Ask Lemmy

It's not.

Riding on the same streets as cars is.

It isn't just America, UK if you have any news article about cycling you can guarantee someone in the comments will advocate for killing people.

So I strap a propane cylinder to the back of my bike. Mutually assured destruction.

They don't consume fossil fuels to operate. Can't have masses of people not enslaved to their car and its operations since that might hurt some big corporations bottom line.

I can't really answer for anything other than ebikes, but that's mostly because ebikes have attracted the same group of inconsiderate assholes that dirtbikes and quads in urban areas have attracted in the past. I'm sure there are plenty of people on ebikes that just ride them around as they're meant to, and I'm all for using them for replacing cars and stuff for commutes. But if you ask me what I think of them, the first things that come to mind are assholes riding them at high speeds in the dark with no lights, cutting through grass, trails and anything else in the parks in my city and nearly running people down. Or people whipping around corners on crowded sidewalks on them. Or delivery drivers running red lights on them and taking people out in crosswalks that had the right of way.

None of these things are the fault of ebikes themselves, but when a huge portion of the ridership that someone comes in contact with consist of either inconsiderate assholes or desperate people whose livelihoods are determined by inconsiderate assholes, it shouldn't be a shocker that it leads to an overall negative impression of people using them.

It just isn't practical to bike most places in the US. It's too spread out, and there aren't paths that bikes can take that they don't have to share with 3,000lb cars that will delete them if the driver makes a single mistake.

So biking is just a recreational thing some people do for cardio near their house.

Not Just Bikes just did a video about one guy who was a major influence for how bikes are perceived in the US.

It’s pretty long but the tl;dw is one weirdo lobbied hard to treat bikes like cars - “vehicular cycling” - and looked down on bike paths, comfortable seats, and not being a jerk.

Cyclist here. Didn't earn my license until the age of 28, when I moved to a city that had even shittier infrastructure for bikes.

If we are going to place blame where it is due, look no further than the engineer, John Forester. John Forester was a wannabe bike racer out in California that wanted bikes to be treated like cars because dip shit thought he was sonic; he wanted to go fast. His concern was that bikes would get relegated to sidewalks and paths where they couldn't go fast if bike infrastructure was implemented. He was against bike infrastructure during post war 1970's CA where lots of urban planning was happening.

When it comes to walking and bicycling, most state DOTs and most local DOTs wait until there is a demonstrated demand before implementing bike infrastructure. Meaning stuff doesn't get done until there's a worn path on the side of the road where people are walking, or — as dark and morbid as it sounds — enough people are killed crossing a multi-lane road that eventually action is warranted. Many cities like the city where I am from were incorporated in the late 1600's early 1700's, and no one was thinking about bike infrastructure then. Roads were built with horse carts in mind, which evolved into cars. For older cities making the changes is a major cost vs urban planning to include bikes when a city is new and being built.

Another key difference between the USA, and European/Asian nations that have better bike infrastructure, is the fact that the later believes in science. In the early 2000s, the city of Paris, France, started a major push to roll out bike infrastructure to encourage cycling because air pollution was such a huge problem. Between 2005 and 2024, levels of nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter — two of the most harmful pollutants to human health — have been slashed by 50% and 55%, respectively. Amsterdam and Copenhagen are other examples of cities that built out bike infrastructure to reduce reliance on cars. Despite the environmental benefits seen in the USA when traffic plummeted during covid, most state and local governments would rather pretend that air pollution caused by cars isn't that bad.

Then there is the whole, if you build it, they will come, mentality. Most people in the USA don't consider cycling viable because there is no infrastructure. It doesn't occur to them that riding a bike is even an option because the infrastructure isn't there. If the infrastructure were there, it might encourage more people to try cycling instead of driving. I work in a busy downtown area for my state government. The infrastructure for bikes here is god awful. There are just 3 roads in my entire town that have bike lanes, and they are often riddled with cars that have double parked in the downtown area. Once you get about 3 miles away from the downtown area, the bike lanes disappear from each road. My job has no protected locations for locking up bikes. I used to lock mine right to a tree outside of my job, and it was stolen. The ONLY reason why the guy was caught was because he stole from in front of a state government building and there were cameras everywhere. I bought a new bike, and an insane lock, and my bike was sabotaged in the new spot on street I found to park. (Someone cut small holes in my rear tire, to the point I couldn't identify there was a breach in the tire when I had a flat because the hole was so small. I'd eventually figure it out, buy a new tire, and kept riding. The last time my bike was sabotaged, the culprit used a knife to cut the rubber of the inner tube stem, which is something that can't be patched, and isn't obvious until you take it apart to look for the problem. Another police report resulting in camera footage being pulled once again showed there was a asshole vandalizing bikes when he couldn't steal them.)

Finally, shitty infrastructure will destroy your bike. The shoulders of the roads up here are littered with potholes worse than the street, like so bad when I hit one, it flipped me over the handlebars onto the pavement. When it's raining, you can't tell if a puddle is just a puddle or a massive pothole. I hit so hard it popped the tire AND bent my rim. Then there's all the glass, and random industrial waste in the shoulder too. It got so bad I started collecting the bolts, nuts, and other random pieces of metal in the road I mailed into our city's DOT with my complaint about the state of the roads. During a bad month, I might have 4 flats, that's almost $50 of new inner tubes, plus my time to make repairs.

Because our road systems are designed around cars. This means that it's dangerous and impeding when a cyclist shares the road. Unfortunately, we just keep building bigger roads and removing bike lanes. This just serves to make it more of a pain in the ass for literally everyone because bikers have to use the car lanes instead of just paving an extra 6 feet of road.

TL;DR america will pave every natural surface for traffic, but won't mark any sliver of it for bikes.

You can thank the vehicular cycling movement of the 1970s for selling the idea that bicycles should operate like cars on American roadways.

(To anyone at all interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading the linked article for more context. Or watching the Not Just Bikes video in Boomer Humor Doomergod's comment if that's more your speed.)

My guess is that the amount of sprawl in America is a big contributor. It means there's a higher barrier to biking, which in turn means that fewer people do it, which then means that there's less effort put into biking infrastructure (and the sprawl also directly makes building infrastructure more expensive), and so then the people who do bike have to be more intrusive on other traffic. So then there's tension between the drivers who end up inconvenienced by bikers, and bikers who feel threatened by drivers.

Our roads are designed around cars, it's very often extremely frustrating and unsafe to have to share the road with bikes.

As an example, most of my commute is along a 2 lane road (1 lane each direction) that's winding, poorly lit, and has almost no shoulder. The speed limit is 35mph, which isn't a speed most cyclists can keep up for very long if they can reach it at all.

If there's traffic coming the opposite direction, it's often difficult or impossible to pass that cyclist safely so very often I've been stuck driving 10 under the speed limit around a cyclist I can't get around.

And again, it's a windy, poorly lit road, coming around a corner it would be very easy to hit a cyclist if I wasn't being careful (which I am, but many are not)

To add insult to injury in my particular case, there's actually a very nice bike path that runs directly parallel to the road, you can actually see it from the road for much of its length, and there's lots of places to get on and off of it, it's paved, it's actually almost as wide as the road itself.

There's also the issue that a lot of them don't always follow the rules of the road, you see a lot of the lane-splitting, running red lights, etc.

And there's good reasons for some of that behavior, I've heard them, I don't disagree with them, but the fact of the matter is that it makes them unpredictable, which is the last thing you want to be on the road.

Some also ride at night without proper lights and reflectors, which is really a problem with some idiots and shouldn't be generalized to bikes in general, but some people are going to do that

There's also Americans' love of big SUVs with big blindspots that makes bikes harder to see when they're around you in traffic.

As for ebikes, I have a love-hate relationship with them.

They can keep up with traffic a lot better, which helps my first point a lot.

They've also gotten a lot of people out on bikes who wouldn't have otherwise, which is great, but it also means that a lot of those people are going from not having ridden a bike since they were like 10 years old to feeling bold enough to be out in traffic because their bike can keep up but never really learned how to coexist with traffic on a bike, so we're doubling down on the unpredictability.

There's also the issue that out of traffic, in spaces where e bikes coexist with pedestrians and regular bikes on trails and such they're often zooming around at unsafe speeds.

And there's the usual patchwork of laws and regulations from one state to another, and a lot of shady imported brands selling bikes that don't meet those regulations. A lot of the e bikes on the road around me are overpowered and too fast for what the laws allow. And people also let their kids ride them which also isn't allowed.

I'm all for more people riding bikes in general , but the current situation with infrastructure, regulations, enforcement, and education here make it a really unsafe and frustrating to share the road with bikes.

You really don't understand the depths of propaganda this country endures.

I blame lycra. It threatens men.

I have been commuting by bicycle in the US (Sioux Falls, SD and Chicago, IL) for thirty years, from age twelve to forty-two. It has never been a point of conflict with anyone in my life, law enforcement, or employers. I really don't know what you mean by "controversial" here; it doesn't match my experience.

I rarely bike at all.

Road bikers are usually assholes, probably because they have a chip on their shoulder about cars being impatient with them. Getting behind a road biker on a busy two-way street is really annoying.

I haven’t seen commuter cyclists get much crap but they’re probably pissed off at how motorists treat them.

Mountain bikers only hate e-bikers because they’re “cheating”, far as I can tell. Kids also ride e-bikes around here like morons and cause lots of accidents.

Anyway, most of the US just isn’t built to handle bikes and it causes tensions to flare, best as I can tell.

Ask GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil.

The only controversies I've seen regarding bikes I've seen as a city dwelling American, are bikes not following the rules of the road.

People get upset when bikes run red lights/stop signs, ride the wrong way on streets or paths, or go way too fast on shared pedestrian paths, especially if they don't have a bell or horn of some kind.

E bikes get hate because they allow people to do 25 to 40 mph on pedestrian paths (where the speed limit is half of that or less). Where I live, lane splitting for motorcyclists is not legal, but E bikes do it relatively frequently. Motorists are not expecting a tiny, silent vehicle to go flying past their door at 30 mph when they're stopped. And for some reason, most E bikes I've personally seen riding at night have no lights of any kind. I don't want to hit someone in my car, and I don't want to be hit by someone as a pedestrian, and it's a hell of a lot harder to prevent that when you can't see them.

I ride my bike on shared use paths and the street with lights and a bell. I follow the rules of the road, and I've never had any issues.

A lot of people hate anything that is different than what they prefer, especially if they believe it negatively impacts them in the slightest. They also really hate it when people point out they are wrong, and the thing they hate actually makes things better for them by reducing congestion or reducing their personal costs (single payer healthcare) if they don't feel like they have personal control over the situation.

These people tend to get into positions of power because they want control and trumpet their views which convinces some people who didn't even have an opinion in the first place. From there, repetition of blatant lies tends to sway the general population who don't have enough information to know better and who see a team they can root for.

People in general are selfish except in a crisis.

I commute on electric bike, literally work at a participation endurance sport company and have only gotten gentle teasing, no hate from the hardcore bikers. I tell them I literally hate riding a bike and that this one cost less than their racing bike, and I am comfortable on it, so use it for grocery shopping and stuff like that.

There is not enough infrastructure for bikes. I am careful and polite, if I have to take the sidewalk I get off and walk around pedestrians, walk it across intersections. If I'm in the road I wait for a big break in traffic or periodically get off the road so cars can pass (there is no bike lane going to work). I see bikers weaving through traffic and understand the frustration drivers have. And have had cars make illegal left turns almost into me and understand bikers being frustrated too.

i don't get it either. i prefer road bikes. I used to commute 14 miles a day in Seattle and I loved the hell out of it. Motorists are usually the worst kind of bike haters.

I didn't notice much hate from other types of cyclists but one of my friends in Portland Oregon would call me lame for needing two wheels. he would unicycle everywhere. even mt biking! he once won some crazy competition from a unicycle mud race!

Much of the US is not dense, so many people have to drive to get places. In my experience, most areas don’t have the infrastructure for cars + pedestrians + cyclists, let alone just cars + pedestrians. The few places that do intermingle all three do so in a way which is very overwhelming for drivers. Cyclists also tend to travel either too slow for cars to maneuver around or too fast for cars to notice them coming. Like motorcycles, their small size also makes them hard to notice or keep track of while driving, and they don’t make the volume of noise that motorcycles do which helps with noticing them.