A “bike platform” that temporarily swaps one car parking space for ten bicycles

A set of stem, handlebar and brifters should come off with an allen key and a snip of the brake and gear cables, and would cost over $300 new even for a modest road bike. OTOH the scene for used parts is tiny around here, so a high risk of getting caught unless selling abroad.

* Cyclists have not heard of it and keep getting insulted daily for behaviors allowed by this experiment * Motorist had the typical knee-jerk reaction along the lines of "This is crazy! Cyclists are madmen! Actual dangers to pedestrians and to themselves, ..." yadda yadda

Of course I don't assume that every cyclist I talked with is respectful of the actual crossroads where this is enforced so my little biased survey is worth nothing.

But I guess if it's not backed up with proper propaganda this kind of new road rules are doomed to create new tensions between cyclists and motorist.

Or just give cyclists proper protected bike lanes, like there have in the Netherlands. But I kind of have lost hope on the French Government and Community Governments for that.

I know that voters are generally a pretty toxic cocktail of stupid and self-interested[1], but what I was describing is that IME pro-car issues tend to be a whole nother level, where the fig leaf of pretending to care about the tradeoffs of the costs to society of one's actions is entirely dropped.

> Public transit is viable when your cities look like New York or Chicago. You put a little train station in a walkable/bikeable suburb, and then put all the jobs downtown. Most post-WWII cities don’t look anything like that. In those cities, it’s entirely rational to cater primarily to cars, because most people couldn’t use public transit and biking even if they wanted to.

Absolutely agree that cars have an important place in any transportation system; I'm not some pro-transit zealot that wants to ban cars and make everyone in the suburbs take buses[2].

But if you've paid any attention to any transportation policy discussions anywhere in the country, it'd be clear that that's not what I'm talking about: the fetish for cars rears its head all along the spectrum of density, including in the densest, most transit-suited parts of the country. We're a million miles away from a level-headed analysis of the costs, benefits, and feasibility of different transportation systems, and that's largely driven by the collective idiocy/selfishness of pro-car voters. Look at any transpo discussion in public or in private, and the status quo bias means that people systematically downplay and ignore the costs of car- and parking-centric policy while systematically exaggerating those of transit, bike lanes etc. (this isn't even close to balanced out by the horrific mismanagement of our big transit project boondoggles).

[1] To be clear, self-interest is a normal and important part of democratic decision-making; what I'm describing here is the subjective point past which we as a society consider the damage done to society from individual self-interest to be unusually selfish.

[2] though you're mistaken about the binary of requiring high density for transit to be useful: the Northeast is a perfect example of lower levels of density than NYC/Chicago making good use of things like commuter rail, often in concert with cars)