https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
https://gizmodo.com/90-years-ago-the-los-angeles-subway-was-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
Apparently LA's loss of underground subway was tied to its loss of overland subway, as well. They seem to have been the same system?
Note that "jaydriving" is not a crime.
Of course, just like everything about driving in China, the rules mean very little. It's pretty hard to enforce your rights if you're dead.
My ten-years-old experience driving there was interesting. At any given time you could expect the cars around you to do the stupidest of all possible things, completely ignoring the rules. But they'd do it slowly, and expect others to adapt...which they did.
There's an additional constraint of acting negligently. If you're going 45 on a road where the speed limit is fifty and someone sprints out in front of your car, you won't be convicted of vehicular manslaughter (assuming obviously that you didn't have time to react).
Somehow I'm reading "within a few feet" as "six inches". IME bicycles are much narrower than automobiles. If it's safe to pass an automobile, it's safe to pass a cyclist while leaving at least eight feet.
If it's not safe to pass, don't pass.
This seems beside the point? Above you seemed to imply it is inherently challenging to pass a cyclist. That is only the case if one attempts to pass in inappropriate situations. Cyclists have at least as much right to the road as motorists have.
We talk so much in America about gun control, why not also car control?
Some examples:
1) I suspect the "new car smell" that car buyers believe affects their judgment is purposely chosen glue (I think it's a glue) that dissipates into a gas that literally, psychiatrically impairs buyer's judgment. It's real. [edit: it's still relatively mild].
2) Stealing a person's main means of transport should be punished independently of how expensive that mode of transport is. So, the penalty for stealing a car should be based on the price of a car and the fact it was the main means of transport for that person. Same goes for bicycles, it could have been a $100 bike, but it's the main means of transport and that person is equally stranded as the driver without it. For this reason, being a bike thief stealing 10 bicycles could mean a decade in jail, if laws were different. Who would steal bikes then?
3) Enforce both car driving violations and bike driving violations, but based on lethality of the vehicle. Right now both driving a car drunk and riding a bike drunk are a DUI, which is ridiculous.
4) Legislation that privileges driving over biking harms children, because they can ride a bike starting age 8 or so, but can't drive until 16.
5) Driving is an extremely lethal activity, but AFAIK biking deaths are mostly attributable to automobiles. If you try to run someone over with a car you can be charged with (I forget the wording but more or less) "using a deadly weapon". Because that's what it is. A killing machine.