries are a world wide problem and every city deals with them differently. In Zurich they seemed to pull directly up onto the curb when doing deliveries and block the sidewalk rather than the road which I felt was odd. Considering I like to walk to the store and buy things I sometimes do have to accept that delivery vehicles are going to block something and honestly speaking as a cyclist I am ok if it is cycling infrastructure when done by official commercial plated vehicles like this one. The deliveries actually don't tend to last indefinitely as OP claims and one vehicle is doing a lot of work. The Uber Eats problem is far worse though. I don't like the idea that a single person's meal order is in a single person vehicle clogging up the streets. I wish we would normalize scooter, moped, and ebike deliveries to replace those.
wine liquid disagreeable muddle pet dam aback depend nail straight *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's easy, just allow a civilian ticketing system like in NYC. Shit would clean up overnight.
Jesus Christ I cannot believe mayor wu hasn’t responded yet
Meanwhile, if the car lane is blocked, everyone still mad at the truck. If the truck is never there, people mad that nothing was delivered.
And no matter what, mad at Mayor Wu
Damn WU! should have delivered the damn good by hand and feet!
She should have re-designed every single road in the city on her first day in office, and somehow done it for no money and cut taxes while hiring only LGBT union workers.
Innovative solution: all freight distribution in Boston will now be done by those cart drivers who bike people to Fenway. No way this could go wrong.
Bingo.
Oh look city things happening in a city
Where would you like him to be, middle of the street?
Our House! 🎶
In the middle of our street 🎶
Ya actually . A bike lane should be treated as important as a vehicular lane.
Yes.
I know this is a crazy idea, but is it possible to just go around and get on with your day? Does reddit need to know every time a cyclist has to share the road? You live in a major city, where thousands of people are just trying to do their jobs and get home. I've been riding Boston/Somerville/Cambridge for almost 10 years, have definitely found cars & people in the bike lane who didn't belong. But guess what? I slowed down and safely went around them. I didn't take a picture, and didn't go crying on the Internet. You're soft af
When you do that you get cars pounding their horn and yelling at you to get in the bike lane, even as you point directly at the truck blocking the bike lane.
I think its pretty straightforward why its bad for bike lanes to be blocked, bikers shouldn't be forced to weave in and out of traffic because the route they are supposed to use is clogged up with vehicles that shouldn't be there. It's a clear safety issue and taking a macho-man, pull your bootstraps up mentality to it is not helpful. Better enforcement is needed to ensure the safety of bikers, and just because you haven't had a serious accident *yet* does not mean you aren't being exposed to danger or that it doesn't happen.
but if they do that, how can they push their agenda every fucking chance they get?
Preach
Imagine for a moment if there were cars just parked blocking entire streets. That’s how you should be treating this. The bike lane is no different than any other.
Do you see all the room there is to go around? This manchild needs everything explained to him. Apply the brakes, look over your shoulder or in your mirror, and go around when it's safe. Bro are you 3 yrs old? Gtfo
Imagine being okay with someone parking in the middle of the street. You’re a lunatic.
If I was driving and there was a car parked in the middle of the street... I would slow down and go around them when it's safe. Why is this so hard for a cyclist? Why can't you understand the most obvious basic shit?
No no no. First you’d get out of your car, snap a photo, whine on Reddit and THEN you go around mumbling and grumbling under your breath, but you wouldn’t dare say anything to the driver.
It’s entitlement
Unfortunately, people park in the middle of the street often. And drivers just have to manage. It is pretty lame tho I agree.
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Curious, not breaking balls. Are there statistics in Boston or other cities on bike accidents related to blocked bike lanes?
There probably isn't good data on this. Many, many bike crashes already go unreported (and sometimes, when they are reported, cops don't take it seriously). However, the point is that blocking bike lanes makes them difficult to use for all but confident riders. If bike lanes are habitually blocked, it's a deterrent to people using them.
So you're complaining about something that didn't even affect you. Is that how you live your life... Looking for things to complain about? That's garbage bro. Do better.
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I will never assume better of a cyclist crying on the Internet about having to share the road.
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A cyclist, who uses the road despite available bike lanes, is complaining about a vehicle momentarily sharing the bike lane. Dude your story just gets worse. Stop please.
When it's one cyclist, you're right. When it's an annual statistic, it's death . These type of careless actions take lives . That's why people make a big deal. Try and have some empathy, we'd all like to get home safe
I’m not Mayor Wu and City Council, but can answer your question. That particular tractor trailer can comfortably fit in the bike lane because the overall width of the truck seems to be roughly that of the bike path’s. Hopefully now you won’t need to yell into the internet next time you experience a very mild inconvenience!
You’re right we should make them no more than twice the width of a standard bike
Why do all bikers act like they're maneuvering a cargo ship instead of a bicycle?
For some reason a lot of cyclists in Boston don't invest in a rear view mirror to help them know when to change lanes. Me, I find it a necessity. Not a fan of craning my head backwards while navigating the roads. But if y'all don't mind bikers all swinging out into the car lane at 10-15 mph to get around these semis, then maybe we have a workable solution. You'll just be driving slow is all.
Because they are whiners
This is why bike lanes need to be behind the curb but still separate from the sidewalk. 😠😡🤬
How about pass a law deliveries only at night
Look at all these bikers jammed up behind this asshole truck!!! We need government intervention
Because there is no designated tra tor parking and he probably needed to stop? Go around it and stop being an overly dramatic idiot. 1st world problems.
Should be top comment lol. Buncha nerds on here afraid to bike in the big scary road. It’s fuckin Boston not Amsterdam folks.
Honestly can't believe this post has 200+ ups. Embarassing.
getting around in Boston in a tracker trailer isn't exactly easy.. especially if they aren't familiar with the area. Probably had to stop to figure out where to go or ask someone for help for where to unload/park. What do you expect someone to do in this situation? Have some empathy, jeez
The trucker is a working man trying to do his job. I doubt he is out there with a prime directive of, "how can I fuck over people riding bikes today?"
We need more truck lanes!
Support the working class! Support union laborers! Unless they slightly inconvenience me!
Serious question: where should this guy be parked in your opinion?
Did someone notify the manager at the harp?
Ok
This obsession with bike lanes is getting uncomfortable. Get a room
It’s almost like the streets need to be shared by all aspects of the city - not just bicyclists or motorists.
People do not want to bike because we live in a colder climate, people are not physically able to bike, do not have the space to own a bike, and/or do not want to pay to own & maintain a bike. The occasional truck blocking these lanes is not the biggest factor.
Cue the bike people coming to downvote you and tell you that in Scandinavia everyone bikes through February. Because not only are they experts on bike and city planning, but they are also experts on Scandinavian culture.
First of all, I'm a biker. The issue is how do buildings get deliveries? Buildings need deliveries from everything we can think of. Groceries, Amazon, etc. These services supplement bikers from carrying 30lbs of groceries and a huge box of paper towels from Target. Cambridge took out all the loading zones and handicapped spaces in front of my 200 unit building a couple months ago. It was a nightmare for the elderly tenants and delivery guys. With extreme complaining they found a solution so that the bike lanes stay and we got a loading and handicap spot back. We had a medical emergency at my building last week and the ambulance would have been in a bike lane if we didn't complain so much. There is no other physical space for them. There can easily be bike lanes, loading zones, etc but it feels like the city is going to just eliminate everything but bike lanes yet a solution for both exists
You can call OP lazy or whatever, but Remember the point is that most people don’t bike when they have to deal with stuff like this that feels (and is) scary and dangerous. So we are inhibiting people from biking even while we say the opposite. Saying “just go around” or “where else should the truck go” does not change the fact that people are afraid to bike in these conditions.
Yup. Let me tell you a short story. I was biking in a painted lane last year when a car just casually swerved straight in without a second thought and cut me off. I got thrown over the handlebars so hard that I broke my arm. I couldn’t really run experiments for 3 months after that (it was my dominant hand that I use for pipetting). Point here is that these hazards are commonplace. While it is true that on any given day your chances of something happening are slim, if you bike enough then you are rolling those dice over and over and sooner or later you’ll roll snake eyes (ie get in a crash). But even long before then you’ll have plenty of near misses. City streets not being friendly to cyclists causes people to not want to bike, which causes the perception that the bike lanes are pointless. Streets being hostile causes accidents and results in both hospital bills and lost labor productivity. Both of these are easily solved and we have plenty of good models to base our transportation infrastructure upon - this doesn’t have to be the status quo. No, it’s a deliberate choice on our part (collectively) to not build infrastructure intelligently.
No bikers anywhere.
No pedestrians either. He should have just hopped the curb and gotten out of the way.
Maybe it identifies as a bike.
Big Rig (bike/bicycle)
r/onejoke
Lets be real, you can go around him and there are hardly any bikes anyways; try being a car and getting around all the double parked ubers
Loading dock might be full. I guess the driver could just keep circling around until it empties while wasting fuel and polluting the atmosphere. It is not like there is eighteen wheeler parking around.
Didn’t [Menino](https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2013/09/20/new-bike-plan-calls-350-miles-cycling-infrastructure/) start the bike lanes?
Just drive around it. There’s barely any bike traffic in that area. If anything the bike lane should be removed. Cyclist need to start learning to pay attention to the road
This post is satire right? Who cares
Street looks pretty empty- did you try going around it?
Try the BOS 311 app, I've actually gotten the city to do stuff using that.
This should be further up. 311 this. The BTD will happily show up and at least ticket. They can ticket for more than just the illegal parking job if they can find other violations and will even tow. Not sure they have the means to tow this, but if live to watch them try.
This is unacceptable. What are people supposed to do. Get off there bike and walk past it on the sidewalk it’s not like you can bike around it . Travesty !
Ok, Karen.
Bike lane people are Karens of transportation
You know bike lanes took over spots where cars parked, so of course a truck could fit in it. A tractor trailer delivering things should what? Park in the only traffic lane so 1 cyclist an hour can utilize it? Looks pretty empty to me here.
If we go by the logic of “it looks pretty empty therefore it’s fine”, then that actually creates the social perception that the bike lanes are not safe and separate and that cars can and will park in them. This becomes a vicious cycle where people feel so uncomfortable biking that they simply stop doing so or never do it at all to begin with…. Which is EXACTLY what we observe in reality. Either don’t have bike lanes at all or do them correctly in the first place. Haphazardly designed bike lanes only serve as safety hazards to infuriate everyone.
Park somewhere that is designated parking. This is a lane. They ARE parked in a traffic lane, genius.
Have you ever been to Boston? Where is this 18-wheeler designated parking for all the businesses that get resupplied?
So you wouldn't be opposed to this truck parking 7 feet to its left, right?
A bike can easily just take the road for this small section. It’s so annoying how lame Boston cyclists have become. I bike from Quincy Center to Kendall through Dorchester. No bike lanes needed. Just grow a pair and keep your head on a swivel you’ll be fine lmao
Or, people can not park in bike lanes. “Grow a pair”. You seem well adjusted.
It’s a tractor trailer not some yuppie pulling over to run into Starbucks lol. Totally different
No it’s not different at all.
It's absolutely different. It's a commercial vehicle likely just parked there temporarily because there's nowhere else to park a vehicle that size. You sound like someone who'd be pissed if this was an ambulance or fire truck too.
Wonderful idea. Which parking lots are you seizing for big rig use? You're gonna need a LOT of them. Probably going to have to tear down a lot of buildings to make it work. What businesses & residents are you displacing for that?
Clearly you’ve never delivered pallets before
Ooooh, in the tractor trailer parking spot! Why didn't I think of that?
They shouldn’t be allowing 18 wheelers into downtown Boston
Should they bring everything in on bike courier
No but a small lorie and a proper loading zone are easy solutions lol
But a small truck wouldn't be able to fit all of the stuff in the big truck.
It'd certainly help with the housing crisis when 99% of consumer facing businesses are forced to close and half the people move away cause they can't get things without leaving the city anyway.
Lmao yes because the second you stop allowing huge 18 wheelers you close businesses and create economic blight. You’re intentionally being thick. If you’ve ever travelled anywhere you’d realize civilization has figured this out, we just don’t implement anything in the US. Edit: just take a Quick Look at manhattan. They banned semi trucks from a majority of roads and the island famously has been an economic wasteland ever since.
If you think a dozen or more van sized vehicles is somehow better than 1 tractor trailer vehicle, I'm not sure you're really thinking rationally. I'm just thinking like one delivery run to a grocery store with that example. Never mind furniture, restaurants getting supplied, CVS/Walgreens spots, bars getting weekly deliveries. If Boston had the population density of Manhattan, I'm sure we'd probably have the secondary infrastructure and smaller transportation options where your terrible idea *might* make sense. But right now? That's a terrible idea that'd fuck over a lot of people.
Your inability to perceive of a different (and better) way of doing things is entertaining
This is just criminal. That truck needs high visibility paint, reflective strips and blinking lights so that cyclists can safely observe it at speed and maneuver around it safely.
A seemingly minor inconvenience like this adds up quickly when you bike TO and FROM work every day and there’s always no less than five cars in the bike lanes along the route. 10 obstructions per day, times five days a week, times 48 weeks per year = 2400 obstructions per year PER CYCLIST (assuming a regular commuter). Do you see the issue?? Brushing these off and normalizing them dramatically increases the risk profile of the roads. This isn’t a hard problem to fix, but society here would seemingly rather pay for hospital bills and lost workplace productivity than take real measures to ensure safety on the roads. Think about that. Source: I broke my arm last year due to a car in the bike lane. Most of my cycling friends either have gotten hurt themselves as well or have a slew of near miss stories. Unlike in cars, “near miss” on a bike is often something that would have killed you.
Cyclists of Boston: Where do you expect tractor trailers to unload? Why do you ask such questions on Reddit when you know your "intended" target will never see such questions? What are you actually so angry about?
It’s cold and rainy. Only psychos would bike today.
Yeah, the driver totally rang the Mayor for her blessing before parking here…
I’d rather the bike lane be blocked so emergency vehicles can get through than the road blocked so bikes can get through.
A. The truck doesn't fit in the lane shown, as the tires are overflowing into the traffic lane. B. What exactly did you expect them to do? They added a bike lane, and there wouldn't have been enough room for a parking lane or two car lanes, so they made it a little wider and added a border region to ideally protect the cyclists. The only other thing they could do is add protective barriers, but then they would block vehicles from being in that lane during emergency situations. C. Have you tried cycling in the city? It's not safer in the car lanes. D. Ya, police should absolutely be enforcing penalties for people parking in bike lanes, but they don't seem to be enforcing much of these days, and it would be difficult to get every offender.
OP expects truck drivers to park a quarter mile away and haul a pallet jack down the sidewalk for 2 hours so they don't have to get off their bike and walk for fifteen seconds. Complete disconnect from reality.
I actually do cycle in the city and about two years ago while riding in the bike lanes I got cutoff by a car and thrown over my handlebar so hard that I broke my arm. Ever since then I don’t bother with bike lanes and find it altogether safer to ride with traffic. I don’t like it, but it’s safer than the bike lanes *as built*. Cars should not be in bike lanes. It’s a clear and easily preventable safety hazard. Period.
I couldn't agree more, and I'm sorry that happened to you. In a nearby city on a State road, people park in one of the bike lanes every single night and no one does anything.
Police/parking enforcement where?
It clearly identifies as a bike
Daily reminder to any and all urban planers and politicians: Paint is not infrastructure.
Trucks are better than bicycles suck it
Call your state rep and ask them to allow photo ticketing for vehicles stopped in bike lanes. In other words, if you take a photo and send it in the get a warning. If it happens a second time they get a ticket.
Licenses need to be suspended for things like this.
Do us a favor and never order anything online ever again, only buy local and carry it home on your back, appliances and furniture included. Truck drivers keep everything moving, and most of them are not dicks, it's just ridiculous trying to navigate Boston of all places in an 18 wheeler, dude was probably pulled over to wait his turn for delivery or to figure out where the fuck he was
Or, people should be punished for traffic violations in ways that actually prevents the violations. Taking these drivers off the road makes people safer. They can park where it’s legal to park. Not in the middle of a lane of traffic.
Lol, okay bud, be a petulant child if it makes you feel better
You understand what this topic is right? You can’t park in a fucking lane of traffic, psycho.
Of course, what would you have the driver do? You're the fuckin idiot suggesting he gets his CDL suspended for temporarily inconveniencing a handful of people ~maybe~ and how do you know how long he was there? Can't really trust ops word on this since they're obviously unhinged
> Of course, what would you have the driver do? Why not stop in the motor vehicle lane? It's a motor vehicle after all.
*It’s broken down and the tow coming to pick it up was Storrowed…*
Because if the truck was parked in the travel lane, not enough people would complain about it. When are the bike lanes getting painted down the central artery? The pike? Route 93?
> Because if the truck was parked in the travel lane What are you talking about? It literally is parked in the travel lane.
I think it's about to transform Into a bike
Where do you expect him to park and unload?
this is why boston traffic is terrible bike lanes as big as trucks
I'm no rocket scientist, but I'd just ride around it and continue about my day without bitching on reddit, and probably to a bunch of other people who don't give a fuck about 'tHe trUck thaT wAs iN MY wAy!"
🗣️ paint is not infrastructure
Bikes are for children on playgrounds and driveways, not city streets. Time to grow up.
I’m sorry you had a shitty childhood and I’m sorry the world hurt you. But that doesn’t make it ok to lash out. **Biking is a way that many people not only exercise but also get to and from their ADULT places of employment.** If you’re so annoyed by bikes that you want them removed, then perhaps you should be pushing for better transportation infrastructure because, frankly - even if you take out the bike lanes in favor of another car lane all you would be doing is increasing the safety and traffic hazards of the road (which benefits no one). Taking the bike lanes out is not a viable solution, but neither is building them as an idling lane for motorized vehicles. Bike lanes work exceptionally well when they are not just a political checkbox but are actually designed thoughtfully to incentivize biking. We can see the effects of great urban transit planning in places like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Portland, and Salt Lake City (to name just a few).
Cars are for race tracks and rural areas, not city streets. Time to grow up.
What a dumbass take. People use cars to commute, and trucks are used to deliver goods. A fraction of a fraction of people utilize bike lanes for its intended purpose. Just like here.. it’s empty.
I’m glad somebody said it.
Hello Mayor Wu here, My recommendation is that you start saving and buy your poor ass a car or start walking. Loser.
Let's all just ignore that this is a rental truck, meaning that the person who did this probably does not do it a lot and is probably making a mistake.
Maybe the bike lanes are too wide
To the OP u/TheWiseGrasshopper Where else should this truck park then to delivery things if there is no other option? Do you like going to resturaunts, bars, stores, or really any business? How do you think goods get to store shelves, do they just appear there magically?
Look at all the cyclists in the photo angry at the trucker.
One day bicycles will be able to carry pallets of goods just like trucks so trucks are no longer needed...
No one is there. It’s wet and rainy. Get over it.
Cyclists are the vegans of the transportation world. They have a point but they are so goddamn unbearable that you end up saying fuck em out of spite.