Quote:
Originally Posted by ArchAficionado
Take your logic and apply it to roads, and be appalled. Our system as a whole has been designed exclusively with cars in mind for the better part of a century. The point of these local bikeways isn't to inconvenience everybody else; rather, it's to lower the probablility that a driver kills a cyclist through a failure of design. If a non-commuter road now becomes non-viable for commuting as a result, so be it!
Many car-brained folks like yourself fail to realize that your default assumption is that the car reigns supreme. Where privelege is the standard, equality feels like oppression.
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Many cycling-addled people like yourself see the car as Public Enemy #1 and therefore believe anything done to make life worse for those users in favor of the tiny minority of cyclists is fair game. The truly unfortunate thing is that certain HRM staff and councillors have the same belief and are diverting millions in tax dollars towards a totally unrealistic and unreachable goal. We are not Amsterdam and never will be.
Given the explosion of growth in HRM, moving people around should be a priority and eliminating existing ways of doing that should never be an option. Adding ways, however, should be. I offer up one example: virtually every street in residential parts of the city except for a few newer suburbs has sidewalks on both sides that get very little use except for within the downtown. Use one of them exclusively for the handful of cyclists and leave everything else alone. Problem solved. The existing mindset within HRM (and yourself, apparently) that all drivers are bloodthirsty lunatics looking to kill cyclists is insane.
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