“White Female Mamdani”?
Seattle mayor Katie Wilson added a BUS LANE.
Daily Mail is pure garbage.
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Please consider sharing achievements of Seattle mayor Katie Wilson rather than sharing the negativity and hateful propaganda of her critics.
Anytime you share a thing you hate online, you are doing free marketing for them.
You could instead ignore it and counterbalance with hope, optimism and successes.
While I agree with you in general, there wasn’t a single thing in that headline I consider negative. As far as I’m concerned, it was all complimentary.
(I know that was far from the author’s intentions, but that is genuinely what I think of it.)
I absolutely love this strategy and am 100% on board.
Daily Hate Mail
Daily Heil Fail
I assume she had this framed and mounted on her wall, I would.
Mamdani is living rent free in those dipshits head. What really hurts them is that its working.
Unfortunately, adding a bus lane does little when drivers fill it up anyways. Unless there’s strict enforcement (doubtful), it’ll just be another traffic lane
They are doing that crap where I live, taking away a car lane for a bike lane. I’ve seen 2 people use it in a two years, not kidding. It’s utter bullshit.
I think you’re in the wrong sub
Ah yes cuz adding more lanes totally gets rid of traffic Just one more lane man I gotta get just one more lane and ill be ok I swear
This is a common optical illusion with bike lanes. Bicycles are a lot smaller than cars and are 100x less likely to encounter traffic congestion, so bicycle traffic always looks much lighter than a similar number of cars.
The only way to be certain about traffic numbers is to do a traffic survey, where you actually go and count the traffic amount during rush hour.
Heres an example of a traffic counter where bicycle traffic looks a lot lighter than it actually is.
Also, even if a bike lane is underutilized, it is often a first step towards a proper bike network. Once a bike network reaches a critical mass, the traffic grows exponentially as people feel safe biking and new kinds of business is enabled by bicycle transport.
In countries like the Netherlands it is very rare to build a road WITHOUT a bike path, and I think that should be the standard. We should be asking why it didn’t have a bike lane when the road was first built.
That bike lane looks so cramped tho. Why not take both the bike lane and the pedestrian walkway and merge them into one wide bike+pedestrian road (still keeping it physically separate from the car lanes of course)? So much comfier, easier on the eyes, and you don’t have to make bike traffic one way so cyclists don’t have to cross the street just to go in the direction they need to. I’d feel so cramped cycling there, like how do I even pass people with any real speed without jumping onto the raised pedestrian bit? They could just swerve in front of me and there’s nowhere to go in the bike lane.
I’ll add an example from my country. Bikes and pedestrians have plenty of space and cars aren’t cramped either. There’s a marked pedestrian lane and bike lane, but since they’re not physically divided, it’s easy to temporarily use the pedestrian side for overtaking if necessary. This road in Montreal doesn’t really need the divider between car lanes since speeds there are likely to be quite low, that could be taken away to increase the width of the potential combined bike+pedestrian roads.
Because bikes are still vehicles, so it is safer for everyone for bikes and pedestrians to be separated.
The cyclist is going to be hurt just as much as the pedestrian if there’s a crash. Physical separation there makes it much more uncomfortable to use and an eyesore as well.
A single bike lane doesn’t do much to make an area more accessible to bicycles. Over time, with enough bike lanes and other bicycle friendly infrastructure, it makes a huge impact.
Our citys are designed very poorly. Our roads are designed very poorly. Our laws are designed very poorly. This all takes time to fix, especially when the people trying to fix things are fighting against the lawyers and lap dogs of multibillion dollar corporations.
I understand your frustration. You want better traffic flow and feel like this change made it worse. You are probably right in the short term, but on a macro scale, the only way to fix the problem is to rebuild from the ground up to make your area less car reliant. Less car use is better in pretty much every way.
That was a really hard to parse title
It was written for the people who get their news from Trump’s social media posts, so not surprising it reads in that style, at least to me.
Yeah that title was godawful
Feels like one of those “bad now, better later” changes—depends if it actually improves transit.
Bus lanes have higher throughput of commuters than car lanes.
If a mayor created a private lane only they could use between their house and work, that would be a crazy abuse of power. Or say, put in stop signs / lights right at their subdivision so traffic was more convenient for them in particular.
This mayor sped up the commute for thousands of people at a minimal impact to a significantly smaller number.
Bus lanes have higher throughput of commuters than car lanes.
To play devil’s advocate…
Bus lanes having higher throughput doesn’t imply that it’s always the right choice to replace car lanes with bus lanes.
If the road was a major bottleneck for cars and this change made it even narrower, it could hurt throughput for both cars and buses!
Cars should be illegal
There’s no devil advocate on that though. It’ll even clear up the congested area for emergency vehicles and keep pedestrians on that street safer. Either way it’s adding a bus lane, not restricting any car access.
How would it reduce throughput for busses?
Say that street A feeds into street B. Street A flows freely and is necessary for a different bus route. Street B is a bottleneck, both cars and buses pass through slowly.
If you remove a car lane from street B, the cars might back up into street A and impede both cars and buses that previously flowed freely through street A.
It’s a contrived example, but honestly I can think of a few places like this near me.
I realize now I shouldn’t have broached this topic in fuckcars 😂
I mean, all discussion is welcome. City planning is a complex topic.
English newspapers are all trash.
Not only the tabloids“Takes away lane of road from motorists” is a wild way to say “Created a bus lane”. These people need help.
The only people who ride the bus are people I hate with wide eyed, red-faced, frothing rage.
I hope this is a description of the inner machinizations of the outraged crowd in question… rather than you being the example.
Whoa, whoa. Chill. It’s just a bus.
Why are you screaming like hell, buddy?
I’m sorry, that’s just my instinctive response to the b-word.
“This doctor who has never had measles is vaccinating people!!1!”
Why do some people never understand that viable alternatives to cars make life better for drivers too.
Oh right, it’s because they don’t want to understand.
Car owners: “We can’t use that one lane now if it’s reserved for buses! This is bad! We want to use that lane!”
Random passers-by: “Well, if you want to use that lane so badly, why don’t you use a bus, then?”
Car owners: “We can’t! B-b-b-because…!” 😡Let me get my daily fail headline translator out real quick:
“Came under fire” == “somebody tweeted”
“Fury” == “a bot tweeted”
“Outrage” == “one of our staff tweeted”
“Slammed” == “somebody liked our tweet”
I’m trying so hard to read this title lol
I’m also enjoying that “mamdani” is the new “omg libarels”
That’s my mayor! On the campaign trail, she raced the eight (the bus she is adding a lane for) by walking while holding her child, and beat the bus to the end of its route. The bus lane is very needed, and she is cool as hell for delivering on her campaign promises.
If you can best a bus in a footrace, that bus route needs to be improved. As simple as that.
My rule of thumb is: taking a cycle should be slower than bus (when starting at the same time) but the waiting time should not make the bus slower.
Edited: wording
With all the stops, cycling is usually faster unless the route is uphill or you really don’t have a lot of stops and probably need more.
How far apart are you stops? It’ll they are too close, I can see this happen. ~5 minute walking?
Bus routes are not always straight, that may also contribute. But yeah, I think stops are 5–7 minutes by foot apart here
Maybe I’m just a dumbass, but I think your rule of thumb is busted?
X should be slower than A, but should not be faster than A + B.
Isn’t slower the same as “not faster”? I think it should be slower than A, but faster than A + B. So between A and A + B.
Or “the bus should be faster if it’s already here, but cycling should be faster if you’d have to wait for the bus”. I think that’s what you were going for.
Okay, I’m not the only one who was confused there for a sec
Yeah, almost. Cycling shouldn’t be much faster than having to wait. If it is, either the route has too many stops or a low frequency.
My average cycle speed at around 10 kmph (minimal effort, no hills, some red lights) and if a bus can’t match this…
Give it better signalling, dedicated lanes to skip traffic, etc.
My ‘can’t hold attention long enough to read all the words’ brain auto-converted it to
My rule of thumb is: taking a cycle should be slower than bus but should not be slower than waiting time + the ride.
which must be what they meant.
Its a good rule of thumb. I ride an hour in to work (on an e-scooter) because it is faster than that bus during rush hour. Outside of rush hour though, the bus beats me every time. It’d be cool if I could become mayor to add a bus lane for that route. And all the other routes that need it tbh.
My rule of thumb is that within a city, a bus (other than BRT) is likely roughly the same speed as a bike, assuming good bike routes.
If the bikes are stopping regularly because of red lights, that will obviously change.
if a bicycle is slower than a bus, then it is definitely slower than waiting+taking a bus
Think you got yourself mixed around there.
no?
counterpoint: cycling takes 10 minutes, bus takes 5 minutes, at this point cycling is slower than the bus. waiting for the bus takes 8 minutes, now cycling is faster than waiting + ride time
that makes sense and now that i reread it idk what i was thinking. sounds like a few people were confused though loll
Bike with parkin can and often should be faster start to destination than walking+bus+walking at least comzared to city buses, it’s different with buses who are allowed to go faster than 50 km/h
Some cities have abysmal frequencies. So you would be waiting for 20 minutes or more
I have done similar in my city (sans baby). I had like a 3 mile commute and while usually the bus would get a ahead of me before I got to work I had a thing where if I got to 2 miles in im not taking the bus for the last mile. That situation was not uncommon. I would stop and look behind so if it was close to two miles and I saw it I might still take it.
I have done something similar on Oxford Street.
I suspect this is not the same.
It was quite a popular race!
As someone commuting to the city from the Eastside (now taking the train every day), I was unfamiliar with the sad state of the 8 line before this post.
There’s a dedicated website: https://fixthel8.com/
I learned from that site that all-girl punk band Tacocat wrote a song called F. U. #8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRFlROqgFwo
Tacocat were great, but I’m pretty sure one of them is a dude. Sad the band is on indefinite hiatus last I heard.
Whoops… I saw a grainy promo photo and listened to the song and jumped to conclusions. Thanks for the correction!
Hell yeah.
We have a dedicated lane for our streetcar line here in KC and it is glorious.
My mayor too! She was the first politician that I canvassed for. I had a blast.
My biggest problem with busses is that they aren’t trolleys or trains. She should consider replacing the bus with trolleys and/or trains.
