alt.hn

1/11/2025 at 6:18:36 PM

Map of California roads for cyclers (1895)

 https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4361p.ct000092/?r=-0.628,0.425,1.749,0.902,0

by grajaganDev

1/11/2025 at 9:10:13 PM

If there's one thing to admire/observe about old advertisements or documents like this (aside from the cycling-specific content), it's how much in a previous age, people publicly put their names behind the content and claims. Company names, schedules, assertions of opinion/fact, signed with someone's actual name.

Not like some website where you hardly know what the name is supposed to mean, or who in virtual land you're submitting information and payment to.

by supernova87a

1/12/2025 at 6:17:53 AM

> Not like some website where you hardly know what the name is supposed to mean, or who in virtual land you're submitting information and payment to.

The last 100 years are known by the state of California to cause cancer and you will be sued.

Limiting liability is surely behind the change you describes

by lostlogin

1/12/2025 at 4:00:49 AM

I always like old maps for reminding us of the places that they thought were important, or would be important, back then, but are minor or forgotten today. For example note the prominent lettering of the town of Colusa and compare with the tiny lettering for Chico, now 20x larger than Colusa. Bodie is noted, but today it's completely abandoned.

Also I want to point out that the notion of riding from Coalinga (then: Alcalde) to Panoche (then: San Benito) via New Idria, on a bicycle, is lunacy. It's a major workout on a modern dirtbike with modern roads. I can't imagine that was a reasonable bicycle ride in 1895, or that anyone had a reason to undertake it from and to these unimportant sites. Must have been different back then.

by jeffbee

1/12/2025 at 11:54:34 AM

The bikes and roads would have been worse than now (e.g. the bikes would have been single speed) but on the other hand in 1895 it seems like the first car hadn't been sold commercially in the US so I feel like the lack of car traffic might have somewhat offset that in the overall experience, and since people do all sorts of crazy rides now I don't think it's that surprising that they were doing it then too.

I bet a fair amount of modern cyclists would be willing to ride an 1895 bike on 1895 roads if it meant zero cars.

by resoluteteeth

1/12/2025 at 7:16:06 AM

The bicycle was an amazing revolution in travel that we(or at least I) don't really acknowledge. A relatively affordable machine(both in initial and maintenance costs) compared to a horse. but it makes you 10 times more efficient when you need to go somewhere. The bicycle was amazingly popular for good reason in the late 1800's. Sort of eclipsed by personal motor vehicles just a few years later however.

by somat

1/13/2025 at 1:37:30 PM

And probably for the same reasons people don’t like bike commuting today when they have a car. The engine obviates topology for you. That is the big difference maker. Throw all the bike lanes on the road you want and if you have some ugly elevation on your a-b, its going to be basically unbikeable unless you give up and walk the bike or are in amazing cycling shape. A hill need not be too big for this either, a false flat can be brutal enough especially coupled with a headwind rolling down that flat.

by kjkjadksj

1/13/2025 at 2:29:20 PM

This is why the electric bicycle is so popular.

by jeffbee

1/13/2025 at 8:29:05 PM

Not without its tradeoffs either. Cost. Lack of good manufacturers and oems or really very many ebike stores. Lack of serviceability of the ebike specific components. The bike specific components generally crap. 2-3x the weight of a human powered bike. Heavier tires that are more annoying to deal with in every metric. Nonzero risk of batteries exploding. Uncertain water resistance ratings. Arguably higher risk of theft.

Plenty of people do tool around on ebikes in socal. But it is a lot fewer people than I might have guessed would be doing it today if you asked me 5 years ago. Not even all that many people rent the scooters anymore.

by kjkjadksj

1/13/2025 at 9:42:44 PM

Careful there. I think some of your axes are down to the nub. Maybe all those drawbacks exist to an extent but the market is speaking and ebikes are very popular.

by jeffbee

1/12/2025 at 6:49:24 AM

Bodie mentioned! It's an inhospitable ghost town that will make you appreciate modern conveniences. Hot summer days plunge into freezing cold at night. The sheer danger the stamp mill held for residents is wild to read about. Definitely worth checking out for those heading to Mammoth outside winter (I think the dirt roads close for the snow).

by lelandfe

1/12/2025 at 12:33:38 PM

Bodie is an amazing place. I don't think it ever closes, it just becomes unreachable by car. You can ski or snowshoe in, and the park is even staffed in the winter by people who live there and have snowmobiles.

by jeffbee

1/12/2025 at 6:27:32 AM

It was a different world. You had to walk, ride a horse, take a carriage or take a train. If the train wasn't available, all of the alternatives were probably just slower than riding a bike.

by Panzer04

1/12/2025 at 7:00:33 AM

Point of interest: the infamous tulare lake.

A massive[note 1] lake that does not exist any more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake

And not on this map(for two reasons), the salton sea, a massive lake that did not exist yet. the other reason it is not on this map, besides not existing yet, is the map does not cover that corner of the state.

1. in surface area, not volume, my understanding is it was really a sort of deep swamp.

by somat

1/12/2025 at 3:30:41 PM

If you're in for a weird documentary, watch Plagues and Pleasure On the Salton Sea.

It's amazing.

by Loughla

1/13/2025 at 4:33:10 PM

The lake existed as recently as 2023…

by trillic

1/11/2025 at 10:12:15 PM

Interesting, I wonder what the red lettering (PH, FR, PL etc) beside the red tracks indicate ? I wonder if it is some indication of the nature of the road.

by glaucon

1/11/2025 at 10:31:53 PM

There's a legend in the upper right of the map. good/fair/poor/very-poor level/rolling/hilly/mountainous

by bryanlarsen

1/12/2025 at 12:44:06 AM

Ha, thank you. I was on my phone and had zoomed in so I missed the legend.

by glaucon

1/12/2025 at 1:41:55 PM

One thing I find interesting in the labels of place names here, that I've also found in similarly old Bay Area content: Spanish names written in English where there seems to be confusion between "o" and "a", especially at the end of the word.

Examples I see here: San "Gregoria" (for Gregorio), San "Ignocia" (for Ignacio).

Some I've seen in another source, but not this map, were "Sausalita" (Sausalito), "Colmo" (Colma).

This reminds me of how older Americans born around the early 20th century, including one of my late grandparents, but also people in old movies, used to pronounce words like window ("winda"), tomato ("tomata"). Hearing "San Francisca" or "Sausalita" in those dated accents is totally not far off.

by asveikau

1/12/2025 at 4:26:22 AM

California and the Bay Area in particular has pretty much always been the best place in the U.S., and one of the best places in the world, for cycling. If you're not riding a bike regularly you're really missing out.

by femiagbabiaka

1/12/2025 at 4:16:41 PM

Davis is traditionally far better than the Bay. Better infrastructure earlier, and much flatter.

by BobaFloutist

1/12/2025 at 5:03:19 PM

Davis is one city I thought? SF/Daly City are the only places with unavoidable hills in my experience.

by femiagbabiaka

1/12/2025 at 8:33:33 AM

Always carry a patch kit. Puncturevine is everywhere. I got so tired of fixing flats that I bought kevlar-lined tires, installed kevlar armor under that, and used pre-slimed innertubes. The added rolling resistance on a heavy steel-framed Miyata was a workout, but flats went to zero. It's the bike I also used at UC Davis.

by magic_smoke_ee

1/11/2025 at 10:21:15 PM

This is beautiful. Thank you for sharing. Especially the border artwork–the level of detail in some of the sketches, the choice to use plants to tie in the advertisements together. Definitely from a different era.

by ChiefNotAClue

1/12/2025 at 7:35:45 AM

I found this map a few years ago and had it printed online on canvas, to hang on my wall near my bike area, I recommend doing this with other old maps as well.

by nvrmnd

1/12/2025 at 2:40:34 AM

"It's a beauty there's no mistake the Barnes are white fellows?"

What??

by mp05

1/12/2025 at 5:51:30 AM

It's advertising referencing the Cooper Cycle Company City Agents who ride White Flyers which are a type of Barnes Special bicycle and which evidently were painted white back in the day.

The Cooper Cycle Company advert is centered below the map in the margin.

The Union Crackajack was evidently a Union bicycle for real "Crackajacks" or a riding group by that name and they chose to ride the "Barnes Special" which evidently was painted white as noted in the other advert and according to the description was well-made for the time period in that welds at frame joints were ground down so there were no obvious seams at the connections. It apparently was a quality product.

It looks like several of the bicycle ads reference specific colors for the brand they advertise so that may have been a distinctive maker mark from back in the day.

For example moving around the margin from UL corner - Fenton bicycle described as Blue Crown (maybe a trademark); along UR margin - March-Davis Cycle Company was the "Speedy Pink and Blue"; LR margin and LC both mentioning the Barnes Special; and I suspect that the left margin advert for National and Deere Implement Company bicycles were distinctively colored.

Just my guess.

EDIT: As a matter of fact I found a 1900 Barnes "White Flyer" Cushion Frame bicycle [0] listing in a UK museum site.

That description supports my guess that each manufacturer used color to distinguish their products from the competition. I got lucky.

Here's a little more history of a bicycle racer, Eddie "Cannon" Bald, who rode a Barnes Special and an example of the bicycle. [1]

There's also an eBay listing for a Barnes "White Flyer" frame [2] that is not cheap.

And finally, someone really knows their Barnes bikes and has a great example. [3]

[0] https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/1900-barnes-the-white-flye...

[1] https://thecabe.com/forum/threads/barnes-white-flyer-special...

[2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/163237177987

[3] https://thecabe.com/forum/threads/barnes-white-flyer-special...

by doodlebugging

1/12/2025 at 8:30:00 AM

The population of San Jose in 1895 was around 20k. I'm imagining bicycling on deep-rutted wagon road passes along the foothills, but full of puncturevine. Good luck going 1 mile without getting a flat.

by magic_smoke_ee

1/11/2025 at 10:55:44 PM

Can someone please explain to me why we chose to treat one mode of transportation as the most privileged?

- Pedestrians are expected to yield to cyclists (de facto)

- Motorists are expected to yield to cyclists

- Cyclists can choose to bike at a slow pace on a busy highway, taking up the whole lane (motorists will be cited for impeding traffic)

- They are allowed to bike on the road at night with barely any visibility aids

- They aren't required to have liability insurance or pass any traffic exams

- The police is very lax about enforcing traffic laws for them

I am all for a good bike ride in the mountains, where there is no traffic, but surely the way we treat cyclists is unreasonable?

by freed0mdox

1/11/2025 at 11:10:53 PM

In the United States we do treat one form of transport as the most privileged, the automobile.

We force places of business to build parking, forcing lower density, and higher cost to business. We build many neighborhoods without sidewalks at all, and with no bike access, forcing pedestrians and cyclists out of dedicated lanes and into traffic where they need to contend with multi ton SUVs. We do not penalize against designing vehicles with extremely poor visibility and excessive height, which directly translates to fatalities of those not in an armored shell on the roadway.

I would strongly encourage you to read more about building our cities and towns not directly around the automobile. We need to build around people, and bikes, and not strictly around the car.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

by fooblaster

1/11/2025 at 11:14:09 PM

Can someone please explain to me why we chose to treat one mode of transportation as the most privileged?

- Motorists are provided with massive road construction subsidies

- Motorists are provided with government-mandated parking spaces

- When a motorist hits and kills a cyclist or pedestrian, punishments are usually laxer than for other forms of manslaughter

- Public spaces and shopping areas are designed with motorists in mind

- Zoning layout of cities and suburbs presumes car ownership

- Environmental costs of driving are paid by society at large

I am all for a good drive at NASCAR, but surely the way we treat motorists is unreasonable?

by Metacelsus

1/11/2025 at 11:53:19 PM

Not at all, try to support the US economy on a bicycle? Without zoning laws and motoring infrastructure you will have a city of Florence, walkable - sure, but you are in a crowd of cars, pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, etc.

by freed0mdox

1/12/2025 at 7:52:15 AM

Careful because if you don't build lots of roads you might end up with one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

by ascorbic

1/12/2025 at 12:22:41 AM

Is Florence terrible?

by dima55

1/12/2025 at 12:37:57 AM

Depends on if you enjoy being on time.

by freed0mdox

1/12/2025 at 2:19:19 PM

It's easier being on time in a walkable city, because the number of pedestrians and cyclists required to cause 'traffic' is extreme.

(I assume you mean Florence/Firenze in Italy, if there's an American city called Florence known for its lack of cars I'm unaware of it.)

by Symbiote

1/12/2025 at 1:02:36 AM

Would you rather live in Phoenix, or something?

by dima55

1/12/2025 at 1:23:12 AM

Why, do cyclists in Phoenix don't run red lights and yield to pedestrians?

by freed0mdox

1/12/2025 at 4:20:47 PM

In many locales, bikes are legally allowed to run red lights, if there’s no cross traffic coming. Bikes do have to yield to pedestrians, I’m not sure why you think otherwise.

by dahart

1/12/2025 at 2:23:08 AM

Wow. Way to not even recognize how you personally benefit from road subsidies. I assume you buy groceries at a grocery store, for example.

by CodeWriter23

1/11/2025 at 11:38:07 PM

Well said!

by fooblaster

1/11/2025 at 11:18:33 PM

What an odd perspective. Bicycles and Automobiles are treated the same in the law. They have the same rights and obligations. Please provide a citation that says that a car has to yield to a bicycle. They are peers. Cars have to follow the same rules that bicycles do when they choose to be on the public roads. There are some commonsense laws that allow bicycles to ride on the shoulder of a road to allow traffic to flow better. I have seen bicyclists be cited for traffic violations on multiple occasions. I've seen automobiles not be cited for violations many more times.

by doug_durham

1/11/2025 at 11:55:33 PM

Just the fact you don't need liability insurance and a passage of traffic laws examination to ride a bicycle on any road except a freeway contradicts the core of your statement.

by freed0mdox

1/12/2025 at 12:34:00 AM

I think insurance and licensing is about the risks and the government stepping in to make things more safe for society. Bikes just don’t carry very much risk to others. Of course, it’s possible a bike can crash into a pedestrian and critically injure, kill etc or cause some property damage buts just rare and going to cause minimal damage. When was the last time you heard a bike causing $1000s in property damage? I have literally never seen it happen and I’m pretty active in the biking community. When you drive around a multi ton piece of steel with the capability to kill scores within seconds, millions of dollars in property damage to others etc, there needs to be some rules. Honestly I think it’s too easy in the US to get a drivers license and the new e-bike laws are overkill. Yes cyclists break traffic laws, but the implications are minor to others (they are mostly risking their own lives). If you feel like it’s unfair, you can always ride a bike!

by r0m4n0

1/12/2025 at 1:16:29 AM

A cyclist can easily cause 1000s in damage by causing an accident with a vehicle, or simply by hitting a pedestrian. Mending a scratch is expensive even for cheap cars. An ER visit, even for a simple fall, can result in a hefty bill.

Since cyclist don't carry liability insurance, they likely have to be personally sued in court for damages, with all associated costs to both parties.

Are you claiming this is a fair responsibilities and risk distribution? How is it appropriate to "risk your own life" by breaking traffic laws on a public road?

by freed0mdox

1/12/2025 at 2:20:01 AM

I kinda agree with what you are saying on damage. It just doesn’t happen so it’s not really a problem anyone cares about. Cyclists don’t regularly cause $10000s in damage. If they hurt themselves, you use your own health insurance. On the other hand, my friend who was mowed down on his bike sharing the road was killed when someone had the sun in their eyes. That woman’s insurance had to pay hundreds of thousands in medical bills and damages. The same with my great aunt, killed in front of her house by a car. The same for my best friend who was killed in elementary school crossing a road. I think that’s 100x more common than the other way around.

Traffic laws are in place to ensure each other’s safety and also reasonably get folks places. Cars are an extreme risk to peds and cyclists, not the other way around so yes, they have more rules and must follow them more strictly. My 3 year old toddler on her trike doesn’t need a license to ride down our neighborhood street because she isn’t risking anyone’s life but her own.

by r0m4n0

1/12/2025 at 3:19:53 AM

Thank you for engaging in an argument rather than just feeling attacked.

Cycling accidents definitely happen, and they’ve become a lucrative industry. Just look up "bicycle injury attorney" and you will see tons of ads claiming that they "have recovered over 50 million for bicycle injury clients". The market here speaks for itself. Of course, a reasonable person doesn’t set out expecting to mow down a cyclist, but accidents happen despite the traffic laws designed to ensure everyone’s safety, and, to follow your example, a 3 y/o toddler doesn’t need a license to ride her trike down the street, but there’s nothing in the law, aside from common sense, stopping the child from continuing down the street and joining a major highway. At least "a multi-ton piece of steel" is visible and moves at the speed of traffic.

What I don't understand, why is it accepted, that both pedestrians and motorists should "watch out for cyclists", yet there is absolutely no campaigns for cyclists to watch out for cars and pedestrians and to follow the law. The easiest solution, imho, is to make the requirements equal for all - if someone wants to use a public road, they should be licensed and insured.

by freed0mdox

1/12/2025 at 4:26:39 AM

Okay, I searched. Nearly all of these attorneys are for when you have been injured, on a bike, by a car.

Because that's what happens a lot. Cars are deadly.

by rpearl

1/12/2025 at 4:51:29 AM

Why do cyclists need an injury attorney when motorists have insurance? Why are there so many attorneys offering this service? High demand? Is it because personal injury law is a well paying grift? Would any of these attorneys represent a driver if it was a cyclist fault? Much harder to collect from a private person than from insurance.

by freed0mdox

1/12/2025 at 12:47:33 PM

You either discovered a massive unreported cause of harm to our society or you are fitting a narrative you have in your mind.

The anger against cyclists is so weird to me. Like I can relate to seeing a cyclist taking up a whole lane on highway 1 somewhere they shouldn’t be riding and me thinking, this is ridiculous, they shouldn’t be risking their own life and slowing everyone down like this (and feeling some anger). But I have only encountered this a few times and even then, it’s just a minor inconvenience… Most cyclists ride relatively responsibly through city areas and are a net positive on the community, environment, parking, traffic, city budget, etc. Look at some data instead of coming up with some narrative in your head based upon some immediate emotion.

This negative sentiment towards cyclists is real, I see it on Facebook all the time and at first I thought it was a joke. Maybe they should add a few questions to the drivers test

by r0m4n0

1/12/2025 at 5:28:50 AM

Insurance does whatever it can to avoid paying and having an attorney represent you is almost a matter of course.

But please continue theorizing that this zero effort google search you went in to knowing nothing about is instead evidence for a world in which there is a large market for attorneys forcing payment by cyclists causing significant damages.

Next, have your last word because this conversation appears completely disingenuous and I will not be continuing it.

by rpearl

1/12/2025 at 4:39:15 PM

> Why I don’t understand, why is it accepted, that both pedestrians and motorists should “watch out for cyclists”, yet there is absolutely no campaigns for cyclists to watch out for cars and pedestrians and to follow the law.

There are several reasons:

First, your assertion is simply not true. There are campaigns to educate cyclists, and markings for them to yield. I’ve seen them first-hand in multiple US cities.

Second, there are far far fewer cyclists than cars, therefore you need to expect there to be proportional spending. More education for drivers mirrors the (many) more drivers.

Third, cars are heavier and faster by a huge factor. Cars cause far more deaths in practice than bikes. There is a much much bigger problem with cars than there is with bikes. Over 40000 people die in the US in car crashes. As far as I can tell, fewer than 10 pedestrians die from being hit by a cyclist. The number of minor injuries of pedestrians caused by cyclists is dwarfed by the number of cyclists or pedestrians kills by cars.

https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-myth-of-th...

Cars require way more education because they’re way more dangerous. As a cyclist, if I hit a car, I die. If a car hits me, I die. It seems really weird that your arguments are ignoring basic facts of physics and ignoring the realities and statistics of accidents and fatality rates.

by dahart

1/12/2025 at 2:35:28 AM

There’s also ~100x more miles driven than biked. Bikes riders do cause a significant number of major medical incidents per mile and even some fatalities, but it simply doesn’t get much attention.

by Retric

1/12/2025 at 6:32:09 AM

And how many of these accidents are damage to others?

The vast majority of serious bike accidents would cause damage only to the rider, I would guess. It's just not worth regulating or mandating anything.

by Panzer04

1/12/2025 at 1:22:46 PM

Actually both are a problem. We got reflectors + bike helmet laws, and little else.

At a minimum any vehicle going 15+ MPH should be making enough noise to get people’s attention.

Personally I’d like to see insurance and licensing requirements on any e-bike with more than 50w of assistance. Because constantly going moderately faster means dramatically more danger as KE = V^2. So going a little bit faster and slightly less in control can be a lot more dangerous to others.

by Retric

1/13/2025 at 2:53:06 AM

Ultimately, anything is better than driving around in a 2T vehicle. Making it harder to ride bikes increases the barrier to entry and hence discourages their use - and the alternative all too often is a car.

Cars are so much more likely to kill people that I think you'd increase road casualties by making the alternatives harder to use. Yes, an ebike is faster, heavier and less safe than a conventional bike. No, an ebike is nowhere near as dangerous as a car, and in general I don't think they should be regulated. The current thresholds most places are setting (250W/25kph or thereabouts) are plenty conservative anyway.

Tangentially, this is why it's also good to give bikes their own space. They are not pedestrians, and they shouldn't be mixing with pedestrian traffic. That's why they're on the road. They act more like a car than a pedestrian.

by Panzer04

1/13/2025 at 3:46:03 AM

> give bikes their own space

In a 2D layout there’s going to be an intersection between pedestrians, bikes, and buses etc.

> anything is better than driving around in a 2T vehicle

While your gut feeling is that discouraging use is harmful the statistics are more questionable.

In the US, statistically E-bikes are roughly as dangerous as cars on a per mile basis. It’s got almost nothing to do with the bikes themselves and is almost totally related to the infrastructure and how people use them. The rates people on bikes ignore basic traffic safety and do things like speeding between stopped cars and then going through a red light is insane. Further, they are directly used around pedestrians with little concern for people’s safety.

PS: There’s lots of ways to slice these numbers, but we don’t actually know the exact numbers for miles biked per year.

by Retric

1/13/2025 at 7:09:38 AM

I don't have evidence to back my claims, but it seems disingenuous to compare ebike and car miles. ebikes are predominantly used in busy areas with lots of other traffic, cars will rack up a ton of miles on highways with much reduced per-accident risk (albeit the accidents are probably more severe in that environment)

If we're going to talk anecdotally, I think we need to read between the lines. Many locations in the US don't have good support for bike riders beyond telling them to ride on the road. This is going to encourage/force many to ride (unsafely) on the footpath because they don't want to share space with cars, and thus into conflict with pedestrians.

I'd like to see a breakdown of ebike accidents between them and pedestrians vs them and cars. I would bet that the vast majority of accidents are into (or from) cars. Almost all of the fatal accidents are almost certainly from accidents with cars as well.

You could try regulating them, but that's not going to fix the core issue that in many places they are expected to share space with cars, and cars are just plain more dangerous than everything else.

Also, I will point out that even if bike riders are supposedly less law-abiding (maybe, I don't know), the consequences are almost entirely isolated to themselves for doing so. They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else. The same is not true for heavy motor vehicles.

by Panzer04

1/13/2025 at 11:18:40 AM

With cars there’s more fatalities per mile in rural areas than urban ones. For pedestrians being killed that flips but not by a huge degree.

It seems counterintuitive that despite being human car interactions being vastly more common in urban areas you see so many rural fatalities but accidents occur in unusual situations.

> They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else.

There’s nuance here. They are more likely to injure a pedestrians in a bike pedestrian crash. However cyclists will be more likely to die because they end up in traffic after an accident.

Old people just don’t handle falls well.

by Retric

1/13/2025 at 8:19:29 PM

Huh, interesting. I guess there's probably more accidents in urban areas, but thanks to lower speeds fewer fatalities.

I don't quite follow the second point - my presumption is that the chance of a bike hurting a pedestrian is lower than a car doing the same, and the chance of causing a fatality is, in general, reasonably low compared to getting hit by a car.

Stats would probably be hard to gather - there's probably quite a few bikes hitting pedestrians, but in all likelyhood many incidents go unreported if no one is injured.

by Panzer04

1/14/2025 at 12:18:50 AM

A single bike accidents is less likely to cause serious injuries but statistically that’s offset by vastly more collisions.

IE the number of serious accidents depends on the number of accidents times the risk of each individual accident and bikes are far less segregated from pedestrians than cars.

by Retric

1/12/2025 at 4:50:15 PM

I was hit by a driver while having the right of way on a bicycle. New York has mandatory personal injury protection of $50K. Because the insurance companies don't want to fulfill their mandated obligations, there was an attempt to secure my own car insurance as the primary coverage despite not being applicable under the law.

In the end I burned through the whole $50K in medical expenses without having to pay for for somebody else's screwup out of pocket. Despite being clearly at fault, the driver was not held accountable due to systemic bias against bicyclists even when we obey the law.

by kevin_thibedeau

1/12/2025 at 12:09:15 PM

Before cars, we did not need things like registration, insurance, traffic signals, speed limits, complicated traffic rules, or even sidewalks for pedestrians or cyclists.

All these things needed to be created solely because cars are extremely dangerous machinery, like forklifts.

Saying that cyclists should need liability insurance because drivers need liability insurance is like saying that it's unfair that people who lift boxes by hand don't need licenses when people who operate forklifts do.

It isn't required because bicycles simply aren't anywhere near as dangerous to people other than the person riding them as cars and the conditions that necessitates these requirements being created for cars don't exist for bikes in the first place.

by resoluteteeth

1/12/2025 at 2:32:13 PM

Almost all of this also applies to pedestrians, and I expect you'd feel it would be a significant restriction on personal freedom if one had to be licenced, carry liability insurance and so on to walk somewhere.

In Denmark (where I live) pedestrians and cyclists will generally yield to each other according to circumstances. Almost everyone knows what it's like to ride a bike, and that it's easy (no extra effort) to pause for 1 second while walking to allow a bike to pass, which can save the cyclist having to stop and restart.

by Symbiote

1/11/2025 at 11:08:16 PM

A lot of cyclist rules are designed around kids.

Thus zero licensing requirements etc.

by Retric

1/11/2025 at 11:57:10 PM

that actually explains it well

by freed0mdox