Politicians in the Bay Area want to remove bike lanes from the Richmond-San Rafael bridge because they are worried about traffic congestion.
Cyclists say removing these bike lanes will put them in danger.
https://richmondside.org/2025/08/05/richmond-san-rafael-bridge-bike-path-final-vote/
https://bikeeastbay.org/rsr2024-2/
During the public hearing, commissioner Karl Hasz was spotted driving his car
Probably driving in the bike lane
The bike lane is like 1/3rd the size of the car lane and has more people on it.
How does putting slow-moving bikes into traffic somehow fix congestion? Some dipshits are under the same impression in Canada, too… Like, have they all forgotten how much a single cyclist can fuck up traffic?
The solution is obviously that the bikers are to join the daily traffic jam in a car, instead of entirely skipping the queue like selfish bastards.
/s, for the satire-impaired.
They want to scare cyclists into not cycling at all
Did anyone call him out for this during the meeting?
There’s a public comment section, right? Straight up ask why he feels it’s appropriate be deciding matters of public saftey while actively endangering the public himself by distracted driving during this very meeting.
From my experience with a different fight in NYC, these people don’t give a shit. They have no shame, they only care about their golden kickbacks.
How do people not vote them out?
Quick, without googling, tell me your state level representative, and give me a summary of their votes on key issues.
Exactly. We can only deal with so many issues in a 24 hour period. With trump, there’s 47 new issues every day. Fraud overload. No way to respond to all the trash. We need the boondocks saints to just get rid of the bulk of the garbage and let’s see how the surviving trash changes almost overnight.
They’re backed by billionaires and landlords who will easily spend lots of money attacking their rivals if it means slightly lower taxes
If billionaires always could win unions wouldn’t exist.
Well they’re slowly fading away
Sadly not every fight has a union available, and unions have been heavily crippled by the US
Most people don’t pay much or any attention to local politics which makes advertising and incumbency very powerful. Most people literally just vote for the name they recognize from TV or mailers.
It would take a large increase in political consciousness to fix this.
Why are all the top level comments from people defending reckless driving?
you need to understand, that the murican car industry has made everything unreachable by walking and biking. its a total alien form of transport in newnaziland.
If you’ve ever driven through American cities, you’ll see that a high percentage of drivers aren’t really driving. They’re using their phone and tangentially feeding occasional input into their vehicles. Automakers keep adding Federally required “safety” features to cars like auto-brake and lane-departure correction, I’ve heard from some people they use those to make an ersatz “autopilot” and just let the car ping-pong down the road while they use their phones. Others, as soon as they *almost *come to a stop, the phone is already in their hand again and they’re paying zero attention to their surroundings, probably thinking they’re being a “smart” cell phone driver.
It is rare I see a USian driver actually operating their vehicle as their sole focus these days.
I’ve personally got in the habit of managing cars behind and in front of me with longer stopping distances and early brake flashing to get their attention off their phones and back on the road so I don’t become an SUV sandwich, and also a quick polite horn toot when the drivers in front don’t realize the light cycle has been green for 5 seconds because some other driver didn’t pull forward, because all of the front drivers are on their phones.
So, they probably feel like they have to defend their idiocy.
Based on this and a couple recent other threads I am becoming pretty convinced that more and more of the people on Lemmy are children.
Edit: I can admit that I was a dumbass who thought that I could do all the things while driving as a teenager. I am guessing the people downvoting me are either teenagers or people who don’t remember being teenagers.
I don’t know man, Lemmy seems to downvote people who make generalizing claims, period.
Your comment didn’t seem to ring with the community, that could be because they’re of the age group you’re citing as the group supportive of this shitty behavior (distracted driving), or it could be because the base of your stance didn’t root itself in examples they could identify with and so they downvoted an opinion they disagreed with.
I’d say the most likely reason people downvote is because they disagree, I wouldn’t have much knowledge on their age though so I won’t make claims on that part.
I think that’s part of the problem though. Downvoting isn’t for disagreeing it’s a vote that a comment detracts from the conversation as a whole.
I hear you and agree with that concept.
I think that, if your goal was ultimately to further the conversation (in it’s format, I don’t see anything wrong with what you initially wrote), adding examples of what you mean by recent interactions pointing towards the user base being more skewed towards teenagers. That might have deterred anyone who was unsure of whether you were being genuine or just bashing on the next generation the way we’ve seen historically.
Careless/reckless driving is entirely normalized in America. Think of the number of people you see speeding, rolling stop signs, blowing through pedestrian crosswalks, speeding up to make the yellow light and “accidentally” running the red. Think of all the people who chat on the phone, attend work meetings, watch videos, do their makeup, and eat entire meals while behind the wheel of a moving car. Think of all the people you’ve heard essentially bragging about how much they speed, who bemoan all the “slow” people on the road who are just going the posted speed limit, or who feel they’re being unfairly targeted when they get a speeding ticket for going ten-over.
Chances are if you’ve driven a car in America then you yourself are guilty of having done some of those things. I know I certainly am, though I’ve been intentional about taming my own hubris behind the wheel over recent years. But it’s hard to accept that what is normal to you is also wrong or dangerous. Especially in a survivor biased environment like reckless driving culture, where nothing bad generally happens to you until it does and then as people get more reckless the higher the chances are you won’t walk away from an accident. And so when you see a post online shaming people for something you do on your way to work every day, you get defensive because to you that’s just normal behavior.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not defending these people or their actions, just offering an explanation for OPs question. Still, I expect to get downvoted for the very reason I just articulated.
Is that even legal? Just holding your phone while driving can cost you a fine of €. 430 here.
No, it is not legal. This bike path is part of the Bay Trail, which was enacted by State legislation, and served as mitigation for environmental damage done by Caltrans highway work. The BCDC was specifically created by the legislature to ensure maximum feasible public access to the Bay. So voting to close the path violates any number of laws and policies.
As for driving while distracted by the phone…yeah that’s also illegal.
It’s probably on a hands free mount rolling at the camera angle.
However, it’s still illegal to have video playing within view of the driver, so he’s still breaking the law
It’s supposed to be mildly infuriating, but it actually made me laugh. Not because I like or agree with the idea, but just at the absurdity of it.
c/FuckCars
So what? Calls suddenly not allowed anymore?
Do you also watch Movies while driving? No hand interaction necessary. Just press play at the start of the ride.
Of course that’s illegal.
Driving distracted in a car of 1000 kg is a surefire way to cause an accident. It’s reckless and antisocial.
LOL
Because not only is he not giving the meeting the full attention that it deserves but also because he’s driving distracted and putting everyone on the road (like these cyclists) in danger.
As someone who constantly has calls on the highway, I cannot follow your arguments.
As someone who drives roughly double the average mileage per year, I don’t find this at all surprising. I see terrible drivers on the road all the time.
Same. And most of them do not have a phone call. So I don’t know what you’re trying to say.
It hasn’t been allowed since 2008. How old are you that 17 years is a sudden event to you?
It should be obvious to everyone that participating in a video call while driving is a dangerous activity
I don’t know where you live, but in most states of the US, hands free phone calls are allowed.
You’re conflating voice calls with video calls. I don’t think Video calls are legal while driving anywhere.
The aspect that makes it illegal is not if a camera is on or not, but if you actively control your phone with a hand. Using Siri? No problem. Video calls? Same. Texting? Big No No. And this makes total sense. I still struggle to understand what the big deal about this is. It is just based on wild assumptions (“he endangers cyclists” or “he is not paying attention”), no more no less. As if this shit was the biggest problem right now. How about you tell your government to not support Israel? Start with solving the real problems first.
Non-resident aggressively commenting on another country’s driving laws then shit talking foreign policy out of nowhere. Bold strategy, Cotton.
The fact is that a video call implies that your eyes are on the video. In this case while driving. Do you see how that’s problematic? Your argument is some weird whataboutism.
You obviously never had a video call while driving and you act like you always look at the road 100% of the time. Hypocrite doing hypocritical things I guess.
Car drivers in the last two years killed about 80,000 people in the US. That is of a similar scale to the murders in Gaza. So your point that this is unimportant is off base.
Imagine being so absolutely unhinged and saying shit like that. This is absolutely mental. Comparing a few car accidents with a genozide. No wonder you have a president like the current.
That bike lane is such an offensive waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure.
A handful of bike activists got a recreational lane that sees almost zero use, while every day thousands of people trying to get to work are stuck in traffic next to an empty lane.
It’s a well-known fallacy in urbanism that bike lanes “see almost zero use.” Bikes have much less visual weight than a car, so one driver in a lane will look like a lane being used while one bicyclist in a lane will look like the same lane being “half-used.” In addition, bike lanes are much more efficient at keeping travelers moving at a constant rate so that they don’t bunch up, meaning that a busy road with backed-up traffic will look like it’s getting more use than an adjacent bike lane, when what’s actually happening is that the bike lane is just moving travelers more efficiently.
Furthermore, the “induced demand” phenomenon means that adding capacity actually doesn’t reduce traffic, at least not in the long term. We have decades of data proving it. The amount of cars that the lane can accommodate will invariably be taken up by people taking that route who had previously taken a different route. The only way to reduce traffic for a given route is to either create more routes or remove traffic from the road. Bike lanes do both.
In reality, for most routes, if you compare the number of people being moved on the bike lane, you’ll often find that it equals or even exceeds the number of people being moved on the car lane immediately adjacent to it. More importantly, they also tend to reduce the number of drivers on the same route and nearby routes as they encourage travelers who would ordinarily be afraid of biking to ditch the car.
I can’t speak to that specific bike lane, of course, but in general the argument that “it’s not doing anything!” is a fallacy, and replacing the bike lane with a motor vehicle travel lane would almost certainly result in worse traffic, not better.
On one hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if this bike lane actually doesn’t get as much use, considering it’s across a 5 mile bridge, and neither end has a lot lot of destinations until you get further inland. There aren’t any 3 mile trips being replaced, and most cars are traveling farther (think Berkeley to Novato or Richmond to Santa Rosa).
On the other hand, there is no other cycling alternative to get between those places. The bridge is a freeway so bikes aren’t allowed in the car lanes (and weren’t allowed before the bike lanes). Sure there’s Golden Gate Transit route 580 with bike racks but it’s hourly, gets stuck in the car traffic (but even worse since it takes very congested exits), and you can’t take oddly shaped cargo bikes or trailers on it. So anyone who commuted by bike would be screwed.
I think that if public transport is using that road, the bus will still transport more people/day, but I’m a bit uncertain if much of public transport is available in this case, or pretty much anywhere in the US
There’s a bus service, but historically, there have been some very nimby reasons for why there’s no faster transit in and out of this region of the Bay Area.
TL;DR: having access to a light rail train would have meant less drivers paying tolls and the board owning the Golden Gate Bridge wouldn’t want that.
For more about this in SFGate. I know this doesn’t make the journey from Richmond to San Rafael shorter, but BART has been known to expand their services and it’d probably still be faster going around than waiting in a car.
I believe the Bay Area has pretty good transit, but I don’t know the specifics at this location. The bus is probably more theoretically efficient, but I would wonder about usage in this case. I believe it’s slightly too suburban for light rail.
I mean… the Bay Area has transit at least, but I don’t think you can call it good compared to places with actual transit.
America-good, not Europe-good.
There’s tons of people living up there who make the commute up and down. If Bart can go as far as Antioch, I don’t see why it can’t go there and has in the past, proposed going through Marin County.
More people commute through the bike lane than a single car lane. Congestion will get worse if you get your way. Are you sure you want that?
That car lane is such an offensive waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure.
Replace it AND the bike lane with a train that can carry 10x as many passengers at a time as both the car and bike lanes combined! Bonus, it can even fit bikes on it! No such luck for the cars though… too bad.
You should reconsider everything about your life that led you to typing all that stupid shit you just typed.
If their time is so valuable, maybe they should ride a bike instead of trapping themselves in traffic?
The average American commute is 41 miles round trip. I guarantee you that a large number of people stuck on that bridge every day have a much shorter commute, could ride a bike instead, and would actually spend less of their time commuting by doing so.
Those are the people you should be angry with because they’re the ones that are directly wasting your time with their frivolous driving trips. The more we get people riding bikes, the less problems those that are required to drive will experience.
Also, maybe if the average American car wasn’t a wasteful hulking behemoth there would be more room for more people on the roads. 🤷
That bridge is too long for bike commutes.
The bridge is 4.3 miles. Average riding speed for a 30-35 year old rider is 20.8 mph according to Strava data. Let’s say its 15mph instead.
That’s a 28 minute ride at below average speed; 20 minutes at average.
That is not too long, as clearly evidenced by the people that use the bike lane.
And that’s not factoring e-bikes. Class c e-bikes can go up to an assisted 28mph.
uh, i’m disabled. and not a little disabled. I could do that bridge on my trike in my sleep. respectfully, where are you coming from?
I rarely ride a bike or even exercise but 4 miles is still nothing. 🤣 Bike much?
If you can’t bike for 30 minutes you would really benefitting from getting some exercise. Biking to and from work would probably do wonders both for your physical and mental health.
I am sick and tired of your blatant fucking lies.
is that you mr commissar
You mean the 3ft wide lane you couldn’t fit a compact car in? Who’s going to drive in that lane? Brodizers? Mall crawlers?
No. The bike lane is full width and the proposal replaces with a full car lane.
Get educated before you try schooling others.
If america had better bike infrastructure everywhere there would be more people riding bikes. Maybe improving bike safety everywhere would increase the number of bikes.
You’re SO close to getting it!
The thought drivers are supposed to have when glancing over at that nice clear lane is: “Hm it might even be faster if I biked.”
Instead, you apparently think “we should throw that lane down the throat of car overload rather than allow anyone alternatives.”
It’s almost like for some reason, there’s mysteriously no fast public transit which easily could connect the north bay with the peninsula or the east bay and that’s why the traffic sucks ass.
Yes, so the proposal is to replace the unused bike lane with a bus lane.
Source?
Approximately 68 cyclist use the bridge per day (3 orders of magnitude fewer than cars. Perhaps if it were within 1 order, it would make a difference).
“Vast majority use it for exercise or recreation, not commuting” https://www.kqed.org/news/12017869/will-the-richmond-san-rafael-bridge-bike-lane-stay-its-still-uncertain
Pedestrian use is even lower https://www.kqed.org/news/12017869/will-the-richmond-san-rafael-bridge-bike-lane-stay-its-still-uncertain
So perhaps 5 cars are taken off the road, at most, vs 67,000 cars.
Thats really making a difference. Great use of resources.
How many years, at even a dozen cars per day, to amortize the carbon footprint of the concrete used, let alone the equipment (diesel fuel), steel, asphalt/macadam, etc?
This project was an environmental net negative, and will never become positive.
I’m all for such projects, but far too often the bigger picture isn’t considered, it’s just a feel-good. Let’s do what actually makes a difference, otherwise we’re making things worse.
MTC data has different numbers: https://reports.mysidewalk.com/3374a0ca74
Regardless, adding a lane won’t work. The bottleneck is the 101, so you just get extra lanes to stand still in. And the toll gate as well.
The lane was already there btw, but it was an emergency pullover lane. It didn’t cost a lot of carbon to turn it into a bike lane.
How is it that 68 cyclists are 5 cars?
If you want to talk bigger picture… they built a pedestrian/bike lane with zero access/amenities at either end (unlike the Bay Bridge). No staging area to load/unload your bike, no parking, no bathrooms, no water fountains. Good luck finding all-day parking on city streets in Pt. Richmond or… San Quentin.
Here are the directions: https://marinbike.org/news/getting-to-from-the-r-sr-bridge-pathway/
Once approaching/getting off the bridge, if commuting by bike, there is no direct connection to the Bay Trail. So anyone living in Marin and wanting to commute to, say, Berkeley or El Cerrito so they can get on BART (or even the Richmond Ferry) has to risk going through heavily industrial areas or dicey parts of Richmond. On the Marin side to/from Larkspur Landing, you had to ride unprotected on the shoulder of the freeway!
Only way to use it for commuters on either end would be to park and ride, but again, no parking and ride facilities. And there’s any wonder more people don’t use it? There’s wide open space at either end of the bridge to build staging areas, especially on the Richmond side right near the Toll Plaza, but nobody wants to make it easy. It’s such a gauntlet I’m amazed that many people use it.
The solution to traffic congestion is to make public transit and alternate forms of transportation more cost-effective, functional, and convenient. That includes offering easy transition/transfer points. It isn’t to open more driving lanes. They’ve known this since the days of Robert Moses in NYC, but keep doing it.
I am thankful for the article links, but how many edits are you at?
I live there.
Opinions don’t count.
You reject first hand experience because it conflicts with your political biases.
Please tell me o wise traveler, how us Bay Area residents should convert full freeway lanes into unused bike lanes.
No I reject it because sounds like every other time I’ve heard push back on bike lanes. My city is currently going through a similar fight and I have heard your argument several times with no backing information.
Your comment doesn’t pass the smell test.
What do I know, I only live there.
Your response to asking for a source was to claim expertise, not do what another commentor did and actually give sources that can be referenced.
Yours is an unvetted opinion.
See the difference? I have no ability to check your bias or info other than your post history. Not to mention it sound like an ad hominem.
I don’t understand the upset, cause he owns a car? Is that enough to make someone a bad person now?
No, it’s because he was in the video conference while driving showing that he was distracted and danger to pedestrians and cyclists.
If he’s doing to drive recklessly he has no business deciding any matters of road safety.So when mum calls to ask if we need milk, she’sa villain!
If she doesn’t call handsfree yeah
So when mum calls to ask if we need milk, she’sa villain!
It’s all about levels.
It’s entirely different to have a 30 second conversation about picking up milk compared to joining a work meeting.
Especially when that work meeting is a video call that is distracting the driver (they are looking at the phone in the picture).
There are definitely those that would ban all phone calls when driving.
I think you missed the mark.
Distracted driving is pretty irresponsible and dangerous.
Just this morning some guy blew through a stop sign and almost hit me. He had his cell phone in hand. Maybe he was on a meeting, too.
I’m a school bus driver. Last year I had a cop blow past me at 40 mph in the opposite direction when I was stopped with my red lights flashing and stop sign out, about to let off a large number of kids who cross the road at that stop. If I hadn’t kept the door closed, they probably would have been hit. I glanced down at the cop as he passed and he was driving with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right handing holding his phone - he never saw my bus at all.
We now have the external cameras that auto-ticket cars that pass us when our red flashers are on, but I wish to fuck we’d had them last year to catch this guy.
Would you tele conference from traffic? Do you think that’s a good idea? Why or why not?
Yes… let’s reschedule a public hearing because one person had a conflict? Maybe we could just adapt to people having lives and working?
Being on a video call while operating a motor vehicle is dangerous and should be illegal in any sane jurisdiction under distracted driving laws.
As long as it’s setup, how’s it different than talking to a passenger? It’s completely hands free at that point.
Considering the frame they caught him in he’s not looking at the road. Is it eyes free?
So can’t shoulder check or look at your passengers? Can’t adjust volume or other settings on your dash?Wrong thing to complain about lol. There’s hundreds of things that take your attention away from the road for a second or two that’s normally done while operating a vehicle already.
Those aren’t the same things and you should know that.
This isn’t taking your attention off the road for *a second or two as you say. This is the type of thing that splits your attention. And humans are terrible at multitasking at the level required for this.
Edit: *
As a driving instructor myself: you’re the person I warn my learners about 👍
A passenger is somewhat aware of the surroundings and might shut up to let the driver concentrate on traffic every now and then. A video call - especially with a group - probably can’t and won’t
It was scheduled. He could have taken measures, He could have parked for a while . This somehow is his job…
I do take calls in the car but when I need to focus on the call I either ask to call back or park. If I don’t need to focus that means the call isn’t important enough to keep it going for too long.
When you are driving your attention should be on the road not on the phone while a hearing about bike lane is going on
which is kind of funny wanting to remove a bike lane that help protect cyclist while driving dangerously
So can’t talk to passengers either then? It’s hands free once it’s setup, there’s nothing inherently wrong with what’s being done actually.
Ah yes, the classic “these things share one property so they share all properties” argument.
Blinking closes your eyes. You can safely drive and blink. Thus, you can drive safely with your eyes closed.
Wow, that’s a good one, I should remember to try next time I drive
But yeah, I ride a bicycle, so what do I know about safety anyway. So touching when people remove bike lanes to improve traffic, because they care <3
If when you talk all your attention is on the passenger like looking at them all the time and not the road then no you should not
video chatting with a screen visible to the driver? fk no. also his setup and use of it violates cvc 27602.
Every car now has screens visible to the driver
And that dumb af and proven to be bad for driving focus that why button are making a comeback ( slowly )
One person was in their car tele conferencing from FUCKING TRAFFIC you stripped and rounded nut.
Fantastic insult, if I’m being honest. Also, yes.
Unless the conflict was like “someone close to me is giving birth” tier, he could have scheduled better.
Your handle is definitely appropriate, troll.
